Throwing the good away
Best and blame aren't the only options
The other day, I was going through some of my old stuff from uni days and looked through my transcripts for the first time. In fifteen years, I’d never done this.
Partly, this doesn’t surprise me because I’m very much “out of sight is out of mind” (which explains the state of my car and why I’m surprised by the mess all over again every time I get back in it).
But it did shake me up because these were big accomplishments and I never paused to fully acknowledge them. In fact, I left my MA primarily feeling embarrassed that I hadn’t applied myself as much as I would have liked.
Never mind I had crawled through depression while still managing to finish my degree AND PLANNED A WEDDING that year. It wasn’t perfect so it was all spoiled. In a cloud of shame, I decided not to go to my graduation.
Looking through my Masters transcript, 38-year-old me scoffed at 23-year-old me. Silly girl. Throwing away the whole thing because everything wasn’t just so. Then, reading through it, I saw that I’d done far better than I’d realised.
And that’s when the pang hit. It wasn’t just that I’d never paused to celebrate the thing. For fifteen years I’d carried the awful feeling that I’d fucked it up. I’d not done everything I could and therefore I might as well have not done it.
Even now this is a story I need to bring into the light from time to time so I can speak some love and compassion into it. There’s this narrative that I’m either the best (even if that just means whatever I imagine to be my best) or I’m worthless.
If ever school wounds were laid bare!
And I can see where this has popped up in other parts of my life since then. Struggling to do paid work alongside home educating has often left me telling myself that I’m not good at either.
I’ve not seen that this is an incredibly difficult ask. And it’s only whenever I rewrite my CV that I can see I’ve actually accomplished quite a lot in these almost 13 years of being a parent, even if some of it was fairly unconventional.
Last year I needed to dramatically alter the age, size and format of the home education project I founded. The transition saw me mentally throw away all the work it had taken to get it going in the first place.
Even when I hung up my hat as a breastfeeding counsellor, after ten years in breastfeeding support, I left with the pervading feeling that I hadn’t done enough rather than appreciation for the many women and babies I’d helped.
But looking through this transcript, it seemed that I was being offered an ink-on-a-page invitation to disrupt the pattern. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life relentlessly measuring my accomplishments and finding myself wanting.
I felt able, for the first time, to sit with that younger woman and really see her pain. She didn’t need berating for not looking at what was going well. She was already too good at doing that.
She needed me to say that I cared about her experience, that there is a chaos to closing a chapter, any chapter, no matter how it’s gone. That perhaps she was trying to assert some control over the transition, to bring some order, to judge herself before anyone else could.
I don’t blame her for that because there doesn’t need to be any blame.