“You owe yourself the love you so freely give to other people.” ~ Unknown
A few days later was my very first day of kindergarten. I was five years old and beginning some of the most formative years of my life. I couldn’t know that my father’s walking out on us would shape the rest of my life. My identity. Self-worth. My ability to trust others. All those things which I needed in order to develop healthy behaviors, coping mechanisms, and positive images of myself and others. The events of that day became my emotional tap-out and poisoned my relationship with myself. And, not surprisingly, all my relationships with men.
As I grew up, I recreated new versions of that abandonment scenario. Going from one wrong guy to the next, I chose men based on the hurt, shattered little girl inside me. I was always able to find someone who would use me, cheat on me, or leave me. Believing that I was nothing when not in a relationship, I chased after and often clung to toxic men who made me feel even worse about myself. I was always devastated when these men left me because I only felt valuable when I had a man’s attention. Occasionally, when I found myself in a relationship with someone who was likely to stick around, I pushed him away fearing that, sooner or later, he would leave me too. This way I could control my own abandonment.
I went from one man’s bed to the next looking for the validation I so desperately craved. Relying on my good looks and an ability to be chameleon-like. I was always willing to be whatever or whoever I thought would be most desirable in the current relationship. Never having secured a true sense of my own identity, I sacrificed myself to become an extension of whichever man I was involved with at the time. When each relationship ended, I became more lost, confused, and hurt.
To combat that feeling, I often started a new romance before the current one ended. I couldn’t be alone. And I rarely was. There always seemed to be a surplus of wrong men and unhealthy relationships. Until there wasn’t.
That’s when I really got into trouble.
I had allowed myself to be defined by my relationships for so long that my entire sense of self-worth came from being “in love.” It was during a particularly rough breakup, with no new romance in sight, that I picked up that pipe. Took that first hit. Instant euphoria! Suddenly I didn’t care. Crack lifted me away from all of it. The disappointment. The loneliness. The pain. But very soon, I needed the high I got from crack merely to cope with everyday life.
~ Excerpt from Cracked . . . Not Broken