Self Love and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

You know that day dream when you’re at a concert and your favorite entertainer pulls you up on stage to help them out with the set.. your moment of glory. An opportunity to really shine, really stick out, excel and be somebody.

Well, that doesn’t happen. At least not to most of us. It’s often like that though, at least for me, looking for opportunities to shine. I work at a job where going out of your way and bending over backwards for people is practically expected. So it makes it very difficult to stand out. In fact, it is sort of a numbers game that when going above and beyond constantly, eventually someone has to take the time to write a good comment about you.

After the constant – and I mean CONSTANT- catering to the needs of 1200 rooms worth of guests I sometimes feel quite deflated. People don’t understand the wear and tear a person working in hospitality feels. Imagine if you have an unsatisfactory experience with a product or service and complain about it to someone at the company. Chances are the first person you talk to is the last person to have any say in what just happened yet are the ones that have to deal with the unhappy consumers all. the. time.

In the back offices of the hotel you’ll quite often hear “I hate people” being muttered about casually. It is sad, but it is true that we say this often. I don’t REALLY mean it, but it comes out. It feels like such a struggle now to go out of my way to accommodate some people who seem to just want to belittle me as a person. Take a person, who pays $329 for a hotel room and expects a certain level of quality and service – I understand that expectation. However, when that expectation is not met, it’s the ugly, entitled side of them that comes out viciously to rip the poor front desk agent down. It’s that disgusting behavior that I crave to point out to the person delivering it and ask them if they’d act like that if their family were standing behind them.

After repeated negative affirmations from outside sources a person will eventually begin to believe that all people are that awful and that those negative things about himself are in fact true. Relationships especially are big factors for the way certain people learn to feel about others.  Intimate relationships run healthfully on a balance of trust and vulnerability. If that trust is continually broken by one partner, or many it eventually takes over the balance and dries up the vulnerability. Which leaves the person cold, hard and trapped inside their own protective walls.

This morning, I received a very, very hurtful text from the guy I’ve been dating. It’s officially over and he officially hates me and he does have a valid reason to feel such hurt. Meanwhile, my emotions are all over the place about it for several reasons. Partly because he doesn’t quite understand the reason why he now hates me, partly because I don’t want him to hate me and partly because if I had truly listened to my heart and my instincts to begin with — SO MUCH hurt would have been avoided.

I feel like a royal asshole. I’ve never been on this side of the heart break before. Besides being selfishly scared of the karmic fee I’ll have to pay for this, what I wonder is why I let myself get into this. I wish that I was strong enough to call it quits at the first red flag. Or even the second.

There’s always an excuse and there’s always a reason. I also know that it’s extremely difficult to be sharing an intimate experience with someone and have to tell them that it doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does to them.  However, as a race of intelligent humans, I feel like we owe it to each other to try.

A utopian society where hearts never break would be nice, however there’s a lot of useful strength that comes from putting it back together again. I would love to love openly and freely with all human beings and be a mother Theresa reincarnate. However, my realization as I walked to the store in a dirty shirt and messy hair to buy self pity macaroni and cheese and cinnamon rolls was that I was not going to be able to love anyone else or let them love me, because I still don’t fully love myself.

You know I’m a work in progress with my self-worth, however the experience today was just another example that I’m not quite there yet. I realize more and more how difficult it is to love oneself and how difficult it is for me to love myself.

I know that loving oneself is not the unattainable white whale of emotional health. My roommate last summer is the best example of this. I would be in awe of her as she would ask for exactly what she wanted and then got it. She had very clearly drawn lines of her worth and it was not negotiable.

It’s as little as speaking up when something is not right in your life, not to hurt or belittle anyone else about it, but to express, communicate and not accept anything that is less than acceptable – to you. My deflation after a busy night at work really leaves no one else to blame but me because I allow that deflation. I know I am a very sensitive, emotional being (as much as I will deny it!) yet I am deflated because I am not there for myself to keep pumping the healthy inflation.

So begins a clearer jaunt on the long term journey. Step one is take some time with myself to establish the unhealthy contributors in my life that no longer have a place. Step two is the process of weeding them out and incorporating the healthy ones. I’m not sure what the rest of the steps are, I sort of just made those two up willy nilly.

Progress not perfection. Who would have thought that in a world full of possibility and luxury and opportunities that our ancestors could never have dreamt in their wildest that there are some people that walk around with all of that at their fingertips but can’t enjoy it because their thighs touch and that makes them feel fat and ugly. An awful, awful shame.

With love…