Never Good Enough

Upcoming Holidays

January
 
1/13 Satanic New Year
1/17 Feast of Fools/Old Twelfth Night/Satanic and demon revels
1/31 Full Moon (Blue Moon)
1/31 Total lunar eclipse
February

2/2 Candlemas/Imbolc
2/13 Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
2/14 Ash Wednesday/Beginning of Lent
2/15 Partial solar eclipse
2/14 Valentine’s Day
2/25 Walpurgis Day
March
 
3/1 Full Moon
3/20 Spring Equinox
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan
3/30 Good Friday/Death of Jesus Christ
3/31 Full Moon (Blue Moon)

Dates important to Neo-Nazi groups
1/30 Hitler named Chancellor of Germany
(Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lamas, Halloween, solstices, equinoxes, and full moons.)

It’s good to be back. I cannot believe I was away for so long! I missed you-all!! This is the longest I have been away from the blog since early 2013. Maybe this means I am less driven, more relaxed and better able to take care of myself?

Here’s a not very good picture that shows red rocks and me in a too-large but nice warm red jacket. I tried to crop it but got totally stuck. It was taken at Sedona, Arizona, a town near a ridge of mountains popular with psychics, monks, and mystics because there are many places where some people feel vortexes of energy. I didn’t, though, and did not explore their meaning because I was too busy drinking in the beauty all around me.

Never Good Enough

I thought of this topic while in Arizona, along with its evil twin, Never Bad Enough. I’ll save that for another time.

My mother wanted me to be perfect. Needless to say, I was a huge disappointment to her. She had been the “plain one,” born nine years after her beautiful and charming sister. I learned that her childhood nickname had been Piggy, which explained a lot. She wanted me to be everything she wasn’t and to have all the material things she hadn’t had. I understood this, and found it sad, but that didn’t stop me from taking it very personally.

I wasn’t pretty enough. My manners weren’t good enough. I wasn’t socially skilled enough. I wasn’t popular enough – as a matter of fact, I didn’t have any friends until sixth grade. And to make things worse, I became overweight when I was five and stayed that way until high school. The more I tried, the more I failed to live up to her expectations and the worse I felt about myself.

The cult also taught me that I was a failure, inferior to everybody else, hopelessly stupid. I suppose there are some cults that tell the kids that they are wonderful and are being hurt so that they will grow up to be brave and strong and able to save their country single-handedly or some such thing. But my cult taught the kids that they were being punished for failure, for not trying hard enough. They had displeased Satan and let down the whole cult. I can’t ever remember being told I did something well.

The cult teachings affected me far more than my mother’s. They seared my soul and they gave me the conviction that I was bad to the core. When I tried to do something good, I was far more evil than when I tried to do something bad. Attempts to help or protect animals or other children resulted in them being hurt even more than I was. I learned that my love and compassion were poisonous.

When I was grown and separated from the cult and my family, the ritual abuse ended but those beliefs stayed with me. Looking back, some were clearly delusional. My manners were just fine and I was slim and pretty and dressed well. (That wasn’t too hard in the ’60’s!) Others were self-fulfilling prophecies. If you don’t believe you have any friends, you will not notice that others like you and will overlook their attempts to befriend you. If you don’t believe you have good social skills, you will stammer and say dumb things and retreat into solitude.

And if you believe your love is poison…well, it is really hard to love anybody at all, including yourself. And when you are aware that you love somebody, it makes you a total panicky, anxious wreck.

It took remembering the cult experiences and seeing how they implanted those self-hating beliefs. And then it took years and years of working on myself to see how those beliefs play out in my current life. I couldn’t just throw a switch and see myself differently.

“Oh! I’m not a bad person! I am a good person who was horribly mistreated! Now I can get on with my life and love myself and be self-confident and live a full and satisfying life.” Nope, didn’t work that way.

I’d get something intellectually, but my emotions and behavior didn’t change much. I’d get something one day and it was gone the next. I would do something positive for myself or somebody else and be filled with fear and guilt. It took a lot of slow, discouraging work, day after day after day, to turn things around.

Am I good enough now? I was good enough to come this far, that’s clear. I am certain l will not become perfect any time soon. I never will live up to my mother’ standards, for she wanted to be an idealized her, and you can’t be another person. And I doubt if I can ever entirely shake off all that the cult taught be about myself and the world.

I hope I will become better as time goes on, but for now, I’m just fine, considering. And that is enough.