I spent my teenage years molding myself into something unrecognizable. I was whatever others wanted me to be. There was a facade of individuality, but I still remained a patchwork project made up of others interests, habits, and personalities.
To my honest surprise, this trait would continue into adulthood. It just manifested in a different way. I’m an independent adult, I pay my own bills, I attend college and work two jobs. I made it out of my childhood jail cell and moved onto a stylishly portable ball and chain. In society's eyes, I'm a functioning person for my age. Well, yes... but have you been proud of anything you've accomplished in the past decade? Who are you when you aren't entangled with another person? What do you truly want to do?
Relationships have been my vice since I was about 14 or so, almost all of them being unfulfilling, toxic, or on the cusp of toxic in a way that isn't black and white in the end. Gravitating towards avoidant or unavailable people, accepting the bare minimum, mistaking the bare minimum for "true love", being personally delusional, abysmal standards, etcetra,. you name it. Everything I touched seemed to die. In between those relationships, I sought comfort in giving myself away in a manner that I won't state clearly almost constantly, and would do so for years.
While I'm a victim to a lot of external factors, I'm notably a victim to my own habits and behaviors. I don't know when to let go, I often unconsciously refuse to, leading me to cling and cling until there's nothing left. I don't have proper standards because the bar is in Tartarus. I overstep my own boundaries in fear of being rejected or punished by others. And most importantly, I don't know my own worth.
Only very recently have I been fully emancipated from romantic, sexual, and complicated relationships. Few months, give or take.
It's been ...very difficult... on bad days. Most days, I feel tentatively okay. On good days though, I truly feel alive. It's a liberating feeling existing without being in the shadow of another. I should've adopted and accepted the annoying, bratty prince/ss part of me ages ago. No point in trying to pretend I'm otherwise, lol.
I always deserved nice things, praises, proper comfort, unconditional validation and love, the list goes on. I never got that and it wasn't my fault. I played the cards I was dealt, and that's the end of it. Whoever I was at the time, whether it be years, minutes, or weeks ago, they were doing the best they could've at that moment, especially in the context in which I was a teenager.
I could write so much about what's happened to me and how it's bled into the person I am today. In the grand scope of things, none of that matters anymore.
What I can do now is to learn how to give all of that to myself. It was all always within me. It's just finding it.