I've been writing. A lot lately. In fact, in the past few months, I have drafted a few pieces, and I've been dying to publish something. This post right here was definitely one of my drafts. This is something I have been thinking about for a while, and has been speaking to me a lot, especially recently.
How do we know we are good people? What makes us "good" over other individuals that are labeled "bad"? How are the qualities that some people possess held in a higher regard than others? Can we really tell others or admit to ourselves when we are not being good people? These questions have been circling my brain for the past few months. You see, I always thought I was a good person inherently. I mean, sure, I'm a brat, I'm stubborn, I have a bit of a mean streak, and as Beyoncé once put it, "I'm a train wreck in the morning and a bitch in the afternoon", but I've never imagined myself to have malicious intent. And, aren't we all made with our own flaws and cracks anyway? That's a part of what makes us perfectly imperfect I have always believed. But, lately, I've been questioning this notion. Perhaps some of the qualities we tell ourselves are good and self-sustaining are much more selfish and hurtful than we want to admit.
I've always been a firm believer in self-care. In fact, I've written about this before: If you can't take care of yourself, you'll be no good to anyone else in your life. But, where do we draw the line between self-care and selfishness? How much taking care of ourselves is too much, and when do we learn to let others in? What does too much even look like? I feel like this is a battle I have fought for many years now. Call it the curse of the only child I suppose, but I've spent a lot of time in my life learning to be content with doing things on my own. I've always deep down felt that was the way it was supposed to be for me. At times I felt like I was winning this battle, and at other times, my loneliness informed me that I was squarely on the losing side. Now that I'm older, and my life has shifted into thinking about having children and a family, I have learned that I haven't really shifted my mindset very much. Now I'm forced to ask myself, does that make me a bad person? Will I ever be able to be a good parent and a good wife if so much of what I believe about living this life is tied into taking care of myself first? Is there something actually wrong with wanting what we want for ourselves and making sure our happiness paramount? And, if so, how do I reconcile that?
It's interesting, because being in the profession I'm in, a lot of my job is tied into focusing on the needs of others. And, I willingly have done so for the better part of 8 years. No matter how tiring it may be at times, it is still what I love to do. In fact, as I have learned about myself, it's sometimes the only glue that holds me together when other things around me and in my life are falling apart. At times it seems like my only saving grace, my one redeeming quality: I may be a mess, but I'm gonna push mine to the side, roll up my sleeves, and get down and dirty and help YOU clean up yours.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get the answers, if the questions don't have answers at all, or if I refuse to be honest enough with myself to admit that I do have the answers and I just don't want to act on it. In thinking about my own happiness, I'm not even sure I am able to come to terms with that looks like for me. We all have these grand ideas of what we would need in order for us to feel some level of content, but how sure are we truly that these things will affect our lives in anyway at all? And, to what lengths do we go to in an attempt to attain these things? Could someone on the outside looking in call our actions nefarious? Selfish or Self-centered? Or do our actions look the way we think they do: Justified.
At some point, these conflicting paths will have to cross for me, just like for everyone else. In my case however, I'm just concerned about the aftermath of the battle. Will I feel like I've conquered my worries about being a good person? Or will I step out of the rubble feeling more broken than before the fight began?
