I Don't Regret Becoming Her. I Regret How Long I Abandoned Her

I have enough hindsight now to make a pretty convincing case against several former versions of myself.

There are decisions I regret. I stayed when I should have left and left things I probably could have handled better. I trusted people I shouldn’t have trusted and questioned people who deserved more trust. I’ve confused chemistry with connection, fear with intuition, responsibility with love, and being needed with being valued.

There were years when I could run a business, raise children, help other people navigate their lives, pay bills, solve problems, teach, lead, love, fuck, pray, cook dinner and hold somebody else together while quietly having no fucking idea where I had gone.

That last one might be the hardest to admit.

Looking backward now, I can see moments when I knew something long before I admitted I knew it. My body knew. My gut knew. Sometimes God was probably banging pots together trying to get my attention. Still, I could explain almost anything away if I loved someone enough, wanted something badly enough or believed keeping everything together was my responsibility.

I became exceptionally good at overriding myself.

Sometimes that looked like making myself smaller. Other times I became bigger, louder and stronger because that’s what the situation seemed to require. I learned how to be useful and productive. Sexuality could become freedom, exploration, connection, pleasure or power. At other times, it became validation, protection, rebellion or a place where wounds I didn’t completely understand showed themselves.

Whatever the room required, I could usually figure out how to become it.

That’s the strange thing about self-abandonment. It doesn’t always look like weakness. Sometimes it looks incredibly competent.

It can look like the woman everybody calls because she’ll know what to do. The mother who figures it out. The businesswoman who keeps producing. The partner who gives another chance. The friend who answers the phone. The woman who can carry an impossible amount and still show up looking reasonably functional.

People may even admire you for the very behaviors that are slowly separating you from yourself.

I certainly received plenty of praise for mine.

There were seasons when strength became part of my identity because I genuinely needed to be strong. Children still need dinner when your heart is broken. The electric company remains deeply uninterested in your existential crisis. Businesses require attention. People you love get sick. Relationships fall apart. Your mother begins disappearing into Alzheimer’s, your body gets tired, your heart gets broken, and trauma doesn’t check your calendar before arriving.

Life doesn’t always give you the luxury of collapsing when you need to collapse.

So you keep going. Sometimes you keep going so long that you forget stopping was ever an option.

Self-abandonment wasn’t always dramatic for me, either. Sometimes it was saying, “It’s fine,” while feeling my stomach tighten. It was answering the phone when I desperately needed silence. Saying yes because explaining my no felt exhausting. Agreeing to one more thing because somebody needed me and telling myself I could rest later.

Later can become a very long time.

At almost fifty, I have to be careful with what I do with all this hindsight.

It would be easy for this version of me to look backward at the woman I was at thirty, thirty-five or forty and ask what the hell she was thinking. Why did you stay? Why did you tolerate that? Why didn’t you listen to yourself? Why did you keep trying to prove your value? Why did you hand people pieces of yourself and then act surprised when there wasn’t enough left for you?

Those questions can sound like wisdom, but sometimes they’re just shame wearing reading glasses.

Fifty-year-old me does not get to sit on a throne and judge the women who got me here.

She knows things they didn’t know.

She has evidence they didn’t have, language they hadn’t learned and experiences they hadn’t survived yet. She understands trauma differently. Love differently. God differently. Her body differently. She understands emotional safety, boundaries, sexuality, relationships and herself through decades of actually living them.

That doesn’t absolve every choice I made.

It contextualizes them.

Accountability asks me to tell the truth about what I did, what I allowed and where I caused harm. Self-condemnation asks me to take everything I know now, hand it to a younger woman who didn’t know it yet, and punish her for not knowing.

I don’t want to do that anymore.

I wasn’t stupid. I was surviving with the tools and beliefs I had at the time.

Sometimes those tools were beautiful. Sometimes they were dysfunctional as hell. Usually they were both.

Even choices I regret were often attempts to reach something incredibly human. Love. Security. Freedom. Belonging. Pleasure. Peace. Recognition. Connection. A chance to finally feel like I was enough.

I can have compassion for the woman reaching for those things without pretending every way she reached for them was healthy.

Grace does not require rewriting history.

I can say, “I should not have done that,” without deciding I was a terrible person. I can admit somebody hurt me without making them responsible for everything I became afterward. I can acknowledge the ways I hurt other people without spending the rest of my life hurting myself as payment.

Most importantly, I can recognize where I abandoned myself without turning around and abandoning my younger self all over again through judgment.

Maybe that’s one of the quieter gifts of getting older. You stop putting your previous selves on trial and start understanding what they were trying to do.

I understand the scared pigeon-toed little girl better now. I have more tenderness for the nineteen-year-old mother who suddenly had another human being depending on her. I can look at the twenty-three-year-old who woke up inside her own life and couldn’t find herself without reducing her to the mess she made trying to get herself back.

None of those women had the information I have today.

They had what they had.

And they kept going.

What has changed is that I no longer believe loving someone requires leaving myself.

Being a good mother doesn’t require disappearing into motherhood. Loving a man doesn’t require overriding what I know. Helping someone doesn’t mean rescuing them from every consequence. Compassion doesn’t mean giving everyone unlimited access to me, and forgiveness doesn’t require pretending something didn’t hurt.

Strength certainly doesn’t require acting like nothing hurts at all.

If something hurts me now, it hurts. I can say that without making the feeling everybody else’s responsibility.

Then I get to choose what I do with it.

I don’t have to suppress pain to prove I’m evolved, and I don’t have to take my hurt and throw it around the room until everybody else is bleeding too. I can feel something, listen to what it’s telling me and decide what belongs to me from there.

I can hurt without abandoning myself inside the hurt.

For much of my life, I imagined finding myself would involve some dramatic spiritual arrival. Apparently I expected enlightenment, perfect boundaries and possibly better lighting.

Instead, coming home to myself has been much less glamorous.

It has meant learning to stay with myself when I disappoint someone. When somebody misunderstands me. When I need to say no. When I’m not useful. When I’ve made a mistake. When that old reflex starts whispering that I could make everything easier if I would just become whatever version of myself this particular moment requires.

I still catch that reflex.

The difference is that I recognize it now, and I don’t follow it nearly as far.

Sometimes I catch myself before I leave. Other times I realize I’ve done it and turn around. What once took years can take months, days or occasionally five minutes and a very irritated conversation with myself.

That’s progress I didn’t know how to measure when I was younger.

I’m turning fifty, and I don’t regret becoming this woman. I actually love her. Not because she finally figured everything out, because dear God, she has not.

What I regret is how long I believed I had to leave her behind in order to keep everything else.

I don’t want to spend the next fifty proving how much I can carry. I already know I can carry a lot. I’d rather learn what becomes possible when I stop confusing carrying everything with living fully.

There will still be people I love deeply. There will be times I give more because someone genuinely needs me. I’ll screw things up, change my mind, misread situations, hurt, apologize and probably find a few entirely new ways to make a mess.

But I don’t have to disappear from my own life while I’m living it.

That’s the promise I want to make to the woman walking into these next fifty years.

Wherever we go from here, I’m coming with me.

→I’m curious about this one because I don’t think self-abandonment always looks the way we think it does.

Sometimes it looks like saying “I’m fine.” Sometimes it’s being the strong one, the useful one, the easy one, the one who keeps showing up. Sometimes it’s knowing something deep in your gut and overriding yourself anyway.

Where have you caught yourself leaving YOU in order to keep the peace, keep a relationship, or keep everything else together?

And maybe the better question: What would it look like to stop doing that now?

Tell me in the comments. I think a lot of us are learning how to come home to ourselves.

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

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This post was previously published on medium.com.