I wasn’t always this self-aware and deliberate about my life. I was too busy self-hating and hiding my past. Too busy feeling like an outsider everywhere I went.
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Note to whoever: the next time someone tells you that everybody’s life was some kind of difficult in response to you talking about your painful experiences, or in response to you sharing your fear of unbelonging and rejection, tell them to shut the fuck up. These are the foot soldiers of the status quo trying to keep us quiet, trying to normalize the fucked-upness of life. As more of us speak up, we reclaim power over ourselves. Consequently, the predators and oppressors of The World become less powerful.
1
I may have looked like a grownass black woman with her shit together but on the inside, I was scared of being revealed as a fraud. I may have looked like I would fight if provoked—and yes, I certainly would. And! This too: on the inside, I was afraid that I would have to keep fighting, that eventually someone would show up to overpower me. I may have looked like I was having a good time—smiling and laughing often—but on the inside, I was tired of having to do the most, tired of performing for acceptance, hoping to be loved.
My parents taught me to hate myself by being violently abusive, by modeling their own self-hatred, and by being self-destructive. All while working hard, putting food on the table and clothes on our backs, in the nice suburbs.
I hated myself for five whole decades. I hated being in my skin. I hated feeling lost and confused and left out in this noisy chaotic world. I hated being me. Until the year I turned fifty and made the scariest decision of my life. I chose to walk away from a reliable paycheck.
2
I was first introduced to the idea of video journaling by my younger daughter back in 2018, while visiting her new apartment. Prior to that, I had recently begun making audio journals with my iPhone. I needed someone I could talk to. Someone I could trust and spill my guts with. I needed to say everything out loud because the alternative would have been a life sentence of feeling crazy, like I was losing my mind. I was tired of carrying all my secrets, secrets I had shared in fragmented pieces throughout my adult years.
Journals—especially audio journal recordings—gave me a safe place to open all the way up.
And then I tried video journals.
At first I was aghast, recoiling at my own image because I thought I was too old to be on video. But I began to realize those negative thoughts came from patriarchy programming. We have been trained in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to hate ourselves, to see all aspects of who we are as not good enough. To compare ourselves to beauty standards promoted by Western European culture, often finding fault within, always judging ourselves harshly.
Not just that. I was also criticizing myself for being an older woman. Patriarchy again. Ageism is real. Older people—especially older women—are not valued in our society. I forced myself to keep going with the video journals until eventually I was accepting of my own features—wrinkles, moles, age spots, uneven teeth. Until I learned to embrace my entire look without making comparisons to all the photoshopped women in magazines, all the social media darlings, and all the celebrity beauties of the entertainment world.
Back when I first started with video journals, I recorded them for a mere few months. Although I thoroughly enjoyed recording the videos and replaying them, I didn’t know enough about computers at the time to avoid quickly running out of hard drive memory. I abandoned video journaling and returned to making audio journals on my iPhone instead.
Life got busy and I forgot all about video journaling for the next few years.
Last week I began making video journals again. It was the first time in several years.
Eeeeep!! 😆
I forgot how much fun it is to journal in this way. Through video journaling I am reunited with my bestest friend in the whole wide world: ME! There’s never any worry about saying the wrong thing or how I look or if I’m talking too much or talking too little. I am my own best friend! I love me without conditions. I can show up to video journaling in any mood and say whatever I want to say.
3
It’s been almost seven years since I quit my day job to pursue writing full-time. I never imagined this life for myself, a life where everything I had ever known would change.
We sold our house. We left Pennsylvania. We moved to a new country. We now live in Mexico. And then all my relationships changed. I didn’t see that coming.
The relationship that changed the most? The one I have with myself.
I dodged a bullet by quitting my job. I was dying inside, losing myself to my own misery. Up until that last year of working—2016—self-hatred and general feelings of rage and sadness wouldn’t release me.
Even when the idea came to me to quit. Even after discussing it with Howard. Even after we both agreed that I should definitely leave due to how much I had come to hate working in that office. I hesitated. Fear gripped me. Could we really make it on just one salary? At the time, we had a mortgage and two car payments and other bills.
A small voice whispered in my mind: Just leave. We’ll figure it out later.
We did figure it out.
We dodged another bullet by getting out of Pennsylvania and leaving the United States. We likely would have lived out our lives there, eventually dying in misery and in debt. We hadn’t realized how unhappy we both were, how the toxicity of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy was spreading and weighing on almost every aspect of our environment, almost every aspect of our lives. We were each full of our own private fears, full of resentments, and burdened with frustrated feelings of helpless.
By the time we got to Mexico, Howard and I were in frequent arguments with each other. Years of pent-up rage, we hurled at each other.
In the past fourteen months we almost called our relationship quits three times. We turned to online therapy and discovered how co-dependent we were with each other. We needed to get more honest about who we’d become. Unpack emotional experiences and take responsibility for how our lives up to this point had turned out.
That shit wasn’t easy. Therapy ain’t no magic wand. It’s one-hour sessions a few times a month. Meanwhile, we had to figure out how to keep living together for the other seven hundred-plus hours per month. Still angry. Still arguing our way through new country scenarios. But also talking our way through to answers. Getting to know each other for the first time as—among other things—empty-nesters, as older black people, and as American ex-patriots. Separate bedrooms saved our marriage. Having a private space to retreat to at the end of each day has been a sweet relief.
4
Turns out, job quitting saved me.
I had worked in that office for seven years. I lost track of myself trying to be a good employee, trying to be a good mother, and trying to be a good wife. Until I saw how being good appeared synonymous with putting myself last. Failing to prioritize myself. Making sure everyone else’s needs were met before my own.
No one seemed to notice what it was costing me to keep showing up in these womanly roles. As if being a martyr super-woman should be something we all strive for. Oh this? Nothing to see here. Just one more black woman in an endless historical line of black women, self-sacrificing for others. Everywhere I turned someone was needing something more from me. I was fucking exhausted. I was swallowing rage and I was about ready to explode.
Yes, I was afraid back then. Afraid to quit the job. Afraid to leave America and start life over in a new country. Every one of us has been properly trained in fear of the unknown. Our fears have been exploited by a country that wants nothing more from any of us other than our labor and our money. Such is American life.
My life was stolen by circumstances that I spent way too many years being afraid to change. I almost had myself convinced that the life I was living was as good as it was going to get, that I should be grateful, that I shouldn’t want for more. Because who did I think I was anyway, having the nerve to want more than I already had? How dare I think I should live better.
And for a while, I also riddled myself with what if questions. What if we run out of money? What if one or both of us get sick? What if I don’t like the new country? What if there is danger? What if my books don’t sell? What if new income streams never happen for us? What if the stock market crashes? What if the banks fold? What if we lose all our money?
I put all those questions to rest with the most important question of them all:
What if I trust myself enough to try life MY way
for a change? Live life on my own terms?
I already spent decades living life according to someone else’s design, following the blueprint of a social construct that was never meant for me. A social construct that built a society on the blood and backs of my people, black and brown people. A society that permits the tyranny of marginalized masses in order to retain unearned power for the privileged few.
What if I trusted myself to build a new life?
How about that, lovely Mia?
Exactly.
And I haven’t looked back since. Life has been incredibly beautiful. I am living the kind of life that has gone beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. And I know that this is only the beginning. The best is still yet to come.
5
In the earlier years, when I first quit the job, Fear and Shame often seeped into my thoughts. Back then I was still embarrassed by my childhood past. Ashamed of being a survivor of sexual assaults and rapes. Ashamed of being an alcoholic. I feared being seen in the “normal” world as someone who didn’t belong. I thought I was unworthy of having happy endings. I privately squirmed with learned self-hatred, occasionally mourning life’s unfairness, regretting the life I’d been given. I self-sabatoged often. I sucked up to loved ones, went out of my way to make them happy, make them feel my love. I also had a temper. Lashed out unpredictably.
6
Journaling led me back to my truer self. I discovered that the little girl inside of me had been here the whole time, waiting for us to reunite. All those years when I had felt so alone—times when I struggled to understand a painful and difficult life—my inner-self, the soul-self, was quietly watching. Waiting for me to notice her. To notice me.
I’m back to being the me I was born to be.
All because I found a way to become friends with myself, discovered the joy of sharing stories with myself. Learned how to smile and make myself laugh. Learned how to love myself more deeply.
If you have never tried video journaling, I highly recommend it. A more beautiful life is waiting for you on the other side of the video journaling experience.
I love you! Keep shining your extraordinary light into the world. Keep being who you came here to be.
You are exquisite! We all are.
Love, Mia 💕
Originally published June 6, 2023