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neallovesyou · 5 years

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“YOU ARE NOT A LOSER”

Lately, I’ve had to tell myself that more than usual and by “more than usual,” I mean an exorbitant amount of times daily over the span of a few weeks.

Sometimes the phone doesn’t ring. Sometimes the texts don’t come. Sometimes a whole weekend passes without a single invite. Sometimes a close friend comes into town for someone else and doesn’t try to meet up with you. Sometimes you reach out to random friends who all seem to be busy. Sometimes your close friends don’t reach out to you for whatever reason. Sometimes your friends say they are gonna hang out and then change plans when something better comes along. Sometimes you play phone tag for weeks. Sometimes your social anxiety gets the best of you. Sometimes you watch 3 movies in a week at the theater by yourself. Sometimes you eat every meal for over a week by yourself. Sometimes the ex you are still friends with starts dating someone else and doesn’t have the time for you. Sometimes it feels like the whole world has forgotten about you and sometimes all those coincidences above happen at once. And because of that all those sometimes start feel like all the time.

I know I have friends. I know I have people that love me. And I know I could have reached out to more people. I know my comedy schedule has taken up my nights. I know I have a great life. I know people get busy. I get busy. I know I could easily get back on the dating apps or send enough “wyd” texts at 1am that someone will eventually respond. I know all these things. I am not angry. I am not blaming.

Even with all that, it’s crazy how quickly I am transported back to feeling like the 15 year old version of myself, who felt like a perpetual loser, after a few weeks of those “sometimes” above. It’s like the years I have spent building all that I have get erased in a moment, and I am back to that teenage kid sitting alone in his room wondering when there would be any contact from the outside world which never came. So much so, that my mom would pretend she wanted to see new movies she had never heard of and ask me to take her just so I wouldn’t spend another Saturday alone feeling sorry for myself because I had no one to go to the movies with. (I am sure that previous sentence is a run on or needs commas for all those clauses. Don’t care.)

I am saying these things not to get sympathy. I do not want people reaching out feeling guilty or offering to hang with me. I am saying these things because it’s how I feel. I am saying these things because I know so many out there feel the same way. This message is for them, the self proclaimed “losers” like me. I have 45k followers on Instagram. I have been on Netflix. I perform comedy to hundreds of people a week. I’m not bragging. I am saying, that despite of all these things, I still feel like a loser sometimes... a lot of times. I still sit at home with no one to hang out with on a lot of weekends. And that’s ok. No one is immune. Not even a dude like me with all those things. So, if you are feeling like a loser out there... it’s ok. You are in a very elite club. It’s filled with a ton of good people. Just remember, you aren’t alone. Sometimes (lots of times), I feel like a loser too. It’s ok. I am rambling now, but you get my point.

Most of all just remember....

YOU ARE NOT A LOSER. No matter what your insecurities tell you, always remember YOU ARE NOT A LOSER. I believe that about 50% of the time which is a vast improvement. I am working on improving it more.

#blog Blogpost Loser sad thoughts writing sadthoughts loserthoughts alone youarenotaloser

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carriejonesbooks · 6 years

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I was recently talking to someone brilliant, 24 years old, beautiful and that person thought that they had already wasted their life.

There are a million metrics and achievements this person has already notched off – things that I can’t even imagine achieving. That didn’t matter. It wasn’t enough.

She called herself a loser. Her life, she claimed, was a waste.

Half the women I know have created themselves and their dreams and expectations in the likeness of a rom-com, which is explained so well in this column by Heather Havrilesky in Vulture. She wrote:

But your concept of yourself makes no sense. You got it from a rom-com. Age 35 is not an expiration date on your beauty or your worth. It doesn’t matter if every single human alive believes this. It’s your job to cast this notion out forever. I’m 48 years old and I’m determined not to tell a story about myself that started in some beauty-product boardroom, among unimaginative corporate marketing professionals. I fail at this quest often, but I’m still determined.

But then there are a bunch of us who don’t or didn’t care about rom-com images. Some of us have massive savior complexes. Some of us want glory. Some of us want to be remembered forever. Some of us have modeled our lives off Marvel movies and Captain America or Ancient Macedonian kings. We’re not much better off.

From fourth through eighth grade my true life ambition was to take a bullet meant for Bono of U2. I would dive on stage, heroically be killed, die in his arms painlessly somehow. And all of Ireland would be so overcome by my sacrifice that they would instantly broker peace. The entire world would do the same.

Saviour complex, much?

I was a weird kid, obviously, raised on too much Doctor Who and Star Trek. But I wasn’t about romance or babies. I wasn’t into getting married. I didn’t want to be defined by my husband or my marriage or my kids. I wanted to define me. I know! I know! The horror.

But we don’t have to be saviors either. There is so much pressure to be something that our culture, our society, our books and movies and television show, Instagram photos and YouTube videos want us to be.

But what makes us feel truly like we have a purpose, that we aren’t a waste of space and resources, that we matter? For a lot of us, connections, doing good, friendships. For some of us that still isn’t enough? We are on an endless quest for more, to be better, to do better, to make the most of our time on this earth. Or we are on an endless quest to meet the expectations that society has placed upon us.

We have to find a way to discover who we are and what we want.

Havrilensky wrote:

I’m going to choose to embrace narratives that make me feel more alive and able to contribute whatever twisted crafts I can to this world, while I can.

I’ve been posting a piece of art or a video on my Facebook every Friday because it is what scares me. There’s this weird vulnerability in those forms of communication that make me feel especially vulnerable, but I want to be a better artist. I want to be unafraid about who I am. Those scary Friday posts are part of me going for that instead of just hiding my paintings in the basement.

I grew up poor but in a pretty intellectual household. There were assigned roles. I was the quirky weird one wearing Snoopy shoes. My brother was the ambitious gorgeous one. My sister was the good one. I was the one who read books, who was nerdy and self-righteous. I heard narratives about who I should be all my childhood. I bet you did, too.

Mine were:

You’re shy.

They thought you were blind when you were born. You still don’t notice things.

You are weird.

You are smart. You’re the smart one.

You aren’t an athlete. You have weak ankles.

You aren’t an artist. Nobody in this family is an artist.

But who I thought I was meant to be was also defined by what was said about my much older siblings but never said about me:

Your brother is so successful.

Look at his dimples. He’s so beautiful. People just stare and stare at him. What an athlete.

Your sister is so kind. Her heart is so big.

Your sister loves children. Your sister is so good.

Me in a U2 shirt, hiding my face because I’m the quirky one, not the good looking one.

Those narratives shape us. Combine them with comparing ourselves to television tropes and superheroes, rom-coms and Instagram perfection and it’s hard to be okay with who we are. Shakespeare said that comparisons are odious. There’s a reason for that. They make us feel shame. They make us feel jealous. They make us feel less. Or they make us think of others as less.

Here’s the thing: Nobody is less. I’m going to leave you with two solid paragraphs of Havrilensky because her article is brilliant and true.

What if you just decided that you’re an artist, today, right now? You’re sensitive and erratic, maybe. You’re maudlin and also expansive. What would it look like to own that identity, as a means of making art, sure, but also as a means of owning your FULL SELF? You wouldn’t feel as angry at other artists. You would recognize them as kindred spirits. You might notice how your shame matches theirs, and fuels all of you. You might feel proud of your small creations and you might start to see how every single thing you’ve done, every place you’ve been, every town you’ve lived in and left, every friend you’ve gotten to know and then forgotten, they all add up to a giant pile of treasure.

You are 95 years old, looking back at your 35-year-old self, and this is what you see: a young woman, so young, so disappointed, even though everything is about to get really good. She doesn’t see how much she’s accomplished, how much she’s learned, how many new joys await her. She doesn’t know how strong she is. She is blindfolded, sitting on a mountain of glittering gems. She is beautiful, but she feels ugly. She has a rich imagination and a colorful past, but she feels poor. She thinks she deserves to be berated because she has nothing. She has everything she needs.

What is it that you want to be? Who do you want to see? Be that person. Love that person.

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Who You Are Is Enough But You Can Still Be Even More I was recently talking to someone brilliant, 24 years old, beautiful and that person thought that they had already wasted their life.

#advice #bemore #carriejones #culturalnarratives #falsenarratives #friendship #kidlit #maienauthors #mondaymotivation #motivation #self #selfworth #womenidentity #writinglife #youareenough #youarenotaloser

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