This is My Life

Leave me alone.

This semester has got me feeling like:

I went back to school two and half years ago to become a therapist, and I’m taking Individual Counseling this semester. I went into it prepared to be able to take feedback (a struggle for me), ready to process any big feelings I had about that, and excited to actually try my hand at this thing I’ve been studying for a couple years now. After bracing myself to be ready to handle criticism, I’ve gotten pretty good feedback from my professor and fellow students so far.

Lo, and behold, I’m still a mess. I cried after my mid-semester review with my professor after he told me he had no doubt I would be “a rockstar at this counseling thing.” Even as I felt overwhelmed by these feelings, a part of me was wondering what on earth is going on.

So I googled “when praise doesn’t feel safe” and things started to make more sense.

The funny thing about the human brain is that we can learn to associate literally anything with danger. Even someone telling us we are “a rockstar.”

In my cult days, I also received a lot of praise, but it often came with a side of disappointment in me when I didn’t live up to my usual perfection. Or a helping of even higher expectations that I could never meet. Or plans for how I should use the my skills that left me feeling like my whole life was not really mine.

I couldn’t just enjoy playing the piano, I had to learn to be an accompanist for weekly meetings. I couldn’t just teach occasionally, I had to lead multiple meetings per week. Since I liked languages, I had to take a Greek class I had no interest in so that our group would have access to a certain Greek research group, etc.

When I left the group, I felt a strong aversion to being in any kind of leadership role or making a commitment to a group at all. It was years before I did anything similar.

When I was thinking of going back to school to be a therapist, but having trouble making the decision, my own therapist told me, “I think you’re not used to doing things just because you want to do them.”

Now I am doing something just because I want to, and I’m finding out that I might be good at it, but my brain seems to be afraid that somehow I’m going to lose control of it this time too. That it won’t be okay for me to struggle sometimes. That there will be some out-of-reach standard I have to meet. That even if this is my dream, someone else will end up using it for their own ends.

(Of course, none of this was clear to me at first. It just felt like an overwhelming sense of dread.)

And so once again, I’m listening to Billy Joel on repeat:

“I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life
Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone”

Being a therapist is MY dream. This is MY life. I know my own values now. I know how to say no.