The 3 Pieces of My Identity I’m Ready to Murder in Cold Blood
Sweet. Nice. Polite. God I hate these identifiers. On their face there’s nothing wrong with them. They all seem like great things. But, now at my big age of 28. I now recognize them as survival mechanisms. They’re an instinct I use for protection. But they also get in the way. They result in less than ideal outcomes that shrink me from my magic.
Sweet…. sweet though. Sweet has become the ultimate trigger. It bubbles up an internal rage that leaves me gasping for air like I’m drowning. It’s become a word that I recognize as dismissive. “You’re so sweet” is typically followed up with a violation of a major or minor boundary you’ve established in the name of protecting your energy and space. It’s as if to say, “You’re a doormat. You cannot think I’d take you seriously.”
Nice. Nice is boring. It’s pleasant. It’s background music like these made for streaming albums we’ve been getting from the likes of Drake. And the one that changed his permanent residence to the “We Don’t See Color” Sunken Place, Calabasas, CA 90290. Nice is what we got from the pollyanna 50s where shit was hitting the fan, but let’s just smile through it and share a milkshake. Nice is what a “good girl” should be striving to be at all times.
Politeness. It’s become a cage that I want to burn to the ground. Polite is what I am out of fear: Fear of Judgment, Fear of Death, Fear of Abandonment, Fear of… the list goes on. I used to think I didn’t have any fears, but I think I hadn’t encountered enough of the world. I was raised on a diet of respectability and politeness. I’m a polite person. I am a nice person. I am a sweet person. However, the niceties and the saccharine sweetness has become a poison that is slowly killing me.
Well, I’m tired. The problem with this three piece suit (especially when worn on me) was that it didn’t leave room for true growth. It was all about optics. Self-policing and striving to be this perfect being that can move through the world without doing any “harm”, because that’s what it means to be a good person, right? But I realized in holding onto those 3 things as part of my core identity, I was literally hiding the depths of who I could be.
I became more aware of the results of the way I choose to show up: the countless toxic people that enter my life and re-enter and re-fucking-enter because at some point I was too nice, too polite, or too sweet to just say LEAVE ME ALONE!
The journey to self takes a lot of introspection, self-awareness, and a willingness to let go of the parts of yourself that are no longer serving you. It’s also means staring nakedly at your inadequacies, and insecurities, and finding a way to love yourself just the same.