Sunday Assembly had to be rescheduled from the 12th to the 19th thanks to the snow we'd gotten that weekend. So I had to wait another week before I could put my worries of screwing up behind me. It was a fairly big month for me. Not only was I doing Trying My Best, but I was singing with the band. Most of my singing was harmony for the songs others sang lead on ("Help", "Deeper Well", "Lovely Day", "Afterlife"), but I did get to sing lead on "Shake It Off". I practiced quite a bit Sunday morning, hoping that I'd knock it out of the park. I also made sure to practice my TMB as well.
Set up and practice for Assembly started at 2:45. It was the first time I'd helped with set up, but it wasn't too bad to go through. I helped with a lot of the audio set up, then got a chance to practice with the band a couple of times. I had to keep reminding myself that I don't need perfection, but to just try to do my best. Rich recorded me during practice, and then another recording during the show. I'm not sure if I'm up for sharing the video here. But all in all, it wasn't bad and I'm happy with what I did.
Trying My Best went fairly well for my first time getting up and speaking. I didn't make enough eye contact with people, focusing more on my words. And I didn't get any comments or reactions while I was speaking. But I did get several compliments after Assembly was over. That made me feel pretty good. I just need to work on my eye contact. At least my pacing, I think, was good. The theme was self-care, and my talk about being a recovering people pleaser seemed to fit the theme fairly well.
In two weeks, I'll be taking another of my goals off the list by hosting Sunday Assembly. No singing this month, because hosting is enough for one month! Rich will be the speaker for the month, talking about Endosymbiosis. I found a reading, Richard Feynman's "A Universe of Atoms, An Atom in the Universe". I can't find anyone to do Trying My Best, but I've been told that isn't a problem. So I just have to work on writing up my notes for what to say as host.
For anyone that may be curious, here's what I said for Trying My Best:
My whole life, I’ve been a people pleaser. I had a desperate need to be liked, taking on the responsibility of everything that went wrong because, in my need for validation, something going wrong had to be my fault. I still remember being around 5 or 6 and my parents fighting, with me going from one to the other promising them that I’d behave if they would just stop fighting. When they split, I was convinced that I had something to do with the divorce. If I’d been a better daughter, they would have stayed together. As I got older and had my own failures in relationships, I realized that the problems in my parents’ marriage existed long before I was born and that even if I were a perfect child, their divorce would have still happened. Even with that intellectual knowledge, it didn’t stop my deep seated need for validation. Or the lengths I went through to get validation from people I was convinced were the ones that were supposed to be in my life.
For seven years, I sought that validation from a toxic relationship. When we met, he said he was single. He treated me like a queen. He showed me off. But not even a year into the relationship, I was begging for him to stay whenever we’d get in a fight. I tried to change everything about myself to make myself what he said he wanted. Even at the two and a half year mark, when he said he was marrying someone else, I degraded myself in ways that he wanted me to. I stuck around for 5 more years. Because I constantly heard from someone that claimed to love me that I was useless, unimportant, needy and bad. My people pleasing ways went into overdrive for those years, becoming someone that my friends barely recognized, pinning my happiness on someone that wasn’t worth it in an effort to be perfect. It was only getting myself physically out of the city we lived in that I was able to break free and be able to tell him no when he told me he was divorcing his wife and wanted to marry me. That’s when I thought I was free of my people pleasing ways
And boy, was I wrong. I rarely put myself and my needs first. I stayed focused on trying to make my friends and family happy with me instead of thinking about what made me happy. If someone asked for help with something, I would always say yes, even if it was something I really didn’t want to do. Whenever someone criticized me about anything, the tears would start to flow, which made me even angrier with myself because I had no idea why I was crying. When someone did something that hurt me, I couldn’t tell them because I knew how I’d feel if someone told me I was doing something hurtful. And the worst case scenarios for standing up for myself ran rampant through my mind. For all that I said I was feeling better about myself, it was still so easy to see that I was letting myself be a reflection of those around me.
It took meeting my husband to get me actually started on the path of learning how to say no to others and yes to myself. We fought, like all couples do, but he never physically left. (That was actually me, going out to drive to work through my anger.) Even when we had diametrically opposing opinions on something, he still told me he loved me. And not like my mother had when I was a child, where “I love you, but I sure don’t like you.” was a common refrain. He stood by me through my depression and my disappointments, taking on the tough tasks when I couldn’t. Little by little, I started to internalize the fact that he wasn’t going to leave me, that the fights didn’t mean we were doomed, that I was lovable, faults and all.
In the last couple of years, I’ve been getting better about finding out who I truly am and learning how to prioritize my own needs above the wants of others. I’ve been discovering the things I like and the things I don’t, and that it’s ok to say “Yeah, that’s not really for me.” when I don’t care for something. Thanks to many excellent friends who know how to say that something I’m doing is a problem without making me feel like a failure, I’ve learned how to tell others the same. I can tell even the people that I love that I’m not up for playing that game, or going to that show, or visiting on that day. I’m getting better at recognizing when to let my depression work through itself and when I need to give it a good swift kick out of my head. I’m realizing that “self”, and especially “self-care” are not dirty words.
So I write. I sing. I read. I take time to sit on my porch and just listen to the birds in the trees while wrapped in a warm blanket and drinking a cup of coffee. I don’t meditate, as it’s never really worked for me, but I do practice breathing exercises. I reach out to friends (though not nearly as often as I should) to try to get together so I’m not so alone. I accept that doing something alone isn’t failure but sometimes exactly what I need to rejuvenate my soul. I buy myself the slightly more expensive body wash because I like the way it makes my skin feel. I bake - or I don’t.
I’m not all the way there yet. I’m still trying to balance the importance of myself with the needs of others. For a recovering people pleaser, that balance can be difficult to find sometimes. I do say yes a little more often than a should, or keep my thoughts to myself instead of trying to clear the air when something is bothering me. But thanks to the friends I have, those that love me, and my acceptance of my own self worth, I’m getting better at finding the point to make me a better Amber.
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| Practicing with the band |
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