Question Three

Lilly Dache’s Glamour Book

Glamour Test – Question Three

“Have you made another list of the points about you that need improvement?”

I’m sure what Lilly is going for here is something like “My skin could be clearer.” or “My posture could be better.” And there are things about my appearance I would like to improve. But to be honest, the whiteness of my teeth or the fact that my hair tends to get dry on the ends are not the things that keep me up at night.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last weeks thinking about my life…picking things apart, analyzing actions and intentions, dragging all of the scary bits into the light. It’s been super painful and it’s made me squirm, but I did it because it’s important to me to understand exactly what went wrong. I want to make sure I don’t repeat the same mistakes moving forward into my next relationship. I don’t want to feel this unhappy again.

 So sleepless nights, anxiety, endless hours with a spinning mind and it turns out it’s as simple as this. It’s my fault. All of it. Everything that makes me unhappy with my life boils down to one thing. I will only allow myself so much. …only so much happiness, only so much professional success, only so much financial gain, only so much beauty, and the very saddest of all, only so much love. I have a level that I will allow myself to rise to and then I decide that I don’t deserve more, that I shouldn’t be allowed to be quite so happy, or quite so financially solid, or quite so connected to or loved by another person and I will sabotage my relationships and hold myself back until I feel safe again…Safe in the middle ground where nothing is terribly good or terribly bad. I guess it looks okay from the outside…I’m attractive enough, the job title sounds good, the relationships appear solid. But really I’m making myself small, settling for less than I’m capable of, and pushing love away.

Of course the middle ground isn’t where the happiness is. True happiness, for me, has always been found in those wild moments, those times that I was really nervous but I tried it anyway. The times that I forgot myself and just felt free, the times that I didn’t worry about what other people thought of me and just spoke from my heart, the times I put myself out there, terrified, but really, really alive, the times I allowed myself to love someone absolutely without caring if I would get hurt.

Now what to do with all this? How do I stop putting limits on myself? This I’m still working on. I just know I can’t live this way anymore.

And also, I’m really going to try to work on those dry ends.

Two points.