Understanding Character Defects, Part One

The following is essentially a short story about my life and how I came to a place of self-discovery and embarked on a life-changing journey. It is a multi part series as it’s difficult to sum up one’s life within one Blog. This is Part One….

Reflecting back on my childhood I recall with extreme clarity the very essence of my behavior patterns. I was always restless, never content. I constantly wanted more, or different or what you had. I wasn’t fulfilled by anything. I wasn’t aware of why or what these emotions were at that time, only aware of what I felt like. I am now able to recognize that certain character defects were present from childhood. I believe they are inherent, not learned. I say this because my childhood was pretty easy, not too stressful or difficult. My parents divorced before I can remember and although my father struggled with the disease of alcoholism, I was pretty well shielded from that. The times that I visited him were always fine and I don’t really recall being aware of his disease in my adolescent years. His parents also bent over backwards to make up for any shortcomings he had so I’m sure that had a lot to do with my unawareness. Basically, my grandparents spoiled me rotten and I absolutely loved it! I grew up living primarily with my mother in an upper-middle class family that traveled a lot, went out to dinner often and shopped just about whenever it was requested. I certainly was not deprived of anything. Both sets of my parents were loving, encouraging and supportive. I had a lot of love surrounding me between divorced parents with new marriages, thus 2 families, two sets of adoring grandparents, and plenty of extended family to laugh and play with. It sounds pretty damn good, right? So, why then was I so discontent? This word, I have decided, is the best way to define my character as a child.

My mother was often exasperated through my school-aged years. I went to a private Christian school and was always getting scolded for talking too much or disturbing other children. She often told teachers just to give me more work. I was very bright and learning came easy to me so I would often finish assignments much quicker than others and would then start distracting my classmates. Some teachers took her advice so that she wasn’t constantly getting phone calls. However outside the classroom was a whole different ball game. I was very curious, mischievous and often rebellious. If someone was doing something they shouldn’t be I wanted to be involved too. I liked to test the boundaries and push the limits. Through middle school and high school I was constantly grounded for lying, ditching and breaking rules at school and home. At the time I was simply labeled as “rebellious”. The adults around me just couldn’t understand why I acted out this way. I was raised by Christian parents with Christian ideals, went to a Christian school from K-8th grade, attended church every Sunday and youth group every Wednesday night. These good Christian ideals, values and morals were drilled into me daily through all of these avenues since birth. Yet for some reason, I just didn’t want to follow the path and stay on the course that was laid out before me. It was frustrating to all, including me because I couldn’t really understand how I felt or what was going on inside my mind. 

I remember in my high school years being keenly aware that I was different then most of my friends. I knew that I was a trouble maker but I couldn’t exactly label my behaviors and I certainly couldn’t process the Why of it all. This clarity didn’t come until much, much later in my life. Thus, I struggled emotionally through the school years. Sure, I appeared to have it all figured out. I had stellar grades, was on the dance team, the cheer team, was part of the “popular” kids circle, had several boyfriends, a lot of girlfriends and was attractive enough not to get picked on or teased. Yet inside I was a real mess. I would overthink everything, worry about anything, complain incessantly, express gratitude almost never and basically lived in self-pity (though I didn’t label it as such). To summarize, I just wanted to be someone else. I wasn’t exactly sure who but I read a ton of books and looked through fashion magazines ad infinitum. I absolutely loved to read as a child and still do. I’m so grateful for this because it has allowed me to be a good student of many subjects and am able to study and read through complex materials with relative ease. My mother always encouraged reading and to this day, she shares her passion for books with my daughters and though she’s moved countless times, she never parts with her cherished library collection. Today reading is a lost art because of technology and social media. It makes me sad as I feel like reading saved me. I say this because it allowed me to escape my crazy head. Who knows what extra trouble I would have got into if I didn’t spend at least some of my extra-curricular time reading. 

Unfortunately, I found plenty of trouble with the time that remained and set myself up for a very rough departure into my college years. I had so little regard for following the rules that by the age of 16 my mother decided that I should go live with my father. He lived two hours away in Los Angeles but it felt like a world away. I was radically opposed to this but my mom was drained and out of ideas of how to reel me back in. With some professional therapy and guidance from church elders, it was suggested that I stay with her but that I didn’t return to school for my senior year. Instead, I was put on a fast track to graduate after one semester through an independent studies high school. I didn’t need many credits to skip grade 12 because I had done well in all of my honors classes the previous 3 years. This seemed like a great plan to me because the quicker I could graduate and move to college, the better. So that’s what I did. I moved to Michigan at barely 17 years old to attend a private liberal arts school that a childhood friend of my attended. She was a couple years older and we had very similar personalities. She liked to push the envelope just as much as I did so moving far away and living my dream life with her seemed like an amazing adventure. 

Adventure is certainly one way to describe it. A more accurate word for that time in my life would be DISASTER. I just couldn’t get it together. All of the emotions and frustrations that plagued me back at home, followed me to college. I hated my classes, didn’t like the professors, hated the weather, thought the girls there were lame, thought my dorm mate was a boring loser, couldn’t settle on which boyfriend would make me happier, didn’t have enough money, hated the food, the town and basically everything about the place I lived in. Basically, I had zero gratitude for anything and lived in a state of self-imposed misery. The world was against me. Why couldn’t everything just go the way I wanted? Why couldn’t people just behave like I wanted? ME, ME, ME ! That was truly all that I cared about. I distracted myself with plenty of partying and drinking just to pass the time. I didn’t want to admit failure and go back home, but I surely wouldn’t dare to ask for help or talk to someone about all of these crazy thoughts in my head. I recall a communications professor that took interest in me. He thought I was very bright and said he saw a lot of potential in my writing skills. When he spoke to me, I felt like he could see through me. He didn’t buy the fake front I put on that everything was bright and rosy. I don’t know how he knew but he did. He asked me to talk after class on several occasions and made an effort to extract more information from me. Looking back I think he was just an intuitive, kind soul that saw a very troubled soul and wanted to help. I didn’t let him of course and he was just the first of many more that tried to help me over the years.

See, the big problem was that I didn’t really think I had a “problem”. I thought you all did. Everyone else was doing everything wrong and making ME unhappy. However, because of how I was raised, I was aware that I was behaving badly and knew that I should be making better choices but I didn’t put a lot of thought into WHY. On the very rare occasion that I would allow myself to think about why, I simply came to the conclusion that I was a sinner and needed to ask God to forgive me. This is basically what I had heard countless times throughout my life , so it really was the only reasonable solution (in my mind) to my discontent existence. If only I went back to church maybe God would give me what I wanted, make sure others treated me the way I wanted and then I’d be happy. The problem was that I partied so hard every weekend that I couldn’t ever drag myself out of bed to get to church so I felt I was just destined to be unhappy.

I feel really sorry for the people closest to me back then. I hurt a lot of feelings and was useless as a friend, girlfriend, daughter, granddaughter or any other role I was supposed to fulfill. Things were all declining quickly by my sophomore year of college and I was desperate to figure out my next move. Luckily, Christmas break was nearing and I was scheduled to return home to the warm, sunny, perfect desert. If I played it right, maybe my parents would allow me to leave Michigan and all of the chaos I had created there. I was sure I could manipulate the details well enough to sway them. After all, they were unaware of the tornado I had created there so I could likely position things to make myself look like the victim and they would in turn feel sorry for me, scoop me up and bring me home. That was the plan.

Little did I know, that I was about to embark on a very different journey…