Like a Garden

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of old journals. I’ve been writing since I was in 7th grade, believe it or not. I haven’t found those particular journals, but based on the ones from 8th grade, I’m guessing they’re not very interesting. Because in the ones from 8th grade, 95% of the entries were about Rick Springfield. Stuff like, “Don’t Talk to Strangers” came on the radio 10 times! I can’t wait to see him perform on Solid Gold on Saturday! I just bought the latest Teen Beat magazine and he’s on the cover!

In my defense, back then you couldn’t hear or see whatever song or video you wanted instantaneously like you can now. If you were really determined, you could call the radio station and request the song. And if you wanted to record it, you had to sit in front of the speaker of your stereo with your finger on the record button, waiting for “Don’t Talk to Strangers” to come on because the DJ said he was playing it next, and hope that he doesn’t talk over it at the beginning or end. And hope that your brothers don’t come into the room fighting or playing or whatever. So it was a bigger deal to hear the song you wanted back then.

But still. It doesn’t make for very interesting reading.

But in between the Rick Springfield stuff, there were glimpses of deep and meaningful things. It has been enlightening to see how I dealt with relationships back then. How I could never be convinced that someone liked me, despite the copious amount of evidence that they did. How little it took for me to believe that someone hated me. How not having contact with a friend for a day would be enough to make me believe I had lost them. My sense of self was so fragile. It’s as though I believed I ceased to exist without constant affirmation.

The sad thing is, that’s still true. All of the things I’ve written about in my blog about how demons are always telling me that no one cares about me, that I’m not important–it’s the exact same thing. I can at least say that I am more self-aware. I understand, at least intellectually, that people’s love for me endures, even when I haven’t heard from them in a day. I understand why it’s hard for me to believe this. I am aware of the ways I have manipulated other people because of this fear. It is the reason why I’m afraid to be in a relationship now–I don’t trust that I have changed. I don’t know if I can be less controlling.

Seeing that I am still essentially my 13-year-old self with more introspection makes me have a better appreciation of the garden metaphor of life. The essence of who we are never changes. Whatever was planted is what will grow there, no matter what I do. But I can do nothing, and nothing will grow at all but weeds. Or I can water, fertilize, prune, and protect, and the best version of what I am can grow. But at any point I can stop caring for myself, and all the work that I’ve done can be lost. Everything can die. Weeds can reappear. It’s a lifetime thing, tending to your garden.

I realize that gardening is how you cultivate wisdom. If you don’t garden, you can go through life and have no more understanding of yourself than you did at 13. You can cease to grow psychologically. You can be in a perpetual state of adolescent angst, wanting to be loved, but going about it in all the wrong ways. The extent of your internal world can be listing the number of times you heard “Don’t Talk to Strangers” on the radio, without ever going any deeper.

So even though I continue to battle the demons that tell me that I am not loved and am not worthwhile, just as I did back then, I am still a more cultivated version of myself. Always a work in progress, but also a beautiful landscape to behold in this moment.