🙌🏻 On Being Better

I’ve started, finished, or given up on a lot of things throughout my adult life. I wouldn’t lie about that. But there’s one thing that has been a constant work-in-progress throughout my adult years:

Being a better human. Specifically, being a better human than my mother.

At this point in time, I am far from a lot of what she is, and I’m immensely proud of that. However, there are days when I can feel her influence, genes — whatever you want to call it — creeping in, and that’s when I start to worry.

Am I turning into my mother, just in a slower way than I had imagined?

Am I more like her than I even realize?

Worse, do I know I’m like her, but am ignoring the signs?

It’s a rough thing to deal with every day, and is part of the reason why I decided to pick therapy up again.

My mom and I, we’ve had a severely cracked relationship my entire life. Because she’s a raging narcissist who’s only ever used any of us kids as a way to get sympathy and/or attention for herself. I don’t recall hearing “I love you” more than a handful of times in my life. My siblings have said the same thing. In my mom’s head, she’s the only person who matters. She’s the only person who’s ever right. If your opinion doesn’t match hers, YOU are in the wrong. Always.

It’s utterly exhausting. It really is.

I have tried setting boundaries. She has never respected them, using the fact that she’s my mother as her excuse. I’ve tried cutting her off, especially during the early years of the pandemic. She harassed me, telling me that I’m a sheep for believing actual medical science instead of “doing my own research.”

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that one thing is incredibly important to me, and that’s constantly working to be a better person than she is. It’s hard, but I’m really trying, changing, and improving.

I try not to think of a recent conversation with my sister in which she said that had our parents said “I love you” to all of us more often, then maybe we wouldn’t all be so bad at expressing our own feelings.

Of course she was right and I agreed, but I’ve been trying to not look backward so much, instead opting to look forward — even if it’s only a short distance. That’s one of my biggest goals I’d like to accomplish in therapy — to learn to look forward rather than backward.

I think that’s one of the keys to being a better human. If I don’t look backward, I can’t dwell on whatever happened — whether that’s my own mistakes or those of my mother. It’s not me ignoring my mother’s actions, it’s me choosing to move past them to better myself.

And that’s what’s really important — bettering myself.