Just Me

"At least I am able in all of my travels to make these memories quit,

but tonight I clearly recall, every little bit..."

I'm filled with self-doubt tonight. All I hear are the voices of others telling me I will ultimately fail, even if I have small successes along the way. I'm taking the GMAT tomorrow for the second time and I'm struggling to believe that anything will be different than it was before.

Trusting myself seems to be one of the hardest things for me. It's always so easy to remember the times when I wasn't able to see something through to the end. I wonder when I'll be able to forgive myself for not finishing Peace Corps and for not being as strong as I'd like to be. When am I going to be happy with the person that I see in the mirror? Even if I do 9 things right, I obsesses about the one that I did wrong.

What's so interesting about this all is that it appears to be adult-onset of self depreciation and doubt. I skipped over my teenage years of self-loathing and we straight into my early twenties.

Growing up as a competitive gymnast, I very rarely attempted any move before figuring out
how I could land it well, with "well" being a subjective word meaning different things at different times. At the beginning of the learning process, a safe landing meant that even if I didn't land in the place I wanted to (like on top of the balance beam) I could land safely on the ground, usually curled into the fetal position. That kind of confidence is almost unshakable. That kind says, "I'm going to take my body and contort it into about five different hexagonal shapes and know that even if my feet don't hit the ground first, that I have enough spatial awareness to make sure that I don't break an appendage doing this."

When I was little I saw some of the worst kind of accidents a gymnast could sustain. I saw a girl, no more than 8 or 9 years-old put both of her hands behind her to stop her fall. Her arms hit the mat first and absorbed the entire weight of her impact. She broke both arms in half. Her arm bones ruptured her skin at a 45 degree angle through each elbow. I'll never forget the sight of her small, white bone surrounded by all of her blood. I can still hear her screams as the picked her up with her arms hanging limply to the side.

Practice continued on normally once the paramedics left. It was either confidence or ignorance to believe that it wouldn't happen to any of us.

Metaphorically, that's the place that I would like my life to return to. I'd like to have the confidence to step to the end of a balance beam and know that I'm going to dismount off and land safely, even if I may not know how I'm going to accomplish what I set out to do. At the very least, I now that eventually by body will make contact again with Earth. Sometimes that has to be enough.

Bringing those memories to the forefront of my mind has a soothing effect on me. I know that I didn't turn into a coward that day in UlaanBaatar, when I was told that I was going back to the U.S. for therapy. I didn't turn into a sniveling piece of nothingness when I left Peace Corps three weeks later, without saying goodbye to the volunteers and friends in Mongolia.

I'm still here, though. Whatever obstacle I try to overcome, I at least have the faith that I'll land safely. If I fall, I'll grimace for not being able to complete it, but then smile when I realize that the experience didn't transform me into someone else; I'm still me. As me, I'm lucky enough that I don't have a a scoreboard tally of success to failure hanging over my head for everyone to see.

If I did though, I wonder how that scoreboard will look tomorrow, around 3pm when I finish the damn test.