I Know Better But I Can’t Do Better

Still living in heartbreak hotel. | REWIND 📼Day #2

old me, same feelings.

July 7, 2021:

“This is the moment of truth. This is the moment where I decide if I deserve better than the options presented to me and I actually believe I can get better than the options presented before me. Therapy lesson: ‘I don’t have to just take what’s given to me. I can make my own way.’ I have another option. To focus on healing the parts of me that believe I need to change in order to be loved, the who believes my anxieties and emotions make me unloveable. To have a stronger faith that I can heal and that I’m deserving of and able to find a partnership based on mutual growth, care, and understanding.”

The risk you take when reading old journal entries is that what you find in your past is gonna be really encouraging or really depressing. In flipping through my old notebooks, journals, and diaries, I'm either pleasantly surprised at the wisdom my younger self poured into these pages, or I'm saddened by reliving what I was experiencing at that time in my life and I’m disappointed in myself for not having learned lessons I was being taught years ago. 

This is one of those disappointing moments.

This journal entry was written three years ago about a boy who did not want me the same way I wanted him. Who had basically told me in the days before I wrote this entry that he did not love me and would never give me the relationship I wanted and proceeded to tell me all the things he did not like about me and all the reasons he couldn’t date me including but not limited to my “neediness” and my “anxiety issues.” And I took to my journal to try to unload some of my feelings and encourage myself out of heartbreak. 

It was not the first time I’d been in a situation like that. And it, unfortunately, would not be the last time. 

I’m sad to say I still struggle with this. I struggle with knowing when to walk away, knowing when to stop trying, knowing when I’m in a one-sided love affair. I wrote about what I was learning in therapy three years ago and I’m still in therapy talking to the lady about how I don’t know what to do when I’m feeling rejected.

And it’s not just a problem I have with dating. I struggle with codependency, people pleasing, and anxious attachments in a lot of areas of my life. My baseline emotion is stressed about whether I’m doing enough, whether I’m proving my worth, whether people are happy with me. 

In this moment, I actually feel a bit ashamed. And I wonder if past Jolie would be ashamed of me too, knowing that years before I wrote this, I had a problem with forming healthy connections and, years later, we still have this problem.

Maya Angelou is famously quoted as having said “When you know better, do better.” The knowing for me is easy, the doing is hard. I know a lot of things that I can’t put into practice. I know how tall Mt. Everest is, that doesn’t mean I can climb it. I know how to read but that doesn’t mean I wanna crack open James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for fun (it’s an overrated book). I know when my time is being wasted, I know when I’m being disrespected, I know when I am unhappy and unsatisfied but that doesn’t mean I’m always able to make the right choices. 

But maybe the problem isn’t that I don’t know when I’m being mistreated or unloved or when I’m unhappy (I promise, I’m very aware when I’m unhappy). Maybe the problem is that I don’t know that I deserve to be happy. I don’t know that happiness is my birthright. I don’t know how to find that happiness within. 

That’s still sad but also kinda encouraging? Haha! Because it helps me see what the work actually is. I don’t need to work on the act of walking away or knowing when to walk away, I need to work on knowing why I want to walk away from anything and anyone who causes me more harm than happiness: Because I want to and because I deserve better is enough of a reason. ← that’s the shit I need to know in the core of my soul, deep in my bones, unshakably. I’m not there yet. But I wanna be there.

I see the through line of faith popping up in this past entry. It’s something I needed then, something I still need now. I’m proud of past me for knowing even then that faith in myself and in my future was something I was going to need in order to truly love myself and know my self worth. I’m proud to let past Jolie know that I haven’t given up on strengthening my faith.

The full quote from Mama Angelou is: “Do your best until you know better. And when you know better, do better.” In the meantime, I am doing my best! I am still doing the work. And I’m not ashamed of that.

This entry was written for DAY 2 of the Finding the Right Words August Challenge under the theme “REWIND 📼.” Use the graphics above and write your own story. Follow Finding The Right Words on Instagram and share with me using the tag #FTRW.

There’s no wrong way to journal. You just gotta find the right words. Happy Writing!