If I’m honest, coming up with a daily blog post has become a drag.

You will know if you read a recent post of mine that I am less than two months away from achieving my one year goal of publishing a blog post every day.

Looking back on my life, my ennui and that attitude is kind of predictable.

I tend to run out of gas and ambition on the final leg of any journey.

That was true in the case of coming up to completing my university degrees, pending motherhood (by month 9, I was ready to extract my baby with a vacuum cleaner (just kidding) – I think that “get it out of me” feeling is nature’s way to prepare you for giving birth), house buying (in one case, I actually bailed on the day the house deal was supposed to close – turns out that was very poor judgment), and many failed so-called intimate relationships.

Relationships broke down as I edged closer to true intimacy. I was a baby adult, you see. While I presented as a walking, talking, competent adult, I was – in reality – a mewling infant. If I started to get emotionally close to someone – that is, feeling vulnerable and safe – the infant side of me took over.

There is nothing particularly attractive or romantic about a twenty something year old carrying on like a five year old. Temper tantrums. Blind selfishness. Acting out by running away.

I was the living epitome of the hurt and angry child who packs up all her belongings in a handkerchief, sticks them on a pole, heads out the door (slamming it, of course), and down the road.

That works until close to nightfall when said child is faced with the looming cold and dark. It’s about that time of the day that your horrible parents don’t seem that horrible any more.

In truth, I wasn’t really much more developed than that. Arrested emotional development is real, my friends.

The value of a healthy family, I came to realize, was that it can (should) provide a safe container – a nest, if you will – where you can work out and work through childish emotions as they come up year after year. It’s called growing up. From about age 5, I grew mostly sideways.

This growing up business is, of course, far from a perfect science. Many people are simply shut down as children and forced to stew in their own emotional pain perpetually. They can grow up to be emotionally arrested, too.

The ideal of a safe family environment in which to take root and grow is just that for many – an ideal. None of us gets through childhood without scars.

So the urge to bolt at the gate just as things are starting to go right was habitual with me for a long time. Maybe I did that because otherwise I would be forced to acknowledge that I was a real grown-up adult. I wasn’t having it. I was still looking for a knight in shining armor.

The acknowledgement of total personal responsibility would have forced me to accept that I did have power over myself and my choices and my fate. Frankly, that seemed like way too much responsibility to take on.

And the other truth was, I feared failure and disappointment so creating those conditions myself gave me a lopsided sense of control. “See,” I could say to myself, “I knew this would never work out.” And son of a gun, I’d be right.

I call it brinking. Giving up just before you are going to succeed. Giving up just before an important goal is realized. Giving up shortly before I could catch the brass ring. (It wasn’t always that, in reality. I stuck with and accomplished a good number of goals. It’s just that the self-talk was discouraging and total joy killer.)

My self-talk in young adulthood was guided by self-loathing and a broad-based lack of self-confidence. Not exactly a loving and supportive voice. It has taken years to change it. To “grow out of it.” The first challenge was to see it, observe it as it was happening and call it what it was. Something like I am doing now.

The accomplishment of publishing a daily blog post every day for a year that I will celebrate won’t matter to another single living soul but me. But here’s the difference between little me and struggling adult me.

I now realize that the primary and only single living soul I have agency over and who matters to me is me. Not in a selfish sense but in a sense of total accountability for my own life. As poet William Ernest Henley famously phrased it in his poem Invictus:

“I am the master of my soul, I am the captain of my fate.”

I quite liked this summary of the poem’s meaning:

The last two lines of William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus‘ contain invaluable advice to those who blame God for their failures. It is not only about God, but the mindset that makes one surrender while faced with challenges. Challenges make one stronger but mentally submitting oneself to those impediments extinguishes the inner light that one carries inside the heart from infancy. Through these lines, Henley tried to say that it’s not about how difficult the path is, it’s about one’s attitude to keep moving forward without submitting oneself to fate’s recourse.

https://poemanalysis.com/william-ernest-henley/i-am-the-master-of-my-fate-i-am-the-captain-of-my-soul/

I finally get it, Mom and Dad.

You did what you knew and the best you could.

The rest of my story and how it unfolds is up to me.

Heigh-ho.