It's amazing how stealthily our old demons can creep up and sink their talons into us when we're not looking.
I was reading an email from an industry group when I came across a name from my college days. This girl was at once one of my best friends and worst enemies. She embodied in human form all of my hopes, fears, and doubts about myself during one of the darkest mental periods I've ever experinced: a true dark mirror. I saw reflected in her opinions of me everything that terrified and drove me. She was older than me, but still my competition. We hit it off immediately, but the competition was always there. Finally, it came down to crushing words flung at me at the very moment when I looked for her approval the most, and the friendship died under contempt, suspicion, and angry hurt.
Without warning, all of the old feelings from back then came rushing back into me-- my heart dropped and constricted as if it was in a vise, my shoulders tensed like too-stretched elastic bands, and I held my breath. I wondered what she would think if she saw what I was up to now: How would she respond to my email? Would she be amazed/snide/condescending/angry about the progress of my career? Was what I'm accomplishing more/less/as worthwhile as what she was doing?
It's incredible how much we base our view of ourselves on the perceptions and reactions of other people. Even though I love my life as it is now, and see myself as a happy, fulfilled person who is making the right choices for herself and living out what I dreamed for myself back then, when I think about her gaze landing on me I still become the tired, humiliated, and crazy hurting little girl I used to be.
How do we escape our pasts and exorcise those demons? How do we move on to enjoy the people who we've come to be and leave those tortured realities behind? I don't know, but I have an email to write and demons to conjure.
