The gratitude I feel for my friends led me down the path of those times I didn’t feel so good being recognized and how I hid myself.  There are so many moments I look back and see I’m missing from the picture.  Many times it was because I didn’t like (don’t like) how I look on film—and because I felt like I look so different in reality than I do on film.  I missed a lot of moments that should have been captured–my pregnancy and the birth of my son, times out with my friends, concerts. I realize now that the reason I didn’t want myself on film was so much deeper than not liking how I looked.  It had everything to do with worth—and why I started this journey of perfectionism.  I was blessed to spend some time looking through pictures with my father the other day and I truly started understanding how blessed I am.  We had some amazing times together when I was a kid, the trips to California.  I felt conflicted about those trips as I got older because I never gave a thought to any feelings of inequity with my siblings until they brought it up later—and one sibling in particular loved to bring it up.  I loved those moments and I truly cherished every one of them—to this day those times with my parents in California are some of my best memories.  My sibling never hesitated to point out that they didn’t get that and insinuating I was spoiled.  My enjoyment wasn’t me being selfish or saying that they didn’t deserve those trips.  I was a kid raised differently from my siblings—that didn’t mean I was favored more.  It did mean that my parents were in a different circumstance and I experienced different things than they did. 

The more they talked about those differences as I got older, I started to feel guilty. Which translated into feeling guilty about the rest of the things I had in my life.  Again, we were raised differently so what I had and the relationship I had with my parents was all I knew. I truly never gave any thought to the things I had—I assumed my parents had given them the same things that they gave me.  I understood later that my parents didn’t have those opportunities when my siblings were younger—but I know with 100,000% certainty they would have done exactly that if they did have the same things available to them then.  My siblings interpreted it as my parents liking me more but I ALWAYS knew that wasn’t true.  Shit, I gave up my childhood trying to be older and prove myself to my siblings, to be their equal and I was still compared to them, never celebrated: I was the president of French NHS for Christ’s sake and I was still told about how good my sister was with languages—absolutely dismissing my accomplishment.  I was a singer and told how good my sister was at dancing.  I started taking myself out of the picture because it began to feel like I wasn’t meant to enjoy anything that came my way—including the things I worked and sacrificed for.  I removed myself from the picture because I thought I wasn’t worth anything. 

Most of my teen years all the way through my thirties are barely documented because I didn’t think the moments I was in, the moments captured, were good enough or that I was good enough to be photographed.  And now looking back at those pictures, I see how ridiculous that was.  Those photos I was in weren’t perfect but Christ I looked so HAPPY.  And I remember feeling that happy, alive in the experience.  I dimmed the entirety of my existence because I didn’t want to rub anything in their faces for having a different experience than them.  I thought I needed to have the same experience to justify being here.  I just wanted to be loved and I diminished myself so much, I learned to hate myself so much, because they had a different childhood than me.  They got the memory of the bowling alley and the arcade—I got the bowling alley and sitting in the restaurant and bringing my friends. They got the memory of the family Christmases in the halls because we had so many people we couldn’t fit in the house—I have the quiet Christmases in the homes with barely anyone (and I still loved them, that was all I knew—I didn’t know I missed out until later).  They got the memory of playing together outside, having secrets from my parents, fighting with each other, loving each other, throwing parties together behind my parent’s backs.  I have none of that. 

I have memories of trying to keep up and feeling so alone.  Trying to appear older and losing out on time with my siblings and my friends because I couldn’t fit in with either.  I lived an existence between worlds, not fitting in, not knowing what I was supposed to do, caught between leading my peers and being resented by my siblings, never at home anywhere, least of all in my own skin.  I spent so much time alone, I’m barely ever in the picture—it feels like I didn’t exist.  And that translated to my adulthood.  If the moment wasn’t big enough, I didn’t want to be in the picture.  And now all I have are the memories in my head.  I fear losing that, after watching both of my grandmothers go through Alzheimer’s and dementia respectively.  I have nothing to remind me that I was there except for my work and my things.  That’s why I can’t let it go.  In some ways that work and the things I’ve accumulated over time are the only things that show I’ve been here.  That I lived. Over the last few years, specifically with my son, I have taken a ton of pictures of him because I don’t want him to not have those– and I’ve put myself in the picture but I still get uncomfortable, thinking I need to look a certain way.  I am in this world, I am living this life, and I am grateful for it.  I’d like to be in it and I’d like to remember it.  I never needed to prove anything—not to my siblings, not to work.  I never needed to be ashamed of my success or diminish my success.  Had I reveled in it more, I think I would have gone further.  No, I can’t blame my siblings for how I reacted, but I can understand it and do it differently now.  I see the bullshit resentment they have toward my parents and they have no idea that they were loved in a way I wasn’t, they were loved for who they were and they had each other.  I had to be perfect and I was still left out of the picture.  I have learned to put myself back in the picture and to love my life.  I need to remember to do that every day, to celebrate being alive every day.  Even if they don’t celebrate me in that way, I am alive.