The Peace Within Accountability

There is peace in accountability. If you’d met me several years ago, you couldn’t have paid me to admit that. The truth is, several years ago, I myself was oblivious to this notion. I’d been in conflict after conflict and not one time had I come out on the bottom of it, even if I truly had. If I said it was so, you couldn’t convince me otherwise. And oh, honey I would die on that hill. There was something powerful about lacking any control for much of my life, eventually learning that I can build my own narrative beautifully crafted in any way that I want. What did I want? Control. How did I get it? By being right. Ultimately, I spent over twenty seven of the twenty-eight years on this Earth failing at what I now know as gaslighting. Crafting weak fairytales in a vain attempt to keep what little control I had over my life.

I’d spent even more time being a people pleaser who truly just wanted to be loved, riddled with abandonment issues that my biological interpersonal group refused to acknowledge. One day, I had seen a video surrounding the depiction of a textbook narcissist. Every word stung as they began to explain who I was in some ways while I desperately clung to the concepts I truly couldn’t resonate with. Even after several swipes away from the video I had wondered why I had told myself that I was right and that some stupid fake doctor online couldn’t possibly know anything about me, yet I felt about as fresh as a pile of crap. That feeling sat with me. You know what that feeling was? Reality.

And what a soul-crushing reality it had been. Sure, there were many very good reasons for why I was the way I was growing up, but when it seeped into my adulthood is when the real problems began to surface. I found myself continuously caught under this wave of self-hate which was extraordinarily counterproductive to my healing journey. Even though I had spent such a long time lying to myself it came to a point where it just didn’t feel good anymore. The idea that I could cultivate my own reality no longer had ring to it. It quite frankly seemed rather boring and if I can be brutal about it…pretty lame.

I’d spent all this time wanting to be right, never realizing that when we make mistakes, we then have the opportunity to learn and grow from them. So, for years I had consistently turned a blind eye to who I truly was at my core, which in those days was never good. I’d gossiped, tested boundaries, and genuinely morphed into whoever I thought someone wanted me to be in order to find myself feeling just a little less lonely. Problem was I could be in a room surrounded by people and that loneliness would still sit next to me, so close I could barely breathe. It seemed impossible to free myself from these chains I’d casually attached to my own ankle.

This epiphany warranted a change that I hadn’t known was so necessary. The love and devotion I’d craved for so long wasn’t being reciprocated because I wasn’t putting love and devotion into the world. Yes, my trauma is valid. Yes, my childhood was not the best. Yes, I had every right in the world to be angry, but it was what I did with that anger that took me down a path I truly almost got lost on. I’d never been so blind with rage like I was in the year 2024. I’ve never clung to so much pain, at least not since 2018 another very trying year.

I’d spent so long questioning who was going to love me rather than asking myself what makes someone want to love me? I’m lovable, we all are, don’t get me wrong. But at the core of it our inner beauty is what shapes what is displayed in our flesh. We can have the clearest skin, the prettiest eyes, and yet harbor filthiest soul. That’s not how I wanted to live. This world has shown me a lot about what accountability can do. That scary idea that I’d run so far from didn’t seem so scary anymore when I learned what grace was.

I’ve made many mistakes in my life. Some huge. Some small. But one thing I am certain of, is that I never died from admitting them.