i don’t know who i am; i just know who i’m not
my thoughts as of late—navigating shame, identity issues, and the idea of hope
One time, in kindergarten, my teacher was fed up with how talkative my class was being—aside from me, because with my anxiety and people-pleasing tendencies combined, I was always on my best behavior. That day, I was the only one allowed to participate in our daily “rest” period, where we would relax and snack on whatever our parents packed for us and chat with each other. I was usually always silent during these, not really having many friends at the time. But that day, at the teacher’s command, the entire room was silent. The rest of my classmates sat there, heads in their arms in the dark, staring at me as I crunched on my goldfish and drank my little water bottle, feeling every bit as awkward as I was oddly proud of being the only one who had followed the rules.
My kindergarten teacher made me out to be the ideal student—because I was always quiet.
This once filled me with pride. Now, I look back, and my pride wanes, replaced with strangeness and isolation, with discomfort and shame.
I wasn’t any better than anyone else in my class. I was simply too afraid to speak.
It took me twenty-three years to realize that I will never be perfect.
But that isn’t the only blow. Not only was I never going to be perfect, but I was never perfect at all. There was never this perfect version of myself that there was return to, like I thought there was. The polite, quiet child from that kindergarten class wasn’t perfect. The well-behaved straight-A middle school student wasn’t perfect. The anxiety-ridden high schooler, so desperate to impress and to please, wasn’t perfect at all. And this adult version of myself is so imperfect that I find myself drowning in it every day. But what’s really, truly changed through all that time?
My child self is not all that different from my adult self, because that child self is me, just as much as my adult self is me. That anxiety, that silence, that desire for validation—I still sit with all of these things. I am still the sole student sitting alone in the dark, eating and drinking and wondering what makes me so different from everyone else—is it truly this sense of being “good”, or is it simply fear that’s stopping me, holding me back?
I am constantly hindered by the expectations of others, to the point where pondering exactly how much makes me feel sick to my stomach. Every text I answer, every person I respond to in conversation, every word, every expression, every breath I take, is carefully orchestrated with the desire for them to think I am normal, because I don’t feel normal, and I never have.
I have a mind that goes a million miles a minute, and a mouth that will not open to share anything that occurs within it.
I have a family who—while they are not by any means perfect—loves me very much. I have a boyfriend who—is also not perfect, hence why we get along so well, perhaps—loves me very much, too. And I love them, I truly do. I can’t always feel the existence and the fierceness of my love, but it is there, and they know it is. But despite having this, despite the blessings of being cared for deeply, I have always felt alone, and I used to like being alone. I used to like to be to myself, with myself, because it meant my mind could delve into all the places it couldn’t when I was around someone else. The way I remember it, I existed almost purely in fantasy.
Memories come back to me now, and they feel wrong, even though they are very much real, and very much me at the time. There is such a strange disconnect between myself and my past, between myself and my current mind.
Now, in my adult life, I can’t quite get back there to that fantasy world, no matter how hard I try, because I always return to me. To my mistakes. To my flaws. To my reality—to the essence of my very core. And that terrifies me.
It makes me resent myself. It makes me think about hopelessness, about loss, about terribly unhappy endings. I dwell in the shame of my own fraudulence and lies and cowardice and toxic feelings, feelings that were bottled up and constrained, feelings that can never spill over to anyone else.
I feel clouded by the darkness of my thoughts, and plagued by the chronic acknowledgment of my own abnormalities. Why did I exist solely in my own mind for so much of my childhood? Why do I crave connection without being able to pursue it in a healthy way? Why do I lie? Why do I not care as much as I should? Why am I hypocritical? Why am I so afraid? Why am I not trying hard enough? Why did I do this? Why did I do that? Do I lack empathy? Do I lack the talents I thought I had? Is it too late for me? Do I know anything about myself at all? Who am I? Who do I want to be? Do I have the capacity to be honest about anything? Or are other people’s opinions and perceptions of me more important than my sense of self?
For so long, I have dwelled in fantasy. In anything other than myself, and my own life. I lived in my own dreams. I woke up every day just to create my own world instead of living in my current one. I bored myself so deeply that I erased myself from my own narrative. I repressed my sense of being, because I didn’t like myself. And I was so afraid of admitting how much I didn’t like myself that it almost killed me when I was forced to. I had to reckon with my reflection in the mirror and think, this is me. This is real. There is nothing else but this. This is it. (BoJack reference, for all my media nerds)
Now, the balance seems impossible to find. I am rooted to the spot, paralyzed by my own dishonest, pathetic nature, by my own horrible mistakes and judgements, by my own skewed thoughts in the past. I feel like the only person alive to think some of the things I’ve thought, or to operate in the ways that I do. I feel stuck in myself. It feels too late to start over. It scares me how willing I would be to start from scratch, to get another chance, to do it all over again.
But then all over again, I would let myself down. I would beat myself up. I would beg and plead for another chance, for another way to turn back time.
Because I was never, ever going to be perfect.
And I’m really struggling to accept that.
I never really saw myself as a perfectionist until I started therapy. I wasn’t trying to be perfect. I wasn’t even trying to be good. Because I was good. In my mind, I was a good person, and nothing could change that. As long as I lived, I’d be living up to that. I’d always be good. I’d always be mature. I’d always make the right decisions. I’d always get good grades. I’d always push through, and make it.
But the version of me that was trying to achieve all these things—which were, in fact, achievements, not simply a way of being—was not doing it for me. It was doing it for other people. I never once tried to be a perfect person for me. A smart person for me. A good person for me. I never tried to achieve something for me. The only thing I did for me was write, and that was mostly to escape from myself even more. And that’s a scary thing to realize—that without the wants of others, I have nothing.
And the lengths I went to achieve this perfect version of myself were what ended up destroying my already skewed sense of self for good. Every time I messed up, I kept it inside. I repressed it. I lied about it. I denied it. I denied my own humanity, my capacity for wrongdoing. I escaped into my mind. I created worlds to run away from myself. I reinvented my reality in my own head. I concealed it, compartmentalizing it as belonging to someone else rather than face it myself.
For years, I did this. I refused to see the negative aspects of myself. I let things rot and fester. I became an actor in my own life; I was like this for almost as long as I remember, even as a kid. I was so desperate to please that I never developed a real sense of self. I just played role after role. I lived my life at half-mast. I fought as best as I could with what I knew, but it wasn’t good enough. I lost more of myself each time.
None of these roles were able to fully make me me, because none of them were perfect. The pushover wasn’t perfect. The liar wasn’t perfect. The faker wasn’t perfect. The coward wasn’t perfect. The cool, nonchalant version of myself wasn’t perfect. The try-hard wasn’t perfect, either. Neither was the listener, or the cheater, or the empath, or the cold-hearted loner. I committed myself to countless different versions of myself to try to chase the perfect me. Now, I find that I am left with nothing.
Even in this midst of nothingness, I hold onto hope.
I began writing this because I felt hopeless. I felt tired. I felt sad and repulsed in my own skin. I felt shame. I felt a mix of self-pity and self-resentment, and I felt anger, too. I wanted to blame the Internet. I wanted to blame my family, my upbringing, for my lostness and my feelings. And I wanted to blame my past self, for not doing right by the ideals of a perfect me.
But the Internet is a defunct thing that did not know better. My family didn’t know better. I didn’t know better. Everything in life operates as it is meant to, with all that it has. We all exist, and we all try, and we all fail, and we all try again. Some of us succumb. We give up, in one way or another. But many of us keep getting up, keep running, keep trying.
And all of this blame can stand, and it can feel like the end of the world, but it is meaningless in the end. The past is in the past, and it can never be changed. What matters now is what we can change, and that’s the present. And in holding onto hope, I choose to hold onto my present, and onto myself, my real self, for possibly the very first time in my life.
I don’t quite know how to stop punishing myself for how much I have hurt, betrayed, underwhelmed, and disappointed myself in the past. Because I will never be perfect, and that really, really sucks. I even feel sometimes that I will never feel good, or proud, of anything I’ll come to do. I want to prove myself wrong. I want to be stronger, better, kinder, more genuine. I want to be committed to something. I want to publish a novel. I want to leave my job. I want to be someone to myself.
It’s been easy, falling into despair as of late. I am not proud of who I’ve been in the past. I am afraid of my thoughts, of the darkness in my mind. I feel lost and confused when it comes down to deciding for myself what kind of person I am. I feel unsure and ashamed of everything, from my past mistakes that deserve a level of shame to the things as simple as my own hobbies and interests—my hair, my face, my job, my morality, my politics, my taste in music. I try to hide it. I try to come across as confident, but I feel like I fail every time.
In short—I’m ashamed, I’m scared, I feel like I have no clue who I really am, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, and I’m really struggling with understanding how everyone seems to be coping just fine in this shit show of a world. I know they’re probably struggling too, but it just doesn’t seem like it. Every day, I cave. I fall apart. I cry. I’m human, like we all are, and it’s so hard. I’m ashamed to not be doing okay. I am so deeply privileged, but I’m so sad, too. I’m so scared of the future, of change, of moving on, of death. I feel like a child in an adult’s body, stuck and paralyzed and utterly pathetic.
I don’t know if I’m good. I don’t know if I can change in all the ways I want to. But I am putting hope and faith into my present self to put her best foot forward. I’m forcing myself to have that hope, because nothing but hope could triumph over despair.
The optimistic side of me says that I no longer wish for a perfect me, but for my own version of a better me, a me I can feel proud of being. I am not lost. I am not evil. I am human. And I want to get to know myself more, even if I don’t like everything I come to find out, because I have the power to learn and to change. We all do.
And I want to listen to that side a little more.
I love you guys, and thank you very much for reading.
About the Creator
angela hepworth
Hello! I’m Angela and I enjoy writing fiction, poetry, reviews, and more. I delve into the dark, the sad, the silly, the sexy, and the stupid. Come check me out!
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Comments (29)
Interesting
Angela. You beautiful soul. This is such an open and honest way to be yourself, thank you for opening up your inner world. What I learned over a long period of time (the hard way) from a talented and wise therapist is this: When we aren't allowed to be angry (what woman is, really?), we use shame to cover anger. What happens when we cover anger with shame is we turn that fire inward to scorch ourselves into submission. The energy it takes to keep it covered AND the energy consumed from the inward self-flagellation is exhausting. If there is no escape from it, we come to a place of learned helplessness. This is where despair flourishes. There is no easy way to learn how to lift the cover AND learn how to feel anger, but even simply knowing this can lend confidence to sally forth. Shame is a quality that is global (as in we attribute it to our whole character, instead of domain specific), and a fixed trait (as in we are permanently flawed). Shame isolates us, cuts us off from others - in an attempt to avoid this feeling we like being alone. Guilt is different: guilt is situation specific, a variable that can be changed. It motivates us to repair any injury we have unwittingly caused. Guilt is about repairing connection. Shame is about severing all connection. There is an infinite amount of space between a feeling and an action. We can feel any emotion without too much fear because now, as adults, we get to decide what and how we want to feel. It's okay to be afraid of feeling those fears we have kept covered, because they're really big waves. But it's good to remember that we generate our emotions, so they can never be bigger than our own consciousness. It's akin to surfing - if we try to avoid the wave, we get churned under and disoriented, even feel like we are drowning. When we learn to surf the wave properly, we glide over it so that it passes us by. When we acknowledge waves as they first roll in, they don't become as large as when they do when we ignore them. In truth, you are the ocean and the waves are your feelings. That being said, feelings aren't facts. They are a mix of electrical impulses and chemicals made by how we interpret information coming in. Our perception determines this. If we've lost the cortical lottery, a lot of information seems more threatening to us than it might to others. This is why different people can experience the same traumatic incident and only some individuals develop ptsd. Knowing this can help us have compassion for ourselves. Losing the cortical lottery isn't a failing or a flaw, it simply is a biological assortment of genes that make us who we are. Writers are too excellent at weaving narratives to explain emotions - especially suffering. This perhaps may explain why many writers have misanthropic tendencies, are often introverted, and may suffer similar maladies/addictions. For my own journey there has been many supports and tools tried, discarded, implemented and researched. Everyone is different and I don't offer unsolicited advice on what might work for you. All I can say is the best advice I have ever been to cut the intensity of my emotions is distilled to this: If you hate everyone, eat a snack If you think everyone hates you, take a nap If you feel overwhelmed, go outside for a walk or take a shower Everything else is just a story. You are a singular human who is teasing out the very threads of what it means to have individual consciousness. If you were born in a different time, you would be a shaman. Keep questioning everything and how it's all tied together, but also know this: You would never speak to anyone of us, especially those you love, with the voice you're using to speak to yourself. You are just as worthy of kind words and encouragement as you give to others. When the voice gets really loud, give it a name to externalize it. (I like to use the name of a girl who was a total bitch in high school, haha). This can help single out the negative self-talk chatter as someone you can talk back to. For example, the voice may say to me, "you're old, you have adhd, you can't do this - you're an idiot". So now I say back to myself, (as if I was speaking to a beloved one), "It's an amazing to learn at any age, having adhd isn't a moral failing/flaw, and I know I'm intelligent - so fuck off Geraldine!" Hope this helps just a little. xo
Actually You are Perfect for me when I read You, You are all I am too whether before or in the now sometimes environment doesnt help to be who we truly are and is asking us to be somewhere where it blocks a natural human flow of ours and love for our every cell to accept who we truly are not in the eyes of the one who cant see or feel invisible but in the eyes of ours and of the ones who know who see and who feel more about us that is purely good and its not for a reason that some people are this way normally i would say we dont reach in life to be perfect but somehow you are perfect in the way you express yourself freely in here Congratulations on Top Story ! one of the best I have read so far and be proud of who you are One of a kind ! One of a star !
Wooohooooo congratulations on your Leaderboard placement! 🎉💖🎊🎉💖🎊
Wow. I identified so much with this. Struggling to be perfect in a imperfect world. And because of this shit show of a world right now? I break down almost everyday too. You are not alone there. Excellent work, and congrats on a well deserved Top Story.
Dear Angela - Perfect-People don't Exist — and that's something to celebrate. 'Real relationships aren't about perfection; they're about partnership. They're about two imperfect people coming together to create something beautiful, messy, and uniquely their own.' jk.in.l.a
Definitely can feel this. Congrats on your top story. :D
I just want to jump on here to really thank everyone for their kind words, personal stories, and powerful advice. I cannot stress just how much I needed to hear you guys today. I am very grateful to Vocal for sending such a beautiful and intellectually astounding community my way with this piece. Thank you to everyone ♥️
Your honesty and courage truly shine through. Such a raw and powerful story. Congratulations on your Top Story!
You indeed have a lot of things to say and I am glad you can speak through writing. The shadow self of each of us comes with the light... made me think of the song me and my shadow.. take a listen... it's quite a feat to have your mr jekyll and mr hyde find a way to get together-- and lessen the difference between them!! Good luck on this journey of life.
Funny how our struggles can mask itself behind being on our best behaviour. Lol. They were all in the dark watching you feast. That's like so satisfying to read. To see the bad ones getting punished. That sounds really draining and I am so sorry you're in this position. (Everything you do always being orchestrated with the desire for others to think you're normal). I feel your pain. I like how you delved into what life was like when you were alone. That you lived in fantasy, but you also was able to delve into all the places, you couldn't when around others. Your memories feeling wrong to you, hits home for me. I am a stranger to my old self and I her. I don't think we've met. And some parts of my past life, I can't even remember. 'Not being able to return to the fantasy, you return to you and your mistakes instead'. Oh now its coming out clearer. The questions you had about yourself, wow. I am taken by how relatable those questions are. Relatable and powerful because of it. Everyone is not coping just fine. I know it's easy to think that way because we all hide, but hey! 👉🏾I had to go out on the street in the rain to find my ring (long story). I was suppose to wash my hair today. I haven't. Couldn't shower either. Barely eaten anything. Drinking a cup of coffee, trying to read your stories to support but also to escape. Oh and did I tell you that I was pondering the bridge, oh yes. My life is hell at the moment. I don't know up from down BUT congratulations on your top story Angela. I am sending all my love and all my hugs. The not needing to be perfect part of your story did make me feel better. I don’t need to be perfect today, but I can take a step towards myself and things will get better from there. We love you too and I hope your self love journey will lead you to hold yourself ever so tightly. Oh and sorry for the long comment. It can’t be helped. 🙈 🎉🎉🎉🤗❤️
This was an amazing piece I related so much. I too was the quiet “perfect” student afraid to speak up. Still wondering about my place in this life. Almost isolated and lost at times, still the kid who didn’t have many friends. Afraid of everything. I too want to be better and less afraid. I feel so seen. Thank you.
Perhaps we just need to change our definition of "perfect" - as we are "perfectly imperfect" just the way we are. Our uniqueness is a gift. You're doing great. You're noticing all of these things about yourself - that's how you heal and rise above them. The other people that seem to be "just fine" simply haven't noticed something is off yet, that there is much more to life. Great article, very well written, thanks for sharing!!!
I really feel you on this, you are putting your heart out and it’s so hard to show your heart to a strange, unflinching, cold world. I love your Bojack reference too. Hugs.
"I am constantly hindered by the expectations of others, to the point where pondering exactly how much makes me feel sick to my stomach." This part hit home, Angela, and I want you to know I felt your every word, not just here, but the entire story, If it helps, I am 53 and it's only been since turning 50 that I started accepting myself. Today, I can wholeheartedly say I love myself. This took decades and a whole lot of soul searching. It wasn't easy and my heart goes out to you. I don't know you but I think you are a lovely person. It's crystal clear. You did something that many won't- show your vulnerability for the world with such passion and conviction. You aren't meant to be perfect because you are human, with that being said, you are perfect just the way you are. Take your time, get to really know what Angela wants, and please make your novel a priority! You have much to say that others can learn from. Take all that pain and pave a way for others while healing yourself. Congratulations on an astounding top story! 🌹🌹🌹
Oh my! First of all congrats on Top Story - richly deserved. To say that I relate to this is an understatement, but it's more than that. This is a tour de force of personal writing, you are an exceptional writer to pick yourself out of your shell and show everyone your raw self. I am in genuine awe. Good luck to you, those who love you and those you love are truly blessed.
very excellent Queen
CONGRATS QUEEN !!!!
Simplemente me encanto. Todo esta dicho.
Wow, Congratulations on your top story
Your poignant sincerity certainly earned Top Story recognition--for you.
You are courageous to face yourself stripped bare to share with the world. I'm glad you were able to write about this. It felt cathartic in the reading of it, so I hope the writing and releasing of it felt that too. This is core work, getting to who we really are, and it is sacred ground. You are on your way! Blessings for this journey to YOU!
Here's to sharing your inner world. Congratulations on your Top Story!
Oh Angela, I'm so sorry that you feel this way. I can relate so much. I used to be a child and young adult just like you - with all the feelings of not belonging, what's wrong with me and solitude, questioning everything about myself. For me, what helped was to unlearn everything I was conditioned to think about me and the world and figure out who I really am underneath it all. And I'm 35 and still not quite sure, but the more I figure the more I know who I am not, and it always gets me one step closer to who i am. I'm sure you're very loved. Here on Vocal for sure we love you! You're a unique, creative and kind hearted soul. I don't believe in perfection but you can't get it wrong until you focus on being your best self - the one that feels best for you.
"Your story truly touched me. It's not just words—it's a reflection of strength, truth, and human experience. Keep writing, the world needs more voices like yours."