I am back! A long hiatus, a dark night of the soul, different voices in my head that have led me nowhere or maybe they have. I highly recommend a few weeks, or if you can swing it, months, of time out. After years of feeling unwell, thousands of dollars spent on all manner of practitioners – quacks and experts included, a nasty bout of shingles a few months ago and a life time of self harassment administered by yours truly, I think I may have finally hit the jack pot of self knowledge.
My doctor (of sorts) took one look at me a month ago and said “You need 6 months off”- whatever that means in the life of a forty something mother of two, wife and daughter of two aging parents who now retired don’t seem to like each other and therefore look to me for entertainment!
I would love to have 6 mths off. Imagine.. re-inventing myself, chilling by the beach, reading books I have had lying on shelves for most of my adult life that are just gagging to be dog-eared and smeared in sun-cream, eating bowls of cereal for dinner ( or not) and generally living the world according to Garp- I mean me! But I, like many of you no doubt, suffer from an affliction most dire: The Good Girl Syndrome.; a people pleaser extraordinaire, a well honed, heavily oiled, Stepford kind of woman, except without the perky boobs and perfect skin. Unfortunately I can’t blame the water supply because I was born with this terrible disease- its in my waters.
Being an HSP to boot doesn’t help. You are even more tuned into everyone else’s needs. A veritable nightmare of feeling, seeing, breathing every ones energies. Knowing who’s needy of what before they even do; complete energy overload, a thousand hands tugging at your apron strings that no one can see other than you, all alone in your nightmare, drowning in your empathetic aura.
Thing is, that you would imagine this good girl thing would be a nice ever so polite thing to live with but no… it’s a voracious, greedy,ugly wolf like beast ready to devour you at any chance. If there was something like ghost busters use to detect ghosts, a plasmatron kind of device that scanned you for good girl-itis, it would be screeching off the scale by now for me. And I didn’t even know it.
The biggest downfall of GG is that you are so bloody good that you can’t see your folly, your downfall, you are too busy orchestrating life so that it is nice and rosy for everyone else that you forget to look at that ugly devouring wolf you have become in the mirror.
If you are tired, exhausted, angry, a tiny bit bitter, or spend hours dreaming of a different life and then immediately reprimanding yourself for such selfish thoughts. If you are secretly dreading the christmas shopping that has to be done in these coming weeks, or hate your boss but see him as your Karmic lesson, or really can’t be arsed to make yet another dinner tonight but instantaneously correct yourself and go write in your gratitude journal then I hate to be the bearer of bad news dahling.. sorry but you got GG bad!
