July 22, 2020 — Twenty-Two 2s

“There’s a lot of twos in today’s date,” I thought to myself as I sat down to write a post for a blog I never started after approximately the 56th time of telling myself that I was going to start one. I was 18 or so the first time I told myself that I was gonna start blogging. I had dreams of becoming a great writer. Anthony Bourdain was my hero. If you had asked me then, I would’ve told you I was on a cosmically directed trajectory towards being the next Bourdain. I was gonna travel the world, eat food, meet people, and write about all of it.

Nearly 10 years later, I haven’t left the country. I’ve written a lot but the vast majority of it has remained locked in my hard drives. There they sit collecting virtual dust if they’re lucky or being lost to old devices that didn’t properly transfer their data if they weren’t as fortunate. Folders of old poems, song lyrics, and countless paragraphs of rambling nonsense remain locked up, chained down by the very insecurities that have plagued me throughout my life.

10 years is a long time to accumulate excuses. “I don’t know what I want to talk about,” I’d say. Sometimes it was simply that I was afraid of being judged: “I’m just not good enough.” Other times, I was “busy” writing other things like class papers or that fucking thesis. However, another thing that happens after 10 years is that a common denominator shines through the heaping pile of bullshit. The little glimmer of a diamond forming under all of the pressure that I put on myself.

Maybe I over-reflect on things. In fact, I definitely over-reflect. I’m over-reflecting right now about how much I actually reflect on things. I guess I hold myself to a high standard and hate putting anything out that doesn’t meet that standard. The problem is that I allowed that mindset to leave me completely inactive. Nothing was ever good enough. On top of all that, there was the anxiety. You get anxious about not writing and that makes you not want to write. Now you’re in the anxiety-driven vicious-cycle that traps you in a downwards spiral of self-deprecation, self-loathing, and stagnation.

A year ago, July 22, that day with a lot of twos, my life got turned upside-down. I was moving to a new and strange place, ended a 3-year relationship, started a new (and the hardest) job, and I was miserable. I hated where I was living. I hated what I was doing. I was lonely. Depression is unforgiving. Everything is tinged with doubt and fear. Trust is impossible. How can I trust anyone when I don’t trust myself? How can they think I’m doing a good job when I know that I’m not? Why is everyone lying to me and judging me?

They’re not. I am.

I convinced myself, just like I did with writing, that I wasn’t doing anything worth doing, that I’d failed at every attempt, that I wasn’t worth what people said I was. I wasn’t a partner worth loving. I wasn’t a teacher worth learning from. I wasn’t making any of the right moves in life, just stumbling from one mistake to the next. These stories are powerful. They control how you interpret everything around you and how you act accordingly. To see nothing but every way that I had and could fail was to blind myself to the possibility of anything but failure.

It took a while before I could smile and not feel the strain of my cheeks tugging in the opposite direction. It took a lot of affirmation from my friends and family to relieve the tension in my stomach, to dry the tears held firmly behind my eyes, to speak as if I believed myself. But even with the affirmations of my peers, there was still the ever-present inability for me to affirm myself. That voice still tells those stories: you’re not worth their time; you’re an imposter; you’re a failure.

A dear mentor told me to change the record that’s in the player. I’ve been listening to the stories of failure and self-doubt and self-hatred for a long time. It’s time to listen to some other records. Some like the one’s my friends played. The ones that went to the tune of, “you’re smart and talented,” “you’re warm and friendly and make people feel welcome,” and “when you speak, people listen, you have so much to say and need to say it.”

So on this day of infamy, this day with a lot of twos, a year from when I reached the lowest point in my entire life, I want to swap in some new records. I want to swap some old commitments for some new ones. So let’s do it. Let’s make this day of twos into a day of joy and power.

In the words of Jay-Z, “here’s 22 2s for y’all motherfuckers.”

I am too cool and too smart. When it comes to creating, I’m far too talented. I am not a slave to the doubt; I have everything I need within me to make it. To the voices that say I’m failing, I see too much success to believe you. There’s so much love in my life and I’m grateful to all of you who extended a hand to support me. I have stories to tell, places to go, and things to do. At the age of 2–6, I’m giving my two cents and not giving two shits. The truth is I’m too sick. Thanks to the folks who saw it when I was too down to believe it. This is to the me I know I am: you are everything you need to be and then some.

• ksisero