Currently This

Yes, I'm still wide awake.

I'm battling serious confidence issues tonight. Every nasty barb ever hooked into my self esteem is surfacing in this endless, infected loop that only shuts off if I start eating. Whee. I don't know which is worse - that the people who said it all to begin with are still able to whisper and hurt me or that I do it to myself.

I've decided to go ahead and work on my own board. I don't know why, except that it feels wrong to abandon it, even if it feels like nothing will come of it now. There's been a part of me all along that felt I was too stupid to accomplish this. If I stop, it won't just be because I feel discouraged and humiliated. It will be because, on some level, I wanted to be treated that way so I would have an excuse to stop.

Maybe, if I didn't have a daughter who had been with me on this project from the start, I would give up anyway. But I want to set a better example for her. I want her to be better and stronger than I am so, even if a year from now I quit on something else, I'm going to stick with this. Just so she sees me doing it.

Besides, I'm not a stupid woman. I'm not degreed, but I have a higher IQ than most people who are. The last time it was tested I got a 138. It's never been that I wasn't smart.

Or driven or passionate, etc. It's that I was broken and had no instructions to tell me how to fit the pieces back into place so they worked right, again. And even so, I have done so much more than anyone ever thought I could. I have been a good mother. Not just better than mine and certainly not perfect, but good. I changed the future of my family and the impact that has will long outlive me, even if no one knows what I did. In fact, that no other child in this family line will ever know how hard it was to break the cycle speaks to how well I broke it. I did that.

So fuck your degrees, you condescending sons of bitches. I'm smarter and more driven than any of you and if I put my energy into advocating for your children the way I have for mine, I'll outshine the whole bunch of you.

Now if I can just say that over and over . . .