Is It Me Or Is It Human Nature?

People think I’m good. I’m not so sure of that. I’m good and tired—I am sure of that. Tired of being someone who doesn’t see the good in herself.

I spend a lot of time in my bathtub staring at the tile, begging it to move, so that I’ll have a story to tell.

I’ve clocked 72 hours in the last six weeks of telling someone how I’m feeling. In return, she’s taking notes and reading the panicked emails I send about seeing photos of myself.

What’s wrong with me, I ask, that seeing myself reflected on a screen causes me to just sink deeper into a tub full of water, begging the walls to talk to me? Knowing that if they say anything hard to hear, I won’t listen.

I’ve often wondered if I am a narcissist, spending so much time hating every inch of myself that I can’t focus on anything else. Everything that happens is because of me. Well, every bad thing.

It’s human nature, isn’t it? To battle ourselves. To break out every verbal weapon that exists in an attempt to express how unsettled we are in our skin. To come up with ways to stop anything kind from other people before our brain can even register it.

What would it feel like to accept it? To log it away and pull it out on the hard days? To realize that inevitably there are good things about us? We absolutely cannot be a body, a heart, and a brain built from a mold empty of any beautiful quality.

Do we realize how hard it is to block out the sun? To feed solely on the dark and the hurt? I’m not so interested in human nature anymore. I’m not wild about spending the next however many years fighting the hardest battles against myself. Are you?

Maybe it’s time to fight human nature. Maybe the only answer is to give in and nurture the part of our brain that believes the lies.

Nature versus nurture. I’m really pulling for human nature to lose.