Be proud of who you are

I was looking at some facebook posts and found some friends who are putting together a non profit group of women to help other women. It brought me so many memories of a time that I was doing the same thing helping single moms, volunteering countless hours as the Honorary Consul helping my Salvadoran community and working as a parent advocate for the Family Support Center helping low income women but now I realize all those hours spent outside my home were done at the wrong time in my life.  What I mean is that I had children at home in those days and I should have been putting  more attention to them and me than my community service. I don't know if I was doing that so people would like me or because I was trying to prove something.


You cannot control who will like you, who will stand by you, who would speak kindly of you, who will judge you, who will love you, who will treat you unfairly, who will support you, who will spread lies about  you, or who will be your biggest fan. At the time there was a group of Salvadoran ladies who were spreading nasty rumors about me. Those ladies, Fatima and Mercedes, who for no rhyme or reason hated me with passion and that somehow affected me to the point that I was trying so hard to prove that I wasn't like that! We literally cannot control how any other person is going to feel, think, or treat us. When we come to recognize that as an actual fact, we can turn our focus to the only thing in this life that we actually can control, and that is how we feel about ourselves. " Be proud of who you are, and not ashamed of how someone else sees you."


I learned that lesson many years ago after going through a series of very difficult events in my life which ended in a difficult divorce leading towards strained relationships with people who at one time were your friends. I had spent years trying to please other people, wanting them to recognize the good in me. I  had spend years trying to prove to them that I was worth it. For a period of time while my divorce was pending I wanted my former husband to think of me as smart, organized, pretty, sexy, nice, successful, a good wife, etc.  but I was never enough of anything of those things people expected of me. Yet as hard as I tried,  there was always someone who would tell me that I wasn't enough, and my view of myself would fall completely apart. I would feel horrible about myself. I would feel sad and discouraged and I would allow myself to believe that someone else's view of me was, in fact, true, rather than looking in the mirror and knowing for myself who that girl was that was staring back at me. As I look at those ladies who attended that event last night, I thought I probably would have been there. How ironic, today I am 3000 miles away and can't go to any of those things anymore when today is when I don't have to prove anything to anyone and today is when I finally got the time.