Breaking up

Before I met my husband, I had a long, long, long history of picking the WRONG partner. In fact, I was a pro at finding the perfect flavor of jerk to highlight all of the negative aspects of my personality: my flaws, insecurities, and fears. In short, all of the stuff I hated about myself was illuminated, and served to me on a silver platter of guilt, shame, and inadequacy. Awesome! Right? It took me years of over doing, obsessing and "killing" myself trying to make the object of my affection happy before I realized that I had a choice. It finally dawned on me that it was up to me to change my fate, and ask for exactly what I wanted. It was that shift in my thinking that was the game changer for me. I no longer saw myself as shameful bag of damaged goods, afraid of a life of loneliness. I accepted that a life alone was a far better choice than a life looking into the eyes of a partner who would never see me as good enough. I accepted the good, the great,and the awesome things about me; as well as the things that I'd always been ashamed of. I knew that if love was to ever be successful I had to live authentically, and that meant forgiving myself for not being perfect. It felt good to say that I hated camping, I'd never liked football, and I was really an introvert. I didn't feel the need to be liked for something I "could be," I knew I wanted to be liked for me. That doesn't mean that I won't ever feel the need to push my comfort zone, have courage to step into uncharted waters, or learn new things; it means that I'll do those things on my terms, and in my own time. I finally broke up with the idea of who I should be, and it was one of the best things I've ever done.
Oddly enough, the idea of assessing my worth professionally had never occurred to me. For the past ten years I have gone from job to job hoping to feel successful, validated, valued; but that has never happened. I've done what I thought I'd needed to do for every organization. I come in early and stay late, put 100% effort into my work, believe in the vision, ask for feedback, have taken measures to improve myself, am a team player, I put clients and co-workers first; in essence, I feel like I've done everything I could possibly do to be an employee an employer would value. And yet, I'm not. I routinely get the assignments no one wants, get skipped over for breaks, am frequently left at my assignment when I should have been relieved hours before, and am paid less than my peers. Senior associates treat me like an idiot, a nuisance, or ignore me. Anyway, the point isn't the litany, it's the lie. The lie I keep telling myself that says that if I try harder, keep my mouth shut, keep my head down, produce more that things will change. They won't. EVER. What I need to do, is break-up with the idea that I can make a broken thing whole, or a bad situation good by working harder; and I need to break-up with my addiction to the opinions of others, and stop looking for ways to validate my internal story of rejection. So, that's it. I'm breaking up with my old, out dated modes of operation. I'm going to create a new narrative that more accurately reflects who I've become, and who I want to be.