The Committee

Let me give you a little background on my job. I'm a Residence Hall Coordinator which means I get paid very little to have a Master's degree and live in a residence hall (dorm) with 200+ eighteen year olds. Sometimes I think it is the fifth circle of hell, other times it is one of the most unique life experiences someone my age could have. Ideally, I don't want to do it for more than another year but I would also like to pay my bills.

Each year I hire a new staff of Resident Assistants and hope that it is more Brady Bunch and less Manson family. This is my fourth staff and easily the Oreos in a row of supermarket generic brands. Each group I get to work with has its super stars and sometimes, unfortunately, its dick holes. This year is all Michael Jordan's and I'm Phil Jackson.

That's about where all of the happiness in this post stops. Over the past two weeks I have had some incredibly cathartic conversations with my employees. They all know an uncomfortable amount of information about me. I also know a wildly uncomfortable amount of information about them. But in the last two weeks we have talked about some really deep shit and dug up some extremely painful and raw emotions. I want to talk about those emotions. Ugh. Every atom in my body doesn't want me to write any of this. 90% of me wanted to delete this post, 5% of me wanted to post it privately, and 5% of me was like "Leah, stop being a little bitch and get your shit together." That last 5% prevailed.

A few evenings ago I met the mother of one of my staff members and during a 10 minute casual conversation, she mentioned this idea of having a committee in your head that is always battling and combating for your attention, emotions, and actions. Sometimes that committee is British Parliament and sometimes that committee is a group of Tibetan monks. Let me talk about my committee.

My committee is tied up in a bank vault and slowly wasting away from malnutrition and emotional abuse. They also smell pretty bad. There is one person that isn't tied up, though. Homegirl has on her Doc Martens, leather jacket, pack of cigarettes (I don't smoke) in a rolled up sleeve all James Dean style, mohawk, blacked out eye makeup, and covered in tattoos, and this bitch is the one who has everyone tied up. She has since been dubbed Sergeant Leah. Sometime during adolescence the committee was working well together like a functional set of civilized individuals. They could come to a reasonable consensus over which flavor of pudding they were going to have as a snack and whether today was meant for Looney Toons or Power Rangers. Then, one day, Sergeant Leah broke down the door and took over. She tied up the committee and pushed them back in to the vault, then closed the chamber door. Occasionally she would open the vault up and peer inside at the helpless committee members, potentially considering letting them walk around or giving them a slice of pizza, but she would always think better of it and sashay away. Sergeant Leah has yet to relinquish control. There has never been a coup or even a negotiation. It's like a hostage situation that the SWAT team passed up on addressing.

The committee members aren't just any regular group of people. The committee members are every insecurity I have ever felt: self-worth, body image, emotional availability, likability, value, self-esteem. Before the takeover, the insecurities were just a regular part of life but they were a few years away from retirement. In other words, I was willing and able to deal with them. But when Sergeant Leah showed up and they were locked away, their retirement party and commemorative plaque became the faintest memory. They were never going to leave the vault and ever since then I have never liked myself.

At some point in my adolescence, I became completely and entirely emotionally unwilling and unable to address my insecurities. I accepted everything I felt that was wrong with me. The culprits who opened the door for Sergeant Leah to stomp her way in were a fear of failure and rejection. If I were to accept the chance that dealing with some or all of my insecurities would result in potentially varying degrees of failure and rejection, then I wouldn't be able to function. I mean, if I tried to overcome them and was rebuffed by any insignificant individual, what was the point? I had little hope for ever overcoming what plagued me because there was too much room for disaster.

This long running bout of one-sided guerrilla warfare has created an ongoing and seemingly never-ending battle with cognitive dissonance. The person who I am today formed on a series of functional contradictions that teeters between 100% authenticity and 100% deception. For example, when I walk in to a room full of people, I own that shit. I make sure people know who I am and that I have arrived. I have unlimited confidence. While on the outside I exude the persona of Baddest Bitch Around, on the inside I wonder about whether the individuals in the room think I'm funny, smart, or worst of all, pretty. I am void of self-esteem. This the type of contradiction I am talking about. Seemingly mutually exclusive qualities manage to exist in tandem with each other inside of my head.

This dissonance has been at least 15 years in the making and is so inherent to my existence and my identity, that the committee has begun to develop Stockholm Syndrome for Sergeant Leah. The insecurities now understand that Sergeant Leah is actually protecting them, rather than keeping them from healthy development. Every time someone compliments me on my writing, my humor, or my appearance, Sergeant Leah runs back to the committee to show them what she has managed to do from them. "Hey look everyone, they all loved my hair. I'm clearly doing something right for you guys." I look for my own value in the approval of others. I long to feel like I'm not on my own and that its okay to not always be the strong, independent one. 

There you go. That is the shit that fucks with my head each and every single day. The discussions that generated the need for this post were easily my most painful and emotional moments of being called on the carpet. Because I have developed such meaningful connections with this year's staff, it has left me less guarded when I am perhaps most in need of it. In simple terms, they call me on my bullshit and know when I am trying to dismiss or cover-up my emotions. I present myself as an independent woman with a cast iron heart who you can't fuck with because it is the only way to keep the committee in the vault.

The conversation hurt. It hurt so bad and it will continue to hurt. I would like to think that it is going to result in some major life epiphany and I am going to be able to open up the vault and let the committee finally get to their retirement party. To be honest, I know that won't happen because Sergeant Leah is very good at what she does.

Last year I read an anonymous quote on Tumblr that summed up my life to this point. Somehow in one sentence, a complete stranger was able to address up my entire emotional struggle. "I don't want others to see me the way I see myself." It is not lost on me how fucked up that mentality is, but I think it is important to be honest with yourself above all else. That was the purpose of this post. It was the expectation that I be honest with myself and a slew of other people, some I have never met and some I see daily. It was an uninterrupted explanation of how my mind is essentially the plot of Misery, just without Kathy Bates and James Caan.