Is it more embarrassing to embrace your shortcomings, faults and failures without fear of public shame?
Or more humiliating to be a public success while you slowly die from within, alone, thinking you're the only one struggling?
And what if the key to the life you have been dreaming, hoping, and praying for lies just beyond the fear of humiliation?
This is the most difficult question I had to confront within myself. Early in my legal career, I was suffering in my marriage. At work, I was on top of my game, performing work I absolutely loved. Yet, the duality of my existence began to take its toll. My unmet private needs screamed more loudly for attention. I pushed them down. Put on my big girl drawers. I returned to saving the world at work each day. Until the boiling rage within me demanded escape.
And that’s when I hurled my shoe across the room at my husband.
I couldn’t believe what I did. Are you crazy? My voice of reason whispered as I realized what I just did. You just got physical with a blackbelt! Are you ready to die?
But when I consider that moment, and all of the cover up, pretending, and escaping. The answer was “yes.” I was ready to die. Death was more desirable than the not-marriage I was stuck in. And the moment came when my duty to everyone else was no longer enough to keep me going on the hamster wheel of pretending everything was okay.
I was desperate for help. But who do you talk to when you’re the one who everyone comes to for advice?
In that season, I began crying out to strangers. Anybody who would listen. Anyone who could understand the torment of living a double life. I returned to one of my favorite pastimes—blogging. I named the site “Angry Women Anonymous” because it was embarrassing what I was suffering through.
I was supposed to be the “head of my class.” I was supposed to be brilliant and capable. But what I was living through in the first decade of marriage was hell on earth. And to my surprise, nothing would ever change until I tore down my own Berlin wall. And day by day, brick by brick, the answers I needed appeared, liberating me from secrecy, resentment, and powerlessness.
If you are a professional woman of faith, looking for someone who understands exactly what it feels like to live a life of public success and private failure, I got you. I posted anonymously for years by the name “Gummy Bear,” or “GB.” I was angry on the outside, but smooshy on the inside. My husband couldn’t see my vulnerability because I was constantly protecting my soft side from him.
I remember being embarrassed at the possibility of my colleagues ever finding out. But over time, as I began to liberate myself from their opinions, I stopped caring. This freed up a lot of bandwidth. There was a lot of unfinished business between me and myself that I had to work on. There was a little girl I had forgotten. She was big, bossy, and brilliant. She was covered by years of performance and fear of failure. She began living more to meet everyone else’s expectations, rather than living in her authenticity.
She was the one who threw the shoe.
I continued to make great strides over the years as I navigated therapy, life coaching, group support and holding myself accountable to the world wide web of people following my blog to track my progress managing the rage. And with each day, each post, I grew closer to little Miss Big Bossy Brilliant who was tired of performing and ready to live.
Today, my husband and I are the friends we never had during the hellish years of our marriage. He showed up as a friend to me only after I became my own friend. Although the day I launched that shoe was not the proudest moment of my adventure, it marked the day everything began to change—because it had to.
Are you ready to reconnect with yourself? Check out 5 Steps to Converting Conflict Into Connection ang begin resolving the conflict within so that you can enjoy true interpersonal harmony with others.
Be blessed and encouraged,
Judge Char
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