Recovering the Self (eBook)

Melissa’s Story – One Step at a Time by Leila Ferrari

Melissa was a competent, friendly business-owner of a highly successful small restaurant on the coast of southern California. At that time, several of her children were still part of the business and she often had repeat customers. These repeat customers included my parents, who even in those difficult years of their lives, always felt welcome and as if they had a place in her restaurant. The following is Melissa’s story in her own words.

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Back when in Michigan we had five children, a husband who took care of things, he worked, and I stayed home. Things were going along really well; we did all kinds of things. And then he dropped dead. I felt that I didn’t have an identity before we were married because I was such an introverted person. After we got married, I developed an identity. After my husband died, I lost my identity for a while. We were young, we struggled.

You follow a pattern: you go to school, you get married, you have kids, you work, and you carry on. When my husband died, the pattern broke. I didn’t know anybody and I had a lot of kids. I didn’t know how to act, whom to be. I didn’t have the pattern to follow any more. I knew that my husband’s brother lived in California, so I thought moving here would at least keep the kids close to some of their dad’s relatives. That didn’t really work. He didn’t really want to be bothered with us. So we took off on our own.

It was really difficult in the beginning. I went to a doctor who had me on practically six different pills—pills to keep me happy, pills to keep me awake, pills to put me to sleep. It just wasn’t working. I knew I needed to talk with a counselor. The doctor said no, that I didn’t need a counselor. Eventually I knew a change was needed. The doctor got really mad when I went into his office and told him I’d flushed all the meds down the toilet. He said if I didn’t do what he said, my children would end up in an orphanage and I would be in a mental institution. All this from a doctor. Just a regular doctor. That was an appalling episode.

I finally did work with a counselor, which in a way was like counseling myself. She listened and I just never stopped talking, until it was all out. I started to hear everything I was saying, to sort it out. She was a help and I began to feel on top of the world. I thought I could do anything and that’s when I opened the restaurant. There was a tremendous amount to learn, including how to talk to other people. At that point, I was still a total introvert. I learned everything in my head but it took about fifteen years of work to get it to the inside.

After the counseling, I felt really cocky; that I really could do anything. But that process of having to do the work to get from my head to the insides caught up to me. In the beginning, I felt ashamed of who I was and what I was doing. I had to fight various emotions, was almost ashamed of having opened the restaurant, wouldn’t tell anybody who I was, was with a friend who suggested going to my restaurant, so then I had to tell her it was mine. It took quite a while to gain what I call my identity again, that is, to believe on the inside that I’m a valuable person. What a process. For a long time, I coped well on the outside but still had gaps on the inside. As I got to know people, no one would have guessed that things were still troubling me. It’s definitely a process.

I would be discriminated against everywhere I went, especially with my three young sons. Even your friends treat you differently. I felt discriminated against by various friends because I wasn’t invited over any more. No one wanted to have me over with my three boys. The pattern was broken. When I was with my mother-in-law, I was a certain way and treated a certain way. It was not the same as when my husband was alive. When I was with my sister, it was another whole experience. I didn’t know what to put on when I woke up in the morning; there was no sense of identity. That was yet to re-emerge. I finally found my own personality, my own identity.

You have to go through all those feelings to come out on the other side. Even though those are difficult, sometimes negative feelings, you have to face it and go through it. Otherwise, you’ll live in that muddle forever. It’s so easy to repeat family patterns unless you see that you don’t have to. You do have to look through it, though, to get to the other side. If you are too afraid and you ignore it, you run the risk of repeating everything, generation after generation. By learning more about yourself and feeling good about yourself and getting to actually know yourself, you can see that different ways are possible. The world is wide open. You also have to take steps, concrete steps to change ingrained patterns.

If you find you are a sad, sick person on the inside, gullible, it takes a tremendous effort to grow out of that, to get away from it. It’s almost like killing or witnessing the death of an entire aspect of your personality, but you have to do it in order to live life fully. It’s a tremendous change, all right. And it takes time. There are ups and downs. That’s life, but eventually you get there; you get closer and closer to some ideal you’ve been able to develop in your brain of how life should be, of the kind of person you actually are or want to become. It takes practice and action every day. If you want something bad enough, you’ve got to work for it. I did a lot of growing during the time I was raising my kids, so we wound up doing a lot of talking and gained a lot of understanding about issues that applied to our lives together.

The therapist helped me see that I was capable of being on my own, making decisions, and thriving, not just surviving in life. I took courses and was good in math but had more problems in English. I kept taking the courses I wasn’t good at, thinking I should make progress in them. Finally when I started taking courses I was good at, I excelled and was usually at the top of the class. Once I decided on a restaurant, the whole thing came together in about six to eight months.

Now I’m happy. I’m proud. People come in and want to get their pictures taken with me, in the restaurant. I don’t think I’ve done anything different from anybody else, raising kids, working hard, but I feel confident on the inside as well as on the outside now. It’s just like night and day, looking at the feeling I had before and the feeling I have now. Freedom at last. I knew it was there on the inside, somewhere, but I had to find it.

Once I make up my mind and go for it, it gets done. Nobody, when I was a child, helped me with anything or encouraged growth really. I survived in school but excelled only in a few subjects, like math. Eventually I went to a four-year business college, about eight months before I opened the restaurant, which was completely a positive experience. I learned a lot and excelled because of the basic math skills. If I had had honest encouragement when I was younger, I might have gotten to this level of development much younger. But it just wasn’t there in my life.

As the restaurant developed, I easily made decisions regarding the restaurant’s finances. I knew, without even having it on paper, how much we had to pay in taxes, how much we had to set aside to live through the winter in an area mostly busy during the summer. This was all the easy part. It’s funny how things roll along and they’re there for you when you need them. Sometimes I think maybe it’s planned… I don’t know. This emotional part. I did the intellectual work earlier and the emotional part caught up eventually.

Through the years, I was thinking I needed somebody to take care of me; I really didn’t need anyone to take care of me, I just needed somebody there, and then I would excel. It’s a funny thing because nobody ever did take care of me. It was the fact that I felt empty. I was only half a person there. I needed that extra person or so I thought.

When my husband died, there were lots of people who wanted to help me. Friends and family members. The problem was that they wanted to help me their way—not my way. They definitely did not want me to help myself. They were of no help and made things a lot worse. I didn’t want that obligation because there is obligation when you accept help from other people. If you start taking help, you better be willing to give something in return. They are never just there for you. Help comes at a price. It’s not wrong; I’m that way myself.

You couldn’t go to somebody and talk, person to person. You had different problems, different ideas, everything was different. You had to do for yourself, make a lot of mistakes, do a lot of searching, thinking I needed somebody. This gave me the power eventually, to start out on my own from that point. I could feel other people, in my relationships, trying to stop me. I would be with somebody for a while, be alone for a while, try another relationship, but it just wasn’t working. Whether it was friends or relatives, after my husband’s death, things really changed. Men don’t like you to be as strong as you are. Thank heavens I could see through some things, and eliminate relationships that would have torn me down. I could have made a lot more costly mistakes, and I don’t mean financially either, but I didn’t.

I found that inner strength. In some parts of the culture, the man is supposed to be the...