“Should I Be …”

As soon as I heard myself say it, I burst into the kind of self-aware laughter that’s been coming to me frequently and spontaneously as of late.

I’d been obsessing about something I did a little compulsively (all of this in a very OCD manner, of course), and, as I am wont to do, I frantically went to my husband to tell him what had happened.

“Good,” he said, “that was the right thing.” I accepted his response for a second, deciding to embrace an action that couldn’t be reversed anyway. My brain, though, wasn’t having it.

“But I mean, should I be ashamed of it or proud of it?” I asked.

Two options. No grey. Shame or pride. Welcome to my brain.

Even I, owner of said brain, can recognize that this manifestation of all-or-nothing thinking goes above and beyond. Ashamed or proud: no “neutral” button. Can I have an A+ in holding incredibly rigid and lasting core beliefs?

In an existence often marked by chaos and unpredictability, I’ve always taken real comfort in my uncanny ability to neatly divide everything I do and everything that happens to me into categories that lend a comforting air of false definitiveness. When it comes to my own life, I’ve traditionally hated the in-between zones. They’re confusing, and I don’t know what to do with them. As I recently informed my poor husband, “I DON’T DO NUANCES.”

Over the past week or so, however, something’s changed. Who knows why—time? Healing? The accumulation of many small lessons I’d internalized more than I thought I had? Self-exasperation, if that’s a word?—but I’m suddenly much more content living in the grey. Not everything bad, or everything good, for that matter, is a reflection of my self-worth. My identity doesn’t need to be tied to accomplishments or to what I perceive to be failures, things I “should” have done differently (such as developing epilepsy, dealing with anorexia, losing so much time to life-saving ICU stays, etc.). In the grey, there’s space to simply exist, nurturing connections, satisfying intellectual curiosities, making typos that aren’t evidence that I’m a horrible, stupid person who doesn’t deserve a place in society. In the grey, I can make contributions to the world that don’t need to be monumental in order to matter. In the grey, not every error, perceived or otherwise, is an indictment of who I am as a person.

So, should I be ashamed, or should I be proud? Meh. Perhaps it’s enough to just be. As long as I do what I can to live with integrity and in accordance with my values, that’ll have to be enough.