Deep down inside of this 28-year-old soul lives a little girl who is full of insecurity. She’s loud, angry, feels misunderstood, not heard and unloved - among many other things. She’s the version of myself that still thrives because I never gave her the fighting chance to heal and be free. In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself awake most nights filled with anxiety, experiencing heavy episodes of night sweats and endless feelings of complacency as I tried to push her away. I wasn’t even fully aware of who “she” was other than knowing that these jargoning feelings were starting to erupt my spirit. But one particular night, adult me came together in her first-ever meeting with the kid version of myself to finally face, and receive, everything little Audrey had been patiently waiting to reveal.
“You have daddy issues,” she said. “The insecurities present in your adult life as they pertain to this idea of romantic love are stemmed from unresolved issues we had with a parent. You can’t give, accept nor attract love because you still haven’t acknowledged the deep-rooted hurts within yourself. Your feelings were once bruised and you’re still suffering, you just won’t admit it.”
I paused, took a trip down memory lane and began to remember. And as it turns out, she was right. I feel a lot of things: unloveable because I was outcast at an early age by the one who helped conceive me. Unwanted due to their choice to not fully be present, therefore I made excuses to justify and accept the bare minimum efforts as ‘the best that they could do’ - a trait that I’d carry into adulthood. Instead of acknowledging my feelings of worthlessness, I attached myself to unavailable men, failing to earn the love that I was never freely given. Where I once prided myself as not being apart of this exclusive club of girls with issues due to an absent father, I realized at this moment that I was, in fact, the poster child. I did the forgiving, making amends and moved forward to break ties with a broken past but not once did I come to make peace with the beliefs about myself that weren’t true, though I continued to manifest. I sat completely still and stunned at this revelation while feeling every ounce of confidence I had garnered throughout the years of my life, leave my body all at once. That hurt… but little Audrey wasn’t finished yet.
“If you don’t love yourself, nobody else can. It’s not that you’re unloveable, you’re just becoming intolerable by making people fulfill a role that was never meant to be theirs. You don’t attract unavailable men, you choose them, often overselling your worth to someone who doesn’t pay you any mind because your father never did.”
The hardest part of our internal dialogue was coming to terms with accepting the fact that I was the problem in every single failed relationship. It never clicked in my head how the role of an absent parent could instill an incredibly morphed view of romance. “How embarrassing…” I thought. “…How freeing.” She responded. My internal child kicked me right off of my high horse and quickly brought me down to a level of humility I hadn’t known in quite some time. Not once did I ever pay attention to these self-inflicted casualties in my dating life, often demanding things from men who had no business nor intention on fulfilling. I was silently choking on my tears, feeling more discouraged knowing I was at a low and unsure of what move to make next when another truth fell into my lap: “You’re already with the one person you’re going to spend your life with… and that’s yourself, so let’s start there.”
“Have your own back by making better choices. You don’t know what you don’t know, so forgive yourself and extend a little grace. But now that you know, choose better.”
I sat on my bed and began to finally unpack my baggage, making the conscious decision to let go of what I was now aware of. Attaching my identity and worth to feelings that were birthed from the actions of another human, proved to be detrimental to me. So I began to set the feelings of unloveable, unwanted and worthless free and spoke truth over myself. My faith in Jesus carried me, reminding me that no other person would love me more than He did, so much so that He believed I was worth dying for. His sacrificial love proved that I was, in fact, worthy of His love. He traded His own life for mine, further proving that unloveable had no place in the narrative of my life. I was brought into this world through earthly flesh but was constructed in His hands before I would manifest in the physical realm. I was His before I was ever theirs. Audresha, didn’t experience the necessary love and attention that she required from a human but she was always freely given the love from the One who created her.
I wrestled with insecurity for years, never really understanding the stem of them. I spent more time building up my confidence, paying more attention to how I treated others and truly thought that I was doing all of the right things but was so confused about why I wasn’t getting back what I was giving. When you’re broken inside, you don’t have the ability to receive the good things that are intended for you because you’re so busy trying to fill voids that you may or may not be aware of. If you make an omelet with one bad egg and one good egg, you’ll ultimately still have a rotten dish. It doesn’t matter that you were one part-whole, one part rotten.. the rotten will always overtake the good.
It’s in these seasons of silence where the busyness of our worlds quiet down that you can finally hear His voice. In this case, He allowed me to have a conversation with little Audrey. It’s good knowing that God loves, but I always need a physical reminder too. And in this particular moment, I was shown that I only needed to be loved and forgiven by the only person who mattered most — Me.