I was reading Skin Game and as she was talking about how her grades reliably make her identity I realized that I no longer cared if I got bad grades. I'm not sure I can sufficiently reason out how that happened. Perhaps she spelled out her weaknesses, that's what the book was about, her weaknesses. And then I decided not to be her. I know it sounds mean and snobbish but one of the reasons that people continue with their bad behavior is that their minds tell them to accept who they are without question. Often, they act, and they speak, and they think and never separate themselves from who they are in the moment and with a conscious mind ask why they are who they are in the moment, what drives them to be that way and what can they do to change it. A lot of people just are. But our minds have the power view all we do, to analyze it, to wonder about it, to question it. Dogs probably can't ponder about themselves. They really are only what they are.

Sometimes when you think about yourself, instead of accept that you are the way you seem to be displaying... you realize how your consciousness doesn't even agree with the behavior or the reasoning behind what you're doing. The reason you hadn't noticed before is that we don't analyze or question everything we do, think or feel. There are a lot of things we take for granted. A lot of things we assume. A lot of things we let somebody else control, spit out into our brains. As far as I'm concerned that somebody else is our subconscious or various levels of it.

And we don't always question what it tells us to feel or think or do. We sometimes just accept that it's simply telling us who we are and that's all there is to it. But it's not telling us who we are, it's telling us a choice that it's made. And who we are is defined by the choices we make. Which doesn't mean that when we were born, we already had a reaction to something programmed into our brain. When we were born, we didn't have the way we would react to finding out we were pregnant 20 years later already programmed. When that moment came, you make the choice to react. You make based, sometimes, on your subconscious. Unless you choose to question it and to make a conscious choice that comes from conscious reasoning. And even then you have to realize that your consciousness is still being pumped by subconscious beliefs and thoughts.

The only way to ever beat the cycle you're in, the same patterns, the same behavior - the stuff you want to change - is to question yourself. Always. Never let your consciousness sit by and let a deeper portion of yourself to do whatever the fuck it wants. Because we obey orders from our subconscious, naturally. And I've just made the first step by questioning the fact that we obey orders naturally. Why do we do that? And then you have to break it further down and analyze the various orders given to us by the subconscious.

I think that my subconscious told me to feel like shit when I heard I had bad grades. It told me to be depressed and to hate myself and to hate the people responsible for giving me my grades. It told me to regret. To dwell on it, even though I can no longer do anything about it, until my future grades start coming into play.

And then I realized that identifying with a letter on a paper is weak. That's what the book spelled out for me. I can't fully explain why. I think I would have to begin analyzing her and I really don't wish to do that.

But the realization struck me as I made the choice not to identify with my grades. That's what of her major problems was identity. She didn't know who she was. And I know who I am. I can feel it. But it's got nothing to do with my grades. And what's more? Grades are an outer symbol of who we are that can be observed by others, which is also one of the reasons we hold on to it.

I've been working on that, silently. Which really means that the topic was broached once but I haven't given it any conscious thought since. I hope my subconscious has been working on it. And maybe the book helped me in that sense because even though she claimed to have another Caroline that was shown to the world, one that didn't reflect herself at all... she didn't give me the vibe of someone who really cares what other people think of her. She seemed to have that split personality because of her own mental problems, not merely because she was trying to hide herself and give people what they want. She gave people what they wanted to protect them, she lied not so much out of fear of their judgment but out of... well, to answer that I would have to analyze her.

So I suppose that in one sense, I realized that her identity issues were out of weakness, but in another sense, even though my identity issues have more strength than hers, in some areas, I also realized that her identity issues had more strength than mine in other areas.

I can't be sure how exactly these helped me because this wasn't even about conscious choice.

I was just sitting there reading the book and as I read her words about identity and GPA, her feelings towards the b's and c's that marked who she was in a negative way... I thought to the fact that I hadn't made the Dean's List. And what that means for my grades. And I didn't feel any self-hatred. The way I usually do. I feel a wash of shame and resentment towards myself and the people involved in my grades when I think about the bad ones. But it was gone.

And it's conscious choice that will hopefully let that feeling survive. Because I've not realized the difference between self-hatred as the reaction, and peace. And I realize that I never questioned the fact that I hated when I got bad grades. I got F's so often from 8th grade on and I cared so much. Some people have stress from trying to do everything. I had stress from trying not to do everything. It never made me happy. But I knew that doing everything wouldn't make me happy either. I picked the laziest choice.

Now that I've felt peace towards my bad grades. Even for a split second. I realize that it's possible and perfectly logical. And the only thing I can do now is to stop accepting the self-loathing as perfectly logical. It isn't perfectly logical to care that much about grades. What the fuck are they?

Maybe that's another way the book helped me. Even when she talked about her grades, she talked about what it meant for the face-Caroline. The Caroline on the outside, that was fooling everybody into believing she was something she wasn't. She identified with the chaos inside of her. That was her core, that was who she felt she really was but couldn't show the world. Which I don't agree with, but the way she sort of disassociated herself with the person who sought identity from the GPA....

Again, I can hardly put it into words. I suppose that means I'm not hitting on the exact equation. I must be missing something. Something about myself, I suppose. Something about the reason I hung on to grades. Because I still don't really know why my subconscious told me to. I know that I felt self-hatred. And I can assume that it had something to do with identity. What has changed from before I read the book?

I don't know. Maybe I learned to love myself just a little bit more since that issue with Divine Mother. I think I got something off my chest that needed to be released. As I told my mom, love can't exist within fear. And I was in fear, of the fact that my mom didn't accept me. Now, I suppose, I know that she does - at least to the best of her ability. She can't understand who I am and why I am the way I am. Maybe if she read the book I have yet to finish she'd understand a little more, although I can't say she'd respect it, but I best not concentrate on how she'll negatively react to it. Maybe she will respect it. Sometimes she seems to respect me.

I suppose I was holding on to that fear. That fear that people wouldn't accept me. And it was based on the fact that even my own family doesn't accept me. I told my mom that I'm always so negative about people because I hurt them before they can hurt me. If I bitch about all the qualities I don't like about someone, once they start bitching about mine, I've already made their opinion invalid by the fact that they're such and such. Like when a girl tells a guy he has a small dick and he calls her a bitch because he thinks, maybe if she IS a bitch, her negative opinion about him won't be valid.

I try to put people down so that when all who put ME down do just that, it won't be valid. I don't have to accept it. If I hate them, I won't have to care that they hate me because their opinions will be worthless.

I hate people to protect myself simply because I don't love myself enough. For some reason, I needed people to accept me. I say past tense because I don't think it's there anymore. Probably because I always accept it for reality, for something natural. And when I talked with my mom, by admitting that that was my reasoning, I exposed things to my conscious mind. And my conscious mind didn't agree. It didn't find it logical.

Or maybe it's the ripple effect. My mom didn't accept me, that was the pebble hitting the water, and all the ripples were my paranoia towards everybody else not accepting me. Maybe by believing my mom when she told me that she only rejected the parts of me she felt were ungodly, which is fair enough because I too reject the parts of people I find ungodly... by believing her, I threw the pebble into the grass. And now there is no ripple effect. Now I'm not paranoid that everyone won't accept me.

Not that I believe everyone will accept me. It's not so much what they will or won't do but how important it is to me. It doesn't matter if people don't accept me. I accept myself.

And since there seems to be a pause in my thought processes I'm going to assume that I can leave it at that. Do I really believe that my worth can be identified through grades? No, I don't. I know that because of how varied grades are. They depend on an infinite amount of variables, including topic and my ability to understand it but not excluding the way teachers grades various assignments or tests, the validity of what tests and assignments they give us and etc. Sure, it shows that I'm adaptable when I can get a good grade in everything.

But when I think about it, look at Figure Drawing. I drew during all of the class periods I came. I did it to the best of my ability. I know that my forte isn't drawing. I've always known. And I can accept that. Because my forte is writing. My forte is solving problems. My forte is helping people. Why in Heaven's name would the fact that I didn't wake up at 5 in the morning on four occasions and spend four hours repeating what I'd already done earlier in the semester many times - give me an identity? Give me my worth?

DRAWING is not what gives me my worth. I know that. I absolutely know that. It doesn't represent me any more than the Olympics do. I'm not in the Olympics so does that make me worthless? No. Because my worth is not associated with the Olympics any more than it is with drawing. That's not me. My worth is associated with my passions, and the way I use my passions. I'm brilliant at what I do. I love that I keep growing and expanding, that I'm not trapped within who I am at any given moment, that I'll be more in the next minute and more in the minute after that.

No amount of not waking up at 5 in the morning on four occasions and not drawing for four hours can take that away from me.

What kind of logic ever said that it was so?

THE SUBCONSCIOUS LOGIC THAT DICTATED WHAT I SHOULD FEEL AND INSTEAD OF ASKING MYSELF IF I AGREED OR FOUND IT TO BE TRUE I MERELY ACCEPTED IT BLINDLY.

It's not true and I don't agree and thus, I no longer wish to feel it. I no longer wish to care if Steve Careau (sp) does not like that I didn't wake up at 5 in the morning on four occasions and go follow his directions. It doesn't matter to me that he doesn't like that I didn't do 5 out of 10 homeworks. It doesn't matter to me that Professor Botsford chose to put those questions on his exam, and make the exam worth 200 ridiculous points - and quite possibly I couldn't live up to his standards.

That doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter if he made a mistake and gave me a grade lower than what I deserved. Neither does it matter if my English teacher did the same on one of my test. Because the higher grade doesn't give me my worth any more than the lower grade. They're equal. In the fact that they mean nothing for me. By saying that I got a high score, I'm really saying that the relevance to my high score is that it represents my ability to do blah blah blah... and that represents my worth.

But that's what our society has set up for us and I don't need to follow their rules to define my worth. I already know my worth, my worth already thrives inside me. I don't need to prove it with some future action. At least, not in the worldly sense. I do believe that I have my own inner standards to uphold but I have faith that I will uphold them because I'm worthy. That's what worthy people do. I know that sentence sounds snobbish but there was no other way to say it.

I think all I'm saying is that my worth is fused with my identity. I am my worth. I don't wear it like a graduation diploma. I am that worth. It can't be taken away from me because as long as my identity exists (and not just my identity as Melissa) my worth will be present.

It makes me proud, but pride is fruitless, to know that I have A's. And it makes me self-loathing to know that I have D's. My worth isn't based on those A's so my worth does not suffer when I have D's.

Okay?