Growing up in the 80’s in a remote and tiny outback town in the Kimberley’s, Western Australia called Kununurra, no one else really had my name. At least not that I knew of. But somehow making its way to the book shelves of the small school library of Kununurra District High School (a combined high school and primary school that I attended) was a book called Thalia the Failure which I soon became aware of. I remember feeling kind of excited that a book had my name but then it had ‘failure’ attached to it. I remember a few little giggles, snickers and maybe a tiny bit of teasing ‘haha thalia the failure’ (in a kids whiny voice). I don’t really remember how I responded, I maybe laughed it off with them, while feeling at the same time some discomfort inside at being teased.
Of course, I didn’t think anything of it as a kid and brushed it off. I didn’t feel like a failure as a child, but over time, how I felt about myself slowly began to erode.
Now as an adult I think more deeply about this, no one else named the same as me yet there is this one book that has my name and is labelled Thalia the Failure??!! Having learned about the law of attraction I feel how crazy and precise is this law, because that is exactly how I feel on the inside now as an adult.
One big fat giant failure. A lot of my pursuits in life is about avoiding this feeling, avoiding the pain that I feel about feeling like a failure. My worth is very much tied up in being ‘successful’, being ‘good enough’, in proving to myself that I am not a failure, but deep down I feel that I am. Deep down I feel that I am this completely and utterly terrible person of a human being who is worth absolutely nothing.
This feeling is the result of a lot of things with the first big turning point was when I was 13, I went on a holiday to Darwin to see my dad. I didn’t see my dad often growing up as I lived in Kununurra and then moved to Perth when I was 12 and he lived in Darwin since he was 2 when his parents migrated from Kalymnos, Greece.
But, occasionally I would go for a holiday to see him and when I was living in Perth and turned 13, I went to see him. It was my first year of high school, and I was super proud of my effort and took my school report card which was full of mostly A’s, B’s and maybe a C.
Just to give background, no one in my family was academically inclined and all of the work I did in school was without parental assistance or guidance. My mother couldn’t help me with school work because she felt dumb. I used to help my older cousin with homework, so I was very independent when it came to learning things, and doing my homework and went throughout my whole primary school and high school years applying what teachers would teach me on my own without help.
So, I excitedly went to my dad to show him my report card, I was so sure he would be proud of me. Boy was I wrong, he looked at the report card, shoved it back to me and said ‘you can do better’.
This was the beginning of the way my dad would treat me over my teenage years. He went from treating me like a ‘princess’ pre-puberty to treating me as if I was nothing. It was as if he changed overnight into this rageful, jealous and controlling person. He would call me up to abuse me on the phone, and he would say all sorts of mean and nasty things to put me down. He was particularly jealous of my stepdad and would often say things like “I am your father’ to imply that my stepdad wasn’t. He would try to control me and tell me what to do.
And this went on for years. Every time my father called it would end in abuse, with threats of disownment, but yet the adults who were in my life ie my mother and stepdad never once tried to stop me from talking to him. I still feel rage about that. How can adults see a child getting verbally and psychologically abused and not once try and stop it? Anyway, yes I am still in rage about that.
Not only was I going through this horrible psychological and verbal abuse from my dad, I was also going through my private hell of coming into a self awareness of my sexual abuse that my mother’s side of the family were choosing to ignore and sweep under the carpet.
So how I saw myself, how I felt about myself and how I treated myself slowly began to erode. Having absolutely no clue about emotional work or feeling emotions, my self hatred and rage grew and grew and deep down I wanted to die. But, to suppress all of this, this is where my addictions to substances came in and became my friend. I started smoking pot at around 15 and from then my level of effort in school plummeted and so did my grades. To graduate from high school I took all of the lower level subjects just to pass. I found that substances made me feel ‘happy’, made me feel ‘normal’ and by the time I was in year 12 I was smoking morning, lunch and night and when I wasn’t wagging school, I was sitting in typewriting class with the giggles.
It helped me to feel ‘accepted’ by the cool kids as I would share my bong around in the lunchtime classroom we were allocated as big year 12’s to hang in. So from the age of 15 to early 30’s I spent most of my life really trying to poison myself and numb all of these feelings inside of me while ‘trying’ to succeed in life and on top of that I took a lot more damaging actions towards myself and others to make things worse.
While I have been sober for 9 years, I can see and feel how I am still trying to avoid these terrible feelings that I am nothing and a failure. Decades have passed and I still feel like a worthless loser and I am still trying get worth from external means, especially when it comes to my passions.
I feel this desperation to get somewhere before it’s too late, before I’m too old, all to avoid feeling like a failure. I want to avoid the shame of failing, not making it, the shame of being my age and having achieved nothing. I feel how much I still treat myself like little 13 year old Thalia, berating her, putting her down, telling her she’s not good enough, she has to try harder, and being soooo harsh on me.
It’s exhausting and tiring to say the least and just one of the many emotional injuries that are preventing my growth. I have no words of wisdom on this subject to leave you with yet, other than to encourage anyone who hasn’t yet, to check out Divine Truth teachings which has helped me so much over the past 9 years to begin my journey of discovering and healing trauma such as this. They have so many amazing videos to learn from about the human soul, trauma and having a relationship with God.
I do hope that I can have some progress with this in the near future and hopefully with God and feeling through some of these emotions I can learn to love little Thalia again warts and all.
Love Thay X
MY JOURNEY INTO MY SOUL 
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