I was so blown away, moved and touched by what everyone said here, that I smushed all your answers together, tweeked them a bit and made them into a (kind of) prose poem. I hope you do not mind. You all are the authors of this poem. Hope you like it:
It has to finally come from me
To do what I do because it is the right thing for me to do,
without depending on
anyone else's motives or opinions or reactions
I have to be strong enough to know what I want to do
in any given situation
and then able to carry it out
It all comes back to me. I am learning to think more clearly
From dependent, to independent, to obstinate, to fearful, to frozen and many other stages
After frozen came confusion
In confusion I had to reason, learn and try and fail and begin again
I am moving on, on my own
Using my own feelings and choices and getting better at it
I asked about the dizziness and was told that it was stress caused by confusion
as I was sorting things out
Sometimes when something really hits me, I get light-headed as I think it out
Those shifts are powerful
It does get better as I get better
For so long, I watched myself trying to make everyone else happy
Trying to control everything outside and inside of me so I wouldn't get hurt
I gave up being me and subconsciously tried to be
the perfect wife and daughter
always trying to live up to their ideal
to be accepted
While failing to realize that I was the author of all the pain with my thinking & acting
Now, I practice my thoughts and actions from this new place of
personal ownership and responsibility
Boy, it feels good
It feels good to take my hands off of the outcomes,
to allow others to struggle or grow or be whoever and whatever they are
in the moment
without needing them to be different so I can feel better
Now, I take care of myself, my reactions, my emotions and my choices
And I make the adjustments in my thinking so I can feel what I want to feel
I had some very wrong information
and realize this was a huge missing piece of the puzzle for me
and ya know what? That's all it was -- "wrong information"
We know what to do with wrong information, right?
(albeit this wrong information dominated our lives and made things twice as hard, painful & frustrating as they needed to be!! GRRRRR!!)