79) Reflections

Reflections- Sitting in the Discomfort

Hearing what it whispers

As I’ve taken on the project of sorting through the childhood that shaped me, I’ve been focused on facts and events, trying to report as objectively as possible the moments that I lived through. This is a helpful and even essential part of the process to be able to see processes and details that are bigger than myself. It’s incredible to have the ability to supplement my experiences with theory explaining dynamics and giving language to my trauma.

It builds perspective. Helps to make everything a little less personal.

But it WAS personal.

It IS personal.

I hated and deeply loved myself at the same time. I believed and embodied the things I was taught, all while knowing better and watching everyone else go along with toxic cycles, and being punished for not accepting them, or not performing them well enough.

I still, 86 posts deep into this series, after a bachelors degree in anthropology and another in psychology, having used up several counselors across disciplines, states, and decades, struggle to believe that it was “that bad.”

In contrast, it’s so hard to believe that I wasn’t “that bad.”

For decades, in groups where people would share their experiences of growing up, I would share a snippet of mine, and be met with absolute horror at what I was relating. I learned to just keep most of it to myself.

I’ve put bunches of the details here, shared between us, and I still ask myself what the hell my problem is.

**It wasn’t that bad.**

I had a roof over my head, and plenty to eat. I had clothes, and family, and pets. We went camping and boating, and when I was little Grandpa would pull us on a toboggan behind his tractor when it snowed. I grew up connected to stories of the past, and the adults in my life were happy to impart old ways of doing things that made me feel deeply connected to our past. We always had a garden, and a yard.

I went to decent schools, and never saw gang violence unless it was on the tv. I had teachers who believed in me, and creative outlets.

I look back on a lot of the details and I’m honestly ashamed I even felt they needed to be included. It still feels like I’m just taking everything too personally, and seeking attention.

So, my Mom told me she didn’t like me. Really? So, what? That’s what I’m going to hold on to? My kids have heard worse. It bothers me that it hurts. It feels like I don’t deserve to let it hurt, because I deserved what she said.

I’m so sorry that any of my kids ever heard anything like this.

I have a child that I haven’t had custody of since 2016, when she was 14. She heard how unwanted she was. She heard what a burden she was. She heard how unacceptable her every move was. I’m not saying her behaviors were ok, but I can’t imagine what I expected her to do with how I was treating her. Of course she’d been given chances. She needed more. We were homeless and I didn’t have more.

That doesn’t make it ok.

My eldest heard from the adults in their life that they were privileged, entitled, fat, ugly, and undeserving. They were belittled for being quiet and shy, which is hands down the most brutal approach to someone who is quiet and shy. Her sister targeted her in brutal ways, and I didn’t stop it.

It’s not ok.

So, it seems really selfish when I hear my mom’s voice in my head telling me she doesn’t like me, that I’m unlovable, and I want to feel validated for it. It reinforces that I was always too emotional, too irrational, and took everything too personally. It makes me feel like needing or wanting validation is too much, like I am too much.

It is easy to feel like she was right. I wanted so badly to be loveable, to stop being too emotional, to stop being too weak. I hated the part of me that wanted validation because it was weak, and she could smell that weakness on me.

How needy. How pathetic. How miserably deplorable.

It is easier to hate myself, than to admit I deserved better, and that I didn’t get what I needed or what I deserved. It’s almost painfully impossible, even though I know I need to, even though I’ve known that for decades. I still feel guilty for feeling hurt by it.

Accepting that I was the problem was easier, because I’m the only thing I have control over, and I was willing to unmake myself for the slightest hint of approval. We will continue the story, and as we do, I hope you’ll be able to see how each new situation reinforced that I was unlovable, undeserving, burdensome, unwanted, and generally too much.

In order to believe that I deserved better, I have to process that through each reinforcement, through each relationship, through so many more interwoven traumas that also told me I was unlovable, needy, and broken.

Hating myself is unbearable, but I’m used to it. Actually, my self-loathing and the resulting humility was one of my best qualities when I tried to relate to other people. It’s what made me worth talking to. It’s what made my awkwardness forgivable.

It took years before I stopped responding with an immediate “I’m sorry,” complete with actions to remedy situations anytime anybody near me had a problem, inconvenience, obstacle, or otherwise adverse effect.

This was pointed out to me a lot after I left home.

“I’m sorry,” was why I was. “I’m sorry,” was the lens through which I understood others. “I’m sorry,” was a given, I just didn’t know what I’d done yet, but I was definitely already sorry.

I thought I deserved minimum wage. I thought I deserved the $0.04 raise that came with my first review, and I bent myself in knots trying to be worth more. I thought I deserved every door that shut in my face, and every misfortune.

I thought I didn’t deserve to be here anyhow- even when I loved myself.

I accepted things for myself, without fighting for more, because I thought that suffering would somehow cleanse me, and I just had to suffer enough. I figured I had to pay my dues, and earn my place in the world. I thought that maybe if I suffered enough, my children wouldn’t have to, and that my suffering would be the key to all of it.

My mom was STRONG.

If anyone were tasked with finding a positive word to describe my mom it could only be strong. She was tough as nails, and didn’t back down. When she said “no,” she meant “no.” She had very little tolerance for any BS. She’d done man’s work in a man’s world while being a mom. She’d been abandoned and backstabbed, disregarded and invalidated. She kept going. She had incredible grit, and seemed like a truly unstoppable force. She had 4 natural unmedicated births and could open any jar all by herself.

I always thought that somehow if I could be strong enough she would accept me, love me, and want me. I thought that if I could withstand enough suffering, I could overcome her disappointment.

I was also deeply rebelling against her control, and trying to find any way I could earn her acceptance of the real me. The passageway had to be through pain. It was all that made sense.

As a bastard and a slut I felt like I was damaged goods, either born that way, or made that way before I knew what it meant to be tainted. Maybe my cousin in the back of that truck just sensed what I was for. I was a liability. I knew it was going to take a lot of suffering to wash my worth clean if it was even possible. I had really hoped that Jesus would have done that for me, like everyone said, but it was pretty obvious that I was going to have to atone for my own. That was further evidence of how rotten I was.

I kept thinking that if I could just find a way to prove myself I could become worthy. There are all kinds of stories and movies about kids who aren’t acceptable by their parents until they do something that makes them enough and all of a sudden their parents are super proud, and everything is turned right.

I just had to find the right rite.

The pain of my dad’s suicide was not enough. The terror I still feel when I think about my brother or my cousin were not enough. The time spent making bottles and wiping butts, and failing at laundry were not enough. If that suffering couldn’t absolve me of my sins, I believed it was because these events were my sins.

There still a part of me that has to be actively talked down, that believes my dad killed himself because I didn’t tell him I loved him that morning.

Or maybe it was caused by that time at his apartment that my mom told me about later, where I didn’t listen to him, and it tore him up. I still wish I’d have just listened.

I wish I hadn’t stolen his cigarettes.

I wish the people who interrogated me hadn’t made him feel accused, belittled, hated. I wish I had chosen anything other than what I’d said at that birthday party.

I wish I told him every single day how much I loved him, and needed him, and how much better my life was with him in it, and how worthy he was, and how enough he was, and how beautiful and precious he was.

I’ve worked through it.

I know it was so much bigger than that. I know what’s reasonable to expect from a 10-year old.

I carried the guilt of his suicide for so long it fused to my fibers. The guilt from his suicide is like a metastatic cancer, and it’s not possible to just delete the daddy death guilt, because that guilt has leaked into all of the surrounding organs. I can’t just rip them all out and survive.

Knowing better doesn’t take it out of my bloodstream and my bones. At best I could hope that knowing better could keep it from happening again, or keep my pain and guilt from getting onto others. I did hope that. I even believed it.

I didn’t put it away until I was an adult though. I couldn’t cope with the nothingness of his absence. It felt like it was an insult to his existence to not be messed up about it. It felt like an insult to my mom to be messed up about it. It felt unthinkable that the world kept turning. It felt like being “ok,” was a matter of acting unaffected.

It was repeatedly reinforced that the expected performance of being “ok,” was proving how unaffected I was.

We didn’t talk about it in terms of understanding suicide, and schizophrenia, and grief. I learned about the stages of grief and brought the concept home and my mom was so mad that I was digging it up. She was so mad that somebody writing a book somewhere is telling her what she’s supposed to do and how she’s supposed to feel. She didn’t need that.

She was fine. What was my problem?

Thankfully, I never quit searching for answers and finally came to terms with it. ALONE.

Before that, I would become hysterical when someone would mention suicide at school, or amongst friends. Other kids thought it was hilarious to set off my suicide hysterics. I thought I deserved that too.

Every year, Daddy’s death date would approach and it would occupy my thoughts and nobody wanted to hear about it, or talk about it, and I couldn’t escape it. Acting distracted at home prompted criticisms. I got really good at masking.

Masking is so lonely.

I can’t tell you how little geometry matters when you’re thinking about the blood splatter on the floor, or wondering how long you stood staring at him laying there before it all registered. It felt like I stood there forever.

Socially, I was suicide girl.

I interacted with the world as suicide girl. I invoked the suicide SCRIPT as my identity, my personality. I fell apart each year. I waited for the day to approach with dread. Waking up in the morning it felt so wrong that another year had gone by. Another year without him. Another year I didn’t deserve a dad. Another year with an angry distant mom. Another year servicing my brother.

Another year not talking about the black hole in the room.

I’d have flashbacks. I’d be sitting in class, and I’d remember his smile, and fall apart hysterically on the inside, trying to act unaffected on the outside. I’d remember time we spent together, and the warmth of his love and acceptance, and the crushing weight of that void would consume me, but not where anybody could see. I’d remember what we came home to that day, the funeral, and moments with family saying really messed up things all through that week. I’d remember people telling me he went to hell, and people telling me to get over it, and people bringing up suicide just to watch the show of me falling apart.

I’d remember moving back to Colorado, and being Mom to my sister while my mom and brother had time together, to bond, to heal, to decompress. They went to the movies that week, just to let go a little bit, and City Slickers was showing.

Eventually, I was given permission to walk to the 1.50 movies to watch it all by myself.

I hated myself for being messed up. I hated myself for not being messed up enough. No wonder Mom hated me, it just showed that she was paying attention.

That wasn’t the truth, but it felt true enough to steer my worldview for a lot of years.

I let select people in, and shared that panic and horror with them. Most of them have weaponized it against me at some point or another. I’ll tell those stories when they come.

I let people in for support, but somehow even that became performative.

I found myself having the same reactions, but not being in them the same mentally. They were expected. I didn’t know what else to do, because nothing else made sense. As a result, I stayed locked in those responses for years and years after the triggers had dulled, still responding to them being pulled because I felt I should, not because they were having that effect.

I was aware of just how performative it was though. People respond to it the same whether it’s genuine or not. I didn’t want to be ingenuine. I felt like I was losing my mind. I was still messed up about it all, I just wasn’t messed up at a 10 anymore, now it was like a 4. I thought it was the sort of thing that either was or wasn’t.

For as much as I’ve processed it, it wasn’t until today, writing this, that I remembered how horrible it felt when my brother came to me to have me “comfort him,” after dad died, or how I clung to that connection, because I was so lost, and so alone.

If there was no space to sort through the suicide, there certainly wasn’t room for that. It was easier to just accept that it was my fault.

“That Bad” doesn’t exist.

If it messed you up, it messed you up. There will always be someone who suffered more, or a worse abuse than you went through. There are always ways that we assign the blame to ourselves, and that muddies up the waves that come later.

Having my memories listed and detailed is one part of this healing process, but it doesn’t end there. It’s also convincing myself that I get to feel anything over it to begin with. It’s pulling out the pieces that I’ve protected myself by coving up, and putting them out of the sight of my mind’s eye, to examine them, feel them, and understand them.

Maybe someday, I’ll even love them.

I can honestly say one of my greatest traumas has been feeling alone in all of it. That doesn’t mean that I have never shared details with anyone, but so often the details I shared to feel connected were used to hurt me later. I’ve found that the majority of people don’t have any space for things that are this honest or uncomfortable.

I discovered that needing people was a liability, a weakness.

I tried to heal myself through healing others. I’ve found self-love through the understanding of others’ experiences. I have given myself support through the manifestation of that support for others. I created space for my otherness through the act of holding that space for others. It has been essential that I’ve managed to participate in what I needed, even if it wasn’t as the recipient.

Unfortunately, that also reinforced that people deserve to heal, but I don’t.

People deserve love, but I don’t.

People are worthy, but I’m not.

People are inherently enough, but I’m lacking.

People deserve understanding, but I don’t.

If I wasn’t really a person, then it made sense why I could create healing for others, but did not receive the healing I needed from others. I didn’t really deserve it. I wasn’t meant to need it.

This became my cornerstone truth, and I built my healing from there.

So, what does it mean if I do need it? What if I am a person too, and I do deserve love and understanding that I don’t receive, that I didn’t receive so many times when I should have?

What does any of that mean when the things that have made me most likeable are my willingness to suffer, my toughness, and my humility?