Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

Spot Fires

NOTE: Although there is no graphic language or descriptions, i do allude to some child sexual abuse.

First things first. For those of you following along, i know i said i would be writing  “Monday to firetrucking Friday”. I want you to know that i am, but i didn’t know that a lot of what poured onto the page would be more than i felt appropriate to share. I’m forthright, even blunt, but some things are too personal and/or too dark. It’s been that way since my post on the 7th.
Personal and dark.

Six days, and I have eaten nothing. It is night. I am sitting in my chair. Ah, God! I wonder have any ever felt the horror of life that I have come to know? I am swathed in terror. I feel ever the burning of this dread growth. It has covered all my right arm and side, and is beginning to creep up my neck. To-morrow, it will eat into my face. I shall become a terrible mass of living corruption. There is no escape.
~The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson

I have mentioned a number of times that i chose to surrender myself to the process of dealing with the abuse in my childhood. Whether it was a lot or a little, it was abundantly clear that, despite my best efforts, i was dissatisfied and unhappy with what i saw as a low level of functionality and an inability to avoid chaos. When at long last i accepted my diagnosis as a multiple, and further, disclosed my past of abuse to my husband, i purposely lowered myself into that cesspool and swam around in it for a number of years. I mourned and i raged, and when i decided it was enough, i climbed out and set about cleaning the muck off.

Getting out and washing away the filth and the stench took some effort. It changed me over the years, and one of the biggest changes was my abandonment of religion and the supernatural, and my embrace of skeptical thinking. I wanted to know what was real and what was not. I applied what i was learning about rational thinking to my memories of childhood. It is a primary value of mine to believe the most true things and the least false things that i can. To that end, i categorised memories according to what i might be certain of, what i could be reasonably certain of, and those of which i could not be reasonably certain. I read a lot of dry, pedantic articles on memories: how we store them, how reliable they are, and how trauma and dissociation can affect their reliability. What i learned from my studies is that i was confident of enough things to justify my perceived dysfunctionality to myself. It made sense to me that i was as fucked up as i was. The things that fell into the other 2 categories then, at that point, didn’t matter.

I set aside things that i was either reasonably certain of or not at all, and i took the memories that i’d always held and tempered them with newfound knowledge of how memory works. I looked for corroborating evidence. I analysed and evaluated everything, with as unbiased an eye as i could muster – which, being dissociative, is not insignificant. What i was left with more than satisfied my criteria for “understandably messed up”.
I was ready to move on, and so i let the other things be. I stopped trying to figure out if i was drugged or dreaming or misremembering. If it was real or imagined. I would know if i was able to, but circumstances made it unlikely in a lot of cases. And i didn’t need to know. I wanted to get on with the business of living.

I’ve been doing my best, and if you’ve been reading along, maybe you agree that i’m not doing half bad. Spring can be a tough season for me though, and i’d forgotten…

I’ve been blogging about this depression i’m dealing with – fighting, in fact. Yeah, i’m coping all right, but i’d like to punt it right out of my field of play, savvy? I don’t want to open my eyes in the morning and instantly feel my brain mantled by the heaviness of my emotions. I don’t want to have to force myself to do the routine i’ve set in place to help combat these feelings/times. I’m proud that i’ve come this far, to this place where it works when i work it, but i’d like to wake up and want to get stuff done. I’d like to awake refreshed and looking forward to the day and all the activities i have planned. No dread at night, maybe even anticipation.
But i wasn’t having that. I was having dark dreams that warned me of psychic trouble.
I think to myself, It’s this personal issue i have going right now, but i’m handling that as best i can, and there’s nothing more i can do about it unless and until circumstances change.
So i journal every day about my current state, thinking Maybe this is what’s going on, and then Oh, maybe it’s that…
I resisted the urge to hide in bed, but i almost tricked myself into thinking i could find the answers in my dreams, so it’d be okay…

I stopped that shit right in its tracks, because that’s my Peanut Gallery and i knew it was.
Look, i said, If y’all want me to know something, you’re just gonna have to freaking tell me. I made a commitment for 1 month, and i’m not breaking it without a good reason.
But i felt more and more unsettled every day. I was close to exhausted, as i wasn’t getting proper sleep, i’ve been fighting depression every day, my fibro’s been screaming and my back had started to ache.

Friday nights are my night to do a little work on this problem i have in my life. This thing i don’t talk about, but refer to all the time. If that’s frustrating, i am really sorry, it’s just that it doesn’t only involve me, and the only secrets i share are either exclusively my own, or involve evil people that are dead or out of my life. I won’t ever disclose someone’s personal business without their permission – even those from whom i’m estranged. I’m not, nor do i want to be, that person. So i work on this issue and go to bed feeling good about what i’ve accomplished.

I woke from awful dreams to find i felt like a bag of smashed assholes. So bad it deserves the profanity. Oh joy.
Sometimes mindfulness is a hard choice to make. I’ve got mad skills to avoid pain, but i checked in instead. Did a searching and fearless physical inventory. Behold how my brain works: I’ve definitely got a UTI. Fuck. It’s a big, cold ball of ache right behind my pubic bone, and it extends all the way to my back. That’s why it’s been hurting. I don’t want to go to a clinic for antibiotics. I don’t people on Saturdays. Saturdays are my day to goof off. Read. Watch crap on telly. Do little self care things like skin masks and foot scrubs and you-shore-smell-purty lotions and all that froo-froo stuff. That won’t be happening.
I could cry. My husband even has a rare Saturday off and now we can’t go do anything.
If i can hold off going to the bathroom long enough maybe i can handle it without a doctor/prescription.

I don’t even know if other people do this, but i’ve been doing it all my life.
I’ve had bladder/kidney problems since i was a baby. I’ve had countless UTIs. For the first half dozen or so years of my life, i thought it was supposed to burn when you urinated.
I’m checking in to my body, realising i have a UTI, and my mind wanders to thinking about all the UTIs i’ve had since as far back as i can remember. My mother telling people she had me potty trained as soon as i could walk (10mos) because i would make a hissing sound when i was about to pee. Because it burned.
The thought pops into my head, I wonder if this is somatisation. That question is like nitrous in my brain’s think tank, and my thoughts race. The level of chatter increases and thoughts are whizzing by so fast it’s hard to track them. But things are clicking…

Click. Click. CLICK. BOOM! 

Some of that reasonably certain stuff became practically a certainty.
I’m not going to get any more graphic, but i realised there was more going on physically, and it confirmed some of my suspicions into as close to conviction as i’ll likely get, or want to get.
The evidence was there all along, i just hadn’t put it together.
Don’t ask me why i needed to know, because i’m not sure i did. I’ve spent these last few years trying to take good care of my Bits n’ Pieces, trying to prove that i can be trusted with their welfare, that it’s my turn to take care of them. Maybe telling me eased their burden, or healed some of their pain. I can only hope.

Today i woke up with a lessening of the physical symptoms from Saturday, but i’m covered in hives. I don’t know if it’s a somatic manifestation of trauma, or a psychic purging, or wtf. I don’t need to know. This may always be my life. I’m hoping things will gradually settle down and my life will be more smooth sailing with less chop, and i have every reason to believe it will. I carved out a safe place with the family i built. I do the work in front of me. I enjoy a quality of life for which i’d hardly dared hope.

This confirmation is a dark thing. It hurts my heart and grieves me. It shakes my worldview. But only a little. This was something i was moderately sure of, but i’d let it be, because my skepticism told me it was appropriate, and i didn’t need it to make my case. My worldview is informed by freethought, but as a humanist, i recognise that perspective may be beneficial to the achievement of the humanitarianism to which i aspire.

So yes, i’ve been on the receiving end of some of the greatest evil humans can do, but as i look back with a critical eye i find plenty of evidence that my seemingly innate belief in the essential goodness of humanity is justifiable. I’m at a point in my life and my personal development where this is not an unmanageable burden.
It’s like back in the day when fires were fought by a community, standing side by side, passing buckets full of water to douse the flames. In this analogy i’m not the one closest to the fire – i think i’m the bucket of water. I’m not an individual inside my brain so much as i’m a sleepy bedroom community on the outskirts of a city, where we’re a bit snooty and mostly keep to ourselves. The day will arrive when we’re part of the city. It is the way of things, and we all understand.

Love and Peace,
~H~

Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

Sledgehammer, Part One

WARNING: This piece is about my relationship with my mother, and includes references to both physical and non-physical forms of sexual abuse, including rape.

“Let me tell you about my mother.”
~Leon

I don’t really know what happened to my mother. She told so many stories that cannot now be verified, and i’ve caught so many of her lies, that i cannot paint her picture with much detail.

Abstract expressionism it is, then.

My mother was born out of wedlock in 1945, to an young Canadian nurse and a British RAF officer.* She was adopted out to a first generation Canadian couple in southern Alberta. They’d lost their first child, a son, within weeks of his birth, to measles, and my grandmother was unable to bear more children. They adopted her first, and then later, a boy. This was during a time when many people believed that adopted children had “bad blood”, because they’d been born to loose, sinful women.

They were raised in a place where nearly everyone, including their relatives practised a particular faith, a faith my mother’s family decidedly did not. The bullying in school was constant, and terrible. The teachers were all of the same faith, and the bullies were never reprimanded. Her brother though, as a boy and a baseball star, avoided most of the school bullying, and all of the suspicions of adopted children being tainted at home. He had replaced the son my grandparents had lost. Mother was an unfortunately necessary step to getting their precious boy – girls were less desirable than boys, but a girl could get your foot in the door, you see.

She must have at least sensed from the very beginning that she wasn’t wanted. When she was raped by one of my grandfather’s ranch hands, their response must have settled the matter. The man had threatened to kill her brother if she told, but she was hemorrhaging so badly it could not be hidden. She wasn’t taken to a hospital, a local doctor came to the ranch to see to her privately. The man wasn’t accused, arrested, charged, or punished, he was merely fired. She was 5yrs old.*

She got pregnant at 15, and was sent to a home for unwed mothers in the US where she was forced to give her baby up for adoption.* Following the surrender, she attended school away from home, to help keep her secret shame safe from the rest of the town and area. The girls at her school being as purely vicious as they were, i don’t imagine she minded at all.

At 22yrs old, she got pregnant again.
This is the point in her life where i enter, and now there are too many asterisks to even bother using them.

~~~~~~~~~~

-she got pregnant by a married man,
-she was raped by a married man,
-she got pregnant by a man of another faith whose parents would have disowned him,
-she got pregnant by a man who left to fight in Vietnam and was captured in country…

She went again to the States to the same home for unwed mothers, but this time she rebelled. She left and got a job and her own apartment, where 8mos into her pregnancy she was the victim of a break and enter and a violent rape.

~~~~~~~~~~

She fled the US for home, only to go into labour on her way, requiring her to make an unscheduled stop in Vancouver, where i born.

I won’t be going into what happened the first 7 or 8yrs of my life. It’s a story that doesn’t need to be told again. What i mean is, i can tell you a bit about my mom by way of explaining the terrible fear i always carry of becoming like her, without putting myself through the unnecessary pain of recounting the most painful years of my life. The years that fractured my brain into the little pieces that i am now trying so hard to manage and love and maybe even heal…

What i will say about those years is this: Afterwards, i believe that she suffered a crisis of conscience over what she’d done, and she didn’t manage the crisis well. I think she fell into a deep depression. I think she tried to fix what she’d done by having other children and parenting them better than she had me. And when she wasn’t able to (she was better to them in some ways and worse in others), she set upon years of self hatred and vain attempts to excuse her behaviour. Finally, it is my opinion that she eventually gave up and gave in to what she had become, and spent her final years reflecting more and more on the outside, what she was on the inside. Filthy. Bloated. Foul.

It is her final years that have most imprinted upon me this fear i have inside.
I watched her descent into utter depravity. As parts of me can move forward or recede as required, as parts of me can emotionlessly record events i have watched her slow free fall into a bottomless pit of what i can only describe as uncleanness.

I watched the house get dirtier and dirtier, until there were used dishes covered in molding food all over the house, including the floors, and yes, even the bathtub, where they were also covered with stinking scummy water, like the ones that filled every sink.

I watched my siblings get dirtier and dirtier, until their eyes, which looked unnaturally large against the pulled masks of their starving faces, seemed to fairly glow. I watched them climb through piles of unwashed laundry that were stacked higher than they themselves stood, looking to find the least filthy item to wear to school.

And i watched my mother. I watched her take food out of her children’s mouths to fill her own gargantuan appetite. I watched her swell from an incredibly beautiful woman who would be called “thick” today, to a mass of heavy, unwashed flesh that topped out somewhere over 600lbs. I watched her stop caring about what she wore, until she simply wore nothing at all. Moving from room to room completely naked. When someone came to the door i had to beg her to drape a blanket over herself. And i was privy to her abandonment of all attempts at personal hygiene, until her stench would fill the room so pungently, that i would involuntarily heave.

I tried to help stem the tide of garbage and odour and clutter and spoiled food, but i was living a life almost completely dissociated from what was going on around me. My room was a sty, too. I would be beaten for it regularly, and it would be clean for a while, but it wasn’t long before it looked much as it had at my last beating. My environment was a reflection of what was going on inside me, just as it was with my mother. I was also terrified of cleaning the house. If i did so under her watchful eye, i’d get criticised, screamed at, and beaten. If i tried to get a bunch of cleaning done when she wasn’t around, i almost never did it right, and she’d beat me when she got home. She even told me once, after my best friend and i had come home for a visit to an empty home full of trash that one had to actually wade through in places, and spent over a day cleaning, that she would have preferred i’d done nothing.

(To this day i hate cleaning the house when other people are around, it makes me terribly anxious and i avoid it as much as possible.)

After i left home, nothing really changed except that my portion of abuse was redistributed among my siblings. I know she beat them until the day she was in the car accident that would eventually kill her. I know that some religious folks who’d been trying to help her went to her home while she was in hospital, to clean it up in anticipation of her return and were pretty grossed out by what they found. I know that i visited her in hospital and begged her forgiveness for all the trouble i’d been to her and she magnanimously forgave me. I know that she seemed to be recovering, but because of her massive girth and doctors’ relative inexperience with the super morbidly obese back then, they missed a small tear in her cecum, which leaked slowly into her guts for nearly 6wks following the accident, causing her to die from multiple organ failure due to sepsis.

And i know it was years before i even began to unravel, examine, and otherwise dissect the relationship i’d had with my mother. I’ve spent years and tears and not a little money in an attempt to learn the extent of the damage she wrought in my life, and to find ways to counteract it all. For a very long time all i could do was stem the flow. I was like her, thinking i was getting better and then i’d find another source of infection that was keeping me sick. And like in our literal lives, sometimes the antibiotic wouldn’t work, or it would stop working, and i’d have to search for something else – something stronger, or something else altogether.

END PART ONE

*Maybe. I cannot verify this as fact, but i have included it because, after years of study and contemplation, i accept that it is probably true.

Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

Rubber, Meet Road

Hello,

I’m not doing very well today and i’m not sure what to say about that. There are terrible and private things going on in my life that i’ve no one to talk to about. I have a therapist, but money is very tight, and we can only afford for one person to be seeing her right now and that person is not me.

I have no close friendships and i’ve suspended my social media. I’m so dissociative right now that i don’t feel like i have enough self-control to be on there. Everything everyone says either frightens, angers, or hurts me. These things that i want someone to talk to about involve the only people i have to talk to…

I don’t know what to do. All i have is this little piece of cyberspace and i don’t know what inside me is currently fit to print.

I do NOT like crying and i can feel my throat tensing up. I’ve got that terrible, painful ache that lives in the space behind the bottom of my sternum. That ache that spreads behind my breastplate, reaching up to fill the gap between my shoulder blades. The headache i’ve had for weeks is now at full throb and my sinuses are swollen and painful. And there’s a piano on my chest playing anxious music that sounds like something from a 60s British horror film.

Okay, i just took an hour’s break from this.

I’ll confess that i’ve been so low that i let my personal hygeine slip last night and this morning. Hey, i wasn’t dirty or smelly okay? Just slow, heavy, tired… sad. But y’all can read other blog posts that refer to the importance of regularity and regimen in my life, and particularly in this area. Clean house, clean person. I have set these routines in place when i was in a better frame of mind, to help get me through the times when i wasn’t quite myself.

So i thought, “Well, that will be a positive thing i can put in my blog, which will be better than going full Eeyore.”

Never go full Eeyore.

So i got up and stripped off my pajamas that i’d been in all day, and i dragged my unwashed arse into the shower. After that i did my skincare and took proper care of my teeth. I even flossed and gargled. Heck, i also lotioned and spritzed and put on a clean outfit.
In part, so i could come here and report that i’d done it.
I’d set that in place, too. So yay me.  /ns (not sarcastic)

Honestly, i didn’t feel much better. A little better, but still so low.
I had defeating thoughts. Like, “It didn’t help. Nothing’s gonna help,” and “I’m not gonna get through this without screwing up.”

Anyone who deals with this sort of self talk may be able to relate when i share that i almost bought in to those thoughts. I mean, that’s what has usually happened, right? I feel this way and i can’t get out from under it. So there’s this feeling of inevitability. And then there’s the lack of energy or fighting spirit. These feelings use up so much energy. I spend most of my will coping, with not much left with which to fight. None left to fight, it seems to my exhausted mind.

But i think about what could happen if i give in and stop trying/fighting:

– police involvement,
– involuntary commitment,
– suicidal feelings/attempts,
– pain and suffering for my loved ones,
– loss of my “streak” and at least some modicum of starting over.

So i tried to focus on getting supper ready.
My worldview shrank to very small chunks of time. Minutes.

Hang in there until my husband gets home.
Put finishing touches on pot roast.
Set table.
Distract myself with an engrossing program.

I made it until he got home. I’d shared with him by text that i’d lost a large part of the day and was not doing well mentally/emotionally.
He was gentle and kind and asked concerned questions when he got home.
He provided a buffer between me and a somewhat contentious teenager (hey, it happens, and he doesn’t know how awful my day has been).
They enjoyed the meal and said so.

After supper my husband hugs me and says how sorry he is about my day.
He asks if there’s anything he can do to help.
I say he’s already helped some, and i thank him. He works 12hrs a day, 6 days/wk, and so i keep supper late, and he sits down to eat before he showers, so that we can eat together as a family, before our son retires to his room.
While he’s showering i’m sitting right here and staring at this screen, trying to think of what to type. I want to be both honest and uplifting.

And that is when i realise that i can be.

You know what?
I’m in trouble. My mental health has been threatened by a terrible event and things could go very badly for me.
I have done all this hard work because, not only do i want to be happy and good, but i know that my mental illness can be a serious impediment to achieving those things. Especially when life happens. Which it does and it always will.

So i am sitting here with my fingers poised over my keyboard – waiting for something inspiring and poetic and deep and true to zing into existence inside my brain and zap my fingers into a rhythmic ratatat-tat on these blasted keys.

Last night my busy, busy, anxious AF brain wouldn’t let me sleep, so i made 4 1/2 dozen refrigerator cookies. Chocolate Haystacks, a childhood favourite.

Today i realised that i’d lost time and i texted my husband and told him i was in a bad place.

I knew things could go badly and i knew i didn’t want them to and i knew that it’s up to me to cope.
I reminded myself that my brain works in weird and fantastical ways, and i may not handle things as well as i -or anyone else for that matter- might like.

Today, i made a labour-intensive, slowcooker pot roast, while switched.

I have made it through the day without going full Eeyore.

While i am not currently suicidal, i can feel it, looming in the background like dark wings ready to fly. Whatever comes i feel even more committed and competent to handle it than i did yesterday. And that is a reasonable expectation realised.

This piece may have a metric fuck-tonne of mistakes in it, but i think i should post it without proofreading. That’s something i never do, but i don’t want to overthink this and end up not posting because it’s so raw and lacking any flowery accoutrement. I admit i checked my spelling of the fancy French word. Heh.

Love and Peace and THANK YOU,

~H~

Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?

Do you really want to hurt me,
Do you really want to make me cry?
~Culture Club

It’s been a year since i quit socialising. Actually, it’s been more like 2, but i’d tried to do a bit here and there in 2015. It was all a disaster, and convinced me that i needed to do something a little more drastic. I haven’t been out to a major gathering since a wedding last Hallowe’en, or had people in my home for a meal in even longer.

I’m not lonely most of the time. I have a teenage kid still living at home, and the other 2 stop by regularly with the families that they’re building. In the last year, that’s been more than good enough. I have some online relationships that have filled any serious need i’ve felt to interact with anyone outside of them.

I’ve never been good at peopling, i guess. It’s not been for lack of trying. I may have put more effort in to having friends than just about anything else. No long term success, though. I’ve had friends off and on throughout my life, some very close and very dear. None of them though, for a long time. The longest friendship i’ve ever been able to maintain was around 15yrs, and no other friendship even comes close to that one, which is, like all the others save one that has been rekindled, either over, or no longer close.

I accept that it’s mostly been my fault. I accept that it’s hard to be my friend, much like i accept that i’m an odd person – not because i know it, but because i’ve been told it’s so, and the opinion seems to be largely borne out. I don’t feel like i’m particularly hard to be friends with, but based on my track record it seems fairly obvious. Heh. I’m not exactly sure what it is that makes me so weird, either. However, based on how hard it is for me to maintain a relationship, or forge new friendships, coupled with how people look at me and treat me… Some people have even told me right to my face, which i actually appreciate. Especially now, with my resolution to stop reading everyone reflexively; blunt people are less stressful.

I had a job from the time i was very young, and the most important part of it was to behave in certain ways around certain people. Different ways around different people. It hasn’t lent itself well to a strong sense of identity. I wasn’t so good at being myself but i was quite good at being who i thought other people expected me to be.

Well, i thought i was good at it.
Now i’m not really sure.

The harder i’ve worked on myself -you know, my brain and my fucked up life- the more i’ve wondered if that was ever really so.
That i was good at it.
You know, peopling.

It also seems to be that, the healthier and more functional i’ve gotten in my brain and my much-less-fucked-up life, the less good i am at peopling. I get nervous, anxious, awkward. Everything feels forced and i know i’m trying too hard. I feel exposed, naked, vulnerable… I’ll smile too wide, laugh too loud, talk too long, drink too fast. Sometimes all at once. Dissociation to some degree is never far behind. I can devolve in 2hrs or less now.

I’m kind of a train wreck.

So i decided over a year ago that it was time to take a break. I desperately needed to get some perspective, and my body needed me to stop punishing it with drugs. My body is healthier and my vision is much clearer. I don’t always like what i see, but at least i’m not crashing into it full speed, wondering What the heck was that, and Is this the collision i won’t walk away from?

Here is my truth: When the people who created me did unspeakable things to me, it broke me on a level that can never be mended. I know that. I don’t know if i can ever trust anyone enough to let them really know me – even what little i know about myself. I know i’m trying my best, and i know i’ll continue to try, but it may be that i’ll never be able to people very well. Some of those friends that i’ve lost along the way have said they couldn’t live with the wall i have around myself. Others have called me closed, unreliable, full of myself, full of shit.

They’re not wrong, although in my own defense, it’s hard to be genuine when you have no clue who you are, and you can’t let down your walls long enough to figure much out.

So i guess what i’m saying is, Fuck them. Kinda. Not really i suppose.
But they hurt me.
People hurt me.
All the time and even when they don’t mean to.
I think just being around people hurts me a lot of times.
I’m sick of people’s shit and i’m tired of trying to figure them out.

I feel safe in my Little Crooked House, and i’ve almost never felt safe in my entire life.
I still get hurt here, but they’re sorry, and they know me. I guess?
I don’t really know right now, but i’m really fucking trying.

Sorry for all the cursing. Dark night of the soul stuff actually makes me less poetic and more profane.
Love and Peace,
~H~

Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

This Beautiful Bag of Mostly Water

 

Loving myself is one thing. Liking myself… That takes some work.
~ HistrionicaButterfly

I’m starting to like myself. Like, holy shit. If you only knew. If you’d spent any time inside my brain, you’d have not thought it possible. I mean, the things i’ve said to myself, about myself. I wouldn’t even say those things to the ones responsible for me being this screwed up. I don’t want to bring down the tone of this piece by being specific. Pretty sure i don’t need to anyway. You already know, because you’ve probably said terrible things to yourself, about yourself too.

I was asked what my greatest fear is. It was during one of those courses that seekers like me are wont to take. It was a deep, intellectual course that asked you questions like, “What are you pretending not to know?” (If you inferred a sarcastic tone in that last sentence, you’re correct. Feel free to carry it through to the end of the paragraph.) In the third level of the course we did a fire walk and went on a zip line (not at the same time, but hey, that might’ve been more fun) and then we were declared an intellectual giant and given leave to talk down to all the unfortunate peons who hadn’t taken the course, henceforth.

My greatest fear was, and is, death. Thanks to how deeply and completely i was indoctrinated in my family’s religion, i still wrestle with that fear. I got some much-needed relief the day i realised that, if the god i was raised to worship is indeed real (for which i see no evidence), i wouldn’t worship him anyway. Still, the vein of acquiescing to religious authority without question, and acceptance of dogma without investigation, runs through me. If i were a tapestry and religion a thread, the pattern of my life would be shot through with it. If i started pulling out those threads, the fabric would fall apart.

To return to the occasion of me being asked to name my fears. We were partnered up and sat on chairs facing each other and were instructed to name everything we were afraid of, stream-of-consciousness style, with no editing. Well, all of this fear flew out of my face like projectile vomit, like  acid. Those who ran the course were right to focus on our fears, but i was a long way from being able to do any serious work on its origins, costs, and consequences. Being terrified of death wasn’t news to me, but something else was. I birthed it like a premature foetus.

I suppose that’s enough build up. Heh.

My second greatest fear is the one where, if i let anyone in to really get to know me, they’ll find out that i’m an awful person and leave.

I was raised with secrets. It started with the real reason i was born, and just continued. I was like one of those cartoon kids getting caught in a snowball rolling downhill, except it wasn’t snow, it was shit. And that shitball kept getting bigger and more destructive. I was taught that we were different than other people. They said we were so intelligent, so evolved. We were part of a privileged circle of spiritual elites that had to practise what we believed in private, behind closed doors. Not because our holy book told us to, but because other people couldn’t understand.

So i grew up inside this terrible dichotomy: being one thing during the day, and something else entirely at night. I knew it was wrong, because it felt terrifically bad. I don’t mean physically, although that part hurt a great deal – i mean it was like carrying a cannonball around in my belly. But these people that i loved, that were entrusted with my care and upbringing, told me it was good. So i learned to subjugate and compartmentalise my thoughts and feelings from a very young age, and the worst thing of all is that i learned i couldn’t trust myself. My thoughts and feelings and perceptions were different than what they were supposed to be, so i did what most abused children do – i internalised the blame. I was the problem. I was wrong. I was bad.

I wondered how they tolerated me at all; i was so grateful for their love.

I always knew there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t born with the knowledge, it was put inside me without my consent. It was the psychological rape that impregnated me with the twisted, misshapen blob of cells that i spat out that day, confessing my fears to a stranger. I wasn’t ready to let it go then. That was over 30yrs ago and here i am finally putting her to rest. I buried my beautiful little hate-baby and i feel so much better. I’m slowly leaving my paranoia behind, like flowers at her graveside. I’m interrupting my inner dialogue that projects how i feel about myself onto the people around me, ascribing meaning to their eyes and putting whispered words into their mouths that are not theirs. And even if i’m right sometimes, does it really matter?

I remind myself of the times in my life when i had friends who welcomed me with smiles and warm salutations. Inside, i was dying. I felt like a fraud, and i was one. I just didn’t know it yet. I had no intimate relationships besides my husband and children, and even those were difficult and strained for me. I was terrified that someone would get close enough to figure out how repulsive i was inside. Bad. Spoiled goods. Completely gone off.

Now i’m starting over and i’m not close to anyone. I’m fortunate to have a situation where i can make short forays into the world around me and practise being me. If i become drained or overwhelmed i can retreat to my Little Crooked House and hermit away for as long as i wish. I’m no longer trying to charm everyone i meet. I don’t need you to be liked. The ones who genuinely haven’t liked me, haven’t hurt me by doing so. The ones that claimed to like me, have often done far worse than even i have done.

My goal is to like myself. To enjoy my own company. To admire and respect my deportment. To please myself.
I am a beautiful bag of mostly water, to riff on a Star Trek quote.

Happy Monday,

~H~

IMAGE: Tim B. Motivv