What has become apparent in therapy is that a lot of this dissonance I talk about in my blog, or this doublemindedness about myself in terms of hating and worshipping myself, comes from some childhood trauma. And I hate to use the word trauma because that refers to real things. That refers to sexual assault, or severe physical abuse, or intense neglect, or whatever. I hate to think about this, or talk about it, because there is no way to phrase it without it sounding like I’m being over- or under-dramatic, or that I’m casting some judgments on my parents or my childhood. I wasn’t abused; the severity doesn’t touch that. I wasn’t neglected, either, in the ways that others are, trapped for hours with no one. I had friends, I had my sister, I saw my mother sometimes. But I’ve been trying to get more in touch with that part of myself, a part I’ve apparently closed off and clad in steel and spikes.
I remember hearing that I was a happy and magnanimous child, very inclusive and loving and wanted to be friends with everyone. I remember small joys of going to the Hartselle pool, or running through sprinklers, or riding my bike around with Jon and company. But when I think of these things, there’s no happy attachment to them, just like there’s no happy attachment to remembering what I ate yesterday. These are simply things that happened and I’m pretty sure they were good. When I think of my childhood holistically, when I try to put myself back into the shoes of younger me, I feel anxiety. I feel rage. I remember being angry as a kid, shattering the first phone I got against the fence in a spoiled tantrum about some shit I don’t remember. I remember bringing the groceries in at my dad’s house after the divorce and dropping a half-gallon of milk on the ground and him screaming at me like I’d never heard before. Kay, my stepmom, stepped in and told him to quit it. I remember forgetting to submit some paperwork for school and my dad yelling at me for that, too. I remember my mom, sitting on the ground with my sister and I, with a clay figure of Mr. Bill in her hand, laughing wholeheartedly as she hit us with it. I remember my mother and sister pinning me to the ground and hitting my sternum with their knuckles as our dog licked my face all over. And all of these memories conjure up these intense feelings of proximity, like I’m there again. I can feel those boundaries being crossed again, I can feel my father’s disappointment and rage and my mother’s hysterics and absence. I feel small, I feel scared.
According to some attachment theory, or maybe it’s a personality development theory, I’m still this child. The other part of me, this facade I talk about, is the way the child hides and protects himself from his environment. With enough time, the facade becomes the default way an individual operates, but there remains that feeling of discomfort or disingenuity that comes from this separation of self and projection of the self, this mismatch of who I present and how I feel.
I am really frightened of all of this. I don’t want to dig into my past too much. I don’t know how to conceive of my parents, who are Good People, as people who did great harm to me. I don’t want to conceive of myself as a victim of childhood neglect and parental aggression because it feels like such a cop-out. I am me and the time for blaming others has long since passed. But I haven’t felt real feelings, like I think I’m feeling towards younger me, in a long time. Real anger, real regret.
And looking at things through this lens, parts of myself start to make sense. My aversion to being manly or masculine, my boundaries with others when it comes to physical touch or anger, my fear of abandonment and my distrust. My disdain for people. The people who were supposed to model masculinity and boundaries for me, well, they didn’t do a great job. I think they did the best they could, again, they are not abusive people nor evil people. Interspersed with the memories of my dad screaming at me are great memories of playing football on the living room floor or the waffles he would make my sister and I every morning. But I think in the times I needed him, he wasn’t there. He and my mother divorced when I was 6 or 7, and he moved away when I was 13 or 14. And my mother, who I mostly feel pity for, she is good, too. She is smart and nerdy and deeply, deeply human. But she did not care much for physical boundaries, constantly holding me down or hitting me with something or other. I wasn’t allowed to be emotional with her, or I didn’t feel like I could be. I felt like my emotions weren’t valid or enough, my sadness wasn’t deep enough, my misery as a child was pedestrian and regular and was treated as such. When people touch me out of nowhere or playfully hit me, even nowadays, I feel like I did as a child. Depersonalized.
I’m terrified to disappoint people. I’m terrified to be belittled or called out. I’m scared to be touched when I don’t want to be. That explains the massive amounts of disassociation I would experience after sex during college.
In an earlier blogpost, I stated that I feel abstracted from myself. This would be that. To some degree, I am aware of my unhealed, childish inner self. The work of my therapy currently is trying to get back to that. I don’t really understand how to do that, or what I should be doing, but that’s what Lucy is for. I am tired of being this Me that was created because childhood me wasn’t sufficient. I am tired of holding people at an arm’s length away emotionally. I don’t want to be so anxious and so avoidant, I don’t want to be this narcissistic stitchwork of the things I thought people would value. I want to love and be loved, I want to cry when people tell me sad things, I want to find the emotional parts of me that have been shoved under the bed. I don’t want to be happy, I just want to be here.
So, that’s where I’m at. And maybe I’m looking at this wrong, I haven’t been to therapy yet this week. But this was the direction we were going in anyway.
I want to apologize to people, I guess. I’m sorry to my mom and dad for disparaging you on my blog. I do love you two. I’m sorry to my friends for the jokes I’ve made in my life, the ones that put you down, told under the guise of you can do the same to me or it’s no big deal, it doesn’t change how much I like you. I’m sorry to all the girls I’ve dated, them being unknowingly thrust into this role of trying to redefine compassionate relationships to me. I’m sorry to that RA I told to fuck himself because he was being classist, if I did it purely for justice reasons, I wouldn’t apologize, but in some other part, that was me putting myself above him. I’m sorry to Jane for me being this way throughout our entire relationship and not having the introspective ability to see how my behaviors and the underlying causes of them was grinding her down into nothing but a role.
I don’t want to be this way anymore. I want to be like other people. The hard part is that the thought that I’m different from other people is one of the hurdles I have to get over. But I really, really want to try. I don’t want to be a better person, a more accomplished person, a more attractive person, a smarter person. I want to be me again, if that’s possible.
jeez, louise 