Jung Jung! Does That Sound Mean What I Think It Means?

A few years back, I realized that I needed to make some changes in my life, or I was going to jump off a bridge.  Most of those changes involved my family of origin.  Specifically my mom, but since my whole family was built around my mom, the whole system was sick sick sick.

When you make sweeping, grandiose changes in your life, your perspective changes.  But it's not just a futuristic, "I will now be awesome all the time!" future-trending change.  Your perspective on your past changes as well.

It's sneaky, too.  You can be tootling along, going through your day, and think of something that happened when you were younger, and Whammo!  Suddenly you realize.  Oh wait.  That wasn't what I thought it was.  That was because.....My Mom Is A Narcissist.

(Still my favorite, no matter how apt the creator's name may be.)

So let's talk about hair.  Or, more specifically, do me a favor right now:  Reach up to your head, and pull on a chunk of your hair.  (For those without any by choice or by genetics, just imagine when you did have hair, and think about what that felt like.)

Kind of a tugging feeling, I'm guessing.  Some pressure, but nothing big, right?

Now imagine if that hurt like hell when you did it.  Ouch!  Immediate burning, pulling sensation and pain, like you're scraping your knee on the sidewalk.

That's what it feels like for me to have my hair pulled.  I'm one of those Highly Sensitive People who feel pain more often, more intensely, and are generally more sensitive to stimuli than other people are.  I get overwhelmed in crowds, I tend to be claustrophobic, and I can't withstand loud noises for very long.  Ironically, given my love for all things Law & Order, New York City is pretty much my nightmare in a nutshell.  I need space and quiet and peace to recharge, and live in the boondocks for that very reason. 

Unfortunately, I grew up in a household where I didn't get a chance to tell anyone this.  I was dismissed, criticized, yelled at,  bossed around, and generally never asked a question with space to answer.  No one ever knew that I actually felt more pain than most people do.

So, to circle back, hair.

My family's myth about my hair goes like this:  I was so stubborn growing up that I screamed and cried every time my mom combed my hair.  By the time I got to third grade, my mom got tired of my stubbornness and willful screaming and crying that she cut my hair short and wouldn't let me grow it long.  It was all my fault for being so annoying and making so much noise when she brushed my hair.  In fifth grade, she started giving me permanents so it wouldn't look so horrible, not that she could do anything about the rest of me.  She was just trying to help me look better, and if I wanted to be beautiful, I would have to suffer through the perms.  "Beauty must suffer," she repeated dozens of times as she twisted my hair into curlers and sprayed the chemicals onto my scalp, bending my head over the kitchen sink.  Every time my hair got to a certain length, she would give me a home perm, so that it would "look decent while that hair grew out."  In high school, I finally picked my perfect haircut, which was so short that I was routinely mistaken for a boy, especially in a small town in the frickin' 80s.

About a month ago, I was thinking about my hair, and remembering this mythology when suddenly

(Seriously one of my favorite things.)

And I felt that sudden flash of truth:  This isn't about me.  This isn't a story about how I was so awful and stubborn and overly sensitive.

This is a story about how my mom was so unfeeling and uncaring that she couldn't take five seconds to put some conditioner into her daughter's hair before she combed it.

This is a story about a woman who was so jealous of her young daughter that she decided to cut off all of her long hair so people would stop saying she was pretty.

This is a story about someone who was afraid of growing old, and couldn't handle a younger version of herself standing beside her.

It's about me yelling and screaming in pain, and not only does no one care, but my mother is actively making things worse for me.  Because she believes that if I am loved, she won't be loved.  If I'm pretty, she will be ignored.  So she does anything she can to hurt me, to keep me ugly, to hold me down.

Happy families are all alike, but anyone with my type of family has a dark book of fairy tales handed to them by whoever raised them or handed them off to the world.  This is what was written down about you, what you were taught to believe.  But what is written can always be crossed out.