Growing Up in a Crooked House

Here you are, a kid growing up in a family.  From a very young age, you're told things, and those things are the only things that are true.  They have to be true, because your parents tell you they're true, and your parents are way bigger than you are, and they're smart, and funny, and beautiful.  Your parents are gods.  So they must be right about the world, and about your siblings, and about you.  They know everything, and they have told you everything you need to know.  You believe them, even if sometimes your inner voice disagrees.  That voice must be wrong.  Your parents are right. 

As you get older, you notice more often that some things are out of whack.  Mom says something nice to another grown-up, but you know that she doesn't feel that way.  You can feel what she's feeling, and it isn't even close to the nice thing she said.  If you're brave, you ask her about it.  She denies feeling anything but niceness to that person, and says you must be imagining things.  She gets that closed-face look, and you know better than to ask more questions.  You open your book and start reading.  

When you're ten years old, you find your voice.  It was there all along, but you've read enough now to understand that you're the downtrodden person in this family.  You're the oldest, and you're adopted and someday your real family will show up and take you away from these people and love you.  That's all you really want.  And your anger comes out of your heart, and you ask your mom questions, lots of them.  She gets caught in a logic trap you've set, and she can't get out.  She slaps you across the face to get you to stop.  Two decades later, she'll tell that story at a funeral to a large group of family members, ending with, "I don't know what made you do that.  If you had stopped yelling at me, I wouldn't have had to slap you!"  Until that moment, you had no memory of that event.

As a teenager, you are trapped, and you are gnawing your own limb off at all times.  You want to escape so badly.  The migraines have been bad since seventh grade.  Your family constantly blames anything wrong in the world, in the family, in the house, on you.  You're too sensitive.  You're too obnoxious.  You are too ugly.  You don't know how to do anything.  You're ridiculous, and you don't take things seriously enough.  You you you you you.  

There's no way to succeed in this household.  You can only survive.  I used to look at all of my classmates in college and wonder what it would be like to be valued for 18 years before you had to go out into the world and try to achieve things.  Instead, I had to fight just to feel like I deserved oxygen, food, love, housing.  I fought and fought and fought, and gave up a lot.  I spent a lot of my early years in a dissociative fugue, trying to escape my actual feelings.  I couldn't face the world, and I couldn't face my own reality.  

Someone asked me once, "Didn't you have a mirror in your life?  Someone who would reflect back to you exactly how gifted and smart and beautiful you were?  Someone who really saw you?"  I couldn't think of anyone.  My teachers knew my mom, and though I was a gold star student, I craved so much attention that I was probably off-putting in that desperate way.  When I started going to public middle school, my bus driver was really sweet to me.  In high school, I idolized my Spanish teacher, who ended up thoroughly disappointing me in a myriad of ways.  For a time, though, I had someone who I thought valued me for who I was.  That got me through a lot of years, despite how it ended.

I see my past clearly these days.  I no longer have any contact with my parents.  After decades of continuing to blame me for, well, everything, despite my success, despite my siblings' dependence and underachievement, despite any clues to the contrary, I finally gave up.  I said, I am done.  You have no idea who I am.  I was shaking when I mailed the letter, but I wrote it, mailed it, and cried for a while. The letter was specifically for my mom, and my dad contacted me a few weeks later.  Hopeful, I decided to have lunch with him.  He made it clear during lunch that I was required to fall back into line and take care of my mother, who was crying every night.  

I'm familiar with that crying she was doing.  It says, "Comfort me!  Make me feel better!  Fix things for me!  You have made me feel bad, so now it's your job to make me feel better!  Come, prostrate yourself before me, and everything will go back to the way it was before, as long as you apologize for making me feel bad, and promise to never do it again, ever.  Because my feelings are your responsibility, not mine.  You are behaving badly, not me.  I am long-suffering and so sad and that is your fault."

Because it's all about her.  My dad asked me zero questions that day.  He didn't ask me how I was doing, how my husband was, or even (logically) why I wrote the letter.  He didn't want to know.  He just knew that I had made his life harder by cutting contact with my mom, and he wanted it fixed, now.  I walked away from that meal knowing that I had never had a mother or a father, just two people who wanted their every whim fulfilled by people they had abused into believing they could never be treated better.  

These days, I work on myself, piece by piece.  I know who I am.  I know who I want to be.  I also know exactly what it's like to grow up in a household where reality doesn't exist.  On my last visit to my parents' house, I was alone for an hour or so.  I walked through the rooms, just feeling all the pain and anguish and anger that lives there.  It wouldn't be so bad if the family portraits of smiling faces weren't staring back at me from their spots on the walls.  I remember what it was like being 10, 12, 15 years old there.  I remember having to smile and pretend it wasn't like that.  

The floors are crooked in that house.  The foundation is partly wood, and it's been sinking since forever.  For thirty years, that was my childhood home, my password when they asked What Street Did You Grow Up On?  I remember every inch of the place, hiding places, nooks and crannies, secrets in every room.  I will never go back.  

Digging Up the Truth; Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Realize My Mother's a Narcissist

For years I thought that I was broken, that there were a lot of things wrong with me.  It explained why I never fit in, why I had a hard time making friends, why nobody loved me for more than a year and eight months, why my family made fun of me all the time.  I would fight back every now and then, but it would always backfire; they would push me back in my corner, and my rebelliousness only proved their point:  I was broken.

About eight years ago, I started questioning that belief.  I started seeing things differently.  The image of the perfect family started cracking in the corners.  If they were so perfect and I was so broken, why did my brother jump from relationship to relationship?  Why did my parents ignore his serious issues and blame me for being too hard on him?  Why did they get angry at me for protesting my dad's treatment of me when I was young, but matter-of-factly talk about his PTSD years later?  

I've always been a voracious reader, and the day I connected to the internet was amazing.  Years later, when I started digging into family dysfunction, it was no different than any other subject I'd researched.  I'm not sure where the threads began weaving together, but I found some references to narcissism and I began discovering some patterns.  I found a checklist for daughters of narcissistic mothers:  Have I consistently lacked emotional closeness with my mother?  Is my mother overly conscious of what others will think?  Do I feel unaccepted by my mother?  Does my mother act jealous of me?  Am I shamed often by my mother?  Check, check, check, check, check, all the way down the 30 question list.  To be fair, I didn't check a few of the questions, but you can't have everything.  

I dug further, and found more websites.  I found Karyl McBride, Issendai's work on "estranged parents", and reddit's (ironic, I know) well-moderated forum for people who were raised by narcissists.  At each stop, I learned more about the patterns of this dysfunction.  I learned that I wasn't the only one dealing with this situation.  I marveled at the similarities between my family and dozens, no, hundreds of other people around the world whose stories I was reading.  I learned about different coping mechanisms, different reactions that families had to those coping mechanisms, and a wide variety of health issues that were consequences to living in the cloud of dysfunction caused by these people.  

At the time, I was still visiting my family about once a month, and I started noticing things.  Every time we would visit, my stomach would be upset for at least a full 24 hours afterwards.  My mom would delay mealtimes, which she knows can trigger a migraine for me.  My family would say hurtful things, and then tell me that I was being too dramatic and sensitive if I protested.  These were all things listed as patterns in a household ruled by a narcissist in so many of the sources I had been reading!  I was just flabbergasted as, over and over, they walked right out of the textbooks and proved the points to a T.  

About six years ago, I hit a wall.  I spiraled into a deep, dark depression.  I did nothing but play computer games and pretty much wish that my life was over.  I had things to live for, but nothing was appealing.  I couldn't sleep, but all I wanted to do was sleep.  The irony did not escape me; I didn't want to be awake, but I couldn't get to sleep.  Looking back, I was being forced to face my reality.  My body was in cahoots with my mind, and it was not being kind to me.  I finally went to see my doctor, who gave me the standard ten point test:  "On a scale of Never to All the time, how often do you think about hurting yourself?" Et Cetera/Peter Cetera.  By the end of the test, I was bawling, and I never cry at the doctor's office; I don't want to inconvenience them (see feelings of worthlessness above).  She prescribed medication for the insomnia and prozac for the depression.  I promised her I would find a counselor.  

I dug around online for a counselor; thank goodness for the internet!  I wanted to trust myself to find the right person, and I looked at different websites and found someone with a philosophy that sounded like my style.  I made an appointment and we hit it off right away.  I started talking to her every week.  In January of 2013, she asked me to write a letter to my mom to say what I wanted to say to her.  I must have gotten a look on my face, because she said, "Why don't you pretend that she can't respond to you?  Like she's tied to a chair and she can't say anything back to you?"  I was shocked.  I had honestly never even conceived of a world where that could be possible.  My mother was ubiquitous, she was all-powerful, there was nowhere she hadn't oozed into, her judgmental voice preceding her.  My eyes went wide with possibilities.  

I went home and wrote an eight-page screed in large cursive letters that very night.  I addressed an envelope and stamped it.  I brought the letter to my next session and handed it to my counselor.  She read through it and asked, "So are you going to send it?"  (She had seen the envelope.)  "I HAVE TO," burst from my chest.  I couldn't contain the words.  I tried to calm myself.  "I have to.  If I don't, I will die."  I knew it was true.  

I mailed the letter that day, my heart bursting out of my chest.  I thought I would die.  I didn't.  I mailed the letter, and I haven't seen my mother since.

I'm still working on myself; my depression comes and goes --- there are no fairy tale endings, and you can't expect 41 years of damage to go away with a snap of your fingers.  There are studies that show that childhood adversity has serious lasting effects on us into adulthood and old age.  But it's been almost five years since I saw my mother, and they've been the best five years of my life.  I'm freer, happier, more myself than I've ever been.  I was breathing poison every day, and I didn't even know it.  Now I'm breathing fresh air, and it's the best I've ever tasted.  

Blood, Vows, Adolescence, and even one of those stupid pamphlets would have been better than nothing.

There are certain facets of a woman's life that are so sticky and primal that we don't ever want to discuss them.  Men and women have some of the same problems, since they've both got gendered ideals to live up to, and devil take the one who doesn't fall in line.  But women's bodies are mixed up in fear and worship and creation and blood and death.  Primal societies worshipped them for creating life.  Our modern world constrains them whenever possible because of the power they hold.  It's no picnic becoming a woman in ideal circumstances; it becomes even more traumatic without support.

Yep, I'm trying to back away from this, even as I write it.  "Let's talk academically, so I can pretend I never started this."  Yeah.  But no.  I'm going to tell the truth.

I was always book smart, and it showed in how I spoke.  I think my mom really thought of me as a miniature adult, and I know for a fact that my dad really only enjoyed hanging out with me when he was playing devil's advocate and getting me to argue with him.  Being smart was fun, and I liked the feeling I got when someone was impressed with me.  So it was natural, then, for my mom to assume that I knew what was going to happen to my body, and that she didn't need to tell me anything.  Right?  Oh hell, I have no idea what was natural.  Here's what I do know.

My mom never told me anything about how my body worked.  When I came downstairs to tell her that I got my period, she said, "I was wondering when that was going to happen!"  I was 13, which I'd deduced was pretty damn normal.  Now, if she was wondering when I was going to start my period, wouldn't you think that she would have something ready for me to use when that happened?  

Nope.  Instead, she handed me one of her supersized tampons and told me to go put it in.  I struggled in the bathroom with the huge wad of cotton for fifteen minutes or so until I gave up.  Exasperated as usual with anything I couldn't do, she rolled her eyes.  I put some toilet paper in my underwear and she sent me off to school, promising she would send me some pads.

In Home Ec class, I got a delivery in a brown paper bag, nothing taped down or anything.  The kids in school all hated me, so I knew that whoever had delivered the bag had looked into it and seen the box of pads.  After class, I went to the bathroom and took care of business.  For the rest of the day, I was on high alert, but no one made any remarks to me, or teased me about the bag.

That year I was in seventh grade, a full on tomboy, partially because I was a full year younger than everyone else, and partially because I was extremely athletic and loved moving my body.  At my previous school, there was no playground equipment, and I loved playing on swings and bars.  My new school had this awesome contraption that had multiple swings and a long string of bars to monkey-climb across.  The boys and I would compete to see who could get across fastest.  The first leap was to the fourth bar out, and then you grabbed every other one for maximum efficiency. I had a great time playing during every recess, break, and lunch.  It goes without saying that I played hard in every P.E. class.

No girls at my school ever used the showers after P.E.  You Just Did Not Do That.  The girls might get a towel damp and dab under their arms with their shirts still on if they'd sweated at all.  It goes without saying that the popular girls never moved quickly enough to sweat.  I couldn't figure out what the point was if you didn't try hard and have a good time.

So one day in P.E. class, my teacher, Ms. S., sat the girls down in the gym and said that over the next few days, she might be pulling kids aside to talk about hygiene and taking care of yourself.  Sitting there on the wood floor, I got that sinking feeling.  I knew she was talking about me.  I was the last to leave the locker room after class, and she pulled me aside.

It wasn't the discussion of, "You need to wear deodorant, some teachers have complained about your smell" that hurt me and made me more ashamed than ever.  It was the look on her face.  I was well acquainted with that look, it was classic Mom.  It said, I am disgusted by you; I cannot belive that I have to deign to tell you this information, but in case you didn't know, you're disgusting and gross and you will never be okay; your very existence offends me.  

I can still see the flutter of her eyelashes as she sighed and told me I needed to use deodorant.  Because everybody else knows this, why don't you?  She never asked one question.  She just assumed I knew these things.  But I didn't.  No one had ever told me.


I started using my dad's antiperspirant, and stole one of his backups for after P.E.  I was definitely the only girl using something that didn't have a pink lid and a light fresh scent.  I just kept hiding as much as I could.

Over the next few years, my periods were fairly normal, but I had a supply problem.  I would steal my mom's pads when I could, but I was so ashamed of everything to do with my body that I could not face buying pads by myself.  I couldn't drive to the store by myself, and we did not live in an urban area.  Occasionally I would buy pads from the bathroom dispenser, but I would break out in a cold sweat, waiting for someone to catch me in the act.  I knew I would get laughed at, and the story would be all over school in minutes.  I didn't have any friends I could talk to about this, and I always knew that my body was something to be ashamed of.  Nobody in our family talked about bodily functions, let alone sex, ever.  My mom could barely look at me without criticizing something about me, moment by moment, and she hated anything I wanted to spend money on.  Occasionally I could throw a box of pads into the grocery cart if we were shopping and she was in a good mood, but that was it.  I knew that I wasn't worth spending money on, my body was awful, and having a period just made everything worse.  I had to hide that, too.

So out of desperation and wanting to stay invisible, I started making my own pads.  I used toilet paper, and wound it round my hand to make a thick pad, then wrapped layers around the crotch of my underwear to hold it in place.  Unfortunately, they never stayed in place very well, and many's the time I had to excuse myself from class to readjust or make a new one.  Walking to my next class was a minefield, and I couldn't adjust anything without calling even more attention to myself.  Wearing these makeshift items was utterly stressful, especially during P.E. or sports practice.  I was afraid to try tampons after trying that first one.  That's supposed to go where?  Yeah, no thanks.

Sometimes I hear stories from my friends about their moms introducing them to menstruation, and I listen really carefully, just so I can hear about what should have happened.  I wonder what it would have been like, how I would have felt about my body, if a conversation like theirs had taken place in my household.  But really?  There was no possible way that could have happened.  My mom did not want to talk about my body.  If I had asked any questions, she would have gotten that pursed lip look on her face, like she just smelled a dead rat in her shoe, and I was disgusting and gross and how could I even ASK that question?  Deep sigh, roll of the eyes, and utter disdain.  I was never safe in that house, and I was never safe in my body, least of all.


My eyesight has been fairly bad since third grade, and when I was growing up, I always took a shower in the morning, then put my contacts in when I stepped out and dried off.  So I couldn't see at all when I was in the shower.  In high school, it became clear that I had to shave my legs to fit in.  Once again, supply problems.  I used to steal the head of one of my dad's refillable razors and hook my fingernails into the slots of the head to use it to shave my legs, all done without being able to see clearly.  One day, I stepped out of the shower and realized that yet again, I had sliced my leg on the back of my achilles tendon.  I put in my contacts and got partially dressed before I stepped out of the bathroom to get a bandaid from the kitchen.  My mom was standing in the kitchen and saw my leg bleeding all over the place.  "You cut your leg shaving?"  "Yeah."  She laughed and shook her head.  "Can't you do anything right?"  I glared at her and went back to the bathroom.  No sympathy, no caring, no comfort, just disdain.  If I hadn't been on a linoleum floor, she might have gotten pissed about the bloodstains.

It's a little disconcerting, seeing all of this out in the world.  But this was the reality of my adolescence.  I was given no information; there was no internet to reference for information, and our Encyclopedia wasn't geared toward teenaged girls.  The authorities who were supposed to help me were just as disdainful as my mother was.  I had to make do, to wing it, to try my best to survive and succeed with the only tools I had at hand.  It's amazing I survived as unscathed as I did, that I survived at all.  

The saying goes, "blood is thicker than water," which is supposed to mean that your family will always be there for you.  Well, my parents were always there for me; my mom to mock and neglect me, and my dad to terrorize me and enable my mother.  However, the real quote is this:  "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb," meaning that the vows you make with your friends are more meaningful than any familial relationship.  My mom always used that saying to remind us that she would always be there when we needed her; to me, that was a threat, not a promise.  Blood may be thicker than water, but blood always reminds me of neglect and disdain, and the ways I was failed, not supported and cherished.

Starting and Running Away

[This blog is actually an amalgam of, like, six different blogs that were all dead ends until I pulled everything together into this one.  So, as the Morrissey sang, stop me if you've heard this one before.]

In a conversation with some friends, you get a beautiful idea. It's like a flash of light in your brain. You're so excited that you start taking notes on napkins and scribble little chunks of thoughts everywhere. You can see the whole project, and you know you're the perfect person to do it.

The next day, you still feel pretty good about it. You get started. You know that you can do it. After a few days, you start moving into the middle. It's not as easy as you thought, and you don't know how to ask for help. Your confidence is waning. Your inner editor starts picking at you, telling you that it's not good enough and you don't know what you're doing and you never were the right person for this anyway. You may even get a whallop of, "You're not the right person for anything; who do you think you are?"

This is the tough part. You've got a choice now. This is the crossroads.

To your right, you see abandoned projects scattered on both sides of the road. The path is level, and after a while, you can coast. It doesn't take anything to walk this way, and it's familiar ground.

To your left, the road looks impassible. Steep, rocky, ankle-crunching gravel. Weeds, trees, brush blocking the way. You can't see anything but obstacles, and there's no way you'll make it past those bushes.

Easy decision, right? The clear road looks way cooler. You don't have to work for anything, you just coast along and do what you think is best ---- throw it all over your shoulder and do what you've always done:  give up. You don't even have to make an effort.

But here's the thing: You're only seeing the first hundred feet of these paths. It's just like driving at night:  you only get to see as far as your headlights can reach, but you can travel forever that way. You just have to keep going.

When I first started this blog, I knew I could do it. But I didn't know how.  I enlisted some friends to support me and help out. I posted my first post and hoped I could keep rolling under my own momentum.

Then I ran away like the blog was on fire. It could have been, and I would not have noticed. I was terrified of telling the truth and being who I am in a public forum. Every time I thought about the blog, my heart started pounding. I felt like a fraud. I knew that if I told the truth about my life, the world would explode.

You may have a different blockade. You may feel worthless. You may think that you have nothing to contribute to the world. You may not know what you want to do with your life, or you may have too many things that you want to do. But everyone, every single person, has a core challenge that they can undertake during their time here. You can avoid it your whole life if you want; that's your choice. But if you face it, you can fix it. It just takes time, and effort.

I could look back on those long dead blogs and think, wow, what a waste of time and effort and energy.  But I know now what they were:  a good testing ground so I could get my bearings, and become accustomed to the idea of having my words out in the world.  I wrote a lot of interesting things on those blogs, and focused on different subjects I enjoy.  I've combined those all together for this particular blog, and it's been a really interesting process.  Those practice runs were really helpful.  Did I know what was happening at the time?  Hell no!  Did I think leaving them alone for years at a time was going to be helpful?  No, I thought I was a loser who didn't know what the hell she was doing.  So, maybe next time I'll decide to avoid berating myself about things that I don't understand yet, and instead accept that we don't always know where projects are leading.

This post is a case in point.  It starts out about one thing and ends about another.  Ye Gods.  But I'll leave it be.  When I picture the path of abandoned projects I mentioned above, I always see a weird hill with random dead air conditioners and dishwashers sitting under trees with piles of junk everywhere.  I guess you can get a lot of good parts and build some cool stuff from dead machines.  Maybe that's what I'm doing, building some robots.  And watching bad movies.  Yeah.

Pain, Taking Care of Yourself, and Being

Pain cures nothing, it solves nothing.  Pain is the thing you live through in order to get to live something else.  Pain reminds you that you are limited, you can't have everything, you can't be everything.  Pain contracts, constricts.  Pain hurts like hell.

I hurt right now.  I have a migraine headache.  There are many types of migraines, and this is what mine is like:  One side of my head slowly starts pounding like someone is hitting me with a hammer, and over a period of hours, the pain grows worse and worse until I throw up or go to sleep.  If I sleep for more than a couple of hours, I wake up and the pain is gone.  That waking up sensation is better than anything, better than chocolate, better than sex (and yes I have had some amazing sex).  That relief when you remember living your life with the migraine and realize that now you don't have to - that is the sound of your entire body loosening its grip on staying alive, relaxing, becoming real again.  That is real life.

The person I am has always been sensitive to the world.  There's something in me that bridles like hell at even admitting that, because it's been used as a pejorative to silence me for most of my life.  But these days I can see the patterns in my life.  I have always been sensitive - to light, to heat, to scents, to food, to crowds, to loud noises, to moods and feelings.  And to pain.  My skin itself cannot handle "normal" cleansers or anything harsh.  I glow red after a few minutes of sunlight, and burn easily.  And those are just the physical aspects.  

No one looked out for me when I was a child.  I was expected to take care of everyone else.  When I was growing up, my mother drove me to school every day, and during that trip, I was supposed to talk to her and make her feel better about her life, her day, herself.  That was my job at home as well, and I unconsciously knew that I had to make peace, I had to take the bad energy in the room and make someone laugh, I needed to make everybody happy.  This wasn't something that was ever said, but every family has a dynamic.  This was my job, my value as a family member.  Unfortunately, when someone gets good at that job, those who need it done become resentful against them.  It's a powerful thing, and like a drug.  People start hating their dealer as much as they need them.

My mother hates needing anything.  She has built her entire life on being self-sufficient and never needing anything or anyone.  The few times she has needed to ask for help made huge dents in her psyche, and she still tells those stories.  You can feel the anger and desperation in her voice.  But her inability to ask for anything makes her all the more dangerous.  She will demand what she needs, and never admit that she needed anything ever.  She will turn it around and make you the bad guy for giving her what she needed in the first place, for even thinking that could ever happen.  

So, growing up, I was the fix-it person who was constantly denigrated for being so sensitive, which was exactly what was needed in order to fix the emotional weather, to soothe the hurt feelings and make everyone happier.  

It's like if you called a plumber to fix your toilet, and then after he fixed your toilet, you turned around and yelled at him for carrying tools, for knowing how to fix your toilet, for even thinking you needed your toilet fixed in the first place.  It's his fault, isn't it, for being a plumber in the first place.  What a jerk!  What an overly knowledgeable skilled worker!  Who would want to be one of those?  What an ass.  Then you not only refused to pay, but threatened to report him for billing you.

"Cognitive Dissonance:  A Case Study."  

When I was in fourth grade, I started getting migraine headaches.  They hurt like hell.  I would try, during any annual or otherwise doctor's visit, to mention the headaches.  The doctor would ask me if I felt pain on one side of my head, and I would answer that it felt like my whole head was in complete pain.  I later learned that this was a standard diagnostic question, and I was answering it wrong for a migraine diagnosis.  So the questions stopped there, and they never learned about my nausea and vomiting if the headache went on too long, instead telling me to take an aspirin, probably rolling their eyes, telling me to tough it out. 

I got that a lot.  Tough it out.  We lived on a small hobby farm, just ten acres, enough to raise a few draft horses and cows on.  My siblings and I had a lot of chores, most of them involving physical labor and dealing with animals much bigger than I was.  I liked the horses and cows, but I got the message loud and clear:  Quit crying.  Quit feeling.  It doesn't hurt.  You aren't feeling that pain.  Get over it.  You're bothering me with your emotions.  Knock it off and start taking care of me again, because I won't take care of you.  You're not worth it.  Your only value is how I can use you to help me.

The summer before I left for college, I was working on some landscaping or something with my dad.  We were just wrapping up when he said, "Well, now that you're finally worth something, you're leaving for college."  

The saddest part of that?  I took it as a compliment.  I was so proud of finally being worth something.  These days the thought of that moment brings me to tears, and makes me want to scream at him:  so what were we all along, Dad?  So children had no value to you whatsoever?  Why the hell did you have us in the first place then?  But in those days I didn't have any thought for myself, of valuing myself enough regardless of what I produced for others.

And that's what I really wanted to get to.  The idea of self-care.  I've had a virus of some kind for the last week or so.  I've been sick and pretty non-functional for most of that time, but I've been able to stay home and take care of myself pretty well.  I was thinking about my college years, and how many sinus infections I got during that time.  I used to go to the doctor and get an official diagnosis, and then get a prescription for antibiotics.  They would always talk about self-care, and how I needed to relax and take some time off school to recover.  It sounded great, and I know they meant well.  But if they wanted me to really take care of myself, there was one thing they would need to do first.

They would need to convince me that I deserved to be taken care of.

A recent revelation I needed to scrawl across a whole piece of paper.  YEAH.

Self-care only works if you think you deserve it.  If you don't think you deserve it, no amount of prescribing will help.  It's why people do dangerous things, even though they know they're dangerous, even though they know they shouldn't.  They don't think they deserve to exist, so what difference does it make?  Whatever they're doing has a bigger payoff to their self-worth than taking care of themselves does. 

I am glad that I'm living in my body now, in a world where I know I deserve to take up space, to speak my piece, to be who I am.  I deserve to take care of myself.  I have worth, and that worth is not based on being used for my talents.  My worth is found intrinsically in just being myself.  Being who I am, where I am, with the people I choose.  

It's taken years, but I've finally assembled a squad of Avengers to go back and yell at my old doctors who didn't believe me when I told them I had really bad headaches, and teach them how to listen to patients more effectively.

(So how is it that THIS universe isn't the upside down when THAT'S not the real version of the world??) 

But I have been working with a team of professionals on my migraine treatment, and I've had some great results.  Nothing's perfect, and you may be interested (and saddened) to know that there's a measurable impact to health for anyone who grew up in a crappy family.  It's sad that there's no public fund to pay for our disabilities that we've incurred growing up with their inability to handle being functional parents!  But in the meantime, my headaches have become less frequent, and the treatment has helped the pain when they happen.  

More importantly, I know my value.  I know I'm worth helping.  I know that even if I miss a day of work, my existence is still enough.  I'm enough.  And I can keep holding that inside me the next time someone tries to tell me I'm not.  I can hold my ground and laugh at their ridiculousness.  

In Praise of Imperfection

I'd like to take this moment to thank my imperfections for making me who I am today.  I invite you to do the same.  If you had no imperfections, would you even recognize yourself walking down the street?  If you could do everything perfectly, wouldn't you need to live in your own little bubble of fairy tale perfectionlandia?  If nothing else, the government would probably keep you in a lab studied by Doctors of Perfectness.  (And we've all seen *those* movies and Netflix series.  They never end well.  (Unless burning down a government complex and walking into Rolling Stone's office with an orange and an awesome story = a good ending.  But I digress.))

We are all imperfect.  Everyone struggles with different lessons and challenges.  

Now stop rolling your eyes; I mean it!  Even the person you've watched from afar - the one with all the qualities you admire and more grace and charisma than you can shake a stick at, that person who seems to have it all together - even they have imperfections, things that in their own mind make them completely unacceptable.  You don't see them, but they exist, bugging the heck out of that seemingly perfect person.  (I enjoyed the billboard that showed a handsome model with the caption, "Somewhere someone is tired of putting up with his crap."  Exactly!)

In school, homework was easy for me - 100% without breaking out the brain cells.  My reading level was at least six grades above my class, consistently, which kept me way ahead of everyone else.  Then I transferred to a bigger school, and suddenly it wasn't as easy.  And I had no idea how to study!  All those big britches expectations had set me up for a fall.  I could have faked my way through, but instead I started watching other kids and seeing what they did.  I intuitively knew that this wasn't something I could skip without disastrous consequences later.  If I hadn't admitted to myself that I didn't know what to do, I wouldn't have opened the door to learning how to study.  

And admitting what you don't know is so tough, yet so important.

You can act like you know everything.  You can even believe it yourself.  But sooner or later you'll need help.  And if you've been bragging to yourself about how you know everything, it's a long hard fall.  It's not the fall that kills you, either; it's the sudden stop at the end.  And if you've never been wrong in your life, that stop will blow your world apart.  

If, however, you've admitted to yourself that you don't know everything, that there are things you can learn in this life, you've taken one step.  That step will save you marathons later on, and it's worth doing just to learn how to ask for help.

A friend of mine reminded me of something important about admitting your imperfections the other day.  I was complaining about something I'm not good at.  "So you're not good at that," she said.  "So find someone who is.  Ask them for help.  Just think, if you were good at that, your future helper wouldn't be able to help you, and their life would be smaller for that missed opportunity."  

As a consummate helper, this struck home.  If I can reframe my weaknesses as "Opportunities for Elseone's Growth," then I'm helping them as much as being helped *by* them.  This gives that inner perfectionist of mine something to chew on, something that will take a long time to wear down before she starts screaming at me again.  

In some circles, that inner perfectionist is called "the gorram tapes".  We all seem to have that inner voice, the one that tells you exactly what you did wrong, and why you should have done it differently, and remembers each of your horrible nicknames in middle school.  This voice has no end.  For some, years of exposure to this voice wears them down to the smallest, saddest version of themselves.  Others learn coping techniques - disagreeing with the voice, dismissing it, or putting it on a raft in the ocean and waving politely (or with one specific finger) as it drifts away or gets swallowed by a shark.  Sometimes I stick a picture of my five-year-old pigtailed self in between me and that voice.  Then I say, "You want to yell at me?  Then you're yelling at her.  And if you yell at her, I'll take you OUT."  Shuts the voice up, every time.

As I write this, I'm struggling myself.  I cannot figure out where I thought I was going with this.  I can't see why anyone will want to read it, or why I thought my idea was any good, blah blah blah.  But I know whatever this post's imperfections, it's the first one in a series.  I will get better.  I will learn from my experiences and ask for help from others who are more skilled than I.  I will put that voice on a raft and tell it to take a hike.  I will face the challenges instead of letting them push me down.  

Maybe next time I'll play Firestarter while I write and cheer Charlie on while she burns up the bad guys.  Sweet!

Fear, a Many Splendored Thing

Let's talk about Fear. Fear is one of the toughest nuts to crack. A friend of mine is fearless. She is like a bulldozer. Piss her off and she will run you down. She does not fear much.

But what she does fear terrifies her. Scratch the surface of anyone who doesn't seem to fear anything and you will find it, somewhere in the depths, the overriding fear that eats into their soul.

When I was growing up, I was afraid a lot. I lived so closely with fear that I didn't even know it was there. I have always been a highly sensitive person (there's a website for us and everything!). I have intensive emotional radar, crowds of people overwhelm me and I even have atypical, highly sensitive pain receptors. In my younger years, I was practically a raw nerve.

So where do you think I grew up? My dad was an alcoholic with PTSD from the Vietnam war, and my mom was a narcissist concerned about making our family look "normal" at any price. It was like putting a burn victim in a dodgeball game.  Niiiiice.

Growing up, I learned to tread carefully, to hide my feelings, to present only the homogenized, prettied-up version of myself (and definitely wear lip gloss). I learned that if I wanted to earn my parents' love, I needed to be someone else. My feelings were ignored or laughed at. I had very few places I could be myself, and even then, I internalized my mom's skepticism and questioned everything I perceived. I didn't know what the truth was, and I certainly didn't know who I was. I had every reason to hide from everything.

Fear was a friend in those days. I always knew when to disappear upstairs, when to hide from the yelling, and when to bury my nose in a book. But growing up like that made me extra careful, extra hidden.

Fear serves a purpose. It helps us survive until we can be free, until we can walk away from danger on our own two feet. Fear helps us win in the end. But what happens when you're free? Do you automatically get the key to your own cage and fly away into happily ever WTF? Unfortunately, no. Our fears stay in place, even though we have moved on. It's our job to dismantle them, piece by piece.

When I moved out, I began choosing very interesting cages for myself. Everything I perceived was still filtered through my upbringing, but I slowly began to learn about who I was, what I felt, and what made me feel safe. Even my crappiest relationship taught me how to stand up for myself, how to face my fears and push through to survival, finding a sanctuary and building my nest elsewhere.

Since I started this blog, I have been facing fear after fear. There's a particular dilemma I face every day, when I'm looking at my life and what I want to accomplish. It's two swords pointing at me, and I'm right in the middle. One is Impossible Perfectionism and the other is Self-Sabotage.

When I was growing up, if I got six gold stars and one silver star, the silver star was frowned upon, discussed, lectured about. I developed serious perfectionistic issues, and still fight with every letter I type, the urge to change it before I even type it. I want to be perfect with every! keystroke!

So one of my coping mechanisms has always been self-sabotage. In sixth grade, we were assigned a 1 - 2 page report on the subject of our choice. We spent weeks learning about outlines and index cards and research and blah blah blah. I read or talked with friends during every study period. The night before the report, I read a couple of books and whipped up a one page report on the piranha, with a picture I traced from the encyclopedia. Got an A+.

All through college, I used this model. If I waited until the last possible minute to write a paper, then I would be happy with whatever I got, because of my time constraints. I couldn't be held to my impossible standard of perfection. I could be happy with any grade, because at least I turned something in.

So, either Impossible Perfectionism or Self-Sabotage. Current Day Me says no thanks. I'm using this blog for many things, but an unforeseen side effect happens to be a sidestep out of the path of the swords. Yes, I will have goals and I will achieve them, but I will not go for perfection. I will not allow my fear of not being good enough to rickroll me into not writing at all.

Pushing through these fears is a stutter step movement at best, sometimes pulling me back to where I started. But for once, it really is about the journey.  I'm learning the steps to a dance that will carry me through any struggle in life. I get to learn about what will work for me in any situation, when I decide to Stop Being Afraid, Right Now.

Fear is a gift. Fear tells you when you're getting close to solving your problems. It doesn't seem like that at the time, as your heart races and you sweat buckets and your head explodes and you cry for hours. But getting past those physical and emotional reactions to actually face and do the thing you fear will free you in a way you never knew possible.

What would it be like to walk through your fear and be free? We're all finding out, one step at a time.