I’ve been hiding and it’s time I come out. I’ve been hiding how pain I’ve been in and how hard my life has been for me from everyone, because I thought if I did that I’d have a better chance at being loved.
People don’t want someone who is set so far back with themselves, people want people who are strong and confident and ENOUGH, which was the theme of my EMDR this morning.
I’ve proved every thought or fear I’ve had wrong about myself over and over, and yet I never get to benefit from my own warmth and love. I’m kept out in the cold from me. Always pressing my nose on the glass peering in at the warm family events.
And ironically enough my devastation would begin at one such an event. The complicating elixir of feeling like I could belong and hold my head high without being numb or shaking with anxiety. Dear Evan Hansen. We will get to that later. I was excited to be out in the world belonging, but where and to whom did I belong and why?
This is the level of lost I’ve been at for going on three years now. And I committed to the unthinkable which has been staying with and in my pain to dig myself out. Even writing those words I begin to cry hard. A hard guttural wild animal cry with frantic panicky eyes.
The things Evan Hansen did to try to become visible. Does anybody see me or hear me? And the answer was no. I became so effective at being seen as I needed to be to obtain love and affection. And my God if I never shame myself again for how I’ve needed to save myself.
This is the commitment I need to become fierce about. To repairing this constant demon of not enough (or worse bad and toxic) that is so deeply entrenched in my programming it’s threatening to squeeze the life out of me. I’m stripped to the bare bones of just who I am to lean on, and not what I do. What I do to fix it, what I do to understand.
I’ll get a breath and then get dragged back down to the bottom of the ocean with an anvil on my foot and drowning over and over again. Sputtering fighting for oxygen, every day of my life unless I became part of someone else’s family which always temporarily numbed the pain and made me feel safe and loved. But that could never be sustained because I was empty of myself. There was no self left that I could see. There were too many words inside my head that conflicted and too many emotions flashbacks.
I can’t get any oxygen. Help me.
I’ve been saying help me so often now, and it brings up shame every single time and more waves of unworthiness. Will this battle ever come to an end, or will these memories, thoughts, and genuine body harm and tired take my life along with my soul.
I’ve been battling for my life and the worst part about that is I don’t look like someone who is battling for their life. There are no scars that can be seen, no marks. This is why we teach visibility by example and why we protect.
Dear Evan Hansen…. I am you. That scared lonely child, who still tried to fight to be seen and then felt bad about that too. For shouting or crying because I learned to gaslight myself out of my own reality to try and survive with my mental faculties.
I think of Viktor Frankl here and why I connected so much with that paper on his book in grad school, and why I have my tattoo and why it means so much to me. He kept his by having meaning, and that meaning was the love he derived from his partner, that’s what he held onto, it was love.
The only meaning I could get in my childhood was acts of service, doing. That’s the only way I got attention of any variety and usually that was to obtain more of what I had to offer. It was not to protect, invest, and be interested in me just for the sake of being so, for the joy.
The purgatory I’ve been has been wanting to be the parent I didn’t have and to be able to do that for my children and trying every way known to man to achieve that. I knew I felt the most alive in the things I’d been so deprived of. So I tried for love.
And then I felt selfish and was told as much and became my mother who also wanted love, but she didn’t give it either, and I do. I am not my mother.
I am not her.
Most days I don’t think I’ll come out of this alive, that is my truth right now. Most days it feels like too much work to breathe. This trauma work while having no love needs met or secure family system and feeling horrible I’m not only not offering that to my children, but I’m not able to access it in myself well going through this. I’m all locked down and sick.
This illness of being lost to oneself and not having much in the way of relief is deadly. It’s a deadly game. I can’t digest food and my head feels as if it will explode. For so long the things I did to comfort were also harmful and I’m aware. I’m viciously aware. I can’t get out I’m trapped in here help me.
The more I say help me and the more I allow myself to be loved only in the safe ways I need to be that the universe constantly puts in my path, healing tries to take hold. And my nasty worn out mind tries to swat it away, and I crumble.
I can only hope that this experience leaves me in such a heap that I never forget I don’t know what someone else is going through and I become kind by design even though life has not handled me gently. The warrior of the light.
All of the ways I was responsible and disciplined long before I ever should have been eroded the very thing I would need in adulthood to sustain the love I so badly desired and deserved.
And this latest period watching my children shout at me to figure it out mom, we need you, except they don’t say that as teens, they say I hate you and you’re going to end up cold and alone because you’re so difficult to deal with. What I’ve been dealing with has been unbearably difficult and I’ve been primarily alone in it. Too ashamed to get any help or even visibility because I chose this right ?
Every time its my fault. Wired for abuse return to abuse. Every time its my fault. And the tape begins you’re selfish, you’re your mother, you’re….. and it breaks my spirit, soul, and heart. Never mind that happening from the outside I’m adept at always doing it from the inside. I could really go for a good coma right now. Yes Moira.
And then when the person that you love tells you in so many ways this is your fault, that’s a rock bottom that knows no bounds. And when you identify with their wounds, but miss all the differences, and you are betrayed and betray yourself and internalize more shame, it’s easy to get a full understanding on how people get to the point where they take their lives.
That will never be my path because it just is not. Not because I’m better than anyone who has. I am not. No more or less just different. If I don’t continue to make meaning out of this suffering by learning my story and then sharing it so others can get the words to heal, that being the healing, it will have been for nothing.
It’s not in me to give up, and I hope I passed that along to my children. I just need to figure out right now how to keep myself full of love and safe, and stay away from anything that is not that.
For my beginning today I reached out to my energy healer and my first step is to go see her, and what I will say is I need your love and support. I have no thinking left. I’m not there to think w her or come up with solutions. The solution is love. And I’m going to be it, and ask for it, and work on recovering.
This is what it looks like to grieve a childhood you never had, and both parents, and a broken and confused reality and scattered mind you have to live with. To grieve all the potential of who you could or would have been with the right ingredients.
This is messy, grimy, slippery, dirty, painful grief. I am going through these things, but I am not these things.
I am enough