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brideoffrankenstein) wrote2020-09-22 07:57 am
Some processy stuff.
I should be working right now, but instead I’m thinking about emotions, specifically negative emotions. I’ve been trying lately to think about my needs, and about what I lack emotionally, what I need to work on, things like that. Basically I’m trying to work on my selfawareness so that I can reparent myself more effectively. The other week, I was talking to Keats about selfharm and they thought that I should write something about it, because – either due to my trauma or my ADHD – I don’t see things as chronologies very easily, more as discrete events. (I have the ADHD ability to connect dots and see things very quickly, just not with emotions most of the time any more).
I started to selfharm while I was being homeschooled. I don’t remember when exactly, but I was homeschooled from the age of nine, and I was definitely self-harming when I had my mental breakdown at fourteen (I am in my mid-twenties now). The problem with homeschool and my mother is that my mother has always been controlling. I always sought her approval. And for most of my life, she was the only adult I was really around.
As I said above, I have ADHD. And ADHD often comes with an emotional processing stumbling block called rejection sensitive dysphoria. Basically it means it’s really hard for you to act proportionately to anything you perceive as a criticism. When my mum would mark my work, I would often start to cry. She’d call me into her study and tell me what I did wrong and what I did right, and I would stand there and get upset. She would tell me things like “You’re [age] now, not a baby,” and “If you were in school you wouldn’t be able to get away with this,” and often she’d end up raising her voice at me and I think even telling me to go to my room.
I think I had already started to slap myself in the face before this, whenever we argued or whenever I got upset, because my mum doesn’t like me crying too loudly or too long. In my room, of course, not in front of her. I had tried punching pillows but it didn’t work. So anyway, when I was having to stand there quietly while I got what felt like told off for my work not being perfect, I ended up starting to dig my nails into my hands or scratch my arms. Mum tried to tell me to stop this, but I just did it more subtly, because I had no other option.
Gradually I was bottling up more and more frustrations and hurts and anxieties, and I was self-harming whenever I needed a release from the pressure. The pain cleared my head. Once, I made the mistake of using a kitchen knife and my parents found out. My mum lied to me to drag me to the doctor (and I still now, over ten years later, get nervy if I don’t know where we’re going) and the upshot is I went to therapy.
Finally, you might think! He might learn some decent coping mechanisms! And oh, my therapist tried. She was a very nice lady and very kind to me. But really…here’s the thing. I tried getting myself out of the situation; I got yelled at. I couldn’t take a shower to distract myself because showers were stressful; I don’t remember the other suggested things but I know I tried several and I know that I was reduced to having to just “deal” with it. You can imagine, I think, the pain of going to a therapist to stop selfharming, and then you get into a situation where you could apply these coping mechanisms and all you’re allowed to do by your mother is….sit still and do nothing. A couple years ago, I wasn’t allowed to go in my room after an argument – it made my mum angrier. I wasn’t allowed to type on the phone for long: “What are you telling Keats about me?”. So I started going into the bathroom after an argument. Sometimes “innocently”, sometimes to just be in a space my mother wasn’t. After a few times, I wasn’t allowed to do this either. I remember one day I had to just sit there, anxious, needing to go to the bathroom, but because we’d just argued I had to wait long enough that it wouldn’t get me yelled at.
Recently, Keats and I have been going through some big emotional stuff. I’m trying to improve and get better emotionally, because part of my problems have been like. You know. Not being great at emotions because I was never taught to be. You know you’ve not been taught well when you hear the words don’t bottle things up when you’re fifteen and you just presume that that’s sarcastic.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to work on crying more, because I spent so much of my life not crying, and see where that got me. My mum sees this, because I live with my parents still. Her main takeaways have been “You’re [age] now, you can’t be crying all the time”, and “You need to go on anti-depressants because you’re crying all the time” and, crucially: “You’re not self-harming, are you? Because I’m not having that.”
Not “If you’re concerned you’re going to start hurting yourself, we can talk about this together”, but “I’m not having that.”
If she doesn’t see my problems that means I don’t have any. If she just tells me not to self harm and not to cry, I’ll develop healthy ways of relating to my emotions! I’ll definitely process my pain well!
My crying has always been a thing I was punished for. A thing that my very education could be taken away for. “If you don’t stop crying when you don’t understand something your dad won’t teach you physics any more!” I’ve never felt okay with my ugly feelings, or safe to be depressed around my parents. My mum has depression; you’d think she’d understand. The extent of her understanding is “Go on pills”.
And now I feel so…I caused Keats a lot of pain because of things I couldn’t process, and because of doing things I’d been taught were the Right Way of handling other people’s emotions. I don’t want to talk about things that are theirs but I really hurt them, not just because of the kind of emotional handling I’m talking about today but because of a lot of the way I was brought up. And so I hold resentment of myself, and hatred of myself, and resentment of the way I was taught to behave, not just for my own sake but for theirs.
I’m having some difficult thoughts right now. I’m tearing up thinking about it and I’m having a hard time remembering that the only way for them to heal is for me to be here to help and to heal myself.
I’m trying to keep in mind that I am worth love, that I deserve love, that I am allowed to give myself love. I don’t feel worth it. I know that’s the battle. That I just have to get back up and keep loving myself. I don’t know how to when I’ve fucked everything up.
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I hate feeling like my personhood disappears into my mother. I don’t mean about my mum’s way of approaching me, although she does tend to assume I like the same things she likes. I get it; I did try to, while I was growing up, because it was the best way to behave. I always felt bad or wary or otherwise wrong for my interests, because anything that my mum didn’t think much of was fair game for ridicule. For example: I used to watch Star Trek before my mum was awake, because I was embarrassed that I liked it and because my parents both made fun of Star Trek. They know that I like it now, but I also hid that I enjoyed Sanctuary, Merlin and Doctor Who. I used to watch them when my parents were out, or quickly close the tab if they passed. I have a huge problem watching “my things” on the tv, or listening to “my music” on the stereo. The music was a bit less of an issue, because my parents shaped my music taste more completely than my tv taste. For a while, my mum made my clothes. We’d been watching a lot of 1940s films together, and I liked a lot of the women’s clothes, and there were a few repro sewing pattern companies that we both were kind of, mutually hyperfocused on. However, here’s the deal: my mum would very gently push me towards certain fabrics and certain patterns, and eventually I would give. If there was a pattern I really loved, I had to surreptitiously fight for it, and even then she might buy it but never make it. She just sort of…geared my wardrobe to what she wanted. This still happens even though she doesn’t make clothes any more really: she bought me a Stevie Nicks shirt and a Talking Heads shirt just the other month. I hate Talking Heads. I wear the shirt as a pyjama shirt, so that no-one outside thinks I like it. Seriously it’s a t-shirt of one of the few songs that I truly cannot stand. But she thought it was cool, so.
Another major way this happens is with my dad. He constantly buys my mum sweets or chocolate or biscuits or cake, and, you know, like…I get that this is how he shows love. And I’d feel like I’d done something wrong if I was getting left out. But it’s constant. Like right now, at the current moment, he has a) made a banana cake, b) got a load of biscuits, c) got us two cakes each on Saturday, d) got us each a packet of sweets. I had one of the cakes, but I knew dad would ask about if we wanted a slice of banana cake twice today, and I knew he also would yesterday, so I hadn’t eaten the other cake. But then, just now with lunch, mum asked me if I was going to eat the second cake, because if not she’d eat it. I felt hurt because it’s like…it was from Saturday and it was packaged, not fresh. I wanted it, but then I thought about it and I gave it mum because, well, I’d rather not let the banana cake go stale. If I had something as often as he got them or asked about them I’d be having a slice of cake after every meal, biscuits at mid morning and mid afternoon, and then just. Other Sundry Sweets randomly through the day. I feel like I’m being fattened up. Ugh god I don’t know how to say this without sounding really bodyshamy. I am fat. My mother is also fat, and bigger than I am. I don’t want to sound like I think dad is enabling my mother, or that it’s bad to be fat. I want her to feel comfortable and not stressed. But I, also, want to feel comfortable and not stressed, and I really do feel like….like my dad gives me the same portions as my mum. He doesn’t eat all the slices of cake and biscuits and sweets, in fact he hardly eats at all. This is just a me-and-mum thing. And I feel like he’s treating me as a mini-me of my mother, same as mum does. And it’s not that I think my mum’s body is bad, it’s just that I want to have control over my body.
And sure I can and have been refusing the sweets and slices of cake and otherwise trying to limit my sugar, but…I feel like a bad person for that. Like I’m refusing love as its given, when I already feel like I don’t really get loved. Or like mum’s going to think I’m being passive aggressive. Or something. And then I think about if dad stopped, and what a double-edged sword that would be. On the one hand, less food to worry about, but on the other, feeling ignored and left out.
It’s like right now I feel like everything is a battleground. I’ve been making quilts, and I want my mum’s advice and approval on one hand, but on the other, when she gets involved it makes me want to stop making them. She keeps saying about buying houses with future lottery winnings with outbuildings for me and Keats to live in (not stay!! Live!). And the other day she showed me a sideboard and said “this would be really nice for yours and Keats’ kitchen”. And it really…when she showed me the sideboard, I texted Keats that I wanted the wildest, most joyous, “ugly” house. I don’t want to be decorating my house and thinking “what would Mum approve of.” I don’t even really want to live too close to her. I really don’t want to live on her property. I don’t care too much if she misses me, and I don’t even really care if she has a breakdown like she did when I moved out for the first two years of university. I don’t want her to hurt or be sad, but I’m not her doll or her entertainment.
This is one of the reasons I’m scared of coming out, not the only one (that’ll have to be a future post) but one of them. I know I’m a man, but I don’t know what I even really like as an individual. I can’t see myself living as a man in the real world. I’m scared that if I come out she won’t love me as much, or it’ll really upset her, because I won’t be her dress-up doll any more. I’m scared of how she’ll expect me to behave and if that’ll be so constricting that my dysphoria will change direction. She isn’t keen on very femme gay men or very butch gay women; she tends to make comments about it, and I’m scared that if I come out and follow my instincts to be the kind of faggot I am, word choice angry and intentional, she’ll be disapproving and pushy. I’m trying to figure out who I am outside of her training, but it’s hard, and I feel like if I go too far I won’t be loved any more.
I’m scared they’ll take my name from me, or make sneery faces about it. I like being Bowman, even if it is a little middle class. I’m just scared that they’re going to push Thomas or William on me (what they would have called me if I was AMAB), and I’ve tried to get used to Thomas as part of my name just to placate them.
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You are worthy of love, even when things are hard. I look forward to the day when you can live on your own terms, and become more wholly and vibrantly yourself. <3
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I'm sorry you're in this awful situation, and I hope that someday you can get out of it. It's good that you're trying to process these things though, and hopefully it'll help.