No Hard Feelings

I've pulled a few things from social media that I thought could inspire different posts, but as I stare at them off to the side here, my brain wants to call them pieces of the same puzzle.  

The first one is this:

Then there's this:

Finally, there's this:

That last one is obviously from a Timehop of mine -- a quote from an episode of This American Life that bangs like a drum through my healing process: Sometimes we're not ready to let go of the lie that preservers our existence.  Yes, Ira Glass.  Yes, sir.

But that sentiment ties back to the notion of the first meme I shared: so many broken children in adult bodies.  For where else do we learn that we're less-than besides our childhoods? Where else do these patterns get established and engrained?  Where else are we told more that we are resilient than in our childhoods?  Kids just bounce back.  They're too young to understand.  What we say or do now will be meaningless because they won't ever remember it.

But they do.  We do.  Children do.

Children absorb everything.  When we were children, we absorbed everything.  And for those of us who grew up in the 80's and 90's, raised by parents that were once hippies or squares -- baby boomers -- we weren't raised to be seen and not heard, no.  We were raised to be resilient.  We were raised to be the promise unfulfilled by the ones who came before us.  We were set out into the neighborhood to run like wild animals until our parents called us home for dinner.  My mother used to ring an actual bell that hung on our front porch.  Outside of that, she didn't know where we were.  

She certainly didn't know who we were.

And that, for me, lead to problems in my life.

By the time I knew I was a broken child in an adult body, I was paying my own taxes and had utility bills in my name.  I didn't know what else to do besides let another broken child in an adult body adopt me, elevate me, celebrate me, and then smash me against the ground because that's all broken people really know how to do: that which was done to them.  Destroy.

Then I thought about the notion of language in that middle meme.  That idea that a male being drunk was a way to explain and excuse where a female being drunk was a way to blame and shame.  And while the context of that particular post is most broadly understood as two sides of intimate partner violence (like domestic abuse) or rape, I thought about it in my own context and my own experience.  I thought about how T. blamed and shamed me for causing all of our problems by getting too drunk without him taking a single ounce of that same responsibility, even though he consumed more alcohol than I did when we were together.  That he used his "blackout" states and his propensity to drink too much as a way to shrug off his actions, to wave away whatever damage he caused, and to have something to point at to say, hey, I was drunk, that's why I said or did those things.  He weaponized my drinking against me and held his drinking softly in his lap like a puppy to pat for forgiveness.  

I let his lies preserve my own existence because the broken child in my adult body didn't know how else to survive.

According to the social calculus, I was as worthless as my mother raised me to be, a drunk, a disappointment, and the sole cause of the problem between T. and me.  He may have been broken, too, but being white and male gave him leverage I could not compete with.  I could not overcome him.  I could not be more than how he defined me.  He is Power.  I am not.

Until one day, I carried the pieces of myself that he'd plucked and scattered across our brutal terrain -- I carried them away and bowed my head to re-affix them.  I rebuilt.  I redid.  I re-emerged from there.  

But first, I had to let go of that lie that had preserved my existence with him for ten years.  I had to let go of people, places, and things that had come to define who I was.  I had to start anew, even though I felt battered.  I'd been battered.  My insides were covered with bruises and scars.  On the outside, I learned to smile and dance and wear bright colors even when I felt nothing inside.  It's the greatest skill of the broken child: that masquerade.  It's the only way to stave off the next round of abuse: look at me, how fun and lovely I am, how funny and desirable, you won't shove me down or cast me out.  Even when I felt dead inside, I made everyone around me see vibrancy and laughter.  It's how the broken child survives.

Now that I am who I am where I am, I see this all much more clearly than I could at the time.  Back then, I functioned on instinct.  I percolated on promise.  I convinced myself every day that I was who people said I was: strong and capable and brave.  Those who'd helped me back to my feet, who'd applied salve to my wounds, who'd loved me when I was so depleted and grief-stricken, I wanted to be the person they thought I was.  And like a child playing dress up until one day, the clothes actually fit, I looked in the mirror and thought, damn, I'm a woman.  The broken child was no more.  I'd cradled that part of me, I'd loved it intensely, and I'd set it free.  That doesn't mean I am "fixed."  It means I am aware.  

That awareness isn't always a path to pleasantness.  But it is always a path to clarity.

I suppose that's why I keep writing every day: not for fun or for leisure but to understand.  For too many years of my life, I let others define me.  I let how others saw me dictate how I let them treat me and that is normal.  Most people probably do this.  In many ways, I perhaps still do.  But all of this time in near-solitude during the pandemic, I have been amazed at my capacity to face demons and dragons and slay them -- even if I've had to fight them again and again.  I confront these plagues with the real resilience that was once falsely assumed by the adults who oversaw my childhood.  I have disappeared into the neighborhood of my consciousness and have given up the need to listen for that bell to signal it's time to return to a place of outside control.  I will feed myself, goddamnit.  I will take care of me.

This week has been long and it has been hard.

This month has been long and it has been hard.

This summer, this start of fall, this end of winter -- this pandemic -- has been long and it has been hard.

The problem with awareness is that it makes "easy" more rare.  But to do the work, to shine the light, to log the miles, to work on the puzzle -- these are ways to give the struggle purpose.

It would be so much easier to be dumb or paralyzed by fear.  But I am neither.  So I fight.  I go.  I strive.  I define who I am and no one else does.  Lies, they turn to dust and blow away and what's left is the bones of the matter.  That's what gets displayed in museums.  That's what is studied and learned.  Who I was before only makes who I am now better prepared to rebel against red flags and paper tigers.  Who I was before only makes who I am now more willing to amplify.  I already know what it's like to lose everything and look at me.  Still shining brighter than the sun.

Fuck anyone who tried to dim me.

I am one story, one voice, one experience.  We all have this capacity to shine.  So shine.

Look at me -- it's so easy, right?

Right.

Sigh.

I held on to lies that preserved my existence because, first, I didn't know they were lies and, second, I thought that's all I deserved.  Even now, escaped as I am from that hatch, I still sometimes wish I could climb back into that predictable space.  It wasn't actually safe, but it was a normal I'd adopted for a long enough time that it brought me stability and comfort.

What a strange thing to say so many years in the future when even small mentions about How That Life Worked bring immediate looks of concern and shock to faces trying to process the story I'm sharing.  I'm amazed how long I held up abuse as the acceptable way the person closest to me in my life treated me on a daily basis.  That seven years ago today, I sat at a picnic table at a park near my apartment and hand-wrote a three-page letter of gratitude to the person who abused, belittled, gas-lit, and manipulated me because I did not yet fully understand how his alcoholism truly worked in the confines of our two-planet solar system.  

Then I took this photo.  I captioned it "Right now."  How little did I know how truly it depicted the warped vision of my orbit at that time.

Eventually -- six weeks or so later -- I would have the experience of reading that letter out loud to T.  I'd have the experience of watching his face and his body as I spoke these words of appreciation and friendship and partnership and love.  I'd have the experience of having him stand up, walk to me, wrap his arms around me, merging our bodies, and hearing him whisper, Thank you.  I love you, into my ear.

Exactly one year to the day after that, he would tell me I'd made us up.

Life and its filters.  I just don't know how else to explain it.

No hard feelings, though, truly.  The delusion of love he conjured within me gave me more life than I've ever known, so I can't remain anything but grateful.

 Originally written October 3, 2020 for the I Spy daily writing project.

_____________________________________________________________

Virtual Tip Jar: Venmo @sarahwolfstar