It's been a while, hasn't it? There's a lot to tell.
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| Went to the Yes rally (it's not about Optus) |
There's actually a lot to say, I just haven't known how to say it.
I'm not sure if I've said this here already, but my parents and I are no longer speaking. It's been a long time coming. I don't know if it's going to be a permanent thing or just a temporary thing, but... with the way things are, there's no place for them in my life.
This is about more than just my transition, although they've made their position perfectly clear on that. It started with my new therapist (gods bless that man!) He told me that a lot of what I was saying about my parents, specifically my mother, was giving him red flags about abuse.
In a previous post, when talking about things that were happening between us, I urged the reader to stay neutral. I'm now backtracking that. I have been apologising for the way my parents have treated me for as long as I can remember. They were raised differently, I'd say. Their parents and grandparents were dysfunctional; they'd been abused them.
But it's not okay. Whatever their reasons, what they did to me was abuse, both physical and psychological. It's taken me a long time to get to a place where I can admit that. I often wonder why I haven't seen this sooner and, the truth is, I've normalised it. It's how I grew up. It's the life I've led. It's all I know. But that doesn't make any of it okay.
So here it is, laid out in full for the world to see. In the past, my family has urged me not to speak about this stuff because it's "family business", whatever the fuck that means. I no longer feel the need to adhere to their advice in this regard, so I'm telling the world what I've been through.
When I was a child, I had emotional problems. This mostly manifested as crying, tantrums, unbridled rage, etc. It's impossible for me to know how much of this is me "out of the box" and how much of it was created by my mother.
I remember being with my ex's family (a LONG time ago) and talking about things our parents did to us when we were kids. Funny stories, that sort of thing. I blurted out that my mother had smothered me with a pillow because I wouldn't stop crying. I thought it was funny. I thought that was normal. The people around me were shocked, calling it for what it was. It was abuse.
It doesn't end there. I remember my mother lifting me up by the throat. I remember my father gloating that I was going to get a hiding because of something that I'd done, but that I wouldn't know when it was coming, waiting for me to let my guard down, and then hitting me until I screamed from the pain. I remember having hand-shaped welts on my body. I remember my mother telling me to hide in the wardrobe because my father was home (I'd run away that day) and then telling my father exactly where I was. She betrayed me.
These things are... hard to say. I've been conditioned to think that they happened because I was "naughty" or "difficult", but now I'm beginning to understand that they happened because two adults chose to inflict pain on a child. They are not okay. Nothing could make me deserve the things that happened to me.
These are the same reasons that I was put on the amphetamines that made me psychotic, even after I'd asked to come off of them for my entire childhood. I have never existed as an individual in my parents' eyes: I have only ever existed as an extension of themselves. I am what they think I am, and I'll never be able to assert otherwise because they refuse to acknowledge that I have free will. I'm a character in their fiction, nothing more.
My mother has this story that she rolls out every so often. Her mother died when she was very young, and she doesn't remember much about her. She claims to have a memory of her mother jumping out of a window, which she is certain never happened. I suspect that this story is manufactured, told to me so that my early memories of her can be explained away as fiction. Even if she does have this memory, I suspect that she at least uses it to shut me down.
I believe that my mother is a sociopath.
Even typing that was hard. My mother has taught me, through years of conditioning, that I am the one who is wrong, in a mental sense. I have mental illnesses. I'm manipulative. I'm argumentative. I'm spiteful. She tells anyone with an ear that I'm a fractured person, wracked by all these negative traits.
The truth is that I am none of these things, but it's only when I'm away from her and my father that I realise this. "They don't know you like we do," she told me, when I said that my friends did not feel negatively about me like my family does. I'd called to tell her that I was moving into crisis housing (which is where I am now) and that I needed her to only say positive and supportive things to me because I was in a fragile headspace. It ended with her crying, monologuing for ten minutes, and saying that she's my mother and should be able to say whatever she wants to me. The conversation never turned to my own crisis; she just said that my life was affecting her chronic pain negatively and to stop it.
That's a common theme in our family. Stop it. That's all they ever want from me. They're not interested in resolutions or the best outcome for my health. Even when they're spruiking that I'm "mentally ill", they're never interested in my wellbeing. All they want is for me to stop affecting them.
I told my therapist that I apologise a lot, and I don't really know why I do it. I was a catsitter for one of my BFF's over the long weekend, and when they got back their partner said "Oh, you got into the mi goreng did you?" It was said in the sense of "Oh, you like that stuff do you? Cool!"
I said "Yeah, sorry."
As I say this now, I'm wondering why I felt like I did. It was a $2 packet of noodles and I was apologising for using some. I'd looked after their cats all weekend, and I was ashamed that I'd fed myself while doing it.
So my therapist asked me if I'm apologising for what I did, or for existing. The answer was pretty obvious to me. I used to think that I was humble enough to accept that I should not impact anybody's life, at all. I realise that humility is something else entirely; what I am... it's closer to being flattened.
So I'm moving forward with my life. They're still in Mackay and we're not speaking. They can't hurt me and they don't control me anymore. Even if we resume contact in the future, it will be at a time when I'm ready to stand up to them and strong enough to stop them from steamrolling me again. I am not a victim of abuse, I'm a strong motherfucker who still exists despite all that has happened to her. I like that.
Having IRL friends who don't share these prejudices against me has been amazing. When I came to Sydney, I was terrified that people would "realise" I was a monster. That never happened. Nobody has thought that about me since I arrived, and I've been very close with some of my friends (in a psychological sense).
I'm going to leave this here. I'll be back to write more sometime soon, hopefully in a better light.
