I am confused.
This is heavy, it’s dangerous. Self diagnosis is dangerous. But I can’t act like this isn’t reoccurring. Like I haven’t always been troubled with being scared. Fears are only made tangible when you add fuel to them, but ignoring things make you explode.
My parents tried to give me a good life. But being raised by a mother with many mental health issues took a toll on me, also being raised by a father who is stubborn and doesn’t know the language I speak.
Anyway, my mom blanketed everything; swept it under the carpet, put it on the back burner until the water boiled over and the rest of the burners didn’t work anymore. She adopted a drug habit, distorting her brain more than it already was.
While her brain was doing this, mine was impressionable. It was and is a sponge. But I was young. I took everything in, gathered my tactics to cope, enabled myself to carry all of these traits that I think came out of nowhere but had to be from somewhere. I’ll find it out someday. I’ll make mistakes, learn from them, and my emotional cuts will scar over, replicating some of the scars that have already scarred. Some cuts are deeper than others. They take a longer time to heal.
So I’m going to bullet everything and see if I can come up with an explanation on it, due to my past experiences. Action and reaction, right? Everything has a foundation. And this is what I believe has attributed to the way I carry myself. How I react when times get complicated, and also why.
+ I always blame me. Whenever I do something remotely wrong, it gets amplified in my head. I think of ways it could’ve gone, resorting to how I could’ve changed the error of my ways, instead of the possibility that maybe they did something wrong. It’s worse if they do not see what they did wrong themselves. It’s my fault if you don’t understand what I said. It’s my fault that you did this to me, because I was susceptible to it. I made you feel something wrong, and I also made myself feel terrible. I’m also conflicted with this because you can’t have an argument with yourself. It takes more than one opinion to have differences. More than one outlook. But I value others opinions more than I value my own. This stems from all of the times that I had suspected that my mother was using drugs. She hid it from me, denied, would call me out for not trusting her. That I was reading into my fears, that it was a personal problem. Now it has become a personal problem. I am always in the wrong.
+ I give the other person unnecessary space, just to come back around like a boomerang. I undermine what happened, how it didn’t sit right with me. It’s minor, there’s no way that it should be taken as seriously as my head is letting on. They didn’t mean it, they couldn’t have. I wait until feeling awful about the details of the situation have become repetitive. If I can’t get over it, I will confide in them. Try to dislodge something that was so clear. It doesn’t even have to be the person, it has to be my guilt. I think I can fix relationships just so the other person can feel better about the relationship or the shambles of it. I’d hate for someone to sit there and let the problem chew a gaping hole into their abdomen and knock on the walls of their heart. I want to let them know that I am there, that I can tell them my perspective, and I will listen to theirs. I will comfort theirs regardless of the situation. Maybe I also find comfort in the fact that I know that they will be on the opposite side, and that I can inquire that side and hopefully we can compromise. I perceive this as such because I would have a thought about my mom, one that wasn’t pleasant. I would counteract it, justify it, and then she would leave or be emotionally unavailable. I would wait until she wasn’t; until she could form cohesive sentences without her being “too tired” or “too angry”. She would come to her defense, and eventually when the conversations died down, I would come to her defense as well. She’s an angel, she never meant it. Subconsciously, I began to make a habit of having a thought be an analytical process until it reappeared as a delayed and an inevitable talk. It’s never too late to talk something out, but it can be too early to talk.
+ I want everything to be face to face. This generation has amazing accessibility to the outside world. I can talk to someone that I have never met, I can join a group targeted towards specific topics within my house. I could let someone know about my home life without them experiencing it themselves. But I don’t want that. I’ve said it more than once, I’ve written so many things on it. I want raw emotion. I want audible conversations. I want touch. When I was younger, my mom used to cradle me, used to make it known that she loved me and my siblings, and my dad at some point. We were that family that ate around the dinner table, that asked each other about our days and what bothered us. I took it for granted. I was too young to really sort out my feelings on that. And the only people who showed any type of affection or admiration for me as the years went on, showed it mostly over the phone. I don’t take it for granted now, I am so thankful for it now more than ever. I make myself look like a fool, but I want other people to understand me and communication isn’t scripted so embarrassment or pauses are always going to be there.
+ I forgive. Don’t hold grudges. They literally amount to nothing. Grudges don’t even make the person holding one feel good. Out of all the thought processes and growing that my brain has accomplished, this one has lifted the most weight off of my shoulders. I am so angry internally, it’s so easy for me to play the blaming game but I’ve learned to go about things the harder way. See their side, ridicule my side. But it’s refreshing to not hold resentment towards another individual. There were so many instances where I just wanted to give up. Where if a person hurt me, it meant that there was absolutely no reasoning to believe that they could follow through with a good action. My mom contradicted this, she would hurt me unintentionally, and then be there and try to make up for it in her own way. I saw the attempts more than I saw the miscommunication. And I still do now as well. If the other person does not want to forgive me, then it’s their priority to feel frustrated and have angst every day instead of mine. It’s okay. Trial and error. Everything doesn’t come out perfectly, second chances are okay. And if they want another one, that’s where the next part comes in.
+ My brain makes me forget things that hurt me too much. I was introduced to the idea by my mom. She laughed at life, it’s a nice ideology. I can’t get hurt by life if it’s funny, right? With laughing, came stories. She always talked about the embarrassing things that we did as children. Most of the stories that she had told me, I couldn’t help but be bewildered. If that had happened at a time that I remembered, I would have acted a lot differently. She told me that maybe I blocked things out because they were too difficult to remember. And I took this into consideration, and I believe it’s true. And maybe it’s not true for everyone or maybe it is, but if someone had asked me to account for majority of the things that happened in my childhood, the reasons why some of my relationships had failed, I would have to literally sit down and cut off the rest of the world to remember things that weren’t blatant. Sometimes I assist my brain in helping me forget events; the delete options on all of my technology and I are best friends. And the blocking option and I are just starting to get to know one another. I disassemble negativity, predicaments that can’t fix themselves or my stubbornness can’t decipher. If it’s not there, I’ll calm down, is what my logic is behind that. It’s kind of touchy. It works surprisingly one moment and then doesn’t the next. It’s a blessing and a curse.
+ I make everything third person. I like this. I’m surrounded by a world where I only rely on myself. Where the only feelings and life that matters are mine. I hate that. Thinking about making sure things are efficient for myself is nearly impossible. I want to mold my mind to everyone else’s. I want to say the obvious that isn’t so obvious anymore. I take my personal experiences, and I take a step back, and picture the way I reacted, the way the other person reacted. Could it have been better? Was it something that I could have helped? Now this comes from always feeling stuck. I didn’t have the things that other kids had, the things that they thought were essential. I didn’t have my own bed until I was about thirteen. I just recently got my own room. One that wouldn’t be taken from me or entered by people I hadn’t talked to personally. I constantly asked myself if this is what an everyday kid that goes to public school received at home. If this is how other households were. I had to paint a household where details like that wouldn’t be miniscule, purely inexistent. My own perfect household. Or the metaphorical people in my brain’s household. It helped me. A lot. I don’t think I ever want to rid myself of this quality. But it hurts when the people I surround myself with don’t have it. I don’t blame them. I don’t blame me for always thinking this way. But the littlest part of me wishes that it would be normal to think about everyone else before myself.
+ I confide in nearly everyone, but when they start truly caring, I play it off like it’s nothing. Now this one bothers me a bit. Not too much, but I know that people do not care. I just have lately been obsessed with the idea that people need help. I’ve always felt like I need help. Someone to basically nag me. To be a punching bag, let me hurt them. Let me talk it out until I feel like I’ve released all of the pressure that I have in my body. So I want to be that for you. I don’t have a clever way to introduce it to everyone just yet, so I begin by laying all of my issues out on the table and declaring that they did indeed have a toll on me. What’s really icing on the cake to that is my lack of eye contact. Makes people really trust me. Regardless, these are my intentions. I want that trust to be built, so I fish and ask and I try to make sure I ask about your day. Because I hate feeling alone, and that’s honestly how a lot of people feel. I just know it.
+ I cry. A lot. Everything is an issue. Everything is interpreted personally, and I am not a baby for saying this. I’ve been watching these naturally tragic movies a lot lately, and for me to not tear up is impossible. My friend who sits beside me in science class made fun of me for it, saying that he’d see me jolt up or grasp my hands and cover my mouth. He said it was annoying, but the only thing that made me worried about him saying that is that someone witnessed it. I try not to break in front of people, but the last bullet unfortunately aligns with this one. Just recently, I teared up in a situation that I definitely shouldn’t have been tearing up for. It was happy for a lot of people, relieving for a lot of people. But these specific three people, ones who are going to be the witnesses to my untimely crying, looked over at me, alienated me, and I walked away. I couldn’t believe that I did that. They had seen a lot of me, but I tried with all of my might to keep that to myself. Crying is a sign of weakness, or so it classically says. But no. I disagree. It’s to show that you care. That they care. That I care. That this situation is meaningful, not one that’s in schedule, that loses its meaning, or the meaning is often obscured. I don’t want life to lose it’s meaning. For that would be the time that I would weep the most. So I’ll risk crying, I just need to know when and where is appropriate. My crying definitely needs improvement. But it’s going to be okay.
Disclaimer: I do realize that people have it worse than me, and they let it stack because no one needs to know about times where life didn’t necessarily seem worth it. Why avoid it? I know that it happened, I don’t take pride in it, but I don’t want to pretend it did not. I am beyond grateful for the good, but I firmly believe that there would be no good if bad didn’t exist.
And there it is. I leave this here to remind others and myself that although a lot of things about life are uncertain and unfair, it is beautiful and unexpected. I want to be something, and I never want to be nothing.
While I am something, fighting nothing, I am so invested in everything.
[Picture used is from a lyric video of a song called Waves by Dean Lewis. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObJIKfZrdwM]