My Little Meltdown
So, this post.
Aw, jeez, you guys!
I really didn’t want to make a post talking about any of that. My abusive self-talk was just going full fucking strength. Here was my thought process: “Oh, great. Now you’re going to make a big whiny post about your sad, sad life and how you don’t have any friends. And of course everybody will be all, oh, don’t say that! You’re wonderful! I’m your friend! Why don’t you just start whining about how fat you are so everybody tells you, no! no! You’re so skinny, I’m the fat one! Christ, Harriet, do you really want pity friendship? I mean, maybe you can just start spontaneously crying in public — surely that will make you friends, too?”
I spent a week or two in a slowly descending state of anxiety and madness, not realizing what was happening. I could have realized, because there were plenty of signs. Whenever I’m on the verge of a meltdown, I start asking the bear everyday, “Are you okay? You seem upset. Are you upset? OH MY GOD AM I PROJECTING.” Fortunately/unfortunately, my bear is so easy-going and willing to examine everything that he usually answers with, “I don’t think I’m upset. But maybe I am. It could be that I am. Let me think about the things that could make me upset. Okay, that made me kind of upset. Maybe I was upset.”
After a week or two of that, I finally hit a low point. You know. Shuffling slowly through your apartment, playing a montage of EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER DONE WRONG through your head, watching bad TV, sighing heavily, opening and closing the fridge. There was no denying by that point that something was wrong with me, but I made the decision that I needed a meltdown. It didn’t feel good, you know, but it felt like… like I had a wound that needed to bleed. So I let myself walk around like a sad sack for awhile, insulting myself and making myself feel like shit, because I needed to let that run its course instead of fighting it.
I finally made that post because I decided two days of being a sad sack was enough and started fighting it. Everytime a depressing thought came into my head, I thought, “STOP THAT, Harriet. That’s BAD and WRONG. Why can’t you think NORMAL thoughts? JUST IGNORE THE BAD FEELINGS.” And I immediately (surprise!) reached a point of anxiety where I could tell a panic attack was building.
One of the skills I’ve acquired since leaving Flint, something I never used to have, is the ability to embrace and accept my badness. Leaving Flint, I felt like my choices were: stay with this horrible, horrible little man and probably kill myself, or leave him which would make me a worthless ugly person who will never be happy. Despite what my bear was telling me, and despite the few alternative role models I’d seen myself, I couldn’t conceive of the fact that my decisions were actually: stay with this horrible little man and be miserable, or leave this horrible little man and be happy. No, it was: make the RIGHT CHOICE and stay with Flint and be miserable, or make the WRONG CHOICE and leave Flint and be a horrible person forever and ever. And I finally reached the point where I was willing to say, okay, I’m going to do it. I’m going to be a bad person. I’m going to take that and own it. I’m going to leave Flint, even though that makes me a monster. I’m going to embrace my ugliness, my selfishness, my horribleness, and choose that for once over my endless goddamn ability to be a martyr. Because, you know what, being a martyr just isn’t fucking working anymore.
Basically, I’ve learned to value myself enough to honor my ugly parts, too. I have to feed those parts sometimes. Even though those parts aren’t usually ugly in the end, they are ugly during the moment I have to decide whether to nurture and love them. Like kissing a frog — the choice to love the frog isn’t worth as much — isn’t unconditional or committed — if it looks like a fancy-ass prince from the get-go. I know what lies down the path of “suck it up, cut yourself, and never tell anybody you’re sad.” I’ve been up and down that path. Down the path of, “Be a selfish, stupid, attention whore” are potentially a lot of shitty mistakes, but god, at least it’s not where I’ve been. At least it’s new.
So, I’m on the verge of a panic attack, and I’m telling myself, “DON’T YOU DARE TALK ABOUT THIS, HARRIET. You will be the WHINIEST if you talk about this. You will be the STUPIDEST ATTENTION WHORE EVER.” And I thought, okay, that’s my cue to talk about it. Because this shit is comfortable, and familiar, but it’s also goddamn boring. Fine. I’ll be a whiner. It’s gotta beat being bored to death by my miserableness.
And yeah, you all came in to tell me how sad my life was and how wonderful I am. And you know what? It didn’t feel anything like I was telling myself it would. It was really, really nice. And once I was halfway through typing that post, I already felt better. Oh, yeah! I thought. Talking about shit! How come I always forget that helps?
I’d also never really connected all those dots in my life. I know all that shit happened, but it’s like a book I read about something that happened to somebody else. I can intellectually tell you how all that stuff probably affected me, but I can only tell you that when it’s not actively affecting me. Like, let’s hypothetically say that you and I, reader, were getting it on. Or trying to. And I suddenly had to stop because, hello! Memories! Badness! Insecurity! Panic! Can I talk to you about that? No, I CANNOT. Let’s say, hypothetically, before we get around to even thinking about having sex, you ask me if I ever had any childhood trauma. Oh, the trauma I have had! Let me tell you about it in astounding detail! Also, I have theories! Theories about how I feel about this, and how I survived it all. I have no problem discussing all this with you. But once it stops being a theory, starts being something I’m feeling RIGHT NOW? It’s like somebody shoved socks in my mouth. I can’t possibly talk about it. Talking about it is somehow the worst thing in the WORLD.
I got into that “I HAVE NO FRIENDS” bad space, and was thinking about ways I could make friends, but kept running up against nasty memories in my head. It was this mixture of sadness for myself, resentment and anger at how I’d been damaged so hard that being basically social was nigh-impossible, and then just utter resignation and contempt for myself that GOD that was YEARS AGO just GET OVER IT ALREADY. I guess you’ll just ALWAYS be damaged, Harriet, if you’re not over it by now. But until I sat down and really fleshed out those memories, connected all the dots, did I really get a clear and sudden picture of how bad it had been. And I had this overwhelming sense of sympathy and love for myself as a child, and for myself as an adult who still carries that child around. Suddenly, it was a whole narrative, instead of little bits and pieces of, “Oh, sure, that happened, but it’s in the past now.” I could see how I got from there to here, and instead of being a monstrous tale of patheticness, it made sense. It suddenly seemed perfectly reasonable that I feel the way I do, act the way I do, am confused in the ways I am. I didn’t feel crazy anymore — any sane person would have experienced the things I have experienced.
When I left Flint, I was in a hyperanxious state to maintain and acquire friendships. I felt like surrounding myself with people would prove my mental health. I was overly focused on what Flint thought of me, not because I cared what he thought, but because I knew he would be spreading around whatever propaganda he possibly could. If I could appear so perfectly normal and together and wonderful, everybody would know he was wrong. And I cared what everybody else thought. Because in my life experience, what people think has power. When I was a runaway, what a social worker thought was the difference between me ending up in juvie or being left alone. What Celena’s mom thought was the difference between food and no food. What Flint thought was the difference between shelter and no shelter. What friends thought was the difference between moving or throwing away all my posessions every time I moved. Not caring what anybody thinks isn’t as simple as being independent and free-spirited; independence and a free spirit requires some lucky circumstances or privilege to maintain, and I didn’t have it. I didn’t have it for so long that I couldn’t recognize when I did.
When I finally realized that I was supporting myself just fine, and would rather go into debt and end up in a stranger’s house again than entertain fuckwits who supported my rapist, I stopped caring what those people thought. But I thought that immediately had to be followed by filling in the hole they left in my life with new people. Okay, those friends suck, I don’t need them, but I still need friends, right? My therapist at the time convinced me that no, I didn’t. She told me she didn’t think I was going to be able to heal propertly or get my shit together if I was spending all my time thinking about other people. She gave me permission to stop caring about friends. So I stopped. It was totally the right thing to do. But I always had, in the back of my head, this idea that I would deal with this again later. When I was all healthy-like. I never confronted or dealt with my idea that FRIENDS = YOUR WORTH AS A HUMAN BEING. I just gave myself permission to put that idea on the back burner for now, de-priortize it. So when it finally came time where I was healthy enough to start dealing with making friends, I first had to deal with how fucked-up my idea of friendship is. That didn’t magically get solved while I got healthier in other ways. And it was the first thing to come rushing out when I opened up the, “Okay, let’s try TALKING to people for once” door.
My bear pointed out to me that this is the first time since I left Flint that my Maslow’s hierarchy is in sync. When I left Flint, that was just this golden time of healing and discovering myself. Everything was all new, even though everything was also all scary and intimidating. For about a year, I was completely and utterly focused on myself. Everything else was a petty concern; I gave myself complete permission to be withdrawn and introverted, to let my entire universe extend only as far as my nose. That was a good and comforting time.
Once I got my internal stuff sorted out, I was able to open up a tiny bit more and notice the world around me. And the first thing I noticed was how much my job sucked. And then Bear and I moved into a house with roommates that, as it turned out, also sucked. And my job was getting worse. And the roommates were getting worse. This whole period of time lasted until last December, when we had a new, nice apartment, and I started my new and awesome job.
So, really, this is the perfect time for me to be having a goddamn meltdown. Everything is okay. I’m safe at home. I’m safe at work. Those two very important parts of my survival are stable and fulfilled and actually quite good. I now have time and energy to afford focusing on something slightly further out of my reach. I now have the emotional stability to notice how lonely I am, how much I want to connect with others. And this likely, hopefully means I also have the emotional stability to actually give it a go. This past few weeks, I’ve finally let myself feel the years and years of rejection and alienation. It was always a bad feeling, but I used to be able to roll with it. I didn’t expect more out of life. As my bear used to say to me, I’d been hurt that way so much that I didn’t even register the pain anymore. My nerves had just been burned off. But that’s not who I am anymore. The fact that this hurts now is evidence that I have gotten much, much healthier — that my nerves have grown back — instead of evidence that I am still some uniquely, terminally fucked-up freak.
And truly and honestly, genuine and normal rejection can’t feel as bad as the shit I’ve been putting myself through, or the ways I’ve been abused. I used to not be able to differentiate intended abuse from accidental, thoughtless mistakes. Abuse had made me feel like I deserved everything, that all pain was pain I had earned by my very existence, pain that God had created just for me. If somebody accidentally hurt me, well, it wasn’t really an accident, was it? Only I deserved to be hurt like that. The universe had obviously set things up specifically to punish me, and just used the other person as a tool of my torment. There are still places in my head where I feel that way, and I uncover them whenever I’m prepared to deal. So, this is the new thing I’ve uncovered. I still take rejection personally, so personally that I have stopped being willing to open myself to the possibility of the vague smell of any person who was once associated with a room wherein a rejection occurred. I still assume that rejection will feel like abuse, instead of like a mild disappointment. I still assume that wanting anything is a sign of weakness, neediness, clinginess, as if my feelings are so vile that they will infect anybody they touch. Until now, I’ve been able to avoid dealing with those assumptions, because my energy had to go to dealing with more immediate problems.
I feel a lot better now. Thanks, guys. I knew intellectually how many other people must understand the way I feel, but I was still surprised to really see how many people felt the same way. It was a confirmation of something I had always hopefully suspected: everybody feels like a goddamn freak sometimes. I am not the only alien in the room. The other aliens don’t have to share their alienness with me — that’s still their call — but I know that they are like me.
One of the nice things about feeling better: it’s like a cork has been pulled out. I’ve had this backlog of fiction and other writing I’ve been wanting to get done, and now it’s just acid refluxing its way out of me. So, gotta go! I have some shit to write.
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Again, so great.
For the past decade, I’ve been living with the guilt of not being able to really get one of my sisters to like me again. Her liking me has, in my head, been the key to my salvation, the thing that will make me a good person again and prove that I deserve to exist, the thing that will get me my mother’s approval again.
Recently, the other sister that I get along with just flat out said to me that it’s perfectly ok if that sister doesn’t ever like me again, that I did not, in fact, cause the horrible thing I was accused of causing so long ago and that this sister is not some sort of infallible, perfect God-like being who can determine the worth of my entire existence. I realize that I used to feel the exact same way about my ex-boyfriend, that if I couldn’t please him, then it meant that I was constitutionally incapable of having a normal human relationship.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that when you write so honestly about your own recovery it helps people, probably even helps keep some people alive. The thing about abuse and mental illness is that they make you feel completely alone, like you and only you are too fucked up to function. Knowing that there are people out there who experience the world in the same way is strangely helpful.
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You guys, I know how it feels to feel like a freak. I feel like that 99% of the time. But you know what? I am just going to do an “Objection, Your Honour!” to this whole freak business becase we are NOT THE FREAKS. Flint is a freak. Harriet’s dad is a freak. The woman who sent me to school with bruises puffing up on my face is a freak. Let’s put the freakishness where it belongs. Feelings are not facts. Freaks are the people who engage in abusing others, not the people who had to survive them.
Damn, that felt good to say. I shall vacate the soap-box now.
“I’d also never really connected all those dots in my life. I know all that shit happened, but it’s like a book I read about something that happened to somebody else. I can intellectually tell you how all that stuff probably affected me, but I can only tell you that when it’s not actively affecting me. “
That’s exactly how I felt and still feel about a lot of what happened. I’ll be telling stuff to a counsellor, and her eyes bug out of her head with shock and upset on my behalf, and I sit there and I could be reading, I don’t know, something really boring like a textbook on trigonometry.
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I got into that “I HAVE NO FRIENDS” bad space, and was thinking about ways I could make friends, but kept running up against nasty memories in my head. It was this mixture of sadness for myself, resentment and anger at how I’d been damaged so hard that being basically social was nigh-impossible, and then just utter resignation and contempt for myself that GOD that was YEARS AGO just GET OVER IT ALREADY.
I feel the way about blogging. This resonated with me and oddly encouraged me to move on from my blog and do something else with my time, and be me where it’s actually appreciated.
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Hear hear. I had a similar sort of background – it’s not the same, no-one’s is quite the same, but the key points of abusive parent(s), poverty, and then abusive partners are there. So is the trying like heck not to let anyone get close to me so they don’t realise how fucked-up my life is compared to theirs, while at the same time being convinced mine was fucked-up because I deserved it.
It took me so long to understand that not only did I deserve friends, but that people *like* me. I also used to crucify myself over the silliest things – a joke that fell flat being one of them. I’m in my late 20′s now and I’m only just figuring out that yeah, I’m likable. Those people? They aren’t just tolerating me. Some of them even look up to me. Holy shit.
People like you and people look up to you. Because that’s what you deserve.
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Harriet, I hope the day comes soon when you can redefine “being a bad person” as “taking care of myself.” I know you know this in your head; some day the thoughts will be automatic.
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I was a weird kid. I had no friends. I wasn’t poor or abused so I am speaking out of a truck full of privilege but here I am, nearly forty, and I still have Massive Unresolved Issues around rejection and abandonment. I mourned for five years after a friendship fell apart when I was 31. All of which is to say, I hear you, and thank you for writing all this. It makes me feel less alone.
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Hi Harriet, I joined your discussion board yesterday and realized, hey, I still hadn’t acheived anything past lurkerdom on your actual blog. So… hi thar.
“I know all that shit happened, but it’s like a book I read about something that happened to somebody else. I can intellectually tell you how all that stuff probably affected me, but I can only tell you that when it’s not actively affecting me. Like, let’s hypothetically say that you and I, reader, were getting it on. Or trying to. And I suddenly had to stop because, hello! Memories! Badness! Insecurity! Panic! Can I talk to you about that? No, I CANNOT. “
I totally relate. Only, I seem to have the additional problem in that almost every time I DO explain what I went through, I have this part of me in the back of my mind screaming, irrationally, that I’m making it all up, and would I shut up and stop being such an attention whore already, and that I don’t GET the ‘privilege’ and ‘resolution’ of counting myself among the abused because I didn’t grow up poor enough, or technically my parents always meant well and were just extremely frakking misguided, or he never actually went quite so far as to forcefully penetrate me, or that OTHER he didn’t get the opportunity to be abusive for particularly long and on some level in my frakked-up head I kind of enjoyed it, or a myriad of other reasons, so shut up, I’m still relatively normal, stop being emo and get over myself already. Intellectually, I know the story I tell is the truth, but because relative to the typical abuse story I still enjoyed more overall privilege, emotionally that somehow makes me a fake who is just desperate to belong SOMEWHERE, even if it’s t0 a crowd of abuse survivors. Or something.
And when it comes to friends, I’ve always been the sort to only ever have one real friend at a time, if that, and when I have that luxury all my other ‘friends’ are actually friends of that friend who I occasionally occupy the same room as. Right now that one friend is my fiance, and in a social situation it’s never long before I just melt into the background or slink into the other room and remind myself that, even if most of his friends like me fine, they’re still HIS friends, not mine, even if I occasionally call them that.
Like your therapist said, though, you don’t really NEED friends. They can make things easier when you get in a pinch, yes, but they are not a necessity. You have your Bear, I have my fiance, and you know what? One person you can really count on is all you need, and it sounds like you already have that.
: Man, can I borrow your other sister? I have been in a similar situation with my only sibling for years now, and I just don’t know how to breach the subject with her (and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to make her see my side of things over the beliefs on the matter she already has).
: Don’t ever stop writing. While providing a vent for yourself, you remind the rest of us that we’re not so alone after all. I’m so glad I found your blog (and that it’s actually NOT dead like what seems like every other blog tackling abuse is).
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Throwing yourself a big goddamn pity party is necessary sometimes! Cause for sure, we all have stuff that makes us feel terrible.
But at least when you say “wahhhhhhhhhhh I’m a failure and I’m never going to have a career or a real job and I’m in debt and not good at paying it down and no one likes me and my bits hurt and I hate living here and…” (my own personal pity party), well then maybe all those things are still true, but you do feel a little better for it. I’m a firm believer in a good cry.
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I’ve not been through any of the shit that you have, Harriet. So maybe this is rather lacking of proper gravity or understanding, and if so I apologize.
But feel like I can relate to the whole, “But I’ll just be whining to get pity!” thing. I go through that and similar thought processes a lot when I’m trying to judge my own behavior, and it’s really maddening and depressing.
Something I’ve found sometimes helps is to make a conscious effort to imagine myself as another person, and then ask, “If it was someone else going through this, would it be bad for them to do this?” It helps to put myself on the same level as everyone else, and it provides a bit of perspective sometimes. Sometimes it still doesn’t help. But sometimes it does.
Gah. I don’t want to be all self-helpy like I know what I’m talking about. Again, I haven’t been through what you’ve been through. But I hope this might help.
Also, thanks for being so open about your life. It’s given me such a different perspective on many aspects of the world. A lot of things that I used to only intellectually know weren’t only in movies, have suddenly become much more real on a gut level. And you have given me an inkling of an idea of what it’s like to go through so many things that I have never experienced. You played a large role in bringing me to feminism (still in-progress, really), by making this shit real for me.
When you “whine” on this blog, you are actually doing good in the world. So, thank you.
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There’s a song by Dar Williams about therapy that I’ve never been able to decide whether I really like or not, but it runs through my head on a regular basis, so I guess it doesn’t matter.
Anyway, your post reminded me of this part of it:
“And I wake up, and I ask myself what state I’m in
And I say, Well I’m lucky, cause I am like East Berlin
I had this wall, and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks and I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they’d know that I was scared, they’d know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling and their calling out
Just like me”
Thanks for both posts, and thanks also to Anya for your valuable soapboxing.
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Read your post wasn’t like reading someone’s pity party for me. It was reading all the things that I’ve never been able to write down and express except inside my own neurosis, walking around my house in little circles muttering to myself as I talk it out in my head. The details are different, mother instead of father, anorexic alcoholism that stemmed from her own abusive upbringing instead of poverty and anger issues, but the results are the same. Reading that someone else has stood their perfectly still trying not to let their face move for fear of the explosion, that someone else remembers the first time another kid casually hugged them in school and how desperately good it felt, that someone else has sat there and said “I can be the good person, and do the right thing and stay with this horrible little petty fool and be miserable, or I can be horrendous and selfish and RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN.” I’ve been there. I’ve been the workaholic who throws themselves into working a shitty horrible job because it’s the only thing that made me feel i was worth something was to work as hard as I could at something that was kind of horrible. Knowing someone else has been there too helps me accept that it’s ok to have been there myself.
The first blog entry I read of yours was the one where you were trying to explain how you got here, and the part that has stayed with me is that moment when you you left the whole group of friends: I dropped them all. Reading someone else writing down the exact same experience I had and in the exact same tone I would was not only a revelation, but a therapeutic godsend. Thank you.
:
You tried to make me doubt
To make me guess
Tried to make me feel like a little less
Oh, I liked you when your soul was bared
I thought you knew how to be scared
And now it’s amazing what you did to make me stay
But truth is just like time, it catches up and it just keeps going
Oh, and so I’m leaving, you can find out how much better things can get
And if it helps, I’d say I feel a little worse than I did when we met
So when you find someone else, you can try again, it might work next time
You look out of the kitchen window and you shake your head and say low
“If I could believe that stuff, I’d say that woman as a halo”
And I look out and say, “Yeah, she’s really blond”
And then I go outside and join the others — I am the others
-Dar Williams “As Cool As I Am.”
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– Boy do I ever know that feeling. My family was middle-middle class. We could afford to live in a really good school district. When I joined the school band, my parents went out and bought me a clarinet so I wouldn’t have to use a school rental. That means I can’t have been abused, right? Kids in that situation aren’t abused. They’re loved. And so what if my mother called me a whore and a piece of shit? So what if she smacked me in the face and pulled my hair? So what if, right after I tried to kill myself, her first words to me in the ER were “you realize you’re just a fucking statistic now, right?” So what if she tried to justify those words 10 years later when I confronted her about it?
That’s not abuse. That’s just having a little bit of a sucky home life in a rich, spoiled white girl’s life.
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Well, poor bear’s mind,
Seriously, when you said that thing about low point and montage in your head… it reminded me of that Flynt movie. You know, the sucky one, but with totally awesome twist ending… i think you get what i’m trying to say.
And the meltdown reminds me how i got into the situation lately that slowly suffocated me* and then i broke and ran away and spend a lot of time totally indulging in things that were venting reaction to that situation, and actually made a decision it’s too late to try to patch things up and i need that to get some stability. Not that i had other realistic options at that time – no other apart from additionaly mentally beating myself up for being a wreck, in addition to that core causes.
And about friends… hey, Harriet, wanna hang out and whine real time a bit? I mean, as long as i am allowed to my share of whining sometimes, too
(not really, i live about 7000 miles away)
*Yeah, co-dependency.
Well, i like your blog. It reminds me of myself, and the fact you write what you write is interesting. It reminds me of the same thing i sometimes do in real life, talking to people about things that i hate to tell even myself and how it helps. The similarity of feelings and experiences helps too, i guess. And sometimes you give a whole new perspective.
“Because in my life experience, what people think has power.”
I think there’s more to that. There is that thing that such past destroys the “self-confidence”, and makes it hard to believe what you actually think. Wait, makes it hard to rely on one’s own values.
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Wow, yeah. Sounds like part of my childhood, too.
Y’know, it wasn’t until I was proofreading my comment (yeah, I do that; does that make me a total nerd?) that I realized that I’d just identified one of my major barriers to patching myself up on a conscious level for the first time. And I sat there and stared at it and read it like 10 more times, just letting it sink in that, wow, I actually felt that way, and boy, did it explain a lot.
In a sickening, I-really-shouldn’t-be-happy-about-someone-else’s-suffering way, I’m glad to have found somebody else that has had that same barrier.
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Happy tears today that you got to this point so quickly. A bit of self pity that it took me nearly 15 years after the abuse ended to figure it out. But all things in time, and like I said in my comment last night, my anger got me into a community that gave me a footing to get through the in-between without as much difficulty as others in my situation seem to struggle with.
Even non-friends who teach you how to accept some part of yourself, your history as just life can make a huge difference. And no, you’re not a FREAK. I am a “freak”, but that was an identity I chose because it was in a way safer and an outlet for the insanity that filled other parts of my life. When I finally learned to own that choice fully was when I began to be able to actually heal. Accepting that I was not like everyone else but it wasn’t wrong made a big difference, and gave me the freedom and strength to deal with the rest as I was ready.
I could say that I wish I’d not been turned off by bad, in some ways abusive therapists as a teen because I might have figured some of this out sooner with help, but hey, that’s another story for another day. Right now, I want a snack, a drink, and a nap before the club, where I fully expect to overdo it dancing but to burn off some of this excess emotion.
Your writing makes me think and understand myself a bit better almost every time, so thanks again.
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I haven’t been reading your blog for very long, so my apologies if this has been suggested in the past, or if you have several times mentioned your loathing for science fiction, or if this is generally a dumb suggestion.
But, something I think you would find fun, and that might be not too far from you, is WisCon. It’s a feminist SF con. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and (unusually) there are memberships available at the door this year, so if you’re close by (“midwest” covers a lot of ground) you could come, buy an at-the-door membership, and hang out. There are a LOT of people at SF cons who are shy and socially awkward. There will probably be people at the con (other than me, I mean) who read your blog and would be excited to meet you. The conversations at WisCon tend to be a lot about books and a lot about politics, with parties full of food and occasional events that are unbelievably silly.
This may be a really impractical suggestion but if you DO want to try to make it this weekend, e-mail me and I can help you get a membership, hotel room, etc. (The hotel where the con is held is booked, but people have been canceling at the last minute and stuff opens up and so on.)
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I love this quote: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I admit to taking great liberties with it by replacing “society” with whatever unhealthy dynamic is in question in order to cut off the kind of “why can’t you be normal?” self-talk cycle you describe. I mean, imagine what a fucked-up person you’d have to be to have emerged well-adjusted from your childhood situation/relationship with Flint/years of floating around trying to survive. In my experience, after you think of it this way for awhile you really start to internalize the fact that it is normal to have the trouble you’re having at the time. It’s just straight-up normal to have trouble making friends when you spent your formative years trying to survive rather than learning the social lessons that kids from stable, safe homes were learning. And then saying to yourself “why can’t you just be normal?” just boils down to “why couldn’t you have just been born into a healthier family situation?” which isn’t really that interesting of a question. And I think giving yourself a script like this to interject into the destructive self-talk loop makes the work of allowing yourself to process this shit one piece at a time a little easier. In my experience, anyway.
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The thing I keep forgetting is how often I have to revisit my own (quite light, comparatively… everything is relative though) trauma and remind myself that I don’t REALLY think I am never good enough for anything or anyone and that everything I do is worthless, etc etc. That that is a learned response and I can and will unlearn it.
I realised the other day that all the people I am really close to (and there are more of them now that there ever have been… that friendship thing is tricky when you genuinely don’t understand why anyone would spend time with you) have their own damage. Abusive parents or partners or both, fucked up families, brutal grief, etc. These are people who understand my context and know how to make me feel safe and ok about having a mini breakdown. Who don’t judge me as being a freak for not reacting like they’d expect to something that just happens to be a trigger for me. The ones who aren’t don’t stick around long – or I don’t. I don’t miss them.
@ esuriospiritus and Karalyn, YES yes yes. Yes. I am middle class, and all in all had a pretty good childhood as measured by many things. My mother never laid a hand on me. But BOY was she emotionally abusive. Which I have seriously only just figured out. Like, this year. I just thought she was a bitch and that everyone sort of feels like that about their mother. The fact that I have a panic attack every time she calls me probably should have been a tip off, but apparently I am a slow learner. Which is what I feel like all the time. Oh, THAT thing is an issue for me? Yeah, I could have worked that out if I’d thought about it. Or I already did think about it, and I STILL had the reaction. I guess I’m always going to be fighting not to fight the old war. As my best friend said to me this morning ‘coping mechanisms are great. Being forced to use them is not.’
Anyway, the point is, I catch myself thinking all the time ‘well, it’s not like she hit me!’ or similar things. Which I recently found out is absolutely the classic thing to say if you have been in an emotionally abusive relationship. It fucked me up, and I know this, and I feel the effects of it every day, and yet I STILL feel the need to qualify that. I even did it at the top of this comment. Because if my childhood taught me anything, it was that I don’t even deserve the attention of having been abused. Also, most days, it IS relatively light, thanks to a lot of work and good people. I’ve been lucky and I really don’t want to diminish that bit either. But that doesn’t make the fucked parts less fucked, or the damage less real.
Anyway, Harriet, I would like to reiterate that the fact that you have provided another safe place for us to talk about these things is a super valuable thing. I know that the way you put yourself out there like this, and the things you have to say, really truly helps. Thanks!
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Oh, my god, that was a long comment.
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: I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a creeper, but I was reading through your archives on your old wordpress blog and I realized… we have the same birthday. O_O So… happy early birthday.
Except I turn 21 this year, and I have friends/acquaintances/whatever that are intent on dragging me out drinking, whether I like it or not, because this is what normal people do on their 21st birthday! Never mind that I never drink a lot for a reason, that reason being that I freak out when I don’t feel like I have control over my brain anymore. A lot of my most negative life experiences are a direct or indirect result of the fact that my parents bought into the Big Pharma Can Fix Any (ANY!) Perceived Imperfections In Our Child lies, and gradually destroyed me over the course of 10+ years with the help of shrinks who had a diagnosis for every symptom of my abuse that made it my fault and shoved more pills down my throat to try to solve the problems THEY caused in the first place. It’s amazing how fast “oh, she just has ADHD, let’s give her some Ritalin and she’ll be fine” can morph into “…and ODD (ha!), and depression, and bipolar disorder, and anxiety, and insomnia, and anger issues, authority issues, and… god, you’re such an ungrateful brat, stop glaring at me like that. You should be grateful your parents can afford to treat all the mental problems you have, you sick child.” It says a lot that the moment I left my parents’ care at almost-18, I quit every single medication I was on cold-turkey, despite being repeatedly told how terrible the withdrawals would be and how I should let them gradually taper me off for the next six months, and don’t I want to continue seeing them so I can try to talk out my various issues instead?
…Sorry, didn’t mean to go on that long of a tangent. But seriously, how do you explain all that to people whose only mind-altering drug experience is with pot and alcohol, and HEYYYYYY, ISN’T BEING DRUGGED UP GREAT, OH YES IT IS, MAAAAN, WE SHOULD GET SOME FOOOOOD AND WATCH [insert cerebral documentary here] WHILE HIGH, YEAAAAH.
: Ugh, emotional abuse. FUN!
“I realised the other day that all the people I am really close to (and there are more of them now that there ever have been… that friendship thing is tricky when you genuinely don’t understand why anyone would spend time with you) have their own damage. Abusive parents or partners or both, fucked up families, brutal grief, etc. These are people who understand my context and know how to make me feel safe and ok about having a mini breakdown.”
Yep, this was me in high school for sure, without even realizing that abuse was what brought us together. Some of those other kids I hang out with, yeah, they’re abused, but not ME, I’m just a bad, bad kid with anger issues.
“…Who don’t judge me as being a freak for not reacting like they’d expect to something that just happens to be a trigger for me. The ones who aren’t don’t stick around long – or I don’t. I don’t miss them.”
Fun related story, I work in grocery and had a guy walk up to me and tell me an unsolicited sexual joke while I was pushing in carts and minding my own goddamn business one day. Instant panic attack. I told one of my managers that I felt harassed and asked for them to escort him out of the store, “because I have to feel safe at my place of work and having random people come up from behind me and make jokes about my sexual organs FREAKS ME THE FRAK OUT, OKAY”, only for them to come upon him telling the same joke to another cashier, who thought it was HILARIOUSSSSSS. Suddenly I’m just “overreacting, because Joan thought it was fine”, and I spent the next half an hour in the back office with the store manager, assistant store manager, and the front end manager being coerced into explaining why I was flipping out so much because “that is not a normal reaction to a silly boobie joke, and what is wrong with you that this upsets you so much?”
After finally admitting that yes, I was sexually and emotionally abused, their reaction? “Oh, well I’m sorry that happened to you, but you said it was years ago, why can’t you just get over it?”
It’s a wonder I didn’t quit on the spot and even worked the rest of my shift that day, ugh. People who have no understanding of PTSD triggers suck.
: Sorry, I keep vomiting textwalls all over your blog. Concision is NOT my strong point. <_<;
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: Aw, thanks. This weekend is already full of plans, and I don’t tend to travel well at the last minute, but that’s a good idea for next year.
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, esuriospiritus, and Karalyn: Though you wouldn’t guess it from my description of my childhood, I was actually middle-class, too. My father was just unbelievably neglectful. But we had a house that looked nice on the outside (if you got inside, you’d find holes in the ceiling and a bucket where the toilet should be), and we took summer vacations, and we had college funds, and went to nice schools. Therefore, we were spoiled little white girls (that’s what dad called us every time we talked back) who didn’t realize how good we had it, and we were emotionally damaged because we couldn’t take somebody getting angry at us when we screwed up.
It wasn’t until I was a runaway trying to fill out my FAFSA that I found out how rich we had been. If I’d had my father fill it out, I never would have received a cent of financial aid. And yet, we had a bucket instead of a toilet, and I had to learn to hate pizza day at school because there were never any leftovers. But, you know, still, it’s not like he hit us or anything. I’m pretty sure that’s also what he told himself. He came from a home where you did get hit, so as long as he didn’t do that, I guess he figured he was doing better. And the sad thing is, he was.
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When I get into the self-hating suck hole of “I am not worthy of breath, everyone would be happier if I were dead because I am so much trouble to care about,” my therapist has taught me to call it “Pig Pen” because I described the feeling as being the embodiment of the dust swirls that come off the Peanuts character, Pig Pen. Not the character, but his dirt.
When I feel this way I am thinking about suicide and the massive poisonous roiling in the solar plexus area is more than I can stand, and yet I sit in one place, all my muscles tight, not moving, only able to think about how descpicable I am. It’s more like the idea of suicide is attractive, but I am paralyzed even to feed myself, let alone get it together to effectively die.
Naming it helped. It’s “false thinking” and putting a name to it externalized it a bit.
I grew up with a mentally ill mom who was pretty resentful of human need and basically used me as a sounding board for her delusions. My reality is still screwed from this, as I sometimes don’t know if I think or believe something because she told me when I was five, or because it’s true, or because–hey, maybe *I’m* the crazy one.
Her mother, my grandmother, was a child molester, and when my mom would need a night off, guess whose house we got sent to? My grandmother would wake me up in the middle of the night and make me come into her bed; in the day time, she sublimated by touching me and groping me and clawing at me every chance she got, and when I complained, she’d say “Your grandmother gets to do this. If you say I can’t touch you like a grandmother touches her granddaughter, then you don’t love me.”
At school, and at home, I hated to be touched. I was hypervigilant and startled easily, so if someone–a teacher, a student–put a hand on my shoulder, chances are I’d scream, hit, bite, or just start crying. My mom would get hostile at me because I hated it when she played with my hair, etc. Even now, my husband and I must keep separate bedrooms because I cannot sleep in a bed with anyone. Their breathing keeps me awake and in the middle of the night the very presence of someone else near me makes me feel like I’m about to be killed.
I hit rock-bottom with Pig Pen a couple of years ago when I was thinking about killing myself and thought “everyone will get mad at me for killing myself because it’s a busy time and they won’t want to be inconvenienced by grief.” I kind of knew somewhere in me that I had gone too far in not trusting the people who really do love me, and in a way, the abuse I suffered was now hurting not only me but the people in my grown-ass adult life. I still have the feeling sometimes, but quitting my job to work from home has helped because I am easily over-stimulated and then I am not in control at all of my responses to triggers. But I am learning more about triggers and what it means to be always in a flasback, and that I can’t always be in control of other people triggering me–the triggers are fake but real…
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Dear Harriet, I’m glad you feel better. There were many things in your post that I could relate to, and that made me remember one of my favorite quotes: Love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things. For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals [her] heart, without knowing it, from various ills… Czeslaw Miloz
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Kate: Oooh, “What Do You Hear In These Sounds.” A great song and such a heartwarming, thought-provoking lyric!
esuriospiritus: You didn’t ask for advice, but the Ask MetaFilter folks had some ideas on “How do I politely decline 21st birthday drinks?” that might be useful.
For those of us who want to listen, or share stories: Every year on the autumnal equinox, the Making Light discussion community commemorates Dysfunctional Families Day (2008, 2009). The point:
And Harriet: when you were talking about owning the choices and feelings you thought bad and ugly, did you hear the echoes of Huck Finn’s “all right, then, I’ll GO to hell” moment?
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I’ve been reading but not commenting because a) work is hell and b) I knew tons of people would show you how much we all care, if that’s what you were looking for. But I did want to mention something that occurred to me as I read this pair of your posts.
Harriet, you are a survivor. One tool survivors use, when they can, is setting boundaries – something you’ve proven you do extremely well. Won’t believe Flint raped you? Not Harriet’s friend anymore. Still friends with Flint? Not Harriet’s friend anymore. Asshole comment on a blog post? Banned. Obviously, Great Wall of China boundaries: wonderfully erected and strong enough for eons.
Boundaries block both sides though. When one has set up something that can’t be breached, it can’t be breached from either side. One can’t make small talk and have lots of acquaintances (which are the larval form of friends) because of recognizing how inappropriate the internal thoughts are for casual conversation; one can’t weaken the Great Wall or an attacker could breach the weakness. (Wow, it’s hard to write “one” instead of “you” but I want to be clear that I’m speaking more generally here than about you, Harriet.)
Thanks again for making me think, hard, about tough stuff.
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I catch myself thinking all the time ‘well, it’s not like she hit me!’ or similar things. Which I recently found out is absolutely the classic thing to say if you have been in an emotionally abusive relationship.
Oh.
Oh.
Shit, I hate being typical. Um. Thanks, though!
: I am glad you are doing better. And I’m glad the rest of your life is giving you the opportunity to melt down safely. I’ll give a plug for WisCon next year – I don’t go but I know folks who have and, from their descriptions I’m kinda jealous.
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:
Thanks, that link had some good ideas. My fiance will be with me and he knows how to tell when and how to defend me usually, so I think I’ll be okay. LOVE the raincheck idea.
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It’s super-awesome to find out through blogs like this one that really (no, really) I’m not alone in the universe with all these thoughts and feelings and alienation and although it’s not cool that people are treated this way – we’re all in it together.
So thanks Harriet, and good luck with the post-meltdown activity!
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Naomi: I’ll be at WisCon this year. Do contact me if you’d like to grab a beverage together and squee about Fugitivus.
hagdirt: I hope you get a chance to come to WisCon sometime! Anyone at all (as far as I can tell) can submit panel ideas. This year’s panels include “Class Basics,” “Dreamwidth,” “The Marvel Women Project,” “Activism: When to Speak Up, When to Let It Go,” and at least one on kyriarchy. I expect I’ll enjoy it.
esuriospiritus: Isn’t it superlatively nice when your loved ones have your back?
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*hugs*
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That moment where you wrote about how you can intellectually speak about something but only when it’s not really affecting you has just described something so succinctly that I have always felt but was never really able to put a label on. I can tell people all about whatever trauma and traumatic childhood I have experienced like it is all just water off a ducks back, like I’m totally fine with it and have just incorporated it into the awesome person that I am. But I’m not fine, and I’m not awesome. I’ve recently started to deal with some of this stuff with my psychologist and only just started to realise how much of that broken little child is still running this ship.
Thank you for your blog Harriet, most truly thank you.
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Harriet,
you might find this paper interesting: http://www.sirc.org/publik/girl_talk.shtml
It’s on female friendships by Kate Fox, an anthropologist. I haven’t read this one, I’ve read some of her other stuff. Some of it may be culturally specific to the UK. Kate Fox is very good – not that I can exactly vouch for what she says, being something of a hermit myself (and male), but her what I’ve read of her work ‘rings true’.
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“I couldn’t conceive of the fact that my decisions were actually: stay with this horrible little man and be miserable, or leave this horrible little man and be happy. No, it was: make the RIGHT CHOICE and stay with Flint and be miserable, or make the WRONG CHOICE and leave Flint and be a horrible person forever and ever. And I finally reached the point where I was willing to say, okay, I’m going to do it. I’m going to be a bad person. I’m going to take that and own it. I’m going to leave Flint, even though that makes me a monster. I’m going to embrace my ugliness, my selfishness, my horribleness, and choose that for once over my endless goddamn ability to be a martyr. Because, you know what, being a martyr just isn’t fucking working anymore.”
THIS puts into words a time of terror and indecision that I finally got out of by making that same choice to save myself. In hindsight, of course it was the right thing to do and long after and after a long period of reprogramming my mind and my emotions into a much healthier state, I can see that. At the time, it all seemed black and pointless and that things would never get any better, just two different flavors of suck.
One of my favorite poems is The Journey, by Mary Oliver who must have some personal experience with this as well:
The Journey, by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
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