I have one more post in me about lying, telling the truth, and how the twain shall never meet. This was my last post on the subject, in which I just meandered all over the place.
In this post, I want to talk about how I don’t knowingly lie to myself, but how my anxiety tells me things that aren’t true. For example, when I’m feeling particularly anxious, my brain will tell me that nobody loves me; I might as well be dead; and that no one will care if I’m gone.
Back when I was a kid/teen/in my twenties, I believed this with all my heart. I believed that I was toxic to the world, and that I made it an actively worse place every day I was alive. I believed that I started each day in the hole as far as my impact on it, and I had to dig my way out.
Why? Because I was told every day by my parents (implicitly) that I was a piece of shit who did not deserve to be alive. I’m sure they did not intend for that to be their message, but that was what their message was, indeed.
Or to be even more precise about it, my father’s message was that my brother and I were irritants to him and should not exist. It took me way too long to figure out that my father didn’t really want children; he just assumed he was supposed to have them.
He was big on saving/losing face and he was always worried about looking bad in the community. Ironically, that did not stop him from having flagrant affairs in said community, but I’m sure he managed to rationalize that in his mind somehow.
He was rarely home as he ‘worked’ from early morning to midnight. In truth, he was carrying out his extramarital affairs after work. Everybody knew it, but nobody talked about it. Even when my mother complained to me for hours about her issues with my father, she never explicitly said he was having affairs. At least until MUCH later (like decades later).
She would talk around it, and it was clear that we both knew what she was talking about, but she would not acutally say it. Which was very frustrating, but there was nothing I could really do about it.
My mother, on the other hand, always wanted children, but it was because as she once actually said out loud to me, she wanted someone to love her. And she expected me to be a clone of her. Well, not of her, but of what she thought the ideal woman should be (even though she was not like that herself). It’s the bitter irony of my family’s dysfunction that the matriarchs preached femininity, taking care of your man, and having children, while not actually liking/wanting to do any of those.
This is the thing that floors me about my mother and her mother (my grandmother). They were both impervious, strident women who were forces of will (except, in the case of my mother, around her husband. But even then, she gave almost as good as she got sometimes). They both lectured about what a real woman should be, but did not follow it themselves.
I, AFAB, was never very feminine. My mother tried to make me so, but it just was not me at all. It wasn’t in reaction to her pushiness, but that certainly didn’t help. Nor did my neurodivergency.
I did not understand why I needed to not run, to not climb trees, to be demure, and to not laugh so loudly. I hated being told to sit with my legs crossed and the dresses my mother made for me.
By the way, she hated doing all those household chores. I did not realize that either until much later. She was an indifferent cook at best, and she only did it because sh ewas supposed to. That’s the sadness of her life–all the things she held to be true to womanhood were tihngs she hated. I would feel more sorry for her if it wasn’t for the fact that she dumped all that emotional baggage on me.
I just could not lie to myself for very long. I did not like any of the so-called feminine things that I was supposed to do. It took me too long to realize that I should have kept a lot of to myself–things that I innocently told my mother because of course she would want to know the real me, right?
Wrong. There were so many tihngs about me that she did not like (and still does not). It took me way too long to realize that I should just keep it all to myself. In fact, any time I tried to tell her something important and she denigrated it, it would just make me feel worse about myself.
This is why I stopped telling her important things about my life, and I don’t feel guilty about it at all. Some would say it was lying by omission, but I would say that there’s no reason to tell her.
Here’s the thing. She doesn’t understand or like anything about me. Any time i’ve told her something important about myself, she’s mahde a disparaging comment or a condescending one. She gets this look on her face as if she’s just sucked on a lemon, and she will say the meanest shit without even thinking about it.
She didn’t think it was mean shit, obviously, and she was extremely hurt/upset if I dared hint that she said something even a bit nasty. When I told her I was taking Taiji classes, for example, she blurted out that I was opening myself up to the devil dancing on my spine. Which sounded pretty cool, actually, but was so bizarre to hear. And she meant it!
Taiji has done so much for me, I can’t quantify it. That was what my mother had to say about it? So ignorant, wrong, and hurtful. That was one of the last things I told her about my life that I actually cared about. I did not need her shitting all over something important to me.
All of this is my long-winded way of saying that it was hard fro me to be kind to myself when I was a child through my thirties. I hated myself, and I thought I deserved it.
That’s all for now. I will write one more post about this tomorrow. I still have more to say, but I need to get to bed.