I’m back to talk about my ideal world once again. In the last post, I went off on a rant about sexism. I can’t promise I won’t do it again. I have a lot to say about gender especially as it’s becoming an issue again with the expansion of gender as we currently define it.
One thing I got into yesterday was how I don’t get gender. I don’t get a lot of the arbitrary categories we throw people into. I get (even if I don’t necessarily agree with) racial categories. I get religion, obviously, and disabilities in general. I mean, I understand that disabilities are…I was going to say each one was a discrete thing, but that’s not even true. There are things that spill over or are shared between differing disabilities. And the fact that there is such a thing as hidden disabilities–I’m just all over the place, aren’t I?
My point is that it’s not so easy to say someone is abled or disabled when you get past what we think of as obvious disabilities (being in a wheelchair, for example). Nobody is 100% healthy. Well, very few people. But that’s another post altogether.
In my ideal world, I want people to be aware of other people. It’s really that simple. But not that easy to get there. It took me so long to realize that people don’t automatically try to understand people who are not like them.
Side note: I have had to do that all my life. I was taught at a very young age that I was the keeper of my mother’s emotions. She would pour out her pain to me for hours every night–mostly about my father cheating on her. I don’t remember if she mentioned his cheating explicitly, but we all knew that was what was happening.
My father did not hide it, by the way. He didn’t see any reason to hide it because if he was doing it, then it was fine. I’m not being snarky or hyperbolic, by the way. My father is a narcissist in the classic sense of the word, and he didn’t feel the need to justify anything he did. If he wanted to do it, then he did it. Why would he not?
Side note: Here’s the fascinating thing. I used to thinki that my father did not love anyone other than himself. Then, I thought maybe he loved my mother if he loved anyone. Now, howeve,r I don’t think he even loves himself. He certainly does not (or did not) enjoy life. He never had anything positive to say about anything, and I can’t remember many times when he smiled in delight about anything.
When I was in my twenties, my relationship with my parents was very rocky. That’s putting it mildly, by the way. Every time I talked to them on the phone (they had moved back to Taiwan when I was in my early twenties (father) and late twenties (mother). Or maybe early thirty for my mother), I was suicidal by the time I hung up. That’s not me exaggerating, either.
One time, my father was here after a conference in the west somewhere (can’t remember where). We got into a fight about something. Again, I can’t remember, but it’s not important. At some point, he demanded to know if I was grateful for all he’d done for me (home, money, etc. It was a lot. I’m not denying that). I told him that I wasn’t because I was a raging ball of anger at the time. Plus, he had pushed me so hard, I wanted to hit him where it had a chance of hurting.
He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes, I mentally recoiled. He spit out at me, “Then why should I love you?”
I died inside at that moment, but it also was a moment of such clarity. I had a sense by the time I was seven or eight that he did not love me. I knew it by the time I was in my early twenties. To hear him say it with such spitefulness was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t have to question it any longer.
Even though I knew it on some level, and even though I felt numb about my parents at that time, it still broke my heart. I simply said, “You’re my father. It’s your job to love me.”
I could not believe I had to say that to him. But that’s part of being a narcissist–the idea that you could love someone just for themselves is beyond you (or might be. I know it’s not the same for everyone).
My fdather is in the late stages of dementia, and it’s pretty grim. It’s weird talking to him now because he’s more expressive than he was earlier in his life. After I told him that he should love me because it was part of his job as my father, he started telling me he loved me when we talked on the phone, but it was very stilted.
Now, he’ll tell me with emotion in his voice that he loves me. I believe he actually believes it. Or at least that he loves the person he thinks of as his daughter. This was something I figured out after my medical crisis: neither of my parents love me as a person. They can’t because they don’t actually know me. And what they do know, they don’t like. I don’t think there is a single aspect of my personality that they think is a good thing. I made my peace with their disapproval, well, mostly.
How did I end up there again? My point is that I have had to soothe their emotions for all my life. I don’t know if I’m innately empathetic, but I have honed that skill over forty-plus years. Itt’s become second-nature to me, which is a positive AND a negative. Would I have chosen it for myself? I don’t know.
Back when I was in my twenties, it was the rage to say that bad things happened to people to make them have empathy. That enraged me because I didn’t think I needed to have gone through the horrid things I did in order to be empathetic.
I have realized, however, that some people do need to go through bad things in order to get empathy. Mainly, people who have been born into several categories of privilege and have not experienced the hard knocks many of us suffer through.
It’s so hard to explain privilege to people who have it because it’s normal to them. You can’t show the absence of something as easily as you can add to an experience/equation.
I’m done for now. More later.