My brother is great at starting a project. If he wants to do something, he just jumps in and does it. He may not finish it. He may put it in the reject pile at some point. But he will move on with ease to the next project and not think twice about it.
Me, I agonize about starting any kind of project. I will put more time into planning it than actually doing it. If I start a project, there is a high probability that I will see it to completion. I will bitch about it. There will blood, sweat, and tears–but I’ll get it done. And it will be done well because of my perfectionist tendencies.
I much prefer my brother’s way of being. He stresses way less than I do and gets way more done. It might not be as high a standard as what I do, but most of the time, that doesn’t matter. We’re not talking about bad versus great. We’re talking about great versus really fucking great. The latter just isn’t needed most of the time.
This is where my anxiety rears its ugly head. It’s where the voices in my head whisper, “You’re not good enough.” “You can’t do that,” and other nefarious thoughts. It’s my mother’s voice as she has told me how wrong I am since I was a small child. I shouldn’t laugh so loudly, climb trees, run around, sit with my legs open, eat that dessert, read so many books, or talk. Add my father to that: I should not be better than a boy in anything, think I know anything of use, or contradict what a man tells me. I should get straight As because I’m so smart, but never show a boy how smart I am. Go to college and grad school and have a stellar career. get married and have children, putting them purportedly first. Go to church and put God first. Date, but do NOT have sex before marriage. Bisexual? That’s against God, and what next? Sex with animals? Taiji? You’re allowing the devil to dance on your spine. Writing stories that have any kind of swearing is bad! Don’t eat so much.
Be less was the constant message I got and still get. I want too much. I ask for too much. I AM too much.
I have rejected much of these messages, but it’s hard to eradicate them completely. If it was just one or two things, it would be, well, still not great, but easier to put in perspective. When it’s my entire being that has been consistently rejected, that’s much more difficult to ignore. And knowing that anything I told my parents would be disparaged, disdained, or disregarded didn’t help. I’ve learned through hard experience that if something is important to me, not to bring it up to my parents because they will tear it down.
My father clearly doesn’t give a shit about my life, but once in a while, he will get weirdly invested in some aspect of it. One time, he was pushing me on what I was writing. I kept it vague because I knew he wouldn’t understand it and what’s more, he would put it down. Normally, when I deflect, he just moves onto something else, but this time, He wouldn’t let it go. He trotted out the ‘we’re family’ trope and implied that I had an obligation to tell him what it was about.
First of all, we are not a family in any way but the most conventional meaning of the world. Secondly, no, I don’t trust that he has my best interests at heart. Why would I? My mother once said to me as a way of guilting me that she was said I didn’t trust she had my best interest at heart. Again, why would I when she has repeatedly shown the opposite to be true?
This is what gets to me. Both of them have shown the me as a person nothing but disdain since day one. They have made it clear that they don’t approve of anything about my life. Not one damn thing. So why the fuck would I tell them anything about, well, anything? But especially anything that is important to me? I saw how my mother imploded when my brother brought up his divorce. I knew it was coming and still hadn’t anticipated how bad it would get. Or how cruel my mother would get.
That’s the thing that really stuck with me. I knew that she would be very unhappy and would probably bring up ‘old-fashioned’ and religion. I did NOT expect that she would state that she wanted my brother to knowingly choose to be desperately unhappy rather than do something to make him happy. Ok, she probably would say that wasn’t what she meant, but that was what said in effect when I mentioned that he and his ex had tried hard to make it work for nearly thirty years and she snapped, “Why can1’t they try for another thirty?!”
I know it sounds seemingly minor in a long litany of abuses, but it honestly shocked me. And I’m not easily shocked. I can’t adequately explain why it disturbed me so much. Maybe because I had thought I’d known the depth of the dysfunction, but that comment went even further. It was what showed me clearly that she did not give a damn about my brother’s happiness; she only cared about the rigidity of what a proscribed ‘good’ life would look like.
He was the good child, the golden first-born son. He had made something out of himself and was very successful. He had been married for nearly thirty years and had three kids. He makes 6 figures a year. he goes to church every Sunday and is a devout Christian (albeit one who is changing what it means for him to believe). If anyone should be getting accolades for how he’s living his life, it’s my brother. He does EV shows in his spare time, by the way, to convert people to the EV way of life. He has solar panels on his house that he installed himself. In other words, he’s done a fucking lot. And yet, many years ago, he said he felt like he was the black sheep of the family because he did not have a post-grad degree.
It goes to show that we both fell short in my parents’ eyes. Yes, my brother has kids, but he has three, including two boys who were rowdy when they were younger, so they do not approve of that. Nor his white wife. Nor his particular wife. Nor the fact that he never went back into tech, but got into real estate instead. He mentioned to me about a month ago how my mother was worried about him because he was ‘so busy’.
Oh right. That was at roughly the same time when she said I should go over and cook and clean for him now that he’s single again. Yeah. She actually said that out loud. My response: I don’t even cook and clean for myself. What makes you think I’d do it for him? I told her I supported him in other ways and she said in a snide voice, “What way?” As if it were any of her fucking business. Which it is not.
I have veered way off course, but this is a big part of the reason I find it so difficult to actually do anything–because of the inner critic in my brain that sounds suspiciously like my mother.