a long time of working on wholeness, at putting effort towards taking up space in the world, to be able to understand why I want to write these experiences out into existence.
Mine is not a story more important than anyone else’s, my traumas and hardships not nearly as bad as some more unfortunate circumstances, and for a while, this idea has kept me small.
The insignificance of my tiny experience.
To say aloud that I was writing a memoir felt sticky with self-importance, egotistically self-indulgent. At times it still very much so does. Then Jordan said, What if it’s okay for you to be self-focused, to take up space? A concept that oftentimes feels impossible for me to believe I deserve.
But this is the nature of memoir: the examined life, the art of memory. It is storytelling of the richest, most personal nature, the growth and change and reflections that dip into the most sensitive parts of the human experience, from the only perspective we can really speak from- our own.
Until more recently, I had also been lacking more psychological information and understanding that would give me the ability to parse through what exactly had happened to my brain and body in those years of epic, unwanted rewiring- the chemical shifts, the deeper patterns, puzzles, and aftermaths. Now the discussion of those same particulars is borderline pop-culture fodder, but at the time I was in them, no one could explain to me what was happening. I was just another girl who found herself in multiple “bad relationships.”
There was also a heavy level of denial to myself that I had any reason to feel any lingering effects beyond the simpler hurt and loss that comes with relationships ending. As I will expound on later, I knew what real abuse was from first hand experience, my mother’s own, and from this background and awareness of far more sinister abuse in the world, I had an unwavering voice in my mind reminding me that these relationships were not that bad.
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Multiple other factors throughout my upbringing made it difficult for me to sustain the belief that my voice and my stories were important. Both taught and sometimes self-imposed, I had long ago learned that I should hide myself, not draw too much attention, that I shouldn’t be seen as too much. Not only is it wrong, but there is a danger in it. I was taught to be someone with strong humility, modesty, careful in what I say. I was Catholic; I was a daughter; I was a good girl. That meant I was supposed to contain myself.
Instead I was too curious, rebellious, bolder than I was supposed to be. My natural spirit was inclined towards that which was almost distinctly opposite to some of the restrictions I was being raised in, loving though the my home also was. The conflict inside and around me stoked the duality of my Gemini spirit even further. I fought against the constraints I felt clawing to repress me as often and freely as I dared, in innocent though impassioned ways. But so early it beget the carousel cycles of shame and guilt, stifling much of the safety necessary to feel room for your personal growth of identity.
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How hidden were the first fissures, just spider slips on the surface. As a girl, I couldn’t possibly know they were there, though subconsciously I felt them spreading. The inception was so quiet, my parents couldn’t even tell what they were instilling. How the things that made me feel unloved were small, but magnificently impactful for me: my passionate spirit trivialized, creative pursuits belittled, the idea of emotional used to describe me with dismissiveness, not a personality quality credited as important nor useful. How it has always felt like I had to be asked to be taken seriously, though it also often felt futile to even request.
This is not to say that I was unloved; far from it. It is more that, as a girl, I can see now it felt that I was praised and admired for certain things that were good: my intelligence, my caretaking abilities, when I was polite, when I looked presentable. And there were other aspects about me that fell into a category of bad, or simply unimportant, to say the least. Yet many of those facets are that which I love most about myself.
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A truer culprit than just my immediate caretakers and teachers was simply, yet complicatedly, societal influence. So many multi-layered toxic notions, paper-thin films of suffocating cellophane that were nearly impossible to see. To speak of a few:
How I was taught to feel embarrassed and fearful about my body, my sexuality, my emotional fabric as a woman, before I even had the chance to explore or understand any of those parts of myself.
How my father did not know how important it was to witness not just my mothers emotions, but to see him model his own (which I have seen the heart of, and they are so tender, so beautiful.)
How my entire family all desperately needed therapy during a significant rift in our well being but mental health wasn’t something they were aware to prioritize.
Through various circumstances, it felt that some of the most core parts of what I needed, such as emotional confirmation and empathy, weren’t accessible nor understood by the people who were supposed to show me them.
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As I find these small lesions, I see clearly their accidental imprint, their unintentional mark on me. But the discovery of them, the naming of the sources, has allowed me to see that my self-esteem must have been more compromised than I realized, and how this is one of the many avenues through which I was tricked into the romantic love that I was. How that small sensation as a child, feeling as though my family did not appreciate me for some of the qualities I loved most about myself, dictated what I subconsciously would seek validation in.
Cue: the seemingly sensitive, the cunning manipulators, the narcissists. These would become my partners.
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As I look back on these initial wounds in my inner child, I see how healing it must have been for my young psyche to be told by these men that I was seen and heard, that my talents were impressive, that my emotions were not only valid but exquisitely worthy, that I was loved unconditionally by them.
The gaze they turned upon me that felt like I glimmered all over, like I was made of stardust.
How they professed often their reverence for my unique individuality, how they saw and loved all the complexities and beauty I saw in myself. They catered to exactly what I so willingly shared I didn’t believe my family saw in me. Each time, the connection and understanding that was found made me feel as if we were both part of an emotional elite. We were feeling creatures, beautifully complex. Us against the world.
To be placed so high above and in such light, then to be rapidly pulled down, smothered slowly only to be saved from the smoldering embers by the same hands, again and again. This core, emotional part of me that had only just started to heal being made to feeling abandoned, unworthy, by someone who also could make me feel so, so loved.
No wonder I started losing my mind.
-S
Thank you