Mindless Ramblings of the Queer Kind

I don’t know about you, but the days when I am tired and have to function as an adult are the hardest for me.  I feel everything so much more intensely.  Every tool I have gained in therapy is so hard to pick up; every word hits like a kick to the gut. 

I have had to look a lot internally lately, funny how healthy choices and relationships do that to you.  Every little thing that I thought I was handling well seems to have this tiny hairline crack in it, and I, being the person I am, can only see the crack and not the picture as a whole.

It is crazy to me that I am in these relationships where I’m not afraid someone is going to leave, where I am affirmed and loved, supported and wanted… Yet I feel so undeserving.  I look at these amazing people and think, why would they want this?  I’m broken goods; I have been my whole life. I isolate myself when people are trying to pull me closer, and in turn, I’m struck with all the negative things in my life, and I’m so incredibly depressed.

I have so many memories that have this haze of disapproval over them.  You can’t dress that way, you can’t act that way, you can’t have that opinion, you can’t want that life, you can’t have that freedom.  So much of what I did as a child and teenager was taking care of others.  I took care of my siblings, I took care of the pets, I took care of the chores, and I managed the feelings of 4 different parents.  Every mistake was under a microscope, pointed out, and my face was rubbed in it.

I suppose that’s where the anxiety started, worrying about what mistake I would make next and what would happen.  Dishes weren’t clean enough… screaming, laundry done wrong… Screaming, treating my brother unkindly because I didn’t have any other example of how to parent…. A smack, hair pulling, some kind of physical reminder of what a bad kid I was.  Gods, even just typing this is making my chest feel tight, and my hands shake.  It didn’t matter how small the mistake was.  It didn’t matter if I had been taught how to do something.  Not doing it correctly was failure, and failure meant loss of whatever safety I had managed to cobble together. 

I continued to make choices that left me unsafe throughout my entire adolescence.  I dated boys who I now realize took advantage of my naivety, youth, and just general need for someone, anyone to love me.  I did things with them I didn’t want to do; I was groomed by various older boyfriends. I did all these things to fill that hole inside of me, and when it didn’t work, I made more unsafe and unwise choices.  I was promiscuous, I cheated, I searched and searched for something to make me feel like I actually had some kind of worth in this world.  I didn’t find it.  Instead, I ended up married at 19, divorced by twenty, and a single mother of 2 by 21. 

So I hopped from taking care of my siblings pretty much immediately into taking care of my own children.  The men in my life were volatile, and I ran when things got scary, never really learning anything from the experience.  I continued the pattern over and over again, expecting a different result, but never getting one. 

The break in the pattern was my second husband.  He wasn’t cruel, he was kind.  He didn’t punish me for my mistakes, but we just never talked about them.  Avoidance and caretaking became the norm for 11 years, and I became burnt out along the way, especially as we added another child to the mix.  I was( am) poly, so in the background, I continued my cycle of dating volatile men and women who reinforced my belief that I was broken. 

It has taken a lot of years of therapy for me to even be able to say that I deserve love and acceptance without breaking into tears, and honestly, there are days when I still don’t believe it.  My entire life has been worth being tired of what I can do for someone else, yet I am being told that I need to focus on myself, stop letting people take advantage, and stop fawning.  Logically, I know this sounds like good advice, but that little voice in the back of my head says, what the hell do you have to offer if you are doing those things. Kinda like Louisa says in Encanto, “I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service.” If everything about me has been criticized my entire life, how could anyone love anything that has not been custom-tailored just for them?

To help you understand just how fucked this is, you know when someone does something, and it makes you laugh, and you get that rush of affection, and you tell them you love them?  My brain cannot handle that.  If someone does that, I panic.  I ask them why immediately because a) I need to log the behavior so I can replicate it, or b) I convince myself that they are saying it in an exasperated way, like ugh God, why do they do this? It’s so frustrating, but I guess I still love them.  Crazy mental gymnastics for someone who finds their self looking at their partners every day and doing this exact thing.

So I am sure you can imagine how discombobulating it is to be in a relationship where I am actively working to not please people, craft an image, or caretake, and finding that these people seem to actually like me?  Dare I actually accept love?  It is mind-blowing to me, and instead of accepting it and enjoying the ride, I find myself in these moments of wondering how I can protect them from me.  How can I prevent them from feeling all the ways I have felt in the past, because I care about these people so much that the thought of even accidentally doing something that might hurt them scares me beyond reason? 

It’s just so heavy, this feeling that I am the reason for all the bad.  That even though I walk through life trying to be small and avoid being a burden, I’m going to fuck it up and hurt people.  Everyone who has ever hurt me had told me how it was my fault, how I was wrong, bad, too demanding, too much, not enough, and because of that, they were forced to hurt me. I don’t want to hurt people.  I don’t want to be any of those things. Sometimes it’s so heavy that, I preface this by saying I have no plan to self-harm, I don’t even want to exist.

I want to get to a place where I trust myself.  That I know that I am in the world putting forth kind energy, that I’m not secretly and unawarely a terrible person.  I want to make mistakes and be able to say that it was unfortunate, but I will learn and do better, instead of feeling shame, self-hatred, and embarrassment.  I want to build a life with partners who love me for the weird, silly things about me, and not just because I’m kind and give too much. I’m in therapy, I am actively working on these things, working on placing and holding boundaries, and working on (what is my biggest hurdle) self-worth. 

It’s getting better.  Not every day is an emotional battlefield.  I have people and places where I feel safe and regulated.  I am doing things solely for me, and doing my best to work through that guilt.  It’s hard, but it’s not hard forever.

So for anyone out there who happens to read this and can relate in any way, and honestly for myself… I’m so sorry that there were people in your life who made you feel like just existing made you a problem. You don’t have to be perfect to earn the right to take up space. Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone does things they aren’t proud of. That is just life.

When we don’t have people guiding us along the way (and honestly, sometimes even when we do), the way we learn is through experience. You will find people who accept you for who you are, and they will make it feel like the sun after a never-ending storm, and you deserve that.

And I’m proud of you for waking up every day and trying.