Explaining Unexplainable Lonliness

[crysthewolf]

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while.  I’ve had a lot of crap on my mind, but none of it’s seemed worth talking about.  Still, perhaps getting some of it out would be a bit cathartic.

I’ve been depressed lately.  It’s difficult even for me to really understand why, but it seems like every little piddly thing has made me feel lonely and left out.  The only thing that I can surmise is that it has to do with all of the crap going down in my family.

I haven’t talked to my Mother in a few weeks now.  Once upon a time, if I mentioned that my Mother was difficult to deal with and that I didn’t particularly WANT to deal with her, I’d have gotten flack from people.  “She’s your Mother.  You can’t just ditch her.”  Here recently though, when I’ve mentioned that I don’t deal with her to people who know me well enough to know my history with her, I seem to run into something akin to relief.  Several of the people around me worried when I started talking to her again that she would do SOMETHING crazy to fuck me up.  And she did.  It’s funny how predictable some people can be.

I’ve just gotten to the point where I don’t really get it.  I mean, I guess it’s typical form for her… there’s a man in the picture that she wants to be with, her kids object, and she picks him over them.  She married my current step-Dad under those conditions, and the one before him I didn’t even MEET until the wedding (he turned out to be an emotionally abusive douche)… and now that we actually LIKE my current Step-Dad, she’s pawning after my biological father.  The thing that kills me is that all of the things that she bitches about in regards to my Step-Dad, are things that my biological father has in SPADES.  But she doesn’t see them.  Why?  Well, because he’s married to someone ELSE.  And she doesn’t give much license to THAT, either.

Meanwhile, in the world of my sperm-donor, he’s gone about telling my Step-Mom, whom I actually DID like, that the affair that she heard about him having was something that I fabricated to break up their marriage.  WHY I would want to break up their marriage is beyond me, but apparently he’s fed her enough bullshit about me over the years that it’s actually a believable story for her, and for my Step-Sister.

And so, once again, much like I did when my brother Wil decided to scream at me over religion for no good reason and make it next to impossible for me to attend family functions that he would be at… I feel outcast.

People close to me probably think that I’m better off for this, and they’re more than likely right.  My family (excluding my little brother Cory, my big sister Sheila, and my oldest brother Brian) has little to offer aside from abuse, heartbreak, and manipulation.  But that doesn’t stop me from feeling hurt over it.   I’m an adult now, my father’s lived in Wisconsin since ‘93 and previous to that I had a little over a year with him here in town after not having seen him since ‘85.  I visited him a few times in Wisconsin, but by and large he wasn’t a part of my life.  Then, a couple of years ago, he retired from the job that took him so far away to move back  to Indianapolis, back to a place where I could actually SEE him on a regular basis, maybe even have a RELATIONSHIP with him… only to get pissed at me over the fight with my brother Wil (but pretty much say dick to him), have an affair with my mother, and then lie about me.

And the fact of the matter is… I don’t really know how to deal.

So I internalize it, and then it shows up in the form of a vacuous, endless, black hole of need that has always been there to a small degree, but that is so astoundingly huge at this point that I can barely ignore it… so huge that it will suck all of the life out of my face and start pulling at the joy in the room if I stay in it too long – or at least that’s how I feel.

Nothing fixes it… and that’s part of why I’m writing about it.  I spend time with people and I KNOW I look sad and I KNOW I mention feeling left out and, I want you to know, if you’re near me, that it has pretty much NOTHING to do with anything you’re doing or not doing.   I know that’s hard to deal with, because when someone’s in your presence and they feel left out, you feel like you did something to LEAVE them out, and that you need to do something to INCLUDE them.  It isn’t so, honestly.  I know this beast.  I dealt with it through most of my childhood.  I’ve seen it in other people.  And it’s more than likely nothing more than my psyche dealing with a situation completely separate that the rest of my brain doesn’t know how to appropriately deal with.

I’m hoping it eventually passes, but the bottom line is that I feel adrift, outcast, and it’s poured over from my family into my general feelings about the world, which is probably actually a pretty normal thing.  Our relationships with our family tend to define our relationships with other people… it’s sortof basic psychology, I think.  It’s how we operate.  The trick, if you have a shitty relationship with most of your family (or at least your parents), is figuring out how to not LET it define your relationships with other people… and that’s hard.

There is a time in your life when your family is really your whole world.  Your parents know everything, and they have all the answers.  If they say that’s the way the world works, that’s the way the world works.  And yeah, you grow out of it… but there’s always some part of your psyche that is still there.  That part fucks with you when your parents do the kind of shit that my parents do.  And that’s where I am.

And at some point hopefully I’ll be able to talk that beast into realizing that she doesn’t live at home anymore, what her Dad thinks isn’t gospel, how her Mom treats her doesn’t have to affect her because she can make those decisions for herself, and that she’s not really a monster but a little girl who, quite understandably and humanly, just wants to be loved…

And, bigger than that, she is.  Maybe not by the people she was born to, but by her family.

Hopefully I can get that through to her.  She’s a cute kid, but she can be awfully thickheaded.

Love,
Crystal

Originally posted at Crystal's World Feel free to comment here or there.

Comments

[ardent-firesong.livejournal.com]

May I offer hugs?

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

Yeth'm. :)

[ardent-firesong.livejournal.com]

*HUGS!!!*

And a cookie ^_^

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

Yay cookies!

[thetammyjo.livejournal.com]

Actually I'm going to counter those folks who have talked to you about your mother.

You can ditch her. If talking to her or being around her is harmful to you -- then your first priority must be to protect and help yourself. If she is any type of decent mother she will adjust her behavior to fit into your life when you want it.

My mom did after I hung up on her repeatedly over a year. Now a relationship which we thought we could never have is actually a decent one because she realized I wasn't the little girl she emotionally abused any more. I had become a woman who could and did stand up for herself.

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

*nods* Over the years I've done a bit of that standing up for myself. My Mother's response is to play the martyr. I'll probably never have that relationship with her, but I will be sane and not dragged down by her emotional manipulation. I just have to find something to fill that hole that she left by being a shitty parent.

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

And thank you. It's nice to feel validated.

[anjala.livejournal.com]

Honey, I really do love you. You are one of the people in my life that I treasure the most. Your "egg donor" doesn't deserve to call you daughter. She's not a mother and I will never call her that ever again.

I am sorry you have been so depressed. You and I react very similarly when we are depressed. We withdraw into ourselves and try to keep it close because we have trouble asking for help. Just know that I am always here when you need me, no matter the time of day. I mean this!

If you ever need to come over in the evening, just let me know. It's just as easy to feed 3 as it is 2.

Babe, I love you so much and don't you every forget it. You are a beautiful woman who deserves nothing but joy and love.

*hugs* *kisses*

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

Awww. *sniffle* Sanks momma.

[mycybertuffet.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling. Do what you need to do.

I was just kind of putting myself in your place as a mental exercise, and I realized that I can't imagine how next-to-impossible your situation makes it to get to a point in yourself where you can kind of take the "wide, landscape" view of things that really allows for internalized realizations. I was thinking how lucky I am to live so far away from my parents. If I was living in the same city as them, and especially in the same city where there was so much baggage and so many bad memories, I'd basically be a walking trigger point. Your entire environment, everything that surrounds you, is like the psychological equivalent of one of those super-security rooms with the laser beams that shoot every which way. Except instead of literally burning, they repeatedly activate the injured places in your brain because of the dense web of immediate associations they conjure up, and pull you back into your younger self & old, long-established habits of existing in your environment. When the little girl part of you is feeling that reactive, it's pretty much impossible for "adult, wise" Crystal to make herself heard. And if old wounds keep getting ripped open, they can't heal. If there's no escape from old ways of being, it's pretty darn difficult to obtain the change in perspective necessary to discovering and settling into a new way of being.

I'm not saying "you need to move to a different city!" or anything. Just that it must be so hard to move on when you're constantly seeing the same things & going to the same places. & knowing that the people who hurt you are so nearby must be so frustrating, & make it really hard to create any sort of psychological distance. I'm sure there are lots of ways to get around it though, to shake yourself up & exist in your environment differently. (Lol - for some reason, I have this mental image of you wearing a pair of color-tinted glasses - I guess it's a symbolic image of a way to force/trick your brain into a fresh perspective, & to see the things you've spent your whole life looking at in a way you never had before.)

Anyway, I'm rambling, & making no effort to force my brain into the creation of orderly, comprehensible sentences. So I apologize if this is a big, confusing mish-mash. I've also been working through a lot of stuff lately, so my mind's kind of an unstructured, chaotic bit of mush right now.

... Anyway ... looking forward to seeing you in two weeks! ;-)

[crysthewolf.livejournal.com]

the reality is, and I guess the thing that is coming home, is that my parents are absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, COMPLETELY untrustworthy, and there is NO way I can have ANY kind of relationship with them without them lying to and about me, emotionally manipulating me, and abusing me.

And that's the reality they've chosen, and honestly, it's kinda tough.

My father did what he needed to do to push me away, for no other reason than that he didn't want to face the consequences of his own actions. He's lying to his wife, ABOUT me, and he tells himself and my mother (his mistress) that it's to "save his marriage". It's not. It's to save his ass, so that he doesn't have to take responsibility for himself.

So he'll punish me, when I didn't do anything to deserve it, so that he, who DOES deserve it, doesn't get punished.

And these are my parents. It's so fucked up that it boggles my mind. And yeah, it's hard to get above it and give it some thought, honestly. Maybe going up to Penguicon, away from everything, will help a bit. Or maybe it'll just be a nice retreat. I don't know if living elsewhere would help at all... I don't know that it's so much the place that reminds me as it is... relationships. There's that sense of "these people love me and I love them, but if that happened with my own parents, what should I expect from the rest of the world?"

It's not rational at all, but it's a deep inner feeling, y'know?

And yeah, I'm looking forward to Penguicon.:)