What's a girl gotta do to be taken seriously?
Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2017 3:21 am
I got a lot of things I wanted this year. I graduated college, finally, with my Bachelor's from a good four-year liberal arts school. I got into a Master's program in Creative Writing. I started eating again, after years of an eating disorder wreaking havoc with my life. I worked two jobs and did several internships in addition to school, all successfully. I even lost 30 pounds.
I worked my rear off, and I did great.
Yet somehow this summer, the depression came back. I think I was triggered by living with this perfectly nice family and seeing them interact with one another. They were "normies"--people who didn't grow up with sexual abuse and verbal abuse and emotional abuse rampant. The kids liked each other, the parents were kind and spoke glowingly of their daughters.
Contrast--my mother showed me a picture of my sister to show me how much weight my sister had gained. When I told my mother I'd been carrying around a bottle of pills "just in case," she kind of blinked then changed the subject.
Did I mention my mother was a psychologist?
It's easy to say that things will get better, that I'll come out of this. Truth is though that my role in the family is to play overachiever in the background to my sister's foreground, who is either intellectually and emotionally disabled or else just a scary rage monster with no sense of fairness or willingness to negotiate on any issue ever. My dad molested me and my mom won't believe me, and she never will. I completely fell apart after she tried to convince me I only thought my dad abused me because of some kind of psychotic break [that no objective mental health professional agreed had actually happened].
What I'm trying to say is, my life is genuinely, objectively impossible. No matter what I do or how much I succeed, it's never going to change the dynamics of my family. I tried going to family therapy with my mom a few years ago, and literally she could not handle the shrink telling her to be a mom and just take care of me for a few minutes. My mom had no idea what the shrink was talking about, no idea what being "supermom" [or even just a mom at all] and putting aside her own emotional needs on behalf of mine meant. Even for ten minutes.
It's like there are these major cracks in my foundation. The mother I didn't get and the fathering and protection I never received and the fear just being in their house, it's all just been creeping up on me like this wave. I can run from it or try to dodge it and maybe that works for a short while, but it's always there waiting.
I've spent most of my adult life pretending I'm okay and trying to avoid being put on meds or put in a psych hospital or otherwise treated against my will. This past week though, since I got back in my parents' house, there's a part of me that just wants to curl up under a blanket and face the wall and never get up again. I just can't imagine actually doing anything productive, or even wanting to--probably because the idea of it triggers all this resentment and rage in me. I keep succeeding at stuff and my parents can keep telling themselves that they did a totally fine job of raising me, and they can think somehow my sister and I are just two equal adults who don't get along instead of recognizing she's a huge bully [literally, she once told me the world and especially my parents would be better off if I'd died at a treatment center in Texas], they can keep on laughing at basically any expression of emotion I ever make. They can keep pretending they're doing a good job of being my family but the truth is I haven't had a family in a long time, maybe ever.
And I don't know how to deal with that.
I worked my rear off, and I did great.
Yet somehow this summer, the depression came back. I think I was triggered by living with this perfectly nice family and seeing them interact with one another. They were "normies"--people who didn't grow up with sexual abuse and verbal abuse and emotional abuse rampant. The kids liked each other, the parents were kind and spoke glowingly of their daughters.
Contrast--my mother showed me a picture of my sister to show me how much weight my sister had gained. When I told my mother I'd been carrying around a bottle of pills "just in case," she kind of blinked then changed the subject.
Did I mention my mother was a psychologist?
It's easy to say that things will get better, that I'll come out of this. Truth is though that my role in the family is to play overachiever in the background to my sister's foreground, who is either intellectually and emotionally disabled or else just a scary rage monster with no sense of fairness or willingness to negotiate on any issue ever. My dad molested me and my mom won't believe me, and she never will. I completely fell apart after she tried to convince me I only thought my dad abused me because of some kind of psychotic break [that no objective mental health professional agreed had actually happened].
What I'm trying to say is, my life is genuinely, objectively impossible. No matter what I do or how much I succeed, it's never going to change the dynamics of my family. I tried going to family therapy with my mom a few years ago, and literally she could not handle the shrink telling her to be a mom and just take care of me for a few minutes. My mom had no idea what the shrink was talking about, no idea what being "supermom" [or even just a mom at all] and putting aside her own emotional needs on behalf of mine meant. Even for ten minutes.
It's like there are these major cracks in my foundation. The mother I didn't get and the fathering and protection I never received and the fear just being in their house, it's all just been creeping up on me like this wave. I can run from it or try to dodge it and maybe that works for a short while, but it's always there waiting.
I've spent most of my adult life pretending I'm okay and trying to avoid being put on meds or put in a psych hospital or otherwise treated against my will. This past week though, since I got back in my parents' house, there's a part of me that just wants to curl up under a blanket and face the wall and never get up again. I just can't imagine actually doing anything productive, or even wanting to--probably because the idea of it triggers all this resentment and rage in me. I keep succeeding at stuff and my parents can keep telling themselves that they did a totally fine job of raising me, and they can think somehow my sister and I are just two equal adults who don't get along instead of recognizing she's a huge bully [literally, she once told me the world and especially my parents would be better off if I'd died at a treatment center in Texas], they can keep on laughing at basically any expression of emotion I ever make. They can keep pretending they're doing a good job of being my family but the truth is I haven't had a family in a long time, maybe ever.
And I don't know how to deal with that.