Family Ties

For the record, I was right. I said some would have a hard time with me adjusting my perspective, but even I wasn’t prepared for what I would encounter. In a short sighted prophecy, I was unaware of the truth I was speaking. Heart wrenchingly so.
When the scales began to fall of regarding one aspect of my life, it was like seeing colors I hadn’t ever seen before, tastes I hadn’t ever tasted, feelings I hadn’t ever felt. But unlike the blessing this is when you fall in love, it was an awakening I still wish I had never had to face. The tastes were bitter, the colors ugly, the feelings painful and awkward. It was a second birth into the rude reality of betrayal, evil for no reason, loss with no rhyme, pain with no purpose. It was a life I didn’t want to have to know, it was easier to assume everything would work out, people were basically good and I would be loved no matter what. In a basic word: denial.
I had been raised in a family, a school, a community, and life where denial is the unspoken truth. Narcissism rules, there are those that get to have feelings and those that don’t. There is a distinct line between “have’s” and have not’s” of relational power and manipulation and I have always been a “have not.” Example: I was 13 when my first nephew was born. Now it goes without saying that my nephews are my treasures. I remember waking with them at night and feeding them and changing them and all of the amazing moments of their lives and I am moved to tears when I see them succeeding and growing and developing. I feel very maternal towards them. And why wouldn’t I? I was there for their birth, for their first steps and words, their very moments of personhood. What a treasure it has been, but that treasure did come at a price. The price for me, was an adolescence. It was my place in my family. They came in, and at the tender age of 13, I went out. I have no resentment of this fact, except that it has never been talked about. My family, my sister in particular, if I bring any of this up, will call me selfish, silly, or immature and mean. My loss is met with anger, a sense of betrayal and great shame. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Subconsciously I have always known my place. I am to be seen and not heard. I am a stage-hand in the second act of someone else’s play. Mostly, to be real, any one of my family members or old friends. No wonder I am so damn loud. The only attention I got in my family was when I wasn’t giving them what they wanted or needed. I was selfish for not babysitting more or for having soccer tournaments on the weekend. When I was 13 I had mono. My family didn’t find out for a year. They thought I was faking. I still don’t sleep because I’m so stressed at night remembering waking up in the middle of the night, listening for the boys because my mom was working and my sister was wearing ear-plugs.
So I found narcissistic people to be with. Friends that treated me the same way. I remember a friend I moved in with after I divorced was mad at me because I was depressed. This same friend betrayed a confidence of mine once, and when I found out got mad at me for getting mad at her. Another friend once yelled at me for 25 minutes because I wasn’t a good enough friend to her when she lived in southern California and it was the year after I got married. That same friend would later move into my old apartment, keep most of my things, including my bed, couch, pots pans, knives, TV, coffee table, lamps, linens and towels along with a myriad of other items and only pay me a portion of the $1000.00 we had agreed to. And it was my fault.
All of these things came to a head this last week when I got in a fight with my sister. I was telling her about a break-through I had in my life and heart, and because it had something to do with someone she had once known, she flipped a lid. This was a significant moment for me in my life and she flew off the handle, ostracized me from my family, shamed me and proceeded to find every way she could to humiliate me, get my family involved and destroy me. That was the last fucking straw.
One question: are you kidding me?
No wonder I am struggling so much. I have spent 25 years surrounded by people that could care less about me unless I am somehow fulfilling their need to be center stage. I am nothing more than a prop, much less a person with a heart, feelings, needs, desires, goals, hopes and dreams.
At 26 I am struck by the very sad reality that I have no clue what I want, how to define myself, or who I am because I have never been allowed to. There is a sick little sad realization the deep instinctual anger someone feels when someone hurts them that I have never been allowed to voice, is going to going to explode one day and I’m slightly afraid of what it is going to look like. Although, I now understand my dark fantasies of beating the crap out of people that have betrayed me more. And ironically, I feel a little less guilty about them. They probably deserve it.
No one has ever expected me to do anything more than them, to have anything more than them, to be anything more than them. I was never the pretty one, the smart one, the nice one, I was always just filler space. A funny wise-crack every now and then. Fuck that.
I guess now I understand why there is such a big gap between the person I want to be and the person I am. I may understand these things, but I can do nothing about the scars they have left. All I can do now is figure out what I was supposed to have known all along. Heart breakingly I now realize this will never happen until I start to redefine me based on me and start stopping certain other factors…. Such as the crappy treatment I have received to this point.
It sucks realizing your family is a dangerous place, that the sister you idolized really isn’t that nice, that the father you thought of as your hero cares more about someone else with no relation, than you. It’s hard to realize, I am nothing but a support system to dysfunctional systems and I will be the one to pay when I leave it.
But there is no other choice. If I am to thrive in a way that is more than just survive, I am going to have to keep jumping off cliffs. I may hate what I was born into, but either I learn to move past it, or I will spend the rest of my living days dying under it, never really feeling what is supposed to be mine.
Hopefully, as I learn to capture some of the heartbreak that went on under the surface, giving myself away will become easier, rather than painful. Hopefully, as I disengage of shaming people, the shame I wear will come off, a piece at a time.