Hopefulness, of a slightly estranged sort

I am a little lost to the sensation of balanced ground right now. I just moved back in with my parents for a month, after house sitting, and in two days I house sit again, with a lovely garden, but many many plants to water. And a cat to be fed.

One day with my parents and I am already just barely tip toeing the sanity and healthy existence line. So much anger, so much unhappiness, so little awareness of each other’s space, of what each of us could be possibly feeling. I’m not much in the mood for being trampled upon these days, this previously quick withering spine of mine seems to be steeling itself quite brazenly. So, being within physical proximity of the people responsible for so many of my traumas, albeit of the less blustery emotional kind, and unnoticeable to those who don’t know what to look for, it’s just too much.

I’ve had two days of no writing. I’m listening to Sigur Ros to repair the damage. If I had to pick one band/musician that epitomizes damage repair, or maybe even things like the delicate repair of the spines of old books, whether with fancy tools, or a bit of a scotch tape salvage operation, it’s Sigur Ros. I’ve never been a very hopeful person, but their music is a beginning lesson in hopefulness, and it makes me kind of pukey. In a good “I don’t really understand what I’m feeling, but I’m just happy to be feeling anything at all” kind of sea sickness way.

I listen to Terami Hirsch to be comforted and less lonely, to Charlotte Martin when I need to feel sad or full of strength, to PJ Harvey when I need to be angry and righteous, to Sigur Ros when I need to learn how to be hopeful.

Is hope the opposite of fear? When I’m afraid I ‘m in a place that is distinctly grey and walled in, fear to me is the absence of future, and hope is future based. Most of my moods are sullen and shaken ones, moments before I fall asleep when I worry if this will be the last time I every get to sleep peacefully, if the world will be ruined and I will be shattered when I wake up. I fear going to sleep because I fear what will be when I wake up. I fear boredom because it means I am wasting my life. I fear speaking because I am afraid of looking silly and foolish, unintelligent and uninformed. I fear starting anything because I will never be able to finish it. I fear pain. I fear being a useless human being. I fear meaninglessness. I fear intimacy because I fear rejection. I fear making the wrong choices. I fear being alone for the rest of my life. I fear isolation. I fear war and violence and torture. I fear that I and the people I love will never be happy. I fear confrontation. I fear making eye contact with people. I fear speaking my true thoughts aloud. I fear letting myself be beautiful because if I’m beautiful, then people will no longer reject me for being ugly, and will instead reject me for who I am. I fear disappointing people. I fear being loved because I’m not sure if I know how to love in return. I fear feeling things. I fear being numb, because I have been.

My brain stem is in constant hyperdrive, and I know it’s survival mechanisms based upon a seemingly irrational fear of imminent death that drives these thoughts. I know what is chemically happening in my body to make me feel afraid, and how this muscle tension and panic causes me to form such wild and frustrating thoughts, which in turn create more bodily anxiety. I understand the science of it, even though I explain it badly. But it’s frustrating that I can’t pinpoint the exact reasons why I react so strongly in ways that other people don’t. Why fear has taken so much root, why my tree is a massive mess of twistiness and strange pain.

Even though I have not experienced what most people classify to be major traumatic events, my body and brain react to almost every experience as life-threatening and logical brain shutdown worthy. It’s not that I’m not capable of logic and reason, it’s just that when I’m expected to perform, or prove that I’m fully capable, I go into survival mode, and the entirely logical part of my brain tunes out, leaving me a babbling mess of foggy feeling attacked. Any kind of criticism, even potential, leaves me shaking, as though I’m having my ego and true self pulled apart into unrecognizable and unworthy fragments right in front of me. So, it’s easier to believe that I’m stupid than to subject myself to such intense seeming scrutiny, even if that’s not what’s actually happening.

At points in my life I’ve seriously considered that being alone in a small house in the far off woods would be the best thing possible for me, the only way for me to go on living. Sometimes I think that that’s the only way I could cope, to shut myself off from any kind of interaction other than with art or music or books. Every conversation I have with anyone is strewn with unintended verbal insults or minute physical rejections. I read body language, facial expressions, and vocal intonations too well, and I take everything as rejection or criticism. What happened to me? I know that everyone doesn’t go through life experiencing being dragged apart and bones picked clean and cracked by everyone she looks in the eye, or shares a word with. Intimacy is agony because it doesn’t exist for me. A horrible statement, I know, and one that isn’t completely true, but in my bitter and weakened places it’s where I go. I don’t trust anybody not to hurt me, and I don’t like feeling so alone and defensive. I hate that I can’t let people in, and that I keep a relatively thick piece of sheet metal between myself and even my closest of friends.

I hate that I feel as though I don’t have the right to speak. I hate being so melodramatic. I hate that other people aren’t so melodramatic, because we should all be able to let go and let it out all together, and then it wouldn’t be such a vulnerable and scary thing. I hate being vulnerable, and I hate that I work so hard not to be vulnerable, because I respect and cherish vulnerability so much. I hate being a doormat. I hate that I don’t understand myself. Sometimes I hate my parents for failing to be strong enough to accept that they had a part in how fearful and fucked up and broken I am. Sometimes I hate my friends for not wanting to listen to me scream and cry and babble and lash out at the world. Sometimes I hate myself for not speaking up when I have the chance. I hate the world for not wanting to hear those of us who are in pain, and how emotional pain is belittled and pushed aside.

I hate being broken and fragmented and poetic and so thin skinned with such a barren multi-chambered heart.

And I hate feeling guilty. For living, breathing, existing, speaking, taking up space, for feeling hateful. For being brought up to believe that I ruined my parents life, beliefs given to me underneath sweet word of affection. I wasn’t born feeling unworthy, somewhere along the way I picked it up.

Now I’m angry and vicious, with a belly full of burning loathing that I just want to forgive and forget. I just feel so guilty harboring so much anger towards my mother, when I can see how much pain she’s in. How upset I get when she talks about the cruel ways her own mother treated her that she doesn’t realize she’s actually inflicting upon her own daughter. How she can’t see her own cruelty because she sees herself as such a victim, such a wonderful, loving, kind person, when she really is constantly lashing out at everyone around her, and overwhelming me, pushing all of her ideas and fears on me.

So little of this is my own. I learned how to hate myself from keen experts who have no idea of how negatively powerful they are. Now, it’s so hard to separate these webs of harshnessess from my own strong and kind self. And I feel like a truly horrible person for even perceiving and articulating these long aching joints of cruelty passed generationally. So, how do I become myself without causing them pain?

I separate.