Love or a lack of.

I don’t feel loved here in my parents’ home. I feel fragmented and harassed and under constant attack. Little attacks, but I’m always on edge, waiting to be told that I did something wrong, that I have to do something that I don’t want to do. My life is made up of little moments of dread. I expect the worst. Always. How can it be love, if I’m stifled and broken and failing and falling apart?

I don’t know how to give love other people, and I’m afraid to love other people, because I have such a skewed sense of what it means to love and be loved. Love seems to be an obligation, something I have to work desperately hard to earn, something that is always in the periphery, just out of my ability to see clearly or grasp adequately. Yes, love has always been something I’ve had to earn, not something I’ve been given freely. I had to do right, I had to be perfect, I had to make sure the other person was entirely happy, entirely pleased in every aspect of their life that I could affect before I could even think of being loved. And I think that by love I mean even the mere acknowledgement that I existed.

I just feel that everything I have is something I’m now in the process of paying back. For example, I feel as though I owe my parents thousands and thousands of dollars for all of the money they spent in raising me. I feel as though I am a bad person because I don’t have money to give them. At the same time, I have this acidic anger lodged in my stomach that just wants to lash out and scream at them for being horrible people and doing everything wrong in raising me. And this makes me feel even worst, because it all then becomes double guilt. Like I was a very expensive mistake who doesn’t deserve anything that she has, and never will.

These thoughts make my heart hurt. Literally, I get chest pains that ache up through my left chest, shoulder, and neck when I think about these things.

So, I’m 25, financially in debt about $5000, and believe that I owe my parents extraordinary amounts of money, so I’m emotionally in debt about $100,000, which I’ve been paying for the last 20-odd years in guilt, depression, existential crises, tears, headaches, stomach, and muscles pain.

And this is such a hard place to be, taking responsibility for myself, for my emotions and behaviours, without blaming. I feel like I’m blaming my parents for ruining my life, and then I feel guilty and sick about that , like I’m a horrible person for even considering that they could have had any kind of impact on the person that I grew into, which makes everything just topple over that much further.
The thing is, my parents have, unintentionally, made me into themselves, and neither of them can see this. Neither of them can recognize that all of my fears, pains, and breakdowns are pieces of themselves that I am showing to them. That I have picked up and grown into. They think that what I am, what I have become over the years has to do with me and my experiences solely. They are too afraid to see just how fucked up and unhappy they are.

I think that, from the moment I was born, I’ve been trying to make my parents happy. Desperately trying, and nothing, ever, nothing I could do took away the pain and suffering, the deep unhappiness that welled from inside of each of them and flowed and pooled, caking over all of our lives. And I internalized the fact that I couldn’t make them happy, which meant that I could never do anything right. I was in, and continue to be in, a completely no-win situation. My parents are not happy people, and it’s not my fault. But I believe that it is. Each of those times when I did something, who knows what, thousands of attempts at making them happy, or in other words, trying to get their love, I was fundamentally rejected. I experienced small trauma after small trauma, which embedded themselves in my emotional core, in my intellectual mind, in my survival instincts. I am a failure because I failed to be lovable. If my parents couldn’t even purely love me, than obviously there was something inherently wrong with me.

Their love was always tempered with sadness. Myself as child interpreted that as being my fault. I was always too aware, but didn’t know how to interpret what I was experiencing.

I’m listening to one of my favorite songs, “Streetlight” by Tom Mcrae, and the lyric that always hits me is “and every night I breathe her in, feel her sink into my skin, still I feel I am envious and obvious and desperate for your love, I am shattered by and criticized and still I crave your touch”. Which pretty much sums up my life. I scramble and struggle to fit pieces of myself back together, to hold delicate fragments together with any kind of glue or masking tape or blood that I can find, but that all of this work is completely undone by my need to be loved, and my inevitable failure at it.

So no wonder I feel this almost unidentifiable nausea/sadness/heartburn/utter exhaustion/failure when I think of love. That is what love is to me, that is what I’ve learned it to be. No wonder I have so much difficulty in being a friend, no wonder I find it impossible to be in a relationship. It hurts less to not let anything in rather than be faced with failure again. And the anxiety… infant fear of parents not caring enough to protect me, childhood experience of emotionally and physically being rejected by my parents.

Being shown that there is something wrong with you is a very different experience than having it implied. When I was 9, my exhausted parents decided that I was an unreasonable and emotionally uncontrollable child, and after seeking help from one ( one! Only one! My mother, who is the queen of third and forth medical opinions!) psychiatrist had me locked away on the psych ward of childrens hospital for 6 weeks. I was pathologized, rejected, medicalized, and treated cruelly and coldly by my parents and a number of health care workers who were supposed to be healing and helping emotionally damaged children. My parents abandoned me, and told me it was my own fault. That’s the love I know. Blame and abandonment, baked with a lovely sugary icing of guilt. Sure makes me want to go out and find more of it. At least my fear of abandonment is justified. I guess.

Untangling all of these things is such a process of repetition. Repetition has such a negative connotation, but sometimes, it is this act which brings a certain sense of clarity, especially emotional clarity, that is hard to discern elsewise ( elsewise being the non-existent replacement word, interchangeable word, for otherwise.). What else is writing, but finding different evocative ways of saying the same things over and over?