Self

In my previous blog I touched upon self-esteem briefly. I am here to tell you that the biggest sad sack in the room can still have a giant ego.  Don't believe it, here I am, waving "Hello".  This is not to say I am confident in all topics.  Since I am a girl, math does make feel oogy.  And science takes a patience I will never possess.  You get the idea.  But I can sit in a room and gradually, systematically, rip apart every person in there, in my mind.  Did I hear a gasp of shock? First censor, my first response is "Fuck you!" Second response is "Oh I'm just kidding".  Third response is as follows:

My earliest memories of childhood are just glimpses at this point, the youngest being 5 years old.  The first things that pop into my head was being in kindergarten and the tights I wore under my dress were cream colored with some sort of ribbing but they didn't quite fit, a little too small.  I was always tugging at them, the crotch (I hate that word) always hung too low.  So my mom's solution was for me to wear my underwear on the outside of the tights instead.  So unless you were rolling around on the floor, which I was, nobody would know.  Big surprise, some kid said "Hey you got your underwear on the outside". It wasn't all that traumatic. I just remember it.  I do recall the contempt in the kid's voice though.  Besides that there are little memories like the sour smell of a 1 pint carton of milk and how the paper carton broke down so quickly when you pressed your mouth on it over and over.  In that same vein, the pure joy of when the cafeteria had chocolate milk for the day. I remember running to the door when the recess bell went off, trying to be the first in line, falling, sliding and cutting my right leg and knee and walking down the hall with my leg caked in gravel and blood dripping down to my ankle.  And the very next day, doing the EXACT same thing.  But to describe these first few years of school, not much stands out.  Things really changed around 8-10 years old, I do remember that I suddenly started worrying about school more and more. Gym class became an increasingly dread-filled experience.  And the biggest thing that stands out is how all my quirks and short-comings became fodder for my classmates.  "Don't you have any other clothes?"  "Carrot top!!"  "Your hair is on fire"  And who can forget the classic gym class humiliation, say it with me, getting picked last or 2nd to last for teams.  You'll never know how many times I survived on the "AT LEAST I wasn't picked last"  Come with me won't you while I paint a picture of myself in 1973.  Messy carrot red hair, lime green polyester stretch pants (homemade no less by my grandma with a pleat sewn into the front of the pants), peach colored sweat shirt, and tennis shoes from your local K-Mart.  Not exactly a princess smelling of cotton candy and sunshine, huh?

I'm going to pause from this description to say, I get no pleasure from describing the previous.  It still makes me feel out of control and vulnerable and to retell it as an adult, ashamed too.  Ashamed that it still causes me enough grief that I am writing about it now.  That being said...

This time period is when I remember the verbal onslaughts starting.  Nobody ever beat me up and it didn't happen even every day.  This what I can say for certain, my parents never had my back. They never stood up for me. They never told me I was good enough just the way I was and they never told me how to deal with it except to say "Just ignore them".  I am here to tell you, playing opossum doesn't work.  Silence to a child is little more than a reason to fill the chasm with their clever taunts and insults. Silence makes you a weirdo.  Silence makes you invisible until that's all you want to do is disappear.  To my adult brain, this all seems melodramatic. But to the child's mind who looks to the parents to navigate them and protect them in this world, it felt like being thrown to the proverbial wolves.  As you would expect, the bullied adopt the bullies' techniques.

I did not become a bully.  I did judge you in my mind.  I judged you harshly.  And every new person who was mean to me was just that much more evidence that there was something wrong with me but I could also find plenty wrong with you.  And the mind that can torture you with memories can also provide you with a terrific fantasy life.  More and more I found myself pulling away from the people who I craved to belong.  I created this idea of what a successful life would entail.  So anything I deemed as ordinary was eliminated.  Having kids was ordinary and why would I have kids so they could hate me too?  Why do I want to create another creature just like myself?  The idea of reliving my childhood through another person sounded like torture.  Reliving these thoughts is painful.  There were many other directions in life I eliminated but it just feels like details now.

This is the kind of random thing that has happened to me as an adult that keeps these feelings going.  Once I was walking down the highway to get to my boyfriend's job to pick up MY fucking car.  I was in my very early twenties.  A small child difference in weight.  I was wearing baggy sweatpants after working a shift waiting tables at Pizza Hut and some car full of guys going down the road yelled out the windows at me "Hey Fat ass!"  "Why don't you join Weight Watchers?"  "Hey  (insert random fatty insult here)"  This hit and run caught me off guard, made me upset, and cry to my boyfriend where I was picking up MY CAR (did I mention that) and he told me to get over it.  The more I tried to convince him that I was wronged, the madder he got at me.  The madder he got a me....

Here's an example of something that happened within the last two years.  I work in a hospital and I used to work the day shift.  Like a factory, we had break times and for some reason the supervisors encouraged us to all go to the cafeteria and take our breaks together.  I think it was so they could keep an eye us and know if we were taking too long of breaks.  As is natural when that many women are crammed at the same table will do, conversations would develop.  Unfortunately the topics drove me crazy.  One lady would come down and spew the same bitches about the nurses everyday.  One lady would recreate the last two hours of work for us.  One lady would talk about her fucked up daughter and her fucked up grandchildren and all the bad decisions they made in life.  And one lady like to run to management whenever I said the word Fuck.  So when I could no longer take the barrage of crazy and getting in trouble for cussing, I excused myself from this break table and went somewhere else in the hospital.  And this is the response I got.  These things were said to my face.  "What, do you think you're better than us?"  "How are we supposed to feel since you're not coming to break with us anymore?"  This is the reaction I got from women raging in age from 40 to 62 years old.  My head hurts now. FUCK YOU Norma. (That's the lady who tattled on me).

I tell you all this not so you will look at me as a victim or feel sorry for me, not at all.  These are the sort of human interactions that still fucking confuse me.  I want to call them all out on their crazy.  I want to tell them to keep their opinions to themselves.  My brain tries so hard to make sense of all this stuff and sometimes, the only way I can survive is to go back into my head and put them down.  And on the outside, just ignore it.