I reached out to the 988 chatline tonight. I’ve called suicide/crisis hotlines maybe two other times in my life, once for truly feeling suicidal and the other time after escaping a near-death situation in a domestically violent home life. This time was different. I don’t want to die but I feel like I deserve hurt and punishment. I am not in physical, emotional or mental danger where I am; I’m in a very safe place, yet I feel like the walls are crumbling and caving in around me, and nothing feels securely fastened to the ground.

I never did learn any healthy coping skills for the experiences I’ve had in life. I don’t think that I truly understood how horrific my childhood actually was until this week. It wasn’t abuse in the sense that anyone beat me regularly (although my mother did spank, and she spanked in anger). I was never sexually molested. But I was deeply scapegoated and emotionally abused by a narcissistic parent, and completely neglected and abandoned by the other. My childhood memories don’t make up what most memories do. A lot of people remember events, remember people. They remember the holidays and what they got those years, and the birthdays and birthday parties they experienced. They have happy memories they can grapple onto. I have a few select, isolated memories that I can look back on and visualize, but most of my childhood memories are FEELINGS, not pictures. Feelings of intense desperation and hopelessness, of suffocation. True despair. The feeling that there’s no way out of the pain.

I was a troubled child, to be sure, but I honestly believe that my troubles were directly caused by my mother. I wonder sometimes how I might’ve turned out if I had been born to a loving, nurturing and well-balanced family. Instead, I was born to a woman who had been sexually repressed by the 1950s and 1960s into being a model female. She has her own closet skeletons and a lot of baggage. She’s always said she never wanted to do to her children what her parents did to her. Some things she stuck with (like not bible-thumping us half to death), and some things she seemingly forgot she would “never do” (like silent treatment until an apology was issued). She didn’t want to be like her parents and she pulled so hard in the other direction she took to a different extremist approach. She came out of the closet and “found” herself, but in the time it took her to reach her liberation she had throttled my development as a woman. I lived through extreme bouts of shaming for wanting to wear dresses, and not my older BROTHER’S hand-me-down clothes. I felt shame for wanting to be girly and to like girly things. She was not always awful; she’d shown me what “lady parts” were and how they worked, so I had a good understanding of my anatomy. She would sometimes “play” with me when I wanted to play with my dolls. She was never fully invested, though. She never fully invested into any of my interests. I was a little girl who liked girly things, and while when I was very young that might’ve been an easy thing to support, the older I got the more disconnect there was because of her own sexual discomforts. She had been so repressed in her youth to be feminine that she rebelled against it, hard, as an adult and a parent, to the detriment of her own daughter. I experienced extreme bouts of shame and embarrassment at her hands when clothing shopping because she’d leave me by myself to “pick” things, with no help or encouragement. She was frustrated at having such a scared, anxious child who didn’t want to leave her side. She was the very reason that I felt so much intense fear, shame, and agony in public. She’d lose her patience with me in stores and berate me in front of everyone. She loves to make a scene. She loves to be the center of attention. And she’s never wrong. Yes, I know the tense in those sentences is current. They hold true today.

I only just started understanding where a lot of my anxiety stems from. A therapist once told me it was a repressed memory from a time in my life when I was very young. My mom believed it to be when I went missing at the zoo when I was 3. I have literally no recollection of this event occurring. I don’t have many memories from my young age. As I said, most of my memories are sensations and feelings, and experience ‘triggers’ that are familiar in some kind of sensory way but unrecognizable beyond that point.

But I really think I cracked it. I think I understand why the world is a horrifying and suffocating claustrophobic experience to me.

I couldn’t see.

I’m very nearsighted. My mother never took me to get my eyes checked. My brother needed glasses. My mother’s eyes are a mess also, one near and one farsighted. My father has a lazy eye and is nearsighted in the other. Why would you think that one of your children had perfect vision? Because I didn’t say anything? How is a child supposed to know the world looks wrong when it’s all they’ve ever known or seen? Did it never occur to my mother, in the years that she had me living with her, that my sitting nose-to-screen with the TV, movie theater screen or book I was reading was an indication that perhaps I couldn’t see well enough? My brother got his glasses, and I told her I believed I needed them too. Of course, I had at this point been prone to lying to protect myself from her wrath, but I didn’t understand how easy it was for her to tell. So every time I said anything, she would just take it with a grain of salt and believe it to be a fabrication. Every lie I ever told was steeped in a single truth: something was wrong, I was fearful and scared of consequences, and I was crying out for help. Even with a child who had a propensity to lie out of habit, a health issue should be checked regardless. It wasn’t until a teacher reached out to my mother because I was failing class that she took it seriously. She blamed me for never saying anything. She “didn’t know.” My poor teacher had to stand up for me because I couldn’t read the notes on the chalkboard, even sitting in the front row of class.

The world for going on about 10-11 years was blurry and terrifying. I couldn’t see where I was going when I was in the store. I couldn’t read menus. I couldn’t read signs. I couldn’t find classrooms because I couldn’t read numbers. I couldn’t find lockers. It was terrifying trying to do anything when everything was a blur. Nighttime was full of halo effects from all the streetlights that I couldn’t make out. And every time I was abandoned and left alone in an unfamiliar place, I didn’t think I’d be able to recognize or find my family again. And for a child who didn’t know that the world was meant to be crisp and clean, how was I supposed to understand what glasses were or how to ask for them? I only knew to ask when my brother got a pair.

I honestly believe that having uncorrected vision for over a decade is what created such a terrifying view of the world. Everything feels threatening. Even now when I can see and make things out, the sensation that things are unfamiliar and unfriendly still hangs over me. It’s taken me years to teach myself to just ignore those feelings and to “not care,” but the anxiety persists. The fear is always there. I know it’s irrational, and I hope that understanding the source of it will help empower me to overcome it, but it’s still a fresh realization and there has been very little time to process it yet, much less learn skills to cope and overcome.

This is only one source of my anxiety, but there are other causes as well. I have an intense fear of being judged harshly/critically/negatively, and that stems from my mother as well. She’s a very vindictive and, at times, hateful person. She judges people so viciously and unfairly at times that it’s hard to understand how she can also have a softer, kinder side to her. She’s a polarizing person and can be a conundrum to understand. The easiest way I’ve found to deal with her is to “sate” her ire. I appease, and I condone, and I sometimes passively enable. I’ve learned not to talk back, and not to argue. The easiest thing is just to nod and agree, and to get along to actually get along with life.

Her propensity to judge people leaked onto me. When it’s the only thing you’ve known (like living in a blurry world), it’s hard to see the world in its softer hues. Life was very bleak as a child because nothing felt safe. My mother judged me harshly on everything I loved. I didn’t like sports, so I was a social pariah during football games or family gatherings. I enjoyed nerdy things like reading, drawing very symmetrical pictures, playing videogames. I even liked to creatively write for a time. I think I have always had something in me that wants to create and bring life to the world, but I’ve stifled it and hidden it away to the point where it’s withered and died because I never nurtured it. It felt taboo to be me. If I liked something that my mother didn’t, she would scoff harshly at me and make fun of me for it. She would whittle me down with vitriolic sarcasm until all I felt was shame and embarrassment. Just for being a little girl who liked something, I was ashamed to exist. It was the same critical judgment I’d receive when she’d take me to McDonald’s and tell me to order something, and I would be maybe eye-level with the counter and nearsighted, and unable to see anything on the menu. The beratement I would get for wasting their time and dawdling in public was horrific. She would huff and puff, sigh in an exasperated way and just let loose. And her sighs are enough to create a very primal, convulsive reaction in me. That lurch into fight or flight kicks in immediately. It still hits me today. I’ve taught myself how to distance from it and ignore it, but I still have that physical reaction. It’s awful.

She would take me to therapists and then take me away from them when I explained what I was feeling. It got to the point where she’d go in with me, and she’d tell them what I was doing and what I was “lying” about (I never did lie to the therapists, even when she wasn’t in the room). She would sit there with her arms crossed, this angry and derisive smirk on her face, knowing full well that she was “right” and anything her troubled child said to the therapists was “wrong.” These therapists would let her lead the conversations, and then let her lead the diagnosis, and leave me feeling scared and unfulfilled. They would allow my mother to gaslight me right in front of them. The worst thing is that I’d leave these sessions feeling “lighter,” thinking that we had made progress, not understanding how horrifying it was that she was manipulating professionals, or that they were allowing her to do it. It was always a short-lived peace after a therapy session, and then the problems would reoccur. They were reoccurring because my mother had created a very terrifying home life for me, with eggshells everywhere and terror triggers. It could just be a look she gave me, or that horrific sigh that she would do, that would kick my adrenaline into fifth gear and have me feeling like I had to fight to survive. The phrases she would use, and the things that she would say, and how nothing she ever did was anything wrong or needed to be changed. Her way was the right way because she was the adult. She didn’t have to change any of her approaches; I had to change mine and fix myself. A child of 5-13 growing up with an abusive parent had to understand adult concepts and somehow manage to behave the way an adult would in processing and fulfilling all of the desired requirements to live peacefully in her house of horrors.

This doesn’t even cover the rest of it. She lived in a hoarder situation (and still does), refusing to clean up simple things or to get rid of them. I had so many horrific experience with cockroaches in my bed or on my body that I have a massive phobia of them and will literally run away screaming. I am distrustful of anyone she’s talked to because she would break my trust and tell people all about my problems. She’s still doing it to this day, and then denies that she’s done it (like the times when I privately discuss something personal and I am assured she won’t say anything, and then I find she’s told my brother all about it). Because of how she’s lived, and because of how chaotic and unstable my childhood was, I can’t stand unpacking any of my things. I spent years living out of boxes.

My migraine is getting worse and my thoughts are getting way more jumbled and I can tell the deterioration of my thoughts by how far off the beaten path I’ve gotten. I’m going to stop writing, take some medicine for my headache and then try to figure out what I can do to clean the slate tonight and try to find some peace. Maybe knit. Maybe play some Pokemon SV. It’s hard to do anything when I’m seeing auras.