Daily Archives: December 6, 2015

Happier in Holland

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Read this article and see if it doesn’t make you want to move to The Netherlands.

Of particular interest to me is the section where it talks about how Dutch mothers are some of the most relaxed mothers in the world. This connects directly to the stuff I wrote about not that long ago about how relaxed, calm mothers raised confident, risk-taking, exploratory kids who make friends naturally and grow up to be stable, healthy adults.

Now imagine a whole nation of such people. Astounding.

Like I have said before, I am the nervous child of a nervous mother. I can’t say what I was like when I was born (obviously), but by all reports, I was a quiet baby. Didn’t cry much, happy on my own. And I was definitely a happy preschooler at one point. Oodles of natural charm and cute as all get out. And precocious as well. It was quite the package.

Then, the abuse happened.

So in that sense, I don’t know how much of my mother’s nervousness I inherited. A case could be made that I wasn’t born with a nervous temperament. As for her influence in raising me, that is very difficult to track, because while I have lovely memories of time spent with my mother as a wee one, most of my conscious memory of preschool life I was being raised by my babysitter Betty.

My parents had me nights and weekends, of course, but the nights didn’t really count, as they were always busy and/or tired. Thus the pattern of emotionally absent parenting began.

So while I did not have a nervous parent looking over my shoulder, instilling their fears into me, and keeping me off the swings, I also didn’t have a calm, confident parent I could run to when I was upset and needed comforting and reassurance.

I just had Zombie Mom and Angry Dad, and siblings who had little time for me either. I didn’t even have friends. When I contemplate all those years of loneliness, I feel an arctic wind blow through my soul.

I was so sad for so long. And I didn’t have the words to express it. And nobody knew, because if anyone asked, I said I was okay. I was far from okay, but I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be not-OK. My parents and siblings made it clear that I was useless and weak and should just stay out of the way, and I was to never, ever, ever ask for anything.

And so helplessness and hopelessness became the norm. I was miserable and couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t even know I was sick. When you are a kid, you don’t know what is normal and what is mental illness. If you had asked me if I was mentally ill, I would have said no, because my picture of mental illness would have been formed by TV and I knew I wasn’t like the crazy people I had seen THERE.

To be honest, I had never heard of depression. Few people had back then. I had literally no idea that being sad and scared all the time was an illness. I knew there was something wrong with me, but like a lot of depressives, I just assumed it was because I was worthless and useless and awful.

After all, that’s how the world treated me. And here’s the result : here I am still trying to process my childhood at the age of 42.

If only I had been born in Holland.

It’s a childhood that is hard to digest. I withdrew so far into myself that I am still trying to find me way out. Instead of breaking out of my shell like the baby chick I saw at Rainbow Valley, my shell just got thicker and thicker, and I lost my ability to feel safe.

To this day, I have trouble expressing my pain to anyone in realtime. My reflexive response is always to say everything is fine and I’m okay (so leave me alone and go away). It is wrong, deeply so, but it is the path of least anxiety. I have a deep seated fear that something terrible will happen if I open up.

It a vulnerability thing, at least in part. I feel like saying there is something wrong would expose me. Partly it’s because admitting it to someone else means facing the fact that I have a lot of problems, and part of me is still in deep denial about that. As absurd as that seems.

But I guess there’s still a part of me that thinks I will just snap out of it one day. That I will wake up, shake the depressive fog out of my head, and stride out into the bright and beautiful day of mental health like nothing ever happened.

And part of it is that I feel like if I admit there is something wrong, I will get in trouble for it. That opening myself up and making myself vulnerable like that will result in rejection, punishment, and shame instead of acceptance, comfort, and reassurance. I tried to open up many times as a kid. Every single time, it ended without my getting any of the help or at least sympathy I needed.

Why? Because they didn’t like me either. So like everyone else, they didn’t have time for me and honestly just wanted me to go away and stop bothering them.

I am seeing a real pattern here.

No wonder I ended up crazy. I was a little kid left all alone in the world. Orphans got more attention. No wonder I ended up with a feeling that nobody actually wants me around and everyone wishes I would just go away. That was the entire message of my childhood.

At least now, I am on the path to recovery. I don’t know if I will ever heal completely, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now, anyhow.

And if it’s a train…. so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not really me

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I am someone pretending to be me, and frankly, making a hash of it.

I read an article about the well known psychological phenomenon known as impostor syndrome . Basically, it describes the feeling that man high achieving people have that they are not really the person people think they are. They just have everyone fooled somehow, and any day now, people will figure this out and they will be exposed and everything will come crashing down.

I have known people like that.

It’s a very tragic syndrome from an outsider’s point of view. Here is this person doing genuinely amazing things who, against all rationality and reason, think that the person who did those things is not really them. It’s a bullshit version of them that doesn’t really exist and some day people will figure it out.

And the thing is, the people thinking these negative thoughts are actually soothed by them. The idea that this tense charade will end soon is a relief to them, even as it spurs their anxiety.

So what is going on? The sad truth is that a negative self-image is so deeply ingrained in these people that they will deny reality itself in order to maintain it. Faced with evidence that threatens this negative status quo, like genuine accomplishment, the only solution is to deny said evidence.

That is actually a lot less frightening to these people than the far more fundamental shift that improved self-esteem would entail. That’s why the controlling factor is how deeply ingrained this negative self-image has become. The more deeply ingrained it is, the bigger a change positive evidence represents.

And it is the nature of the human animal to resist that kind of change. Our emotional equilibrium is maintained by a system that by default is set to reject big changes. It’s designed to protect the integrity of our knowledge base and even our sense of reality, but it can also be our worst enemy when it works to maintain the deep belief in our own worthlessness rather than accept that the undeniable evidence of our own achievement is valid and thus attached to us.

Another thing mentioned in the article is the difficulty in valuing that which comes easily to you. Regular readers will recognize that as something I have talked about in this space many (many) times. The labour theory of value is the strongest and most natural value system, far stronger than any extrinsic valuations, and under that theory, value equals difficulty.

After all, we’d be far more impressed by a grandmother running a marathon than a fit young person. Why? Because we’d assume it was far more difficult for Grandma.

Therefore, if you have a natural talent for something, it can be hard to put much value in it. Like I have said before, it’s hard to get excited about something that, for you, is as easy as tying your shoes. Even if others are impressed by it, you’re still like, “Whatever. Glad it made you happy. ”

Which brings the conversation around to me. You probably saw that coming a mile away. When I posted a link to the article on Facebook, I rather flippantly said something like “Well, I am pretty confident in my talent, so I am not worried about this happening to me. ”

And it’s true that I am perfectly willing to accept evidence that I am outrageously talented, incredibly intelligent, and possessed of a startlingly unique and insightful point of view that will ease humanity through the growing pains of a new and glorious future.

It’s like I have room reserved on my ego shelf just for evidence like that. Part of me has always believed I was exceptional. Part of me, in fact, would be pleased to receive such evidence… but not surprised.

But that’s not where my impostor syndrome lies. Those are dream achievements, not the real thing. What about the things I have already achieved? How did I handle that?

My first instinct is to reflexively say “What achievements?” but that just shows the severity of the problem. Because I have achieved certain things.

Like high marks, for example. I got my marks for my Intro to Journalism class last week. 91 percent. That is an impressive mark by anyone who isn’t a Chinese parent’s standards. And yeah, it feels pretty good to get a mark like that. It even makes me feel abit better about myself. Golly, I really am smart!

But it doesn’t impress me all that much, because it’s not much higher than the sort of marks I usually get, and which I take for granted. When you can get 83 percent on an exam without even studying, it is really hard to see it as a big deal.

I won’t tell the story again, but regular readers know that I didn’t even know I was on the Honor Roll in my last year of high school until graduation night. And even then, I found it more funny than anything else.

So while I have never felt like I was an impostor who was only fooling the people, I have definitely been guilty of discounting genuine achievements because it is very hard for me to change my deep down lack of self worth. So I treat it like it’s no big deal.

But I have done some impressive things. I wrote, directed, and starred in a play that took me 24 hours to write. I started two highly successful communities (Vancouver Freecycle and the local furry community) and nursed them along until they were big enough to survive on their own. I am in the process of conquering my depression and getting my life back. My creative writing teacher said I was a “very strong student”.

Most people haven’t done any of those things. And if I told people about them, they would think those were pretty cool things to have done.

And it does make me feel good to remember those things. It’s nice to know my time on Earth has not been a total drain on society.

And yet, deep down, my self-worth is still…. troublingly low.

What the hell is wrong with me>

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.