Walking on heavy ground with this one.
During yesterday’s Thursday Therapy, I ended up saying, “maybe I should just make peace with being the sort of person who will always have to rely on others”.
And that opens an industrial sized kettle of wrist-thick worms.
Let’s take the most obvious worm first : men are “supposed” to be independent.
It wounds and enrages my male pride to imagine being such a weak wishy-washy wimp that I am a burden on others for the rest of my life. I have to believe that I will some day be able to at the very least carry my own weight and pay my own way or I will go crazy.
The fact that I have been a burden on others for almost my entire life fills me with a deep and terrible shame that weighs me down like the proverbial millstone around my neck through every moment of my life.
It doesn’t matter that it “shouldn’t”. I could recite all the reasons why it’s “perfectly fine” that I can’t survive on my own like I am reading them all from a hymnal.
Forgive yourself, you’re sick. Nobody expects ill people to be independent. You just concentrate on getting better. You do the best you can. We don’t mind supporting you because you’re wonderful in your own way. Don’t worry about us – none of us are here at gunpoint. We can handle the extra burden because we’re stronger than you, and we do so willingly because we love you.
But I still hate myself for the fact that I will always be a burden on others and end up using other people as barriers to crouch behind between me and Dread Reality because I’m too weak and scared to handle damned near anything.
And the weight of the burden of shame I carry as a result is incalculable. It is the rock that crushes me, the darkness that oppresses me, the black cloak that smothers me.
Going deeper, there is also how limiting it is. Being so weak makes pursuing my own destiny and finding out who I really am and all that teenager and adult stuff.
I am trapped in this crapbox of a life by my illnesses and my failure to thrive, and I feel like I am drowning at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, with all that ocean above me and me down here where sunlight cannot reach me, barely staying alive through all the pain and suffering, wishing I could truly be alive.
And I deserve so much better. But without the power and/or strength to get what I deserve, what god damned difference does it make?
I guess, for now, I can’t really make peace with a dependent life. I’m still too restless and hopeless and frustrated. At the very least, I need to further convince myself that I “pay the bills” in my own, unique way.
Jesus, that sounds so pathetic and lame.
What I am saying is that I am deeply conflicted still.
But some day, I will make it out of this funk so I can exit my shame.
Maybe then, I can even learn to love myself.
More after the break.
Gnar gnar gnar
OK, let’s gnaw on this wound some more.
Where does all this guilt come from? Why does being a burden on others mean so much that is so dark to me? Why can’t I relax about the whole issue?
Why can’t I forgive myself for being broken?
I mean, logically, it shouldn’t reflect on my self-worth and self-image at all. Lots of people get sick in lots of ways without thinking it makes them a terrible person or feeling horrible because they are such a burden on others.
So wither my complex?
The first explanation I can think of is that it is a manifestation of the illness itself. Depression thrives on making you feel bad however it can, and guilt for dependence on others is an obvious vulnerability it is all too happy to exploit.
It’s at least first-level plausible, and Newtonian physics, it answers all questions.. up to a point. But then just falls apart.
Because it really just begs the question. WHY do I have that particular weak spot?
For that I think we need to once more visit my childhood.
(SFX : Crowd groan)
Yeah yeah. Get used to it, a lot of bad shit happened then.
Like I have detailed here before, as the youngest of four kids with the nearest sibling being 4.33 years away from me, nobody ever had the time or patience to teach me what I needed to know in order to contribute to the chores like they did or take care of myself.
But that didn’t stop them from making me feel bad about not being able to do things by calling me “useless” and telling me that if I really wanted to help. I should just stay out of the way and let them take care of things.
I don’t even have words to describe the sort of violence that does to a child’s self-worth.
I was taught that I was useless, that I would always BE useless, and that I should feel terrible about it while having absolutely no control over it.
Geez no wonder I have this fucking complex!
And no wonder I feel so incompetent at life. What life skills I do have I was able to teach myself, for the most part. And were necessary for my own personal survival.
So I learned to cook for myself, and do my own laundry. But I never needed to mop a floor or vacuum because the others did that and refused to teach me.
Add in the clumsiness I got from a) having no friends to practice basic motor skills with as a small child and b) having nobody know or care that I was half-blind before my glasses when I was 6, and I have always felt helplessly maladroit, with no hope of learning very basic life skills and therefore being humiliatingly incompetent at things even retards can do for the rest of my god damned life.
The shame runs deep and hard in this one, n’est-ce pas?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.