Feeling better today.

The sunshine helps, I think. It boosts my mood. So does moving around more. It’s hard to convince myself that motion will make me fill better despite all the times it totally has, but that’s the depression talking.

And I don’t listen to that whiny bitch any more. Never tells me anything good anyway. It can shut the fuck up permanently.

I would stick its head under water and laugh at the bubble till it died if I knew how.

Therapy was good. I told my therapist about how depressed I have been lately, and why. The stuff I covered on Wednesday. Told him how writing it out helped, too.

Once more, thank you.

He was pretty appalled when I told him about how I had to shop for my own clothes. It really is appalling when you think about it. A lot of my childhood is appalling.

I made the “mistake” of saying that I thought some people had far worse parents than I. I have met a lot of people online with whom I would not swap. Parents that beat them, screamed insanity at them, belittled them, did everything they could to make sure their kid never thought, even for a second, that they were valued or loved.

But therapists do not like that kind of quantitative comparison. They hate to hear their patients say someone else had a worse childhood than themselves. To them, it sounds like you are minimizing your own pain.

And they are not wrong.

He also made the point that in some ways, neglect is worse than outright abuse. I’ve said as much here. Abuse at least gives you a relationship and an enemy. The person beating you is the Devil. You’ll kill them or get out or both. But when you are emotionally neglected like I was, there is no clear enemy.

My parents did fine on the basic level of parenting. I never went hungry. I had a birthday party every year. I got a winter jacket and boots when I needed them. Ditto school supplies.

And of course, my parents never told me they didn’t care about me, didn’t think I was worth anything, and wished I had never been born. To this day, I am sure they would deny ever even thinking those thoughts.

And I’d believe them.

But the thing is, it doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is how you act, and from a very early age, I was given the distinct impression that I was, at best, an afterthought.

I told my therapist that all my life, I have felt cared about, but not cared for. Caring about someone in a passive kind of way requires very little effort and absolutely no commitment.

The example I used was telling a friend that you had to move this weekend, and them saying “That sucks. Good luck with that. ”

They have definitely established that they care about you enough to be sad that you are doing to have to do something which sucks. But they are also not going to exert the tiniest bit of effort to actually help.

That is how it has been for me for my entire life. Teachers, parents, eve siblings sometimes. Everyone went on record as caring, but absolutely none of them were inclined to go even slightly out of their way to help me.

Couple that with the way my parents told me, both in words and in attitude, that I was never ever allowed to ask for anything, including help, and I was one abandoned kid.

But not in any ways that show, of course. Real abuse leaves no evidence.

So all through my childhood, I was terribly alone. Nobody was there for me. I had nobody I could rely on, nobody who had my back, nobody who was willing to do a damned thing to help the weird little fat kid.

You would think I would be able to go to my teachers, but nope. Their response was always the Platonic ideal of caring about but not caring for. They were technically sympathetic to my plight, but they made it clear they were not going to do anything about it. They just wanted me to go away.

That’s why I eventually gave up trying. It was really hard for me to ask for help in the first place with how my family had raised me. Having my head messed up by getting an answer that seemed sympathetic but didn’t actually help was too much.

I mean, what a trip to lay on a kid, right? From where I sit now, it was clear that they didn’t want to help me, but when I was elementary school age, I didn’t understand that. So I would go away from those encounters feeling like I had gotten what I wanted, but also knowing that I hadn’t, really.

Eventually, my cynicism caught up.

Looking back, I am amazed that I didn’t end up being a very bitter, angry, and possibly even dangerous person. I suppose the lack of a clear enemy helped with that. I had no idea I was being neglected as a kid.

However you are raised is normal to you.

It took a lot of years of adulthood for me to be able to articulate and understand what was wrong with my childhood. All the sort of surface things a kid could understand were there. I wasn’t beaten or verbally abused. I lived a normal middle class life. I had a roof overhead and food on the table and a place to lay my head.

I would not have been able to understand, let alone articulate, what was different about my childhood. And even if I had been able to do it, I probably would have blamed myself for it, like I did with everything else.

After all, I was the weird little fat kid who was way too smart for his own good. That meant there was something wrong with me, something that meant I would never fit in or be accepted.

Of course it was all my fault.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.