When people ask me how I am, I reflexively say that I am fine. Even when I am anything but fine. It’s hard coded into me.

But why? Why is it so hard for me to admit things are not OK at all?

Even with my doctor. And your doctor is supposed to be one person you can tell anything if it is relevant to your health. But the moment I am talking to my GP, I snap right into “placate and vacate” mode, where I only want to get the authority’s approval for giving them the answer they want so that they will leave me alone.

That’s how it was with my family. I was always a-OK to them. Even when I was so depressed that nothing felt real and I was constantly filled with anxiety and dread.

I gave them the answer they wanted, and they went away.

Because honestly, what good would it have done to fess up? All that would happen is that they would stop for a moment after saying “Oh.”. Then they would change the subject. My family was not equipped to deal with a lot of emotion.

Instead of help, I would have ended up feeling more depressed than ever because I opened myself up and then got rejected. Actually, not even rejected. It was more like being ignored for being too much of a disruption to the person’s expectations and making emotional demands of people who, like me, were highly cerebral.

Unlike me, however, they were not natural empathic healers. Especially not to me. I was officially unimportant. My needs were irrelevant to their lives and I was expected to mroe or less just fade into the woodworking so they could go back to pretending that this surprise interloper hadn’t shown up and upset the apple-cart of the family dynamic.

They never made room for me. There was no room in their emotional budget for me. I was left to fend for myself in all things because I did not officially exist and there was no way they were going to tale anything away from what they already had in order to give me anything, let alone my fair share of the love, attention, consideration, feeling of importance, or even basic validation.

Instead, I had to live like a mouse. Fitting in where I could, trying hard not to be noticed (because I would be passively punished for drawing attention to myself) and being absurdly and pathetically grateful for even the smallest scraps of attention and approval because I was so lonely and starved for attention that a bread crumb was a feast to me.

I couldn’t ask for anything. If I tried, I would get that same awkward pause and then be treated like I had asked for a lung, a kidney, and a firstborn child.

The message was clear : there was no room on the budget for me. When someone does not officially exist, the very idea that they would have the temerity to actually ask for something is absolutely ridiculous, not to mention outrageous.

It was as if I was caught trying to steal from them.

No wonder, then, that I stopped trying, and started deflecting their insincere inquiries. It was the least painful option. To this day, I battle a deep sense of feeling like I don’t deserve anything, that I am unimportant to the point of irrelevancy and that I should never stop apologizing to the universe for existing.

How you treat your kids is way more important than what you say to them. Nobody ever told me I was unimportant and that they wanted me to disappear. If they had, they would have had to confront how badly they were treating me, and obviously I did not, in any way, warrant that level of discomfort, so they just went on thinking everything was fine.

And like a trained seal, I did what was expected of me and played along.

School was the same. Nobody wanted to deal with me. When I tried to tell the teachers about the brutal bullying I was experiencing, I was just told whatever it took to get my to go away so they could go back to dealing with something actually worthy of their attention.

Actually acting on my behalf was so far out of the question as to be unthinkable. After all, they would have had to get up from their desks, and go outside, and find the perpetrators, and haul them to the office and punish them, and oh my, they are exhausted just thinking about the going outside part of all that.

And all just to keep a grubby little smartass from getting what he deserves for being such a weird and difficult child?

No fucking way.  They resented even the effort it took to get rid of me. Anything more than that would be an unconscionable imposition.

If it had been another kid, one they liked as opposed to one they thought of like one would think of an incontinent old dog with fleas, they would have intervened. If it had been one of the keeners in my class, the very fact that they had been physically attacked would have been seen as a major indictment of the whole school and caused people to wonder what the world was coming to when an innocent (and highly presentable) child can’t even feel safe at school.

But it was just that weird Bertrand kid, and he brings it on himself by being weird, so to hell with it.  It’s not even worth the time and effort it takes to reject me. Only the absolute minimum of engagement is acceptable, and even that is deeply resented.

What happened on the playground stayed on the playground, along with my blood.

So whether it was home or school. I was treated like I was less than shit. I deserved absolutely nothing and should be grateful people ever notice me at all.

And that’s how I still feel to this very day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.