Just to get this out of the way : water imagery!

I have been contemplating the iceberg that sits on my heart and keeps me from being able to totally relx around people, let alone be truly open with them and thus connect with them on more than an intellectual level.

I can feel it\ there, a gnarled knot of tension and fear and paranoia, and compared to it, the rest of the the ice around my heart is a  half-cup of lukewarm slush.

It’s where all those miles of frozen tundra inside my soul come from. It is the frigid prison I built for myself to keep the world OUT and be SAFE. Safe where nobody could touch me. Safe where I knew the arctic winter cold would kill anyone who tried.

And some have tried, and died, banging their hearts on some mad bugger’s wall. I didn’t know how to let them in. Presumably I did know at one time, but after a while these things get rusted in place.

It’s not their fault. I just couldn’t relate to them. They were… normal. They had normal childhoods with normal parents who fussed over them, scolded them, looked out for them, worried about them, and fought with them.

I couldn’t be part of that world. Not with all that ice in me. I was stuck in an over-intellectualized trap that kept me safe… and isolated. I could never let down my guard. Not with people who live in the real world, undetached.

I still don’t know if I can be part of that world. I’d like to be. Heck, I long to be. part of that warm and shining world that I saw in the windows of other people’s houses. I would look and wonder what it was like to live there. In that world.

But I lacked the language and the mental flexibility to recognize what the problem was. I suppose that was part of the shared reality of my family. I would look into those houses and wish I was there but then I would admonish myself and feel guilty because I could neither see nor articulate what they had and my family did not.

Life just seems more…. real in there. It was a world full of people for whom icy intellectualism is not an option so they had no choice but to deal with things as they come and do they best they could with the muddle of emotions and thoughts that life had given them.

Sometimes they act on emotion. And they don’t feel ashamed of it either. That’s an acceptable thing in their world. These people did not grow up in the kind of regime of extreme emotional hygiene I did.

In many ways, my mother is a very sweet, kind, wonderful person.

But if you are afraid to upset your mother because you love her so much, that does not leave a lot of room for honesty, and without honesty, there is no intimacy. No connection. I feel like my siblings and I all got the same programming mixed in with our sloppy joes on Saturday night,.

That programming said : always be peaceful and calm and happy around Mom. Don’t let any negative emotions show because she will get upset and she is such a strong projecting empath that the negativity will come right back at you, along with the terrible guilt about having upset her.

So I don’t know about my siblings, but I never told her a damned thing about what was really going on in my head or my life. Around her, I was always OK. Fine, really. No need to worry about little ol’ me. Nothing to see here. Move along.

That left me with nobody I felt I could talk to about my problems. And no way to express all my negative emotions… including the suicidal ones.

And the thing is,. I think I internalized this regime of always being A O K as far as the world was concerned. It was definitely not okay for me to not be okay. I knew deep down that what people wanted was a response that reassured them enough so that they could go back to not thinking about me.

Like this little alarm went off in their heads now and then and they realized they had been ignoring me for a long time and there was probably something they should be doing about that. Probably.

So it was easy for me to give them that signal they wanted. I knew that no good could come of saying anything but that I was fine. People wanted to maintain the momentum of their daily lives and if I had given a non-OK response, it would have ended up in an emotional train wreck as people reacted with a level of shock commensurate to my suddenly projectile vomiting blood while my head rotated.

Get your kids the Fun Time Exorcist Sprinkler Toy today.

That’s how unexpected a non-OK response would have been. A non-OK response would have forced people to deal with me as a human being when they were so comfortable forgetting I existed.

No way that would have gone unpunished. No way I rated even one percent of that kind of emotional investment.

My conception was an accident. Do I was born already an inconvenience. An imposition. And my family was quietly determined to keep the disruption to their lives to an absolute minimum, and that meant minimizing me.

And to this day, I feel like I don’t have a right to exist. Like I am a detriment to all who know me and nobody ever really wants me around or wants to hear from me,. and if I am lucky enough to accidentally get some attention, I am comeplled to do my darnedest to entertain them as best as I can in order to encourage them to keep the attention coming for as long as I can.

That last thing I would do is reveal anything remotely negative or serious about myself. Then people would run away in packs because I was already wearing their patience thin just be attracting their attention and reminding them I exist.

Any negative emotion coming for me would be a patience-snapping unendurable imposition of the highest possible order.

So I kept everything locked up tight inside. Nothing else was safe.

And I learned to disappear. After all, that’s what seemed to make people the happiest. When I did my level best to preserve the illusion of my nonexistence.

Don’t talk at the dinner table. Don’t attract attention to yourself. Never ask for anything, ever.  Not even if your life depends on it. Go along with whatever your parents ask of you, They are both busy and tired and they have enough on their plates dealing with their three older PLANNED children. The ones they INVITED.

So you’ll just have to fit in wherever. Or not. We don’t care either way. Just don’t bother us by having any kind of needs or wants or desires or anything.

Meanwhile, I was drowning at the bottom of an icy-cold ocean and being crushed by the pressure.And I didn’t even know it.

It persists to this day. There’s a lot of things I would like to talk over with my mother AND my siblings, but that would disrupt THEIR lives, and so no matter how much it might help me, it’s completely out of the question.

My needs never even enter into it. I am worth absolutely no investment of time, energy, consideration, or even mere thought, or any other conceivable resource, whatsoever.

And that’s why I grew up to be crazy,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.