This writing is far more revealing than what I normally feel comfortable with. I'll preface it with a Trigger Warning for all kinds of abuse. If you don't want to read it, feel free to move on, but this is my life, this is my survival story.
These types of questions always kinda get under my skin. I get this sense of unease when I think of answering them so I generally don't because that would require me to be blatantly honest with everyone “out there in the real world” as well as repeating the things that I already tell myself in my head. It would come off as exceptionally negative. This is a post all about ME, Emily.
Who are you and why are you here?
I’m nondescript Emily. I came here because I am sick and tired of being stalked and harassed by my ex family and ex 'partner' on conventional social media. I won’t go into where I am or where I work. I won’t disclose my age or anything descriptive about my child for safety reasons.
Why you ask?
Because my story is abysmally depressing and I am fearful. Yes. You read that right.
Am I happy with who I am?
Nope. I know I'm not. I can try and lather on as much make-up onto my life to make it look pretty, but I would know that it's just a façade. I think that I have made far more bad choices in my life than good ones that have led me to this present day.
I am absolutely covered in flaws. There probably isn't a part of my psyche or personality that isn't scarred in some way or another. I have been told so many times that I don't listen. I say things that are inappropriate without thinking. I apologize too much, I hate my own voice. I don't like being reliant on anyone, I'm terrible at accepting compliments (because I’m always looking for the hidden agenda) and even worse at accepting gifts (This is as a result of growing up where everything was transactional including receiving affection or tokens of appreciation). I tend to want to see the good in people for way too long and have ended up in horribly abusive situations as a result - yes, I count that as a flaw. I have weird taste in music and I don't really have any version of a social life, calling myself "socially awkward" is probably the understatement of the year. It takes a long time for people to understand me, even though I'm exceptionally boring as a person. I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning and tidying yet I think I fall short in my efforts because of the chaos that seems to reign supreme in my environment.
I'm not a bad person, but I have lost so much of myself in the last ten years, that I don't actually feel I even know myself or what I like anymore. I have way too many hobbies and interests that I don't find time for but I have very few marketable skills.
I undersell myself when I make "art" because I don't believe that my creations are worth anything but the lowest that anyone will pay, I know why this is and it's something that I definitely need to rectify - like NOW.
There are times when I truly do believe that I'm a terrible mother and that my daughter should have been born to a much better one. It's probably the one thing that I get down on myself about more than other issues because I am squarely responsible for her overall well-being and I really don't want her to have a childhood even remotely similar to what mine was, because then I have failed her entirely.
I've wrecked more relationships with friends, family and loved ones than I would like to admit, it stains my soul and is indelible, but those are the pages in my book that I would love to burn. Sorry, no exchanges, no refunds, this is your life and you will lie awake at night and mull over every shitty comment you made for the last 20+ years, every confrontation, every student, colleague and staff member that thought you were a crappy mentor.
I feel like I wasted a large portion of my life on chasing other people's expectations of me, ideals that they could show off to others, yet I still felt like a failure. Am I actually a failure? This is such a difficult question that catches in my throat and I find myself not able to breathe, let alone answer it, but I will try.
When I look back at everything that I have experienced and endured, the fact that I’m still here and still trying, I TRY to give myself some credit for it. I have not had the easiest life. Sure, I know I haven’t had the hardest life either and there are plenty of people worse off than me so I should count myself fortunate in some regard, but failure? Well, I feel like one often. There was a breaking point in my life and I know where it was where I think something inside me gave in and I lost my sense of self, my sense of drive, my fire essentially went out. I clawed myself out of it somehow but I don’t think that I ever fully recovered because since then, there have been more failures than successes and more going backwards than any other conceivable direction. It seems like the blows kept coming and I just wasn’t quick enough to get my dukes up in time.
I’ve still through all of that tried to be a solid, moral, ethical person. A good person in essence.
While I’m writing this my cat is busy nuzzling my chin with his nose and purring loudly. Does my cat think I’m a failure? Nope. He is loved and well cared for. He’s not the most spoiled kid on the block but he’s not a drain cat either.
Does my child think I’m a failure? Well when she’s screaming “mummy I hate you” at the top of her lungs because I chastised her for drawing on the wall and TRYING to explain having respect for other people’s belongings, yes, she probably in that moment hates me. I never reply with the same, I only say “I’m sorry that you feel that way about me” or “I’m glad you got that off your chest” but sometimes when she changes it and she cries and asks me “Mummy, why do YOU HATE ME?” My world seems to shatter in that moment because there is nothing further from the truth, I love her with every part of me and I know that teaching her the hard stuff isn’t going to be easy, but it’s necessary. It cuts so deep thought, through to my soul.
But you see the problem up there? I will ask what everyone else thinks before addressing myself. Do I think I’m a failure?
By the common definition of failure and success? Yes. I do consider myself a failure.
That is the hard truth and it’s something that I have to accept. Will I be able to turn it around? I’m trying.
I came up with something a few days ago when I let my mind run and have it’s own fun. I was busy looking for something in the nooks and crannies of the apartment and my mind popped out this phrase:
Late onset failure to thrive
It stopped me dead in my tracks and I froze. The term failure to thrive is something used by doctors when babies don’t meet the average growth targets for their age. It’s been studied but I haven’t found anything concrete as to why it happens. My suspicions rest solely on environmental factors. We are a product of our environment, I do believe that.
So what happens if you have an absolutely abhorrent environment but your will to survive and thrive even in that adversity is greater than the will to give in to it’s influence? You push yourself because it’s really a fight for survival and that’s all you know. Survive or die.
When you grow up like that, you don’t pay much heed to the idea of what society deems successful because all you are geared towards is getting through the day unscathed. You push yourself to the absolute limit mentally, emotionally and physically because you are convinced that if you don’t, you’ll die or have to suffer the wrath of your parent, sometimes I’m not sure which is worse when you’re living in it.
It becomes all you know until one day you are burnt out and bested and then? You collapse and it all comes crashing down. You admit defeat and you essentially acknowledge that you were never that strong, never that bright, you start believing everything your parents told you in the heat of anger and that voice drowns out any hopes of achieving anything again.
And that is where the Fs come into play. I can remember as a young adult that my initial reaction (not response, reaction) was to fight. Fight as if your life depended on it, because something inside me believed that it did.
But it changed when it all fell. When I fell.
It transformed into Freeze, Fawn and Flight.
Whenever I feel overwhelmed now, I want to run. I want to run away from everything and everyone I have ever known and I did once. I isolated alienated myself more and more. I became withdrawn, the world was a scary place and everything consisted of or hinted at danger. And what did I do? I went back to the abusers that I was so desperately running from originally. They welcomed me with open arms at first. They sympathized with my demise and the turmoil. They made me feel like I was safe. But that’s the saddest part about abusive situations. Lovebombing turns into something else entirely over time. They know where all your deepest wounds are and they pick at the scabs, never really allowing you to heal. They rip open scars from years ago and then throw vinegar on them just for added effect.
When I left, it was because I uncovered something so heinous that my father did that I couldn’t even believe that I was a product of someone so evil, so selfish, so hate-filled. My father had sexually molested my eldest sibling. It had gone to court but they never told me what it was actually about. The social workers failed me by not realising that there was so much more wrong with my dysfunctional family when I told them “I will go anywhere as long as it’s not with her” – my other sister, the one that was relentless at bullying me and who was sexually abusing me until that point. They abided by my wishes and I was placed in a family that much resembled an actual family.
There was no drunk mother screaming at her husband, breaking windows with her fists and trying to break down doors with an axe to kill him. There was no father with a gambling problem or who was a serial adulterer. There was no parent that laughed at the pain I endured that chalked it up to “sibling rivalry” or that it was all natural and part of growing up. There was no sister that brutalized me and threatened me. I didn’t get choked or have my head smashed in on a piece of concrete.
I walked on eggshells for weeks wondering when it was going to happen. I remember once having to direct my foster mother to my sister’s house to collect some of my belongings, but I couldn’t quite remember the directions. That was the first time I had a panic attack - at the age of 12. She didn’t know what was going on and while trying to concentrate on the road she herself panicked, tried to talk me down and I remember saying “I am so sorry, I can’t remember, I hate myself, I am so stupid I can never remember anything”. I remember looking at her face through my tears and seeing how petrified she was. I felt so selfish for making her feel bad. She told me that it was ok to not remember and that I wasn’t in trouble, she wasn’t angry with me. She said she knew I had it in me to remember. She asked me if I could remember seeing any markers like road signs and I remembered a T Junction with a massive double chevrons left and right but not straight. She told me that was good and that it would help. She asked me more and slowly we were able to find our way there. Perhaps in that moment she saw something in me that hadn’t occurred to her before, I was a really scared little girl that hated herself, that was desperate to do good by everyone or perhaps she thought “oh gosh, what have I got myself into by taking in this child?”
I remember another time when I was shopping with her and she asked me if I needed a razor to shave my legs. I wasn’t sure if it was a trick question because I had never been asked that before by a parent. I froze and just stared at her pleadingly. I opened my mouth by nothing came out, I felt absolutely paralysed with fear. She must have seen it because she turned back to the rows apon rows of hygiene products and she said “well I’ll get you some because I’m buying some for the girls and myself too” and I remember she turned round and smiled slightly, then dropped them into the basket and put her arm around me comfortingly. I was riddled with guilt, because I didn’t believe that I deserved anything that was specifically for me. I stuttered out a “thank you Yvonne” when we were at the checkout with my eyes fixed on the floor.
Eventually I had to speak to my parents about them wanting me to go back “home”. My parents took me to a little tavern bar thing down the road from their house. I remember having stew as they told me that I was a burden on my foster family and it was time to stop being selfish. They tried to soften it with niceties but I already knew that I was doomed to go back to that hell hole. My sister had already gone back and knowing that she awaited me made my stomach churn.
The day I went back was the day I knew that my father was a psychopath and my mother not far behind. I walked into a house filled with photographs of my eldest sister’s child who was only a baby at the time, where there were holes burnt through where her eyes were. I then was given the “talking to”. I was never to even usher my eldest sister’s name in the house or I would be out on the street and disowned. I was never to contact her ever again or I would regret it. I remember this vividly. I remember being wrapped so tightly in fear that I vowed to never disclose the abuse I had suffered at my other sister’s hands, I knew I would suffer being disowned and possibly worse.
The years went on, my mother’s alcohol abuse increased. The fighting got worse. I hated them. I hated my life. I hated being a prisoner. I made a little calendar and stuck it to my bedroom wall with all the days that I would have to endure until I had completed school and I could leave of my own volition. I used the little circle pieces of paper that come out of a paper punch that I would stick over each day that went by. The calendar seemed to go on forever and I felt like I would never get out. I stole money from my father’s moonbag in small denominations and stashed them away so that as soon as I could leave I would be able to travel. Somewhere. Anywhere. Just somehow get far, far away. I dreamed of going to America and starting a whole new life.
There is so much in my memory that is filled with grey blanks, slightly blurry memories of my childhood. It was only a decade ago that I realised how much I had completely dissociated through my life back then. They say it is a survival mechanism of your subconscious. That it packages these things into little blocks and locks them away.
Through time and reading up on dysfunctional families, I have learned a lot about myself and a lot about why I am who I am. Why I deal with certain conflict situations the way I do. Why I am prone to depression and anxiety. Why my mind runs a mile a minute when I panic over what any balanced person would consider a small obstacle.
Does any of my story make me unique? No. Countless people the world over have suffered similar or worse than I have, have survived and have turned themselves into successful individuals in spite of their upbringing, in spite of their failure, in spite of their challenges. I don’t think that I’m even remotely close to that – yet.
I severed ties with those people. I never got to say goodbye to my mother before she died. I know that deep down she loved me, but she never found an escape for the prison that her life was. She resigned herself to it and even though she greeted everyone with a smile, deep down, she had become so bitter. It would come out in retorts sometimes. She revelled in seeing my suffering on occasion and she would use any opportunity to cut me down.
Leaving was one of the hardest things that I did, because that little kid inside me so badly wanted to be loved by the people that hurt me the most. Do I regret my decision? No.
Do I ever wonder how my life would have been if I hadn’t been that kid in that family? I used to daydream about that a lot. I don’t do it anymore because there is nothing that I can do to change it. The fact that I survived through that and didn’t turn into a psychopath is testament to my inner strength.
Am I still fearful? Absolutely. I live in fear every day. I am still absolutely petrified of my sister and I know that she stalks me on social media trying to find me. I have no illusions that if she did, she would only have one goal in mind. The only saving grace in this is that I don’t believe that she would try to kill me until her father is dead, which I don’t believe is far off now that my mother is gone.
I sometimes wonder how people like that don’t end up in jail. My ex father wasn’t convicted in court even after pleading guilty to sexually molesting my sister because of a technicality.
My mother wasn’t convicted of trying to shoot my sister but was instead committed to a mental asylum for a period of time.
My ex sister is so good at being the innocent, lovely, kind and generous mask that she leads everyone to believe is her true self, that she’s never been convicted of anything.
I am the only person in my family of origin that hasn’t been arrested. Is that a measure of success? I don’t even know. It’s such a sliding scale with these things that if you put all of that into perspective, I suppose you could consider it a measure of societal decency.
After I left the abuse didn’t stop dead in it’s tracks either. In fact, it escalated. I received message after from my ex sister telling me what an ungrateful little snot I was for dishing out this treatment to her parents, that had only ever championed ‘us’ and that they were the only thing that mattered. She cut me down, called me delusional for believing that her father would ever have done something like that, that it was a lie. I have witnessed first hand how damaged my eldest sister is from what she experienced. They can call me whatever names they choose, but I actually know in my heart what the truth is. Her father was a pervert. He collected sexualized “art” books. Every quip he made was inappropriately sexual and I know that he abused my mother sexually and emotionally. My mother secretly hated him, but she was his prisoner and she wasn’t self reliant enough to ever get out.
I remember her screaming during a fight where he was sitting with an unhappy smirk on his face. “You’re a F******* pervert!” I remember his response, ingrained in my memory like a video. “Ok yes, and what are YOU going to do about it?” “I’ll f***** kill you!”
So my ex sister can believe whatever she wants to believe. She can deny all she wants to deny. I know what I lived. I know what I saw. I know what I survived. I know what she is.
I am not her. Thank someone out there that I am not anything even close to what she became. She taught me to hate myself. Perhaps that was a projection of her, perhaps it was jealousy. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have a long road to self forgiveness ahead of me. I have a long road of self discovery and self acceptance ahead of me. I don’t particularly like myself or my personal life. I won’t shift the blame onto them because considering all of this, I didn’t turn into a junkie or an alcoholic or kill myself to escape from where I came from. I’m still here, but I know the challenges I face. I know that my life should have been different. I know that getting into abusive relationships in my adult life stems from a feeling of familiarity. It’s something that I have to unlearn. It’s something that I need to fight against. I’ve admitted that nobody is going to love my past unless they can use it to their own advantage. Nobody is going to love a person that secretly believes that they are useless or that they should never have been born, that they were an unwanted child, an additional burden.
I finally unburdened them and was disavowed, disinherited and disowned. Did it feel liberating? At first it did, but nobody who tried so hard to make their parents proud wants to read those words. The finality of it washed over me in waves of relief followed by waves of grief. It was a very dark period of my life. I emerged from it battered and the words surface in my dreams from time to time.
Somebody that I spoke to afterwards told me “well as toxic as they were to you, you have to acknowledge that you were toxic to them too”. That stung but is actually true. When your mother dresses you for kindergarten school and says “I wish you had been born a boy”, you don’t understand it when you’re 6. My mother knew her husband was a monster and my being alive was probably too much for her to bare in her mid forties.
I’ve gathered moments of pure love in unconditional things that she did for me. I’ve gathered together words of encouragement that she sometimes would say and I’ve tried to hold onto those instead of holding onto all the other stuff. She was the only one that I still feel love for and her death felt to me like she had finally found peace, that she was no longer a prisoner of the man she chose to marry. That in death, he couldn’t hurt her anymore. It gave me peace knowing that she was actually better off in death than what she had lived through all those years and never found a way out. I hate myself for not being able to save her, but at the time, I had to save myself and my daughter. She would never have left with me, I knew that.
I would far rather walk the earth entirely alone than have to be a prisoner like that. I continue to break those cycles with my own daughter and she won’t understand until she’s much older, but I will have a relationship with her. I will provide the guidance on becoming a woman that I never received from my mother. I will let her hate me for enforcing boundaries and for being present in her life. I will never be a slave to alcohol or drugs and I will never let her feel like she was an unwanted child even though the relationship with her father was an abyss of emotional, sexual and financial abuse. She will learn all the lessons that I wasn’t taught that dragged me through hell and back, but I will be there when I explain my choices of action to her.
Are there aspects of myself that I do like? Yes, there are a couple. I am generous of spirit and I have a lot of love and compassion for those around me that I hold dear. There are moments when I feel proud of my life considering that the statistics were stacked against me in favor of the alternative that could have been but I didn’t let them take me. It is not an easy path that I walk and yet, I’m still trying. I’m still striving for something better. I don’t want anyone to pity me, so I never tell my story, just a bit of understanding as to why I am who I am. I’m still trying to turn it around and to at least make something of myself where I can for once not be in fear and looking over my shoulder. Perhaps that day will come. Until then, I’m just me, Emily – and this is my story.
I have no idea how hive works yet, so I don't even know if this is acceptable, at least I hope it is.