Negatively Positive

Not long ago, I was filling in a new-ish friend on some of my trauma lore -- 2015, the miscarriages, and the early years of my marriage.

 

That last bit is something I have not really spoken to anybody about. I had already learned that honesty was an offence punishable by public dismemberment and being buried alive, plus I couldn't reconcile being honest about the pain while simultaneously loving my husband. I shut down. I spent probably four years in an eternal present. I had no past and no future. No thoughts besides how to prevent the next blowup or smooth over the current one.

 

Early on, I had been messaging my friends about my confusion at his sudden change in attitude. How the calm, generous listener had overnight started screaming insults over basic use of the English language. Their response was unanimous: Leave him.

 

The thought was very tempting, I won't lie. But I had seen who he had been before, and I was unwilling to believe that kind act had been only an act. This isn't who he is. He wasn't always like that. It has to be just stress or something.

 

When I tried to explain this, with my rapidly-decreasing ability to think (let alone write) in comprehensible English, they escalated. I will not watch you self-destruct. If you don't leave him, I will not be a part of your life.

 

How do you respond to an ultimatum like that?

 

I had been friends with some of these people for over a decade. I had helped most of them through life-threatening crises of their own. I had offered so much time and energy to them freely, even in times when my own life was crumbling. Now I was in crisis, and they could not remember the times I had moved heaven and earth to help them through worse.

 

I don't have the mental capacity for your problems as well as my own, they told me, one by one. I can't handle your negativity. Don't bring me into your problems anymore.

 

But it won't always be like this. It'll get better... right? Marriage is hard and we're both learning and it'll get better, it just sucks right now.

 

I was speaking to an empty room by the end, with only my own voice for company.

 

It has to get better. This isn't who he really is. I made him a promise. I made a vow before God.

I promised. 

 

I hung onto that thought with all my strength. But my fingers were slipping. 

 

Five years earlier, when my world had crumbled around me, when the Angel of Death took a combine harvester to every part of my life, the friends who didn't die in the devastation turned on me: you're too negative. You always see the worst in everything.

 

Now, as my loving husband turned into a monster before my eyes, as I clung to the insane hope that this was only a season and not an eternal condemnation... my friends still left me. I chose to look for a sunrise while buried alive, and that still wasn't good enough.

 

When everybody died, I was too negative, too sad. When my husband turned out to be a real-life Jekyll and Hyde, I was too positive, too hopeful.

 

Make it make sense.

 

Like if you hate my guts and are just looking for an excuse to cut me out of your life -- this is a Pro-Tip, by the way, take notes -- just say you hate my guts. Just be honest. Don't do this 'you're too X' song and dance. It's like trying to kill a grizzly bear with a spoon -- it takes way longer than necessary, and everyone involved feels way more pain than they needed to.

What's more, I am sorely tempted to message every single one of those people who couldn't find a scrap of compassion in their hearts -- hearts that in some cases were still beating because of me -- and tell them you know what? I was f--king right.

 

We are coming up on another wedding anniversary. If anything, we are happier now than we were even in those early days of dating. And if I had followed their advice and left him, he would be dead and honestly I might be too.

 

 

P.S. -- Do you want to know what the problem was? Why my husband went from sweet, romantic, caring, and generous to angry, manipulative, vicious, and did I mention angry?

An allergy.

A food allergy to a very common seasoning.

By the time I convinced him to go to the doctor about it, it had mutated into five other major chronic health conditions which we are still trying get treatment for, to say nothing of the ongoing emotional fallout for both of us individually and in our marriage. Our marriage still exists only because I'm a stubborn German who is still too bitter about my uncle leaving my aunt (for literally zero reason) to give up on my own marriage for any reason at all.

Vulnerability

In years past, I was known for my bluntness and honesty, in all situations, 'socially acceptable' or not. This kept the weird neurotypicals at arms' length and brought the neurodiverse people who actually tell you exactly what they're thinking into my circle.

Then I went to college.

A common theme among my directors and professors was vulnerability. "You need to be more vulnerable." "You need to be more open." I couldn't understand what they were on about. I asked them so many times to define, to explain, to give an example of what they meant, but none of them could. The main one would smile sardonically and say, "I think you already know." But I didn't. How could I be vulnerable? In all my brutal honesty, what had I missed? What was I hiding that they didn't already know?

And the other day while doing the dishes it hit me.

They wanted me to be honest.

But there was a fatal flaw in their logic -- they assumed I was not already being honest. This was why I could not understand what they wanted -- I was already doing it, but they wouldn't recognise that and instead kept telling me I was wrong. The fact that they could never once explain to me over the course of five years what I was missing/doing wrong should have tipped me off that I was not actually doing anything wrong. But I knew I was inexperienced and I was trying to trust their 'experience.'

I went through an obscene amount of emotional pain in college. The death count alone from those years of my life exceeds the death toll of friends of people twice my age. I drew on that heavily for my first character -- Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden. The child loses both parents and the only home she's ever known to cholera. Surely she's haunted and grieving when she first arrives in England. I think this is what made my performance of that show so great. I could relate to the emotions of the character. And yet, I remember the director telling me that the character (at the beginning) needed to be 'happier.' He gave no reason for this. I ignored him, of course... even then, my acting instincts kicked in to save the show from his incompetence. While that's not the way I should have gone about it, he was also at fault for not being willing to acknowledge the emotional states of all the characters at all points of the show. He used this incident as proof that I was 'too stubborn' and 'refusing to be vulnerable' and ultimately used it to justify actively preventing me from getting my diploma.

To him, 'vulnerable' meant 'happy.' To me, 'vulnerable' means 'honest -- no matter what.'

To be happy at the exclusion of all other emotions -- no matter how valid -- is to skip over at minimum half of the human experience. To be vulnerable is to be honest about every emotion, not just happiness.

I maintain that I am more vulnerable every single day of my life than he perhaps has ever been at any point of his.

Honesty

3 April 2022, 5.37pm; 2 May 2022, 7.53pm.

I've always been a brutally honest person. This is probably one of the most obvious manifestations of my ADHD/autism and is definitely the neurodiverse trait that loses me the most friends/potential friends. I say exactly what I mean, not the social nicety beat-around-the-bush say-the-opposite-of-what-you-actually-mean code for what I mean.

This means, as someone with depression and an encyclopedia's worth of tragic backstory, I am VERY open and honest about depression and emotional pain. This led to my ex-church telling me God couldn't love me (this after telling me for eighteen years of my life that 'honesty is the best policy?' Make it make sense), as well as my program director deliberately sabotaging my Bachelor's degree -- I was 'too negative,' therefore he in his infinite wisdom decided I, as a deeply wounded and actively grieving person, was not worthy of holding a postsecondary degree and did everything in his power to make it so. While he did underestimate my stubbornness and sheer force of will, I would be lying if I said that he didn't erode my confidence.

The two nails in the coffin came from my now in-laws and one of my bridesmaids. In-law has decided to take offense with EVERYTHING I say. And I do mean everything. Anything I post online, handwrite, or say out loud is fair game. No matter what I say, they WILL find something 'wrong' with it. And their definition of 'wrong' is very different from the rest of the world's definition of 'wrong.' Oh, but they're never criticising... they're "only trying to help" and it's not their fault if I'm "too stubborn to let people help" me. If the definition of 'help' now means 'set fire to the Titanic on the way down,' then yes, they're doing a bang-up job.

The second one was someone who I thought was a very good friend. So much so that not only was she one of my bridesmaids in my very small wedding, my husband and I donated a fair amount of money to help with her medical expenses less than six months ago. Less than two months later, she blocked me with the excuse, 'my mental health is too fragile to deal with your problems.' So much for her assertion that she was always going to be there for me and that it was 'okay not to be okay.'

So I hid. I cut contact with literally everybody except my husband, my parents, my siblings, and one (1) friend. I essentially stopped using social media, and I kept work conversations strictly work-related. If nobody wanted to hear from the real me, they weren't going to. I even stopped talking to my in-laws except when absolutely necessary. It took almost thirty years, but I had finally gotten the message. I -- the true, authentic, real me -- was NOT wanted. Anywhere.

This worked for six months. I even stopped talking to the people who I hadn't actively cut off unless they talked to me first. I was just so tired of being rejected and guilt-tripped and bullied and abused just for being honest about myself and my experiences. I could feel my soul shriveling and dying, and I was quite literally praying every single day that God would just kill me. If I couldn't be honest, I didn't want to live anymore. I was actually dismayed when I realised that my sudden spells of vertigo were actually a concussion, not a malignant brain tumour as I had hoped.

Then it came out during an argument that I had been keeping how bad my mental health was from my husband. He was so upset he didn't speak to me for three days (as if that was going to make me want to die any less). Under threat of divorce, I promised that I would be honest, but warned him it wouldn't be pretty. He was so upset he agreed.

At this same time, I was actively working on an outline for Kyrie so I could maybe finally properly rewrite it. The ENTIRE plot of this story hinges on the main character's ruthless honesty. Turns out it's really hard to write about a brutally honest character when you can't be brutally honest yourself.

Then, I had the opportunity to sit in a zoom class with Dianne Walker -- the Dianne Walker, the Ella Fitzgerald of tap dance. And near the end she spent TWENTY MINUTES emphasizing how important it is for the tap dancer (really, the artist in general) to be honest, brutally honest, even if that's not the happiest place in the world.

When that class ended, I sat there and wrote in my journal for half an hour about how angry I was that I had let so many people beat the honesty -- beat the artist -- out of me. How angry I was at my in-laws especially for trying to run my thought life (funny how the 1984-style conspiracy theorists are the ones who are most concerned with controlling how people word things and how people are 'allowed' to think). Here is an excerpt from my initial reaction:

I spent five years of my life having the honesty gaslighted, shamed, and manipulated out of me at a ‘Christian’ performing arts college, of all places (after all, aren’t Christians supposed to be honest? isn’t art supposed to be honest?). My spirit suffered beyond what words can convey. It led to an eating disorder and a very troubled marriage. All I wanted was to die. If I could not be honest, then there was no other alternative. To live is to be honest. To share life with people is to be honest. All I ever wanted was to be honest and to share my life with honest people, in a spirit of giving, receiving, accomplishment, and growth. I knew as a young teen that honesty was paramount in art, but I let [college program director] and [church deacon] and [in-law] beat it out of me with their manipulation and vile, vicious words.

I used to say great art was beautiful, but now I say that great art is honest. My greatest art has come from honesty — not pain, specifically (though sometimes that is what I must be honest about), but honesty.

Sehnsucht, One More Time, Joy And Suffering, Kyrie, and, in a burgeoning way, Emotional Tourist all came from a raw and honest place and THOSE are my greatest accomplishments.

My creative output slowed not long after Brittney and my cousin died, and stopped entirely after M died. I thought it was the fact that they died that stopped the creativity, but now that I think about it, it wasn't the deaths themselves, it was how much I was bullied for openly grieving about their deaths that stopped it.

It's funny how people get so offended about grief. Not 'uncomfortable,' downright OFFENDED. I have had my career, my academic future, my friendships, and my marriage threatened by people who couldn't handle my honesty -- even if that includes honesty about grief or my mental illness. I don't understand that, because the very nature of honesty means you are honest at all times. 'Selective honesty' is not honesty -- that's manipulation.

Enough of that. I want to be an artist again. I want to live again, and to live is to be honest.

Writing, Escape, and Control

Originally written 24 December 2021, 2.53am.

I started writing very young.

I took to the written word extremely quickly as a child. I was reading competently at age four and by the time I was eight I was attempting to write books of my own. I was constantly narrating the world in my mind as I watched events unfold, narrating as if I was narrating a book. Sometimes, it turned out, I was (though surprisingly few events in my novels have stemmed from real-life events).

When I was a young (and later an older) teenager, I holed up in my room, hiding from my mother's absolutely unpredictable rages and the awful words about any and all my minuscule failures rushing out of her mouth like swords to my battered soul, writing, on looseleaf, on scraps of schoolwork, on typewriters, on my beside table, on anything I could get my hands on. Writing and listening to music became the only two ways to drown out the horrible sounds of my later childhood and early teen years.

When I wrote, the world in my head dampened the sounds of the world where nobody cared and nobody listened. The aural effect of music filled in the gaps that writing couldn't. I stayed up late into the night and filled the silence with music -- music for enjoyment rather than to smother the awfulness -- and spun out dozens of alternate universes from a curious coalition of my brain and my fingers. At age fourteen I completed my first novel draft, and some seventeen more have followed suit since then.

I joined Facebook, then started this blog. My writing, heretofore a closely guarded secret, expanded onto platforms that people could read. The blog especially was a very raw and vulnerable place for me. Facebook, however, gave me a platform to hone skills I was weak on, such as succinctness (remember the 430-character limit?) and clarity. I had a moderately good run as a pseudo-comedy writer who simply spun everyday events into decently funny one-liners. As I aged and my mental health worsened and I started losing friends to depression, I slipped almost unconsciously into a storyteller/advocate style of writing. I told my own story with unflinching starkness, in hopes that the friends and family who read my vignettes would better understand and be better equipped to help their friends and family with depression. There are so many misconceptions surrounding mental illness in general and depression in particular, and I, as a writer on the inside of both, had a unique perspective -- and I thought maybe a sort of obligation -- to bring to the people. The act of writing about my experiences had the side benefit of helped me to clarify them and even to bring some modicum of healing to my now even-more-shipwrecked soul.

Then I met my husband. Or, more accurately, my in-laws.

Of course they were nice at first. They're still decently nice now, however, many wars were had on the topic of my Facebook posts.

To this day, I'm not sure what their issue is. There is a history of depression in the family, so it wasn't like they didn't understand. But essentially they forbade me from posting on Facebook. Not one single post about mental health was allowed. Not one iota of honesty about myself and my life was allowed. I fought this, tooth and nail. There were many screaming matches, and the wedding was nearly called off multiple times because I could not understand how they could say that they wanted me in their family, yet they wanted to chop off one of the very things that made me ME. Without writing, without honesty, I would not be the same person. That seemed to be exactly what they wanted.

Eventually, I gave in. I was just so tired of the screaming matches. I went back to writing on this blog (luckily I hadn't gotten to the point of telling them of its existence yet) because it was once again the only place I would write whatever I wanted to and not be torn to shreds for the next 4-5 business days.

In some ways, I regret that. I regret letting them control me like this. My husband is great, but his family is an absolutely impossible battlefield of land mines -- sorry, I mean unwritten expectations. The blog is a valuable outlet, but not writing as much as I used to makes me feel like I'm only half of a human being -- and a primarily-dead half-human being at that. I was finally beginning to come into myself as a communicator, and they casually stripped 25 years of writing, of ME, away from me like they were putting groceries away after running errands.

For as long as I can remember, crafting the written word has been a part of my life. And all it took were some overbearing in-laws to strip me of one of the three (3) things that has ever consistently brought me comfort over the course of this life filled with an almost-comical and certainly-unbelievable amount of death and misfortune.

They wonder now why I don't trust them. Why I don't talk. Why I come off as so rude, distant, and angry all the time. Nobody ever stops to think that that's what happens when you take away one of somebody's only coping mechanisms.

Too Much

This week I had another close friend suddenly cut contact with me because I'm too much of an emotional drain on her.

I get it. I really do. It seems unimaginable that somebody could have such as long of a streak of abusers, deaths, and bad situations as I have. It's a lot for anyone to carry, including me. And that's why I turn to people for help and support.

Inevitably, though, my despair-ridden life overwhelms them and they 'step back' for their own mental health.

I do get it. And that almost what hurts the most. I trigger people's worst mental health symptoms. I am the reason my formerly happy friends are now suffering. Maybe depression really is contagious. Maybe I really am God's punching bag.

They say 'just be positive,' but as much as I want to, no amount of happiness and positivity is going to stop the abuse and the deaths and all that pain that just keeps piling up with nowhere to go. Forcing myself to pretend to be happy only distances me from myself because I know deep down that I'm just suppressing the pain and not dissolving it. And if I can't be honest with myself and with my friends, then who even am I? Why even bother? They're not my friends if I don't feel comfortable being honest with them, but they also say they're not my friends because I 'overshare' and I'm 'too negative' when I am honest. To me, friendship is when you can talk no holds barred and no punches pulled. If I can't do that, then you're an acquaintance, not a friend.

But if I try to honour them with my honesty, I get cut off. And the stupid thing is, I get why. I get that they need to protect themselves. But then who's left to help me pick up my shredded heart? Who's left to hold my hand? Who really means it when they say they're always there for me?

I feel like I'll always, only be too much for people. There is something fundamentally broken in me and who I am as a person and it will always ruin every person I touch. I am poison, and despite what some people say that isn't a choice. Do you think I chose to watch my family dissolve? Do you think I chose to be abused by a primary caregiver, the church, the director of my college program, and my voice teacher? Do you think I chose for my friends and my cousin to die horrible deaths? Do you really think I wanted all that to happen? If I could do my life over again, I wouldn't even be born. It wasn't worth it. There were good moments, but they don't outweigh all this insoluble pain. I would rather have never existed. Or at least I wish I had died in that car accident, when I still had the hope of a decent life ahead of me -- before anybody else died.

Honest Ramble

Can I be very, very honest about my life right now? Here is one of the few places I can be, because here, on this website, on my domain name, nobody is required to read anything I write. If you want to read it, fine. If you don't, fine. Nobody's forcing anything on this blog down anybody's throat. On Facebook and Instagram, I have a persona to keep up, at least a little bit. I do show frustration on there sometimes, but I try to balance it with humour (even if it's sarcastic/dark humour).

I'm frustrated beyond words at my lack of ability to get a job. I've been job-hunting for three years. And I'm not being picky. I've applied for waitressing, cashier, reception, janitor, construction, literally anything that I'm even kind of half-qualified for. I feel like a failure as a human being because I'm not self-sufficient, because I still need financial assistance. People tell me, 'just apply for everything.' I know... I've been doing exactly that for three years. And I feel like I'm defective, like something's fundamentally wrong with me because despite being very qualified for a variety of different types of work, literally nobody even contacts me for an interview or anything. How is it so easy for everyone else to get a job and not me? What's so horribly, horribly wrong with me that it's immediately obvious even to those who have never met me in person?

I haven't practiced dance since February. I just -- haven't. I was busy, then sick, then injured, then recovering, now sick again. And now I'm wondering if I even bother picking it up again because now I'll be so far behind -- again. And it's not like all that practice was serving me well anyway... I was easily the worst dancer in Fame.

I am bored as heck. Having no job and no more schoolwork (ever) has left me with a LOT of free time that I really wasn't prepared for. Ordinarily I would just use it for practice, but I'm not even sure I want to put in that much effort anymore... I'm not sure it's going to be worth the time and energy I've put into it, and I have so little energy to play with as it is. I'm not sure I should even bother pursuing the performing arts anymore. I'm not sure what I should be pursuing or what I should be doing. I feel very, very purposeless. Up till now, the arts was my purpose. But now... now I don't even have that. Never before in my life have I not had the arts, some kind of creative project, to capture my imagination and my days. Never, never before. Is this how people live? Is this the hell they wake up to every day? How do they breathe under that weight?

I just feel so, so useless. I feel like I have nothing to bring to the world that somebody else isn't already doing ten times better. I feel like everyone's got everything taken care of and they don't need me for anything. I worked so hard and I tried so hard and I practiced so much and it wasn't enough to be of use to anybody. I feel like I have nothing to contribute, nothing to say that hasn't already been said, nothing to do that hasn't already been done. They say to put your own unique stamp on the world and to live life as only you can, but my only calling card is that everything I do is subpar. And maybe that's not even my fault... but it feels like it is.

I don't want to just spend my life watching YouTube. I don't want to spend it scrolling through Facebook. But right now those are literally the only options available to me. I don't have a job and I don't have talent and I don't have money to start something even moderately big. I can't even do another dance video -- I don't have the money.
I'm scared that I'm just wasting my life and that I'll be mooching off my family for the rest of my life. I'm scared no-one needs me. I'm scared I'm missing something.

My brain literally feels like it's being eaten by acid -- melting, burning. I wanted so much to create things, but they're always, always subpar and I'm exhausted from expending so much energy into something that's worth nothing.

When you're a kid you can do something as stupid as make bracelets and sell them for $5 each and make money that way. But when you're an adult they expect so much more from you. They expect the world. They expect complete perfection. Nobody will pay $5 for a string with three beads on it made by a fully functioning adult human who's perfectly capable of going out and getting a job... right?

I feel unheard -- completely invisible. I send emails and it's like they're never received. I talk to people and it's like they never heard my voice. I stand by them, I even touch them, and they look right through me. It's like being gaslighted by the entire world -- 'I never ignored you.' Then why do you refuse to acknowledge my existence?

I'm aware that time is marching on and I'm doing nothing with it and it'll end soon and I'll have nothing to show for it, but it's not for lack of trying. I tried -- I tried. I freaking tried.

I feel like I'm trapped and I'm drowning and I can't get out.

The Things You Told Me

6 July 2017, 10.00pm.

You told me to 'follow my heart/dreams.' So I became an artist.
And you told me I was stupid.

You told me to 'find a job.' So I went into construction.
Then you said that 'wasn't legitimate' because it's a family company.

You told me you would always be there for me if I ever needed to talk. So I emailed you.
And you never replied.

You told me you wanted to hear about how my life was going.
Then you told me I'm 'too negative.'

You told me people care about me.
Then you turned your back and walked away, leaving me to find these mythical people myself.

What the actual heck do you want from me?