Sometimes I'm a Bad Friend

I’ve haven’t been treating my friends very well lately. Which is really, really unlike me. Because I care. I hate scaring people. I hate inconveniencing people. I strive to be the kind of person who is ready to be there for you whenever the need arises.

Because I didn’t have that growing up.

I didn’t have a person who stood in my corner when I was attacked. I didn’t have a people react well to being bothered when they were busy. I didn’t have a person who called out bad behavior. I didn’t have a person who protected me from the scariest person in the world.

I became that person, because I knew no one else was going to stand up for my siblings or my mother. I had to be the brave one. The strong one. The one who fought back. I claimed the role of Momma Bear, Mother Hen, the Protector, because nobody else would take on the mantle.  I never wanted anyone to ever feel the way I did.

The flip side of being the protective one, is that you gather a lot of people who rely on you. You gather people who look to you for comfort, love, advice, inspiration, etc. But they aren’t the kind of people whose first instinct is to catch you as you fall. They expect you to continue to stay strong no matter what.

So, when I say I haven’t been a very good friend lately- I should clarify. To me, my “bad” behavior looks like ignoring text messages, ending phone calls instead of answering, avoiding my friends.

Why am I doing that?

The short answer is “I’m tired.”

The full answer is a little bit more nuanced.

I have depression. Some days are really, really bad. Bad in this context means I’m struggling.

Struggling with feeling emotionally drained- like those times you have when you’ve been dealing with conflict with loved ones or when one bad thing after another keeps happening- and finding the “happy” is not the first thing on your mind. My struggles include sensitivity to noises, like screaming, crying, loud or repetitive sounds- they make me clench my teeth and flinch. Motivation is low- because things don’t hold much interest, or their demand of my attention feels draining.

So I did what I normally do on a particularly bad day- I reached out the best way I can when I feel drained- by sharing a Facebook post letting people know I’m not okay.

But I always have impeccable timing- because on my really bad days, everyone else is having an incredibly busy or rough day too. Normally I just give up on the fact that anyone will be able to help me at that moment and just lay on my bed and distract myself until hubby gets home.

However recently, with the amount of reoccurring “bad day, I let people know, nobody comes to help” instances, it’s beginning to feel like I’m not worth it. People read my “I’m having a bad day” and think I just woke up on the side of the bed. When my reality is my brain is telling me to jump in front of a bus, my kids are being typical destructive screaming toddlers, and I can’t stop crying.

On those days I feel like the worst parent in the world because I yell, because I want my noise to be heard. On those days I feel like a waste of space. The epitome of human garbage. My attempts of reaching out for someone, anyone to just come and sit in my house while I cry on their shoulder, or shower, or just have a quiet house for fifteen minutes and is met with nothing but “I’m sorry” and “love you” makes me want to scream.

I scroll on the internet, waiting to just feel numb so I can attempt to tune out the “I’m garbage” echoes in my head. And when friends see my post and text or call, all asking me to do something- let them know if there’s anything they can do, do I want to go out, do I need anything- I was angry.

Angry that I had to continue to explain how I felt. Angry that my call for help was interpreted as a “I’m being a good friend if I ask you how you’re doing ” instead of the one thing I actually needed.

All that anger brought up other memories, memories of me reaching out the best way I knew how – asking to live with friends because I couldn’t stand living at home anymore and being told no. Trying to explain how bad things were and being brushed off with, "everyone get’s mad sometimes." There were more times than I can remember- and no one believed me, or were too busy to do anything.

I relied on isolation then, to protect myself. And I have reverted back to isolation now to cope with my feelings of rejection and dismissal. I feel angry even now, even though the recent occurrence was a week ago. Because it’s easier to be angry and lash out, then it is to sit in isolation and feel truly, and undeniably alone.

Rationally, I know I’m not being fair to the people who have worried about me for days. I know it’s not fair to judge them for their lives being busy, having obligations, or having their own bad days.

Emotionally I wish they never made the promise “call me if you need anything” because it feels like a lie. A lie that they tell to feel good about themselves, but one they never intend to act upon. Which is unfair, because friends do come help, family does reach out and watch the kids. I don’t expect people to revolve around my life, nor would I want them to. I just wish that people understood the depth and true severity of the situations when I make my “It’s a bad day” posts. Because on days like that, I don’t need your words of concern or affirmation. I need a hug. I need a babysitter. I need someone else to actually be the strong one while I lose it.

I’m sure some of my good friends reading this are like, you told us you wanted us to check in, and now you don’t? Why do you keep changing what you need?

Because I’m human. Because on bad days, words of affirmation feel like lies. They don’t sink in. “I love you!” from far away is as good as “I ate a sandwich”. It’s just words. There’s no, “I love you enough to drive over. I love you enough to watch your kids. I love you enough to hold you while you cry. I love you enough to listen. “ That’s the difference. And I’m going to admit that when it’s a really bad day, like last week, I still might not respond well. I’ll still isolate myself, I still won’t believe anything you say, I will still be emotionally distant. Because I’m struggling, and the words “I’m garbage”, “Why am I not good enough?” will be the soundtrack in my brain. And all that any of us can do is wait it out.

I guess the thing I hope you take away from me sharing these occurrences is to check in before your friends post they’re having a bad day. If they are having a bad day, and you are able to- take them food, a good movie or game, give them a hug, clean their house, put them in the shower - anything to let them know that you care both in words and in deed.

The other thing that I think is incredibly important to understand about people with mental health issues is explaining everything that’s going on in their head can be complicated, extremely frustrating to condense, or just plain exhausting. It really can be a struggle to have to tell people over and over and over again why you feel sad- when maybe the only reason is the chemical imbalance and the medication isn’t adapting. You are not entitled to the inner working’s of their mind. It’s not wrong to ask them what’s wrong. Just let them know that they don’t have to talk about it or explain everything. Let them know that you are there to be supportive presence, and not another drain upon their energy.

I really do have good friends, whom I love and I know love me. Right now I'm working on forgiving the ones in the past and the ones in the present for not saving me when I wanted to be saved.

Adventures with a New Therapist

I went to see a new therapist today. It was not a good therapy day. Not because of the paperwork, that’s just a necessary evil. No. Today was difficult because I had to answer questions that even I don’t ask myself anymore.

Trying to explain to a complete stranger why you answered “I feel the dread of impending doom” on a questionnaire is no easy feat. Because trying to take your thoughts and translate them into comprehensible English is hard enough. Add crying to the mix just makes it that much more difficult.

To answer the question- things just…

Bad things happen to everyone. But it often feels like the universe likes to be particularly cruel with its distribution of “sucky-ness” when it comes to me and my family. It’s hard to be excited for the future when you know that getting your hopes up for good things is just asking for heartbreak. Example, getting kicked out of your house not long after Christmas. Finding out your parent has a disease and watching them being hooked up to a machine daily in order to live. Watching another parent go through an already sucky pregnancy and then miscarrying.  Sibling getting injured right after a parent loses a job.

And from the stories from one parent’s childhood- let me just say, that they’ve been dealt a whole load of suck their entire life, and it just only goes down hill from there.

So I find it extremely hard to find things to be excited about in the “future”. If I want to function like a slightly normal person, I don’t allow myself to think that far ahead. Because the future only holds chaos, pain, and day to day suck fests.

I still cling to the immature belief that good things should happen to good people and life proves me wrong every step of the way. I just want things to lighten up. I want the world to just freeze and be okay for five freaking minutes. But life doesn’t work like that.

Everyone has tragedies, crises, failures, and letdowns. Everyone also has good things happen to.

But back to therapy.

I know people mean well when they bring up the good things. Like my little family. But again, this stranger doesn’t know me yet. They don’t know that I originally sought out therapy because I believed that my son “stole the sun”. I believed that my pregnancy with him screwed me up. On the really bad days sometimes I still believe that. But I’m seeking therapy now to try and heal from my miserable, awful childhood.

It was hard answering question after question about why I answered the way I did, only to start crying all over again and have to take five minutes just to be able to speak. Again, crying isn’t weakness- I’m just annoyed because it’s a barrier to explaining my thoughts.

After our session, I wanted to call up my previous therapist. I wanted therapy for going to therapy. Haha.

I feel raw. I feel drained. I feel all the emotions of digging up the past- anger, pain, vulnerable, protective. I am again emotionally paralyzed and I can’t do anything remotely productive when it comes to work. My hands and my brain aren’t responding. Because all I want to do is curl up in my bed and listen to lives other than my own- be they on the internet or in an audiobook until I don’t feel anymore. 

Unpacking the Past- Case 1

Sometimes the past haunts you more than you expect it to. Part of me wishes that somehow, magically when I turned 18 everything that made childhood hurt would be wiped clean and I could forget all the hurt, and words, and the messy negative feelings of my adolescence. But as we all know, we don’t get an emotional memory wipe when we become legal adults. We have to carry around our emotional and psychological baggage just like everyone else and unpack it and sort through it if we ever want to take care of it.

So today I am taking that step of unpacking my baggage. There are going to probably be several posts that deal with me processing my past, all in an attempt for me to heal. This is me showing my metaphorical injuries that have been festering and, currently, infecting my current day to day life. And I refuse to let the infection continue to spread. So it’s time to metaphorically cut out the bad tissue, let myself be vulnerable and exposed, and let my tribe of friends and family support me while I heal. 

So today's surgery is delving into some things that I have kept hidden for years. 

I was verbally abused all growing up. 

I’m not talking about the occasional yelling by a parent who has lost all patience.

I’m talking about being called a piece of crap and trash for every wrong doing. I’m talking about being shouted at until I cried because I broke a toy or spilled something. I’m talking about hour long lectures about how I was a terrible child because I didn’t stop my siblings from hitting each other, or not cleaning up their toys, or if they ruined a nice thing.

I’m talking about feeling like you weren’t allowed to eat, because if you ate too much bread, or used up the last of the peanut butter, or went through the packages of ramen "too fast", then you got a lecture about how expensive food was. If you opened another package of something when another bag was already open, then you could expect a yelling match and being sent to your room for the rest of the day, with my dad possibly hiding it later. If you touched one of his favorite foods, or something he planned on using for a meal a week down the road, another lecture. If I was cooking and I wasn’t doing it exactly how he did it, I would get shoved aside and told exactly how I did everything wrong.

Nobody could do anything right, in my house. And for almost half my life, I believed that I deserved it. The yelling, the threats to drop kick us, slap us silly, lock us in our rooms for weeks, the complaining about how we never listened or did anything right, that as soon as we were 18 he’d kick us to the curb… I believed that my siblings and I were the most unruly children to ever grace God’s green earth. I honestly thought that we must have been terrible burdens not only to my parents, but to everyone around us, if we needed to be yelled at and threatened so much.

I was responsible for my siblings… that philosophy was drilled into me so much that it is now an essential part of my character- I am responsible for everyone around me. But most importantly, I was their protector from my dad. When I finally realized that this behavior was not just awful but abnormal- normal dads don’t make their children cry for opening a bag of cheese, I started to talk back. Yes I was a moody teenager. And oh boy did I have a beef with my dad. So I called him out on it. Often. I asked him hard questions… like “if we’re so awful, why did you have six of us?” and “why do you live with us if you hate us so much?”

Of course, a 13, 15, 17 year old didn’t deserve an answer. I was a moody, disrespectful teenager. Who was I to question his authority? And I would often be told after an argument like that… that I was just like my mom. And no, I never took that as a compliment. Not when he complained about my mother to my aunts and uncles for getting distracted by reading. Not when he condemned my mother for being a terrible mom because she played video games – the same video games he played right along side her. Not when he belittled her in front of me and my siblings. Telling me that I was like my mother only drove in the mentality that I was an annoying burden in his life.

I would like to say that I treated my siblings with kindness and love, and sometimes I did. But often I was just as angry and yelled at them too- because in my mind I was far less scary and mean than my dad. That really was the scariest thing; saying “Do I need to go get dad?” because getting dad meant a shouting match that would make you cry, a prison sentence in your room, and a possible physical punishment as well- usually spanking.

But you know what the hardest part about the abuse was? The fact that my dad could be so kind to complete strangers. The fact that he could be charming, and funny, and sweet to everyone but us- his own flesh and blood- made me feel like I WAS the complete garbage I had been called all my life. I can recall a good friend of mine and a coworker of my dad that said: “He must be so fun to be around at home.”

Boy did I want to correct her and tell her everything… but I couldn’t. Why make people think less of my dad when he hadn’t done anything mean to them. They wouldn’t believe me. They’d think it was the complaining of some angsty teenager. Nobody would believe that my sweet, charming, kind dad was a raging man who belittled and verbally tore his family to shreds.

So when we got kicked out of our house right after Christmas my senior year, I moved out. My dad may have been “joking” every time he had threatened to kick me out as soon as I was 18, but I didn’t want to find out. So I beat him to the punch. I lived with friends for a few months, and then with my Uncle. And boy did I learn… learn that I really couldn’t have cared less about finishing high school, or musicals, or anything else. Because no matter what happened, I was stupid and a burden to everyone around me. A lot of my social anxiety comes from these years of abuse. Because if I was a burden and inconvenience then, it still must be true now.

Thankfully, my friends and family did help me. I learned a lot of self confidence and I learned that I didn’t have to be around people who made me feel small or worthless. It took me 17 years of listening to that kind of talk to believe those lies and it might take me another 17 to unlearn it.

So why am I writing today? Why share all this, today of all days?

Because I am angry.  Angry, that the man who called me garbage for a majority of my life, wants everyone to forgive and FORGET the pain he inflicted for 24 years. He wants people to be happy that he’s making positive changes and pretend that the past never happened- that the hurt will just magically disappear. And that makes me angry, because deep down, it makes me cry. Because the apologies I received growing up- still made his anger my fault. There was never “I’m sorry, what I did was wrong.” It was always- “I’m sorry, but what you did was wrong and I was right to yell at you.” I can count on one hand the times my dad has attempted to apologize.

The only real apology he gave me was at the beginning of June this year. And this was the first time that he had asked for my forgiveness.

Now I am a believer in change. People can change. The person I was, the yelling 13 year old big sister, is not the woman I am today. And I did forgive him. I forgave the man that was sitting on my couch that asked for forgiveness- because I knew he was trying. And I really do forgive the man who is working on becoming a better person. However, I did not forgive the man I think of when I hear the word “Dad”. I did not forgive 17 years worth of abuse in that moment, because I am still working on letting it go.

In order for me to let it go… I need to write it out. I need to let my tribe know what I’ve gone through. I am done letting the dad of my past hide behind his charming exterior, because I no longer feel a debt to him anymore. I no longer feel like I need to please him, because I’m never going to receive his praise or approval- so why should I need it now? My pain is just that- mine. Hiding my pain for the sake of his reputation will only continue to hurt me.

So this is step one in my process of healing. And this is the hardest thing I have ever felt compelled to write.