One More Perspective

OK, I’ll level with you.  Actually, with myself.  I am full-blown depressed.  Not suicidal, let’s get that out of the way.  …but I don’t feel like soldiering on, and pretending I am hanging in there.  I am not.  My Therapist said it for me, as he was onto the fact I was stuck in my “must put on an alive face” mode.  I am grieving, I am lonely, and I am stuck believing I must hide it.  Hide it from whom, though?  I have no minor children to put on a brave face for, no significant other, not even friends who are nearby to convince.  I am here only with my childhood programming telling me I must appear functional no matter what, and my job in a state that still feels completely foreign to me.  No one needs me to keep them alive, fed, and all the reasons my life had meaning thus far that commanded I survive.  In fact, as a woman over fifty, I am certainly flirting with being perfectly invisible.  No family checks on me, sometimes some friends do.  That’s very kind of them, the few who are left after I stopped being the engine of my connections.  Funny, a few years ago I was so convinced I had real relationships and friendships.  Today, I can count them on one hand.  So this is my reality now.  Just me, with a lot of energy I used to spend on keeping my one-sided relationships and my happy face going. 

I don’t even care to go into the whyforhowcome of it, like I can do so well.  Not going to do it, because in the end, all there is is the bottom line.  I am so perfectly alone, it could be scary, if I wasn’t so damn good at it.  No, not going to explain why I’m good at it.  Just going to sit with this.  …still on the rooftop with my twelve-year-old self.  Just as lonely as then, but no longer delusional that others live by the rule of first do no harm as I do.

In many ways it’s better now.  I have closed my expectations of others who were, when I was twelve or now at fiftysomething, never capable of coming through and meeting me.  So that’s good progress, I guess; I get to acknowledge the shit, and get to let go of false hope.  No one is coming.  No one understands.  No one else was there as my life unfolded, so it’s you and I, kid.  I get to validate what living with my family was like, how it felt to be in the wrong from a young age, molested by my much older brother, unprotected by my mother, and exploited by my uncle.  I get to validate what was real for me when I married at age nineteen, how I conducted my education, my first successful pregnancy and delivery at home, my single-mother-while-married status not once but twice, a twin pregnancy that could have killed all three of us, and managing to get my three children to age eighteen with absolutely no one truly in my and their corner despite what it looked like from the outside.  So yes, I will just allow all this to be on the surface.  Come on up, come on through.  Not palatable, not convenient, but the reality only I know.  Not those who get to judge snippets out of context, who condemned my reaction so as to distract from my stimulus.  So many have benefitted from my over-functioning and protection, from my willingness to be the engine, to fund, to curate, to sponsor.  I have made into a parent, ultimately in title, many who never actually invested as one.  They readily took those who were a product of my blood, sweat, breastmilk and tears, cozied up for the plug-and-play experience, declaring themselves the committed, kind and reliable ones. 

So if my rest has to be utter isolation, then so be it.  At least no one is putting me in a double-bind of extracting what they need while they rail when I speak out.  I have been controlled by the narratives designed to shut me down, to remain in servitude to the family facade, in all its definitions.  So getting to be in peace while in exile is a gift.  That I am a whole string of 21st century pop-psychology labels is a small price to pay to step out of the charade.  After all, I have no further responsibilities to anyone else.  I get to let everyone else exist without my buffer, my role of the built-in scapegoat.  

Let’s be clear.  I don’t approach anyone with a tit-for-tat mud-sling.  If anything, I deeply understand the need to resist counter diagnoses for people who are no better equipped to handle four generations of what we all inherited, than I am.  I spend a lot of time thinking about how much this is true.  Inconveniently true.  Wishing and declaring ourselves different by getting to step to one side and pointing to the other makes not for transcendence.  Ha!  If that could be true, I would have achieved it decades ago.  No, there will be no shortcuts for any of these four generations, rest in peace to those who have gone before us.  

It is just my twelve-year-old self and I on the roof of my childhood highrise in Hungary, sitting side-by-side in the unfiltered reality of what was.  I am not here to fix the past, but to finally bear witness to it.  There is no tidy epiphany waiting around the corner, there is only the decision to quit performing survival.  She and I don’t have to fix what was broken long before we arrived.  …but I will honor how lonely all players in this theater have been, no matter what narrative and identity they chose.