Starting a public blog can be daunting, well, it has been for me. There is so much I have to share, to say, but getting my thoughts organized isn’t as easy as I thought it would be so I just started writing with the hope that it will all make sense.
I grew up feeling unwanted, unloveable, fundamentally flawed, and largely misunderstood. I was bad and nobody wanted me around. My mom seemed to always be cross with me and expressed it with spankings, the belt, the wooden spoon or the fly swatter, whatever was handy. My siblings may have received the same from time to time but I feel like I got it the most and the worst. That brand of discipline may be called abusive now but back then spanking your kids was widely accepted. I don’t remember my dad spanking us so much, he mostly gave me a “talking to”.
In school I really had no friends. I was bullied pretty mercilessly in grade school because I had “accidents”(wet my pants). In junior high, life did not improve for me at all. even though I had mastered my bladder. The boys in my class would follow me around barking and call me dog. It was pretty terrible and although I tried to remedy that by agreeing to go away to boarding school in a few hundred miles away, for some reason the bullying followed me. I couldn’t understand why this was happening. Why were my peers being cruel here? They didn’t know me, they didn’t know my past and there was nobody to tell them of it, nobody at the school had heard about my “accidents” so I started to feel like I must have been telegraphing “I’m a scapegoat” to the world since the day I was born.
At some point during my childhood, I became a tightly wound little ball of sadness, anxiety and rage. I developed Borderline Personality Disorder, Complex PTSD, Chronic Depression and Anxiety Disorder, as I’ve recently discovered through a lot of therapy.
Looking back it’s not hard to see where my younger, more formative years set me up for behavioural challenges, constant negative thinking, and frankly, for a life of tolerating abuse and mistreatment from others. And, if I’m being completely honest, I learned to abuse and mistreat other people as well. It’s not something I’m proud of but I’ve done my fair share of lashing out in a state of rage and have hurt and manipulated people I claimed to love.
Coming to a place where I can heal has been hard. Changing self-destructive patterns, setting boundaries, showing myself love and compassion has been hard. Some days I feel so heavy with guilt, shame, anger, sadness and longing for something I’ll never get that I simply want to stay in bed and forget there is a world out there. There are days when I just want to scream at the top of my lungs, no words, just plain old screaming, other times I want to hit shit, throw shit and break shit. Those days require a lot of brain-labour, reprogramming myself to challenge rather than accept the negative thoughts that creep in and threaten my health and well-being. They require I modify my behaviour so I don’t self-destruct. They require that I breathe.
My Phoenix Rising 