My Reality

"It's a journey of discovery to learn whether I am my job or the person who lives inside my soul," it says on this very blog, and I've been about the journey for quite some time. The answer has been elusive, but I think I have come to some conclusions that have been waiting for me just out of reach. The saying about perception being people's reality has always been applied to other people: I've not been allowed to have my perception, but have been forced to accept their reality. It's time that I become my own reality and stop accepting that their perceptions are correct and my reality is wrong, a world view that has changed my life more than once and left me wondering who am I.

My reality is that I am a fundamentally flawed person. Whereas, when I was younger, I pretended that my flaws didn't matter, as I grow older, they matter more. I was abused by my mother literally from the moment of birth, an event she related in agonizing detail annually when she called to wish me a happy birthday. When my mother died a few years ago, my family turned on me like a pack of dogs, needing to assign blame for my mother's cruel actions during her lifetime to someone else so none of them had to accept them as real. I became the scapegoat and somehow, all that cruelty and abuse was my fault. My mother was, herself, raised in a dysfunctional family and abused by her father, so what she did to me was ... what she did to me because, somehow, I had it coming. My mother emotionally scarred me, and wounds that I thought were long healed had simply scabbed over, waiting for the day that the scab would be ripped off and the wound re-exposed to the elements. When family members who participated in the abuse wipe it out of the family memory and then accuse the victim of making it all up, it is time for the paradigm to shift. I cut my family out of my life so I could go on, which seemed at the time and continues to be the best action I could take to protect myself against their actions.

I have learned that my survival depends on what I do, not what others do to me, the result of a culminative disassociative break over a decade ago, the first of November 1997, in an incident that sent me reeling into a mental state from which I thank God every day I was able to recover. Because the event involved friends who had shared my life for decades, it was particularly cruel and debilitating. I lost my job, my home, and my career, but more than that, I lost myself. I am here now, I have a home, I have a job, and I have parts of myself, but my life has never been the same as it was before that betrayal. I used to enjoy life; I used to love going out with friends; I used to make social calls and have parties in my home; I used to love being with people and volunteering and doing whatever I could to enhance the quality of life around me. I do nothing now, nothing, because everything that I loved about being me and living my life was shattered. If I have nothing, I have less to lose if it happens to me again. Life goes on, but I am the first one to admit that it is an empty shell of what it once was and that is going to have to be okay as that's what it is.

Several events have combined during recent months that have again exposed my vulnerability to the people in my life who call me friend, but do not treat me in a friendly manner. I have not yet decided how I am going to handle them this time around, but I do know that I am not going to allow myself to be abused in the name of friendship. It's taken me two weeks to acknowledge and accept how much hurt there is, so it may take me a bit more time to figure out how I am going to dress the wound. It hurts when strangers treat me with disrespect, but it cuts deeply when friends do that, especially when their language reveals that what they show to me is not what they believe about me.

I am much better at being my job than I am at being me, a realization I came to while watching the Dustin Hoffman movie, Last Chance Harvey. Harvey goes for it, but I'm not sure what "it" is, so I don't know yet whether I'll go for it or not, but my life needs another direction: the path I'm on is not working for me. If I can do my job well, then I can relax in that arena and develop myself so I can do me as well as I do my job. If I don't get a grip on how to be me, who am I going to be when I no longer work at all?

I have never much liked myself, perhaps because most of my life I have been told that there isn't much for anyone to like, and my life experiences have pretty much borne that out. There is trust involved in both a family and a friendship that makes a person vulnerable to the ones who share an inner circle of life. When I finally let my guard down and stop waiting for the gotcha, that's when it happens both in my family and in my friendships. I don't want to live my life in isolation, but I also don't want to live it all the while waiting for yet another person to rip off the scabs of the worst times of my life and then stand back and watch me hemmorhage.

Perhaps because I was abused during my formative years, I've allowed the people in my life to abuse me too, maybe in different ways and to different degrees, but to the same end. I go out of my way to keep my mouth shut, rather than confront people who hurt me, because I know what happens when I talk back, but even that coping mechanism has blown up in my face more than once. While no one else in the world has even a moment's hestitation about letting me have it no holds barred, I walk away, rather than confront, because I hear the words, "Don't you talk back to me, young lady!" being screamed at me, and the open hand coming at my face. When I defend myself and say, "But I never said that," I see another smug face telling me, "I know you didn't say it, but I know what you would have said if you had said it." I can stand up for myself where people who don't know me treat me with lies and disrespect, but I don't ever want to give anyone I know a reason to smack me down because I tell them no or disagree with their perception. Been there; done that; worn out the t-shirt.

Don't get me wrong: I'm sure I've given as much as I've received, but I have come to a point in my life when I cannot do either any longer. I'd rather not be around people than have to accept their verbal abuse and false friendships. Anyone who would treat me that way needs not to have me as their target one more minute.