#therapy note

I have spent the last several days (since last Thursday morning at around this time, basically) wondering what my life would have been like if I’d had parents. Like, parents who actually parented me. If I hadn’t been left to take care of myself, and then to take care of my sibling. Who I might’ve become. 

My therapist and I talked about how yet another thing that I thought was a failing on my part is a completely reasonable response to the way I was raised. That yet again I was so well trained to the circumstances of my upbringing that it had never occurred to me before that there was a clear and obvious root to the issue. This happens so often. So often, I’m having to learn that the things that are ‘wrong’ with me were put there. That not only am I not inherently broken, but that I haven’t even had the control required to fuck up my own life like this. 

I think about this, and I think about my body. How every unexplained ache of my joints, every shock of burning pain as my nerves set themselves alight for no good reason, comes back to my upbringing. How their selfish, pointless, arbitrary flip-flopping between hovering and neglect and outright abuse led to this pain, this slow-forming whiplash that has continued to wreck my body and mind, as the guilt that was their favorite tool still grips me. I am built on a pocked foundation, porous, and soaked in undeserved shame. What a fascinatingly evil thought, to raise a child to be broken, but to convince that child that it is at fault for its own brokenness. 

But I can’t even give them credit for that, because it wasn’t evil or malice that made me this way. It was just that I was raised by a couple of dumb abused kids who didn’t know any better. Who I can’t consider fully at fault, for their sheer stupidity. And that is the worst part.

Well, no. The actual worst part is that I was the trial. I was the test dummy. Because my sibling has had parents. Difficult and imperfect and still harmful as they are, they have shown up in much more significant ways for my sibling. My sibling has adults who do not expect them to be an adult. My dad still says things he shouldn’t, and my mom still lacks the discipline required to create a stable routine for the kid (who desperately needs it), but they are still there. They are there for my sibling in a way that they never were for me. They don’t expect my sibling to take care of themselves. they let my sibling have access to the things they want to do, to the help that they need, they celebrate their successes with them and they look to the future for their failures, and they let them be a child, and they let them have help, and I wonder why I couldn’t have had any of that. 

On top of everything else (and there is so, so much), I was diagnosed yesterday with two learning-related disabilities. One of which I share with my sibling. I know this because my parents got them tested and on medication for it when they were like eight years old. And here I am, twenty years older than that, finally having someone say ‘yes, it makes sense that you’ve struggled, and here’s why.’ I’m almost thirty years old, and I just.

I just want to know what things would have been like if I’d have had parents. Some guidance. Someone at home who didn’t treat me like a burden all the fucking time, who didn’t set arbitrary boundaries for me, who didn’t take away the rewards of the things I worked for without ever thinking about it or explaining why (or, worst of all, remembering it at all now). I want to know what I would be like if I’d had parents whose treatment of me didn’t lead to all of this pain, emotional and physical. I want to know why I had to be the test child. Why they couldn’t get their shit together for me in the way that both sets of parents did for their respective second children. 

And I want to know what to do about it now. How I’m supposed to move forward. Interacting with them hurts. It feels like being complicit. It feels like pretending that everything is fine, to keep them in my life. I want to say, loudly, somewhere, that even if I do keep these people in the periphery of my life, they have never been my parents and should not be allowed to be considered in any of my successes. I want answers, but I don’t, because there is nothing that they could say that would make any of this better, and because I know that there wasn’t a reason for any of it. Not really. That I am the product of their apathy. I could cut them out, but it would mean either cutting out the rest of the family, or explaining. And how could I ever explain in a way that would make it make sense? How could I ever explain all the ways that the little things they did have ruined me, have led to me just starting my life at almost thirty years old? I suppose I could just tell everyone about the One Big Thing, but I don’t want to expose that trauma to everyone. I don’t want everyone to know. And it’s not even the most important part anyway. It feeds in, into everything else. 

I was not allowed to exist, and I was not allowed to grow, and I was not allowed to learn, and I do not know who I am. That is at the core of me, and I don’t know where to go from here.

Reasons why I'm seeking help: