#depresstag

[firebirdy]

I have a very vivid memory of sitting in front of the laptop in the dining room, and my mum was in the other room watching TV, and she had written a few paragraphs of coursework for me and yelled a lot and made me go to the local library to find books about Italian unification (shockingly, there wasn’t much to go on) to quote, even though this was not something I’d ever done before and didn’t really know how to do, and she had yelled more, and had said “now YOU do it”

And I was sitting there looking at the screen, just like

Looking.

You might as well have put a bunch of scrap metal on the floor and told me to build a functioning helicopter.

I was thinking “She’s going to absolutely kill me when she comes in here. It’s been 3 hours and I haven’t done anything.” I put my hands on the keyboard and took them off and put them on again to try and get myself to give a pavlovian response and start typing,

and I could not.

I Could Not.

And NOW, looking back, I’m like: I wasn’t doing it on purpose, I wasn’t fucking around, I didn’t open the internet in another page, I literally just sat and stared at a screen for THREE HOURS and typed NOTHING because my brain was providing no output.

But back then it was because I was A Shit, I thought.

[firebirdy]

I wasn’t being obtuse and it wasn’t just that I ‘didn’t feel like it’, like... My mind would go blank, and I’d get so panicked I’d get the poops, and I just couldn’t figure out... how to begin

As if without clear and ideally step-by-step instructions I Couldn’t Do Things

And I am only able to start viewing it that way NOW, because as a kid, I Knew that it was because I was a Bad And Incompetent Person, and my mother encouraged this view in her own ways.

So if I can NOW say, actually I just needed things presented me to differently and I wasn’t doing it on purpose,

That’s a big deal for me.

[firebirdy]

Broader Context: 

as a teenager (and somewhat as a child, but it reached critical mass when I was a teenager) the most intense sessions of beration my mother unleashed were about coursework, which is school projects you do at home (typically essays) which count towards your final, formal qualification grade. The situations varied:

One time she asked to see a piece of English coursework and, fairly gently, was like “let’s re-do this, you can do better” and was pretty teacherly and reasonable about it,

One time she got me to show me a page of my Graphics Design coursework (not due for several months, it was a long-form project) and went ballistic because it wasn’t good enough and made me re-do it, but then promptly showed no further interest whatsoever in the rest of the coursework and let me do the remaining 19 pages all alone,

One time I approached her on the evening before the deadline and said “I’ve got this maths coursework and I haven’t done it” & ofc she was furious and made me sit and try to do it, but didn’t intervene personally all that much,

One time she made me show her a piece of history coursework about a week before the deadline and went ballistic because it wasn’t good enough and made it re-do BUT to very different standards than what my teacher had asked for (e.g. telling me to quote secondary sources which Isn’t Necessary at A-level). I got a B and my teacher said he thought I could have done better but I guess we’ll never know,

(The next year she told me I had to re-sit that paper because I had gone to her the night before with nothing done and I’d got a D, and wouldn’t believe otherwise until I showed her the grade certificate)

But the biggest single unifying factor in all of these is:

Mind-numbing terror and incomprehension

(which is why I hadn’t done the maths coursework to begin with)

[firebirdy]

@fabledquill replied to your post: idk, I don’t… LIKE it that she can still reach me....

As someone who was in a manipulative relationship for WAY shorter than you have been with your mom, I will cautiously offer the personal sense that every time an abuser reaches out in kindness it is typically followed, intentionally or unintentionally, by a negative experience. It is an exclusively unbalancing act, and I have learned in my case that all such actions (when coming from the abuser) should be ignored or treated with suspicion.

yeah you’re right, you’re right... That’s what my gut feelin’ was telling me, but then there’s also the guilt mechanisms my mum installed kicking in, so it’s kinda a mess up in my brain about it! My instinct is that, although it might be a sincerely un-malevolent gesture, it’s ALSO a violation of all the ways I’ve indicated I don’t wanna be in touch anymore, and just....... more complicated than a simple Christmas card...

Like it’s in my mum’s nature, I think, to kinda hurt & trample people when she can, and to cut them out when she can’t (i.e. with non-familial adults) and IDK that she INTENDS to do it with any malice, but she does DO it. At the very least it’s a pattern of behaviour she reliably falls into, and if I get back in touch or whatever, I’ll be stepping back into that pattern myself

HHHH

Thanks for your thoughts pal, it’s helped make things kinda clearer in my ol’ noggin C:

[firebirdy]

I wonder how seriously she took me, a year ago

Did she think I would come crawling back, beg forgiveness? Did she think it would go back to being the same as before? Did she think she could wait me out? She blocked me on Facebook first, I know that, but I blocked her right back. When it happened, I thought, I wonder, I wonder if one day she’ll unblock me and assume I’ll be so grateful for her attention, only to find that the wall she built has another exactly as tall on the other side, and that one isn’t coming down?

I wonder how that will make her feel

I wonder how she felt when her letter was returned to sender unopened. I wonder if she figured out that I shredded the second letter she cleverly sent to my workplace instead. I wonder if she could tell I’d blocked her number when she left the voicemail I didn’t listen to, I wonder if she realised I would delete it, un-listened to

I wonder if she thought of me on my birthday

I wonder, is she mad at me? Does she hate me? Does she call me a tart, a cow, a slut, the way she did when I was a teenager? Does she blame me? Does she miss me? If she misses me, I don’t know what it is she misses. I was recalcitrant, secretive, avoidant. I didn’t like her. I was afraid of her. Most likely, I guess, she would miss her sounding board, the blank dummy she could monologue at and which had learned not to voice any opinions in return.

I wonder if it felt like when she shredded the dissertation-length letter I’d written her before I had even got of the house

I wonder, did it feel like when my brother quietly messaged me to say she’d gone into my old room, was pulling my notebooks out of the drawers, was shredding them into pieces and throwing them in the bin?

Did it feel like when she told me she didn’t remember the things she’d said, like when I hadn’t got enough proof, when she insisted she hadn’t meant it that way?

I wonder

[firebirdy]

I used to watch a lot of Simpsons with my family as a kid and one day my mum scoffed that Lisa was stuck-up & miserable, like she was an Inferior Simpson, & I was like 

My god 

We are living such different lives, my mother and I

[firebirdy]

it’s raining and I wish I were OF THE RAIN

[firebirdy]

I don’t want to try. ANYTHING. I don’t want to do ANYTHING!!!! No movies. No games. No drawing. Nothing. I want to like...... rise into the sky and... become cloud essence....... something easy.