I’m at the stage in my life where I’m figuring out that a lot of things my family did to me when I was young really fucked me up pretty good; banning me from having anything to do with things that I was hyperfixated on every other day, letting my younger sister torment me and then gaslight me about it without consequences because “you ARE too sensitive and you SHOULD know better than to fall into her traps by now,” sending me to a psychiatrist for “Peter Pan Syndrome” because I didn’t show any interest in dating as a young teenager, and mostly just kept carrying on the way I had been as a kid…
And the worst part is? It hurt them, too. I don’t resent them for it. I can’t. Not when I know how they were going about things, and where we lived, and what the world was like back then. My parents KNEW there was something not standard about me, and they did as much research as could be done in the days before the Internet, and sought help. “Do you think she could be on the spectrum? What we’ve read matches up pretty well in some areas, but not in others. We need some more guidance from a professional” was their method.
And the professional they went to, in Conservative Florida in the 90s, steered them absolutely WRONG. Told them “That’s a boy disease, you have a DAUGHTER, she can’t have that.”
They would never have hurt me if they’d known. If they’d had the resources and the correct information. In fact, now that we DO know, a lot of things are more clear, and they’ve gotten a LOT more relaxed about my atypicalities. They have always been good parents, and they have always loved me fiercely. The fact that they were led astray in a time before information was so widely available at our fingertips is a reflection of the doctor who led them astray, not of them.
We’re all still working through it. We’ll be working through it for the rest of our time on Earth. And I can’t really talk to them about it because it’ll hurt them too much, or they’ll take it personally when it’s not, it’s really not personal at all.
But damn if a lot of the ways I hate myself don’t make a lot of sense cast in the light of what was done to try and make me “more well-rounded.”