On Unlived Lives

There’s a quote by Jung that resonates with me: “The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents”

That has put a fine point on the knowledge I have been struggling within myself, that I am not living up to my potential, and looking back on my upbringing is it no wonder I struggle with learned helplessness & its accompanying self worth issues, as neither of my parents were able to extricate themselves completely from the traps their parents created for them. 

At a minimum their lives are great cautionary tales for myself of things or a life I want to avoid—so I try to move forward the best I can. There is no alternative. 

Reviewing Old Blog Posts From 2018-2017

It is wild re-reading old posts, being reminded of a few things (i.e., the solitary apology I ever received from mom), and the instability of my relationships with mom, my sister, and her sister. If things were relatively peaceful between mom and I, then things with my aunt or my sister suffered, and visa versa. 

If mom was fawning over one of us, she was fighting or freezing someone else. And always triangulating. Someone always had to be the villain or scapegoat in her narrative. 

Damaged people DAMAGE PEOPLE. The collateral damage for me is I am left shattered, anxious and avoidant, and hyper vigilant—the last characteristic I am viewing as a super power that serves to protect me, but still it is exhausting constantly bring mindful and assessing risks. 

Mom is the one who physically died, and yet I am left behind feeling as if I were already a ghost and an afterthought. Sometimes I feel as if I were a ghost haunting my own grave that no one visits.

Mom wasted so much time creating & stoking chaos, it didn’t leave much time for love, though there were glimmers of it (or so I thought) along the way that got diluted in the chaos. 

Sadly what little glimmer of familial love or ties that remained in the aftermath of her death, the Trump presidency and the persistence of the COVID pandemic diluted things to the point where I am convinced there isn’t much left at all. 

Cruelty & Weakness

 

“This Is How Things Are Now”

I originally started this blog when mom was alive as a means of documenting and warehousing and compartmentalizing the abuse & absurdity I experienced in my relationship with mom.  

In the aftermath of her passing, I now see that it has evolved into documenting my relationship with myself. 

Before COVID, I thought I had a handle on everything: controlling myself, my thoughts, and by extension my feelings to the point where I was off antidepressants for 11 years. 

Back on medication & back in therapy again, to put myself back together again. Familiar territory. 

I have been re-reading the entries in this blog and reflecting back on the version of myself writing those entries, and so many thoughts come to my mind: the exhaustion & exasperation of constantly being vigilant and protective of me, Maharajah and our life, mindful not to share anything that could be gossiped about or twisted into something else entirely. 

I spent too much time being protective, vigilant, angry, resentful. I see the gaps in blog entries where I was documenting how many days I went without contacting mom, or days when she would call me an outlandish amount of times. 

Exasperation. Exhaustion. Control. Stress. Then her love bombing with a mere glimmer of what appeared to be love, which would dissipate back into the spiral of stress, and nothing ever making her happy, leaving me feeling like a failure—why bother? 

Spending that much time being hyper-vigilant, over stressed, feeling like the villain in the stories mom told herself and others didn’t leave much room for love—and to be honest, it is difficult for me to distinguish actual love versus trauma bonding & Stockholm Syndrome regarding mom. 

I learned too late in life what this is (or was): peptide addiction (the interplay of excess cortisol + dopamine depletion in particular). There I go again, doing what I do best, intellectualizing my trauma. 

Things toward the very end moved too quick, no time for tidy attempts at a sentimental goodbye. The last month of her life was, for all of us, high stress. And in a way, I am chasing my “next hit” of dopamine from a wave of love bombing that will never come. Closure has yet to darken the doorstep of my heart & psyche.

In her 2019 Christmas voicemail to me, in response to gifts she can no longer afford to give us she said, “Well, this is how things are now.” 

Indeed. This is how things are now. At some point I hope to progress from stone cold resignation to actual acceptance. In the meantime, I am trying to allow myself the grace to “just be” and sit with my thoughts and feelings until such time my sadness lessens and my resentments melt away.