Dandelions

Notcot.org is running a contest asking people to leave a comment describing their favorite 'symbol/icon/etc' and what it means to them. What a fun little exercise! The symbols people are choosing say so much about them, especially if it came to them without their needing to overthink it.

The symbol that immediately came to mind for me was the dandelion. For the past few months I have been occasionally considering getting one as a tattoo, but I haven't really spent a lot of time trying to understand why it is that I identify with them so much.

For starters, when I was a kid, I absolutely loved finding the little puffy ones and gently blowing the seeds to watch them be carried off by the wind. People always called them weeds, which is a racially insensitive term among plants, and they killed them off with all sorts of nasty chemicals. 

I'd sometimes blow them over to my neighbors clean, green lawns. I tried to be furtive about it, because I knew they were on the other team, and when I saw patches of little yellow lions roaring from their yard I was so excited! The yellow looks so pretty against a thick green lawn. But I stopped doing that when I realized I was sending them to a premature and painful death by chemical warfare.

My sisters liked them too, though I don't know if they got the same excitement I did from finding the patches of white clouds. They probably considered them on a par with the violets, which our yard had plenty of and I certainly appreciated them too, but did you know that when you squeeze a dandelion stem, some white gooey milk comes out? It's just like the stuff that you find in milkweed - another exciting plant, though not as common.

And then there are the not quite ready dandelions, with their modest green heads squeezing around a patch of soft, gently forming seeds, accented with the crunchy remains of the flower petals peering out the top like a little tuft of hair. When I was feeling curious, I'd pull the seeds out from the top. They came in one big cluster, with a sound like velcro ripping. I always felt a little guilty because they never could float on the wind like they would if I'd been more patient, but I'd try to loosen them up and toss them up in the air to see what would happen.

 That feeling of adventure, of the curious pursuit and experimentation, is the reason I'm an artist. I just find so much creative inspiration after so many years of playing around with everything I've come into contact with. I've found so many things that make me feel happy to be alive, and I have this fear that if I don't start making them myself the world might run out. I mean, the internet has shown me so much, from how to blow a shofar to how our children can benefit from the acknowledgement of racial issues rather than trying to make them 'colorblind'. I always find something new that interests me, and that often sparks new interests in things I never would have looked at before, so I suppose there's plenty left for me to find and I'd have to live a million years to see it all. But there seems to be a finite number of cool things in the world, and I want to contribute to that number.

I'll make another post some other time on why I'm an artist. That's a big topic, and I was totally sidetracked off dandelions. I'm not really interested in writing about them anymore though, so I guess I'll leave it at that.

Desperate Times

Facebook is death.

I seriously had a problem with that site. Five minutes ago I deleted half a dozen life stealing apps from my account. I was completely addicted, to the point of having a second account so I could spam my wall with "Help me with this challenge!"-type posts without feeling like an idiot. I had over 1100 friends on that account, and we were all in it together, a bunch of spamming, gaming, time wasting sacks of potatoes.

I'm glad to be rid of it. I wish it were as permanent as pouring a bottle down the sink. Unfortunately I can reactivate my account, and the games all store my data for a few months. Chances are I won't. I'd hate myself too much if I reactivated.

My hope is that this will motivate me to read more, or draw, or write. I looked myself in the mirror today and saw my messy, unshowered hair, my mascara-spotted cheeks, my visible ribcage and slouching posture and recognized just how much of a mess I am, as if I was seeing myself from someone else's perspective.

A friend and former boss mentioned on facebook that he was working on a production budget today, and I started to write, "Got any room for me in there?" But it turned into, "Got any room in there for an anxious, depressed, unreliable, barely functional addict with a history of mental breakdowns and way too much drama in her life?"

Claro que no lo envié. Maybe I'll get back to studying french. Probablement, je vrai étude français. I'm not sure if that was right.

I was driven to learn French, and continue learning Spanish, by a strong need to run away from everything. I know disappearing into Europe was always a fantasy, but I bought into it and didn't want to admit to how unrealistic it is for me. It's so romantic an idea, and it's so depressing to be stuck here. It's oppressive! It's all strings, they're attached to everything, they tie everything down to be buried.

Suicide isn't really an option for me, but sometimes that's a nice fantasy too. That sounds kind of disturbing, I know. It's more extreme than doing whatever it takes to get to a foreign country with a foreign language and have no home, money or backup plan. That's really my first option if I'm looking for a way out. It certainly carries a decent chance of finding myself turned into a skin-sweater or being raped or worse, but it does have a higher survival rate than suicide.

I remember in high school, when I was severely suicidal, I'd leave the house at 11pm and wander down to the dirtier areas of Lowell, hoping to find myself as a statistic. It was like sky diving, but a lot more depressing and frustrating.

This is me on a down note, when I'm more depressed than anxious. Generally, especially while I'm alone, I'm either like this or I'm totally freaked out and am trying to calm down. Middle ground shows up from time to time, especially when I'm distracting myself with good conversation or company. Sometimes, some people have this fantastic soothing influence on me, I feel safe, my anxiety diminishes and I can't feel so depressed. It's the people who don't come with so many strings attached, who are interested or care about me without expectation.

This is one of those posts that toes the line between public and private. I'll leave it public, but maybe some day I'll hide it away.

Chelmsford

Going home is such a challenge for me. Every Friday I try to convince myself it's worthwhile and I fail. It's paralyzing, the idea of it. I'm honestly terrified of Chelmsford, my old home town. Before I had that life-changing hospitalization I would go back mostly to work, and the occasional family function. I'd drink, distract myself with work, friends and drugs, and try my best to connect with my family.

But without those distractions there's a palpable wave of anxiety constantly washing through me that brings an absolute certainty that at any moment something monumentally awful is going to happen. Every corner of every room is a trap. Every moment I'm forgetting something vitally important and trying to figure out what it could be. Every word I say, every opinion I have and every action I take is under close scrutiny and assumed to be wrong. When I'm there, I know this like I know my hand is my own: there is no possible way to doubt it, and the longer something bad doesn't happen the more the anticipation builds. I think that's among the reasons why my nightmares are always so much worse there.

I can't handle those feelings, they're too much for me, way too much. It feels absurd, looking at what I wrote in that last paragraph. I recognize how crazy it is. Generally the only way I can handle it is if I dissociate or derealize. The last time I went home I lost my ability to remember anything over a couple years past. I couldn't remember my grandpa's name, I couldn't remember my teachers when Lauren talked about them, I couldn't remember the names of the sidestreets next to where I lived for 20 years. Everything seemed new and surreal, like it wasn't my life, like people had confused me for someone else. There was a funny little fear in the back of my head that there had been some sort of weird mix up a couple years ago and I had usurped someone else's life and never realized it.

It wasn't so bad originally, even when I was fresh out of the hospital and staying sober. It was when I had my major dissociative episode and people tried to convince me to go back to Chelmsford. They made me feel guilty for being in New York because they were so worried for me, and they would feel so much better if I went back to safe old suburbia, where they could keep closer tabs on me. It was one friend in particular who brought this out, but I got it from a number of people back there. I didn't want them to worry, and I felt sick, that people were afraid to let me live on my own. It made me feel claustrophobic. I had images of them digging into me with their claws, grasping at me, dragging me toward them and swaddling me in their secure nest in the suburbs. It was for my own safety, they were trying to take care of me, because they believed I couldn't take care of myself. I felt like I deserved more respect than that, that I deserved more trust.

After coming to grips with the idea that I might be forced to live in Chelmsford, I haven't felt at all safe there. It will take a while before any sense of security there comes back.

The next thing I need to talk about is my relationship with my family.

All Apologies

Apologies can be really important to me. I'm currently ruining a great friendship because the guy hasn't apologized for his actions, when all it would take is for him to say he's sorry. To accept having been wrong takes a lot of strength of character, and it's so hard for so many people. My father has apologized to me maybe twice in my life, but he has never truly been genuinely apologetic to me. It's always been turned around on me to make me feel guilty and make me apologize for his bad actions. When I was in a hospital, bedridden, he made fun of my catheter. I was hurt, and plainly asked for him to please not mention it because it's really embarrassing to me. He steamed for a good fifteen minutes, and then he snapped and unplugged my tv, which was among my only sources of entertainment in the room since I wasn't supposed to stand up, and then he marched off to a far corner of the other room in the suite so I couldn't talk to him about it. I walked over to him in excruciating pain against the doctor's orders, and was sobbing and apologizing to him and begging for his forgiveness. I apologized to him over and over and felt very guilty, and what had I done? I was embarrassed by his teasing me and called him out on it, and he saw it as disrespectful to him, and unappreciative because he had taken his time out to be there with me in the hospital.

He never has and likely never will apologize for that, which is always going to bother me. One thing he has apologized for is cutting down that mulberry tree, though my mom had to push him into it, and it was an, "I'm sorry, although there's no way I could have known you would be so irrationally attached to a tree, so of course I have nothing to apologize for, just stop crying" type of apology.

I remember the first time I noticed him apologizing, it was a shock to me - he was carrying something and it was heavy and he put more weight on my end than I could handle so he said, "Sorry, sorry! Let's put it down."

I was floored by it, and then I was stunned that it would be such a shock. I had accepted the fact that he was never, ever wrong, never made mistakes, and took it for granted - he never had a reason to apologize, if he did something wrong it wasn't his fault. It was probably mine. I'm sure he apologizes much more to mom or other people he considers his equals, but he just doesn't to his kids, or at least not without cutting it by saying things like, "Sooo sorry charlie!", quoting some old tv show. It saves him face by making it insincere, as if it's silly to be upset over whatever it is he's apologizing for.

He just has too firm a belief that he's always right to ever ask for forgiveness.

That's all probably not so far out of the ordinary. Or is it? And does it matter? I mean, why do I accept such clearly unhealthy behavior just because it might be somewhat normal? His never apologizing and constant blame gaming has left me with some severe complexes.

Ugh. Those movie and tv jokes about incidences of bad parenting that say things like, "That'll make for good conversation with her therapist twenty years from now," used to be funny to me, but they so aren't anymore.

Abuse

Here's a passage from this book I've been reading, "Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Herman:

This malignant sense of inner badness is often camouflaged by the abused child's persistent attempts to be good. In the effort to placate her abusers, the child victim often becomes a superb performer. She attempts to do whatever is required of her. She may become an empathic caretaker for her parents, an efficient housekeeper, an academic achiever, a model of social conformity. She brings to all these tasks a perfectionist zeal, driven by the desperate need to find favor in her parents' eyes. In adult life, this prematurely forced competence may lead to considerable occupational success. None of her achievements in the world redound o her credit, however, for she usually perceives her performing self as inauthentic and false. Rather, the appreciation of others simply confirms her conviction that no one can truly know her and that, if her secret and true self were recognized, she would be shunned and reviled.

This is almost verbatim something I've talked to my therapist about and now, because it's in this book and is so precisely accurate to one of my biggest issues, I've spent a lot of time thinking about its roots. This is in the context of child abuse. What other roots can cause this intense a complex? When I was a kid, were my parents' behaviors abusive?

I know they love me, and I love them. They've been there for me, at least financially and in terms of bringing me to therapy and such. But they rarely show affection or pride for me, and often seem very emotionally distant. Because they treat affection toward me like it's something awkward, limited or even shameful, I have a hard time reciprocating anything. Both of them remind me now of another few passages in the book:

The abused child is isolated from other family members as well as from the wider social world. She perceives daily, not only that the most powerful adult in her intimate world is dangerous to her, but also that the other adults who are responsible for her care do not protect her. The reasons for his protective failure are in some sense immaterial to the child victim, who experiences it at best as a sign of indifference and at worst as a complicit betrayal. From the child's point of view, the parent disarmed by secrecy should have known; if she cared enough, she would have found out. The parent disarmed by intimidation should have intervened; if she cared enough, she would have fought. The child feels that she has been abandoned to her fate, and this abandonment is often resented more keenly than the abuse itself.

... In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent. Sometimes the child attempts to preserve a bond with the nonoffending parent. She excuses or rationalizes the failure of protection by attributing it to her own unworthiness. More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent. She may in fact feel more strongly attached to the abuser, who demonstrates a perverse interest in her, than in the nonoffending parent, whom she perceives as indifferent.

... In the course of normal development a child achieves a secure sense of autonomy by forming inner representations of trustworthy and dependable caretakers, representations that can be evoked mentally in moments of distress. ... In a climate of chronic childhood abuse, these inner representations cannot form in the first place; they are repeatedly, violently, shattered by traumatic experience. Unable to develop an inner sense of safety, the abused child remains more dependent than other children on external sources of comfort and solace. Unable to develop a secure sense of independence, the abused child continues to seek desperately and indiscriminately for someone to depend upon.

...Thus, under conditions of chronic childhood abuse, fragmentation becomes the central principle of personality organization. Fragmentation in consciousness prevents the ordinary integration of knowledge, memory, emotional states, and bodily experience. Fragmentation in the inner representations of the self prevents the integration of identity. Fragmentation in the inner representations of others prevents the development of a reliabe sense of independence within connection.

... The sociologist Patricia Rieker and the psychiatrist Elaine Carmen describe the central pathology in victimized children as a "disordered and fragmented identity deriving from accomodations to the judgments of others."

I think that in a way, I thought of both of my parents as how this book describes the 'nonoffending' parent, though I certainly spent my entire 20 years of living with them in constant fear of offending my dad, who was prone to flying into fits of rage over the tiniest things, and when his anger was even remotely justifiable he really lost it. One time I recycled a box of something, and the bag of recyclables was next to the stove, which had a burner on boiling water. It was maybe a foot away from the flames. My dad screamed, "Everybody, wake up!" at the bottom of the stairs, stomped up them two at a time, and I remember being so scared to admit it was me, but I did and he was absolutely furious. We went downstairs and found that the bags had been ripped apart and tossed all over the kitchen. At first I thought the dog had done it and found it a little awkwardly funny, but I was horrified to find out that my dad had done it in a rage, and that the mess was my fault because I had been so irresponsible. He made me clean it up. My mom helped, I think. Anyway, that's one of my clearer memories. I also remember him wrenching the keys from my hand after I tried to get in the back door once, and locking the door on me, locking me out of the house. I walked several miles in the rain without a coat or my purse, to a friend's house, who wasn't there, so I spent the afternoon crying in a sub shop, Kastore's. They gave me tea and a jacket while I was there, free. He was mad at me because he and I got into an argument, I think over how he had been drowning squirrels in the back yard, and I was too upset to handle it so I said I needed to take a walk to collect myself. He saw it as disrepectful. I can remember a lot of times that he would be screaming at me over this or that and he'd hold my shoulders and force me to look him in the eyes, which I often couldn't do. He was rarely physically violent, but that one bothered him enough to throw me into a door once.

Reflecting on this, I'm reminded of how much I admired the trees in my back yard. I used to talk to them, and saw them as living beings, as friends. I guess they were the idealized people in my life. They just constantly grew and were so strong, and I was the only one who could climb them all the way to the top, a hundred feet above everything. I'd climb up in them and read, or just relax and appreciate how it felt to be rocked back and forth by the wind in the summer. I knew, deep down, that they would always be there - they had been there before I was born and would be there long after I died.

One of them, the biggest and strongest, died because the neighbors put a salt pile next to it, so we had to cut it down. Another died after a big gust of wind blew it over and it crushed half the back yard - I can remember the sound, I was bolted awake by it and instantly found myself in the doorway of my room by the time it hit the ground. Several others were cut down with it because they had been damaged by the fall, or because .. my dad wanted to? I'm not sure. They must have been damaged by the fall, or were otherwise dangerous, or he wouldn't want to waste the effort and money cutting them. Although I remember we had to fight to convince him not to cut down the last beloved maple tree, one which Kim had particularly liked and which I had spent a considerable amount of my childhood sitting in. It was damaged, but not severely.

Our cherry trees died of fungi or rot, two more trees died probably because they were too close to the street and our town salts too much and cuts away indescriminately branches that go near the phone lines or over the street.

The latest tree to go was the Mulberry tree. It was like my last childhood friend. The other maple tree has always been more Kim's friend than mine, though I like it too. My dad decided one day that it had been bothering him for too long - the birds that ate the berries pooped purple on his car, and the berries fell in his swimming pool which he never uses and never cleans but takes care of the chemicals and the equipment. So he tried to force me into helping him girdle it. I didn't realize what he was doing until I was outside, and I freaked out. I was sobbing pathetically about it to him and of course he couldn't understand what made me so upset. I didn't even really understand. This was just a few months ago, and it still hasn't been cut down. He just girdled it so it would die a slow death. Earlier that day I had been thinking happily about how the berries were just starting to come in, and I was so excited for when they were all ripe. Most of them were green, but a few were purple and I had eaten a couple. I guess what excited me brought dread to my dad.

Sometimes I think I'm just too sensitive, too emotional, too this or that, but that's just putting the blame on me. I shouldn't try to take responsibility for what bothers me. That's a whole other post, though.