I feel as though I’m about to play a game of “Who said it” with myself except I cannot remember the exact wording but I can still feel the context in my heart. Someone recently was talking about their past when they referenced how everything had a purpose if not only to simply shine a light over some who are still lost at sea. I was picturing my life as a hurricane over the ocean. There are plenty of ships out to sea who are bobbing and tossing in the raging, dark waters and their lights moving about as their ship does toss and bob as violently as their boats. Then there is the lighthouse. It is stable and consistent in how it spins its light silently and resiliently. Resilience. That word has stuck with me this year. I remember trying to read a book about resilience, but it was written by a runner who was constantly referring back to the one workout I entirely loathe: running. Gross. Although it had potential to be a great book and even one that would help me out significantly with the parables it contained, I simply set it aside after it sat collecting dust for months after the first few chapters. One point did stick, however. All people who have succeeded in life have consistently stuck to the smaller habits until they became the bigger habits. In other words, if I ever wanted to take my fat butt off the couch to run a marathon, I would have to first learn how to walk a marathon then jog; or better yet, I’d have to learn how to run one mile before two and so on.
I’ve been listening to a lot of people speak. I’ve found that YouTube or Audible, and even my church with its recent retreat and usual sermons, that hearing another few voices are far better than the negative self-talk I’ve grown so accustomed to that it’s still incredibly hard to apply metacognition to be aware of the words I’m saying to myself. The realization hit me a few weeks ago while talking to my mom. She had self-deprecated perhaps four times in only a few breaths of speech. I cannot remember the topic, but it was then that I told her, “Mom, you should never talk about yourself that way. Do you really believe that [insert negative speech she just uttered]?” It was then that we talked about the power of speech, our thoughts, and prayer and how much CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and other therapeutic methods have immensely helped my overall well-being and happiness. It was then that it hit me: why am I basing my happiness on what I DO? There within realizing that I still have a lot of work to do with my own inner thoughts and internal experiences that I also realized much of my worth has always seemingly been based off of what I DO.
I know that my sibling has uttered the same thing before. They’ve also discussed with me, in passing yet not directly, that they have symptoms of being part of a brain-washing cult. I thought that they were referring to that time they dedicated a year to study as a student of theology in some leadership, young adult religious camp that practiced some discipline akin to being in the military such as shared quarters, strict rules around cleanliness and punctuality, as well as duties being assigned to run a ministry and they even corporately fasted from time to time (they have a few stories about quitting sugar, &c.) and worked out as if it were boot camp. They were the healthiest and most religious I have ever seen them, but if it weren’t for the forced and manipulative nature of that cultish lifestyle, they would still be healthy, devout in their religion, and not morbidly obese and living a lifestyle that is quite opposite to that damaging culture. Does the word “cult” come from “culture”? It would appear so, wouldn’t it?
I digress. The point is that the topic has come up but not in the way I was expecting. Instead, it’s been about the near-impossible standards I grew up with as a kid not only with my grades but also in how I kept my room tidy and unlived in, my hair smooth (it’s naturally unruly and half waves/half curls), my clothing ironed and never torn or patched up (this especially referred to my school uniform)… it’s no wonder the stress had me pulling out my eyelashes. Not only did I fear being unworthy of God’s love but also of my parents who were constantly nit-picking everything I said or did. My papers at school were constantly being graded with the strictness I’ve witnessed in movies with an empathic cringe of the teacher slapping a big F on an excellent report after the student had stayed up much of the night studying and rendering. Although I am thankful for my education and refined discipline in how I present myself, it has unfortunately led to some unfair standards in which I measure myself and the world.
I’m now remembering the recent animated film Encanto. There are several characters I could go through and analyze and find much I have in common with in each of them. I have felt like the outcast of the family simply because I love to travel and try new things and take risks like skiing, rock climbing, and kayaking. One thing I’ve never seen my family do is work out and I remember thinking it was odd that one of my cousins downstairs (I grew up in a duplex with my immediate family living in the upstairs unit and my dad’s brother and his immediate family living in the downstairs unit until eventually my grandparents also lived with my uncle downstairs) would run. He would go for a run. I mean, like he was getting muscles so he was doing far more than just that, so when I was in high school I also went to the gym on a regular basis because this cool pastor who decided to be our gym teacher decided that he would take us to a real gym to show us how to work the equipment and we had to track on a worksheet what we did and how many reps… I remember I was so hot then, or so I thought. That brings me to not talking about Bruno but about Louisa. I had an incredibly hard time talking about any of my emotions with my mom. Even if she asked me directly it was difficult. I don’t know if it was because I was embarrassed or if it was because when I did try to talk to her she would downplay things or even change the subject. Just the same, though, I went through my adolescence feeling very much alone in how I felt and that I had to be strong to get through high school by myself. I definitely didn’t have many if any friends and none of them I would talk to on a level beyond what was for homework. I had to know what was for homework because if I didn’t spend much of my evenings studying and completing it to perfection, there would be hell to pay later. Hell would be possible yelling along with an hours-long critique alone in my dad’s study with him pointing his finger down at me and his eyes dancing with anger. If my mom was a part of those conversations I would be asked why and what else I could do to fix the problem that usually was my already excellent grades not being good enough, so I had to be strong. I had to carry all that pressure, but it came at an incredible cost.
I didn’t at first see myself as Isabela in Encanto, but now that it’s been some time and my six-year-old has watched it several times and the soundtrack still lives in the car’s CD player, I can now see it. I was always confused with relationships, but now it makes sense. I’ve been trying to perform for approval all my life. It’s led to how Mirabel treats Isabela in the first part of the movie: with disgust and that not-really-jealousy-but-quit-trying-so-hard-all-the-time reaction. I’ve been called many names from “Miss Perfect” to “Teacher’s Pet” and I guess it’s the “Miss Perfect” that got to me the most. But…just as Abuela plucks that one little white flower that isn’t as pristine and perfect as the other pink ones in that scene where Isabela sprouts a crown of flowers on her head when the pressure of starting a family of her own hits her, I had no room to be anything else. If I was “Miss Perfect” then why couldn’t I ever seem to be enough for my parents? Once I knew the code to crack to be a successful student, I kept winning prizes for science fairs, art shows, had a poem I couldn’t even imagine trying to find now published, had art in an East-West conference…the list goes on and on and the Who’s Who list three years in a row…high honor roll, scholarship to the Maine College of Art for two semesters in a row…I don’t remember the celebrations or all the certificates, but I do remember wishing I could stay in my parents’ good graces long enough to not be picked at or somehow reeled back in with more discipline because my hair was too messy or my uniform too wrinkled or “Did you see that stain? Did you pick your face? You’re breaking out again…”
Resilience. Is it, though?
Oxford Languages defines resilience as a noun as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” I don’t believe I was recovering quickly in those years. In fact, I believe I was one of those many boats out to sea looking for the lighthouse and here I am still searching for that one, lone light that is unwavering.
I recently took another personality test, just a thing that came up during the retreat as well as a paper bag full of “love notes” that we each wrote one another for the sake of encouragement. The MC/leader asked us to not leave anyone out even if we didn’t know them all that well as if it were Valentine’s Day at school. I find that interesting: why exactly have we built this system where obligation to include one another can be just as damaging as being left out? Perhaps we won’t know the true aftermath until these children come of age to tell us what the true experience was and whether or not their social status or awareness within the group impacted anything at all because they had to give a Valentine to every single kid in their class and invite every single kid to their birthday party. I don’t mind it, honestly, it’s just an inkling curiosity of what the future will talk about around a campfire with a guitar and hot cocoa. I ought to get some dairy free hot cocoa mix made up for myself and my daughter. And a fire pit if these winds will allow any such nights before winter sets in.
My personality turns out to be an ENFP according to a few tries at the Meyers-Briggs. I’m not sure what it tells of myself, but I was surprised not to find any J in that acronym. Although I try hard not to, I believe myself to be a judgmental person, especially when behavior is harmful to another’s peace and happiness. Harmony. Now there is a word that would characterize it for me. Oxford Languages defines it, in one of its many definitions, as “the quality of forming a pleasing and consistent whole.” I associate it with contentment and peaceful coexistence. I first felt this feeling with my husband when we were first married and adjusting to living with someone (for me it was the first time with a man who wasn’t my brother or father). I remember the first few quiet afternoons together. There was no effort in enjoying one another and he was the very first, and possibly one of the only, people I have been able to just BE around with no agenda or rushed feelings of a to-do list or set of expectations to fulfill. So maybe I’m not judgmental at all. Maybe those judgements I thought myself to make of myself and others and my environment are really just observing things that could “rock the boat” and disrupt my desire for harmony. That would very much be more of a feeling trait like the F possibly stands for. There is also that part of me that is still working out what depression means. Psychiatry.org, since I’m now in a theme of defining words and their connotations, defines it as, “Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act.” Indeed.
Now here is the crux of the definition for me: I don’t always feel a lingering sadness that is characteristic of major depressive disorder and its close cousin anxiety. Some of the Google search results will make mention of this on the first five or so hits. I think more than anything that it *could* cause sadness because of the disrupted thought patterns that are not consistent with reality. I’m not talking insanity, but of the book by the pioneer of cognitive behavioral therapy, David D. Burns, MD. In his book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy published originally in 1999 according to amazon.com, Dr. Burns makes reference to the many ways in which, for someone with depression, there are “depressions” in our beliefs about the world around us. He then proceeds to break down these common thought patterns in the several chapters to follow and how he effectively helped many patients of his retrain their thought patterns to better match reality. For example, and I’ll make this one up, a depressed person might see that someone is laughing at a joke across the room. That person might think, “They’re laughing at me” because they had a quarrel the other day where reality is they thought a joke the depressed person was not able to hear from across the room was funny. It had nothing to do with the depressed person, therefore reality doesn’t always match the inner thought life. Those thoughts are “depression.” If this depressed person was to collect several of these thoughts, or impressions as Dr. Burns sometimes refers to them as, over the course of a day and it were to become habit, then naturally there would be a negative mood in the person’s overall demeanor.
It was perhaps before I was even aware of such cognitions, impressions, thoughts, whatever one might call them, I began to feel not good enough for my parents. And, because my parents were my world, I possibly didn’t feel good enough for the world. Then, as I began to embark in the only social circles I knew to be in church, where I was constantly told I was a sinner, and school, where I was always being critiqued and graded… it only feels to be the natural conclusion that this is why I struggle to form healthy, lasting relationships. My brother, once my first playmate and best friend, quickly ditched me once he skipped a grade in school and I stayed back a grade. Then, a sibling rivalry began between my sibling and me. I cannot work that one out very well, but my female-born, non-binary sibling was a rival. We fought so frequently that our seats at the table were set apart. What was it that we fought about and why? At what age did this start? Perhaps I was taking out the new social pressures of the new school out on them? We had changed schools from the public school to a rigorously disciplined private religious school. I laugh now at that comparison my mom used to make of how it wasn’t all that bad because no one was hitting us with a ruler like the Catholic school she grew up in where every teacher was a nun. She’s right, it wasn’t at all like that, but it wasn’t without its own hardships and trials that I have only now begun to acknowledge.
Here I can see my younger self striving to the point where I was literally pulling out my hair. That isn’t when things got better, though. In fact, that was when things were at their very worst. My aunt had had a heart attack. At home, I’d constantly hear about how our family wasn’t following God because they weren’t as religious as we were, and her smoking and obesity caused her to have a heart attack. Irony here is that everyone in my family at the time were all overweight except myself. My parents openly talked about the impact of the world on those who don’t follow God. I could even imagine at any point they will conveniently not recall this or say it never happened, but here’s the reality- I grew up believing my entire family was full of dirty sinners who were all going to hell. I don’t believe any of these notions were ever communicated directly but it is the conclusion my young mind came up with. I do, however, remember my nana saying once, “I wish all my children would follow the Lord.” I remember once I had the gall to repeat that to my aunt who snapped back at me angrily that she was, in fact, a believer. My poor, young naivety didn’t understand that there were many forms of believers in just the Christian faith alone. All I knew was my pastor preached a “you’re in or you’re out” kind of gospel that were the passive aggressive forms of the infamous “fire and brimstone” type of sermons. He even yelled when he got excited or “passionate” about a topic. I even remember teachers and my pastor passing along their political beliefs like they were the only correct way of thinking. Now that I’m nearly middle-aged (how can one know if you already are or past middle-aged?), I understand politics to also be a very complex and personal decision and have often found myself baffling at the extreme right oppressive privileges of the elite white. My biggest pet-peeve is the insensitivity of refusing to honor another culture or belief or heritage and how this oppressive class of people consistently say it is their right to never offer respect to another human because it is oppressive to themselves. I mean, what kind of gaslighting is this anyways? If you’re bothered by someone wanting to be called by their Native American name because it’s oppressive to your whiteness? Yuck. If only they’d all take a class in aggressive bias like I had to for Girl Scouts leadership training… but then we’re back at forcing others into doing things even if it’s for the greater good and I don’t know how I feel about that like with Valentines. I still haven’t read my paper bag notes from the women’s retreat…
So, my aunt is in the hospital for days or weeks. Who knows what time span it was because as the song goes, “What time is it and in what month? This clock never seemed so alive!” (You and Me, Lifehouse). When things go a certain way as a kid, often one can be left grappling at how many actual minutes have gone by. On a happier note, that song is about losing track of time while with a lover, so it doesn’t really apply. What I do know is that it started on one of the many very long shopping trips my mother would take for groceries. There must have been some stress at school, possibly the bullying had already started? Ah yes, that’s right! I had cut my hair because my mom thought it would look cute in a pixie cut. The first time I got it done, I loved it. It was fluffy and didn’t take any effort to style it. A boy at school, and this is in fifth grade, said that I looked butch. He hadn’t bothered me that first time because he was known to just say things off the cuff like that and I had shrugged it off. I was a little bothered by it, but it wasn’t until on the playground much later when I had that same hair cut trimmed that he started to taunt me with the name Butch. It makes me wonder if the movie Home Alone had come out prior to this playground bullying. I had immediately hated the haircut and couldn’t believe the hair stylist had gone much shorter than I had wanted to begin with, and this boy noticed much to my horror that it indeed looked like a boy’s haircut on me. I was not wearing it well like some girls can pull off. I felt ridiculous. I remember having quite a few bellyaches in fourth grade around math class and reading aloud, but fifth grade was literally the worst. I even had my mom called to the classroom where I was standing near the door in the hall. She had asked me if I was feeling sick because I was anxious and I said no. I had no idea what that really meant or that worry could bother my belly. All I knew was the very mention it was time for math I would feel very sick to my stomach. Try as they may, my class was known to continue to talk regardless of the teacher attempting to write someone’s name on the board with a checkmark system that meant losing morning recess, lunch recess, and visiting the principal’s office. When I was trying very hard to concentrate on math problems, I’d become incredibly annoyed and worried about getting it wrong because I wouldn’t be able to focus. What a rough year! And it was just the beginning of the next seven years of torment.
So at some point, we’re at the grocery store, bored as usual, while my mom is calculating the budget against the actual store prices and meal plan. Now that I’m doing that for my own family, whether it’s online pickup or not, it’ll often take 2-3 hours for one week’s worth of groceries. I remember how tired my feet always were around the middle of the store after an hour or so and that pushing the cart was something I’d fight my sibling over. My brother was possibly old enough to stay in the car or maybe he was silently following us, but I surely remember my sibling there. My brother was 4 grades ahead of me so as a high schooler, I’m sure he must have been in the car waiting while my sibling and I had to be in the store because the three of us together often would cause trouble by treating the family van as a playground or coming up with some “pass it/catch” or “keep-away” game that often ended in quarrels over the actual rules of the game.
I’ll have to come back to the grocery store. What led to actually pulling out my eyelashes and why did it bring relief?
summersolstice1115 