My Past
Diary entry 4
(The diary entries are intended to be read in order.)
Before I begin to delve too deeply into my plan of recovery, or my healing path, I feel I ought to provide some background information concerning the past I was to heal myself from. The purpose of reviewing the past is not to dwell in it or in self-pity, but to bring to light all of the subconscious beliefs and pains, the thoughts and feelings we are unaware of which are subconsciously determining and perpetuating our reality, be it pleasant, or, as in my case, not. The fact is, that no matter how you work to change your present by changing or controlling your conscious mind, if you are coming from a traumatic background, you will find that you cannot affect your present reality well, because experiences you can’t even remember have been burned in your psyche as a child and are still affecting you and the energy you emit into the world. In order to effect real and enduring change, I believe you must start from your beginning and confront and then release all of the unpleasantness and pain from your past. For example, anyone who has ever had to clean out a fish tank knows that when you siphon out all of the putrefied food and fishy excrement stuck in the gravel, the water in the tank gets stirred up and filled with floating filth that had settled at the bottom. Only when the filth is stirred up out of its resting place can we vacuum it all out with the siphon. The first step, then, is to bring past pain to light.
I will separate the stages of my life neatly into chapters, as if it were a book.
Introduction to the World
I was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1968 to an American mother and father. I had a brother, born in the U.S., who was three years older than I was. Two years after my birth, my parents moved us back to the U.S.
According to my mother, once we left Canada, I was never the same again. Her claim is that I was a happy child in Canada, and that once we moved away, I withdrew inside myself and became quiet and shy. I personally don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised; what little girl wouldn’t cry at being forced to leave Canada? 
.
From birth, in my nature, I was inherently unlike anyone in my family, while my brother, by contrast, is quite similar to my mother, and even more similar to my father. Even physically, I was an oddity in the family–while all of the other immediate and extended family members had dark brown-black hair and/or darker skin complexions, I was born with strawberry-blond hair and very white skin. In later years at school, for example, I was always the one everyone liked to hold their bare arms up next to to see how “dark” their tans were while marveling out loud at how white I was. It was all in good fun, though, and I became fond of my fair complexion, even though it was never “in vogue.”
Health issues:
I had been born with a serious genetic disorder called phenylketonauria, or the easily-spelled version of the disorder, PKU. However, I had no idea about this disorder or what it was until I was in my early to mid-20’s, when I re-established contact with the Canadian PKU specialist who had treated me when I was little. This is to say, my parents never explained to me what PKU was or that I had it.
I had also been born with a severe peanut allergy, which my mother says she did not know about until I was 10 years old, at which time I was tested for allergies in association with a severe asthmatic condition I had developed. In spite of my mother’s lack of awareness of my condition, there were many occasions prior to my tenth year where I had become very ill due to having ingested something containing peanuts (usually cookies that had been made for us by my great aunts or my grandmother).
Chapter One – And There was Light
0-8 years
The first chapter of my life basically begins with my birth and leads up to the age of eight. For this era, I only have shadows of memories– of being at the house of some elderly woman, and maybe in some daycare or nursery school, of being locked in a dark classroom closet by my mother’s students (apparently my mother was some sort of teacher at that time), and being bullied into eating peanut butter by my brother. It was a dark and precarious period, devoid of parents, especially lacking any maternal presence or feeling of safety. The only memories of parents I have during this chapter include me and my brother spinning around dancing while my father played his guitar and sung, as well as the prevailing violent feeling of my mother and father fighting. My father had a violent temper and, as I learned many years later, nothing to everything would set him off, so life with him was a fearful existence. I became very scared when my parents fought, especially if they fought while one of them was driving.
Nowadays, my mother’s retrospective assessment of me as a child is “You were so quiet that I forgot you were there,” which reveals both my nature as a child and my mother’s nature as a mother, especially if you think about the implications of that statement within the context of a mother-toddler relationship. By contrast, my mother’s retrospective assessment of my brother as a child is “He was a pain in the ass. He was always shouting after me and demanding attention,” which says a lot about my brother’s nature. These two statements combined provide very accurate insight into the spectacular contrast in the fundamental natures of my brother and me.
A great number of the memories I still have from this chapter, though, actually deal with the time I spent with my best friend, Ann. All of the good times I had were with her, playing at her house, sleeping over-night etc. I liked her parents. I have more memories of her parents than of my own–and fond memories at that.
The final and most prominent memory I have from this chapter is the fright that consumed me in my alone-time, of which I feel I had a lot. I was full of fears as a little girl, the worst of which reared their ugly heads at night as I was supposed to fall asleep. My parents had a very big house and their bedroom was very far away from my brother’s and mine. Our bedrooms were upstairs and far down a hallway, while my parents’ bedroom was downstairs and far down another hallway. Our rooms were so far apart, it was like living in two different houses.
I froze in my bed in the winters, for lack of covers, and I often slept on the bare floor beside the heat vent to keep warm. The heat vent also had a second purpose; my brother and I would listen to our parents’ fighting, which always carried clearly through the heat vents.
On summer nights, I would lie in my bed frozen, again, but this time frozen with fear. I always heard a voice in the blowing wind calling my name, while the curtain on the window above my bed kept getting sucked in and blown out, and my door kept opening and closing all by itself…until it would finally slam itself shut–I was paralyzed with fear. I feared the ghosts in my room and in my closet, and I feared what was under my bed. And they never went away.
Finally, there was a painting hung on the wall in my bedroom which gave me a desolate, sinking feeling. It was a nearly colorless painting of a circus ring surrounded by spectator bleachers. The bleachers and circus ring were deserted except for a very pasty white, emaciated-looking clown in the middle of the circus ring. I can’t remember what he was doing, but I would stare at that painting while lying in bed, and I could feel the desolation and loneliness of it settling like a fog in my impressionable child-heart, which was just helplessly absorbing all of the emotions around it.
Chapter Two – The Divorce
8-20 years
The second chapter of my life began when I was eight, lasted until I was 20, and is primarily characterized by my parents’ divorce and the endless familial hell which inevitably ensued. Without going into details of the divorce, I will summarize the highlights.
For me, it all began when my dad punched my mom in the eye, breaking her glasses and cutting her eye, while I looked on from the back seat of the car (it was one of those car fights I mentioned, although my dad had pulled over to the side of the road this time–the fight appeared to be about directions). My mother determined to get a divorce at that moment. It was a violent divorce, with my parents making scenes frequently, public shouting and crying, kidnapping the of the children, one parent breaking in and stealing things from the other parent’s home, adult friends and family taking sides, as if in a war, no one at all even momentarily considering me or my existence, etc. etc. (I can’t speak for my brother–he wasn’t present at the “punching” and he did side with my father. He is much more aggressive and assertive than I am, as well as a few years older. He always makes sure he is taken care of above all else, so I think his experience was quite different from mine.)
As traumatizing as it might have been to see my father physically assault my mother and then immediately break down into sobbing tears, literally begging for her forgiveness, and then to be kidnapped by him and be forcibly kept apart from my mother at the age of 8 etc., those were all nonetheless mere moments in time. Traumatic moments in time, followed by stability, are easier to overcome than the prolonged conduct of my parents, especially that of my father, that ensued. So, without ever overcoming the traumatic moments in time that had happened to me, I was thrust into the worst part, which was the hellish dealings with and between my parents.
In a nutshell, my father was a very bitter and angry person, who had above average intelligence and was extensively educated in human psychology. My father was mentally abusive and highly manipulative and controlling of people’s emotions, minds and behaviors…and lives. He used his knowledge of human behavior and his exceptional intelligence without mercy. He exercised his manipulative behavior and mind control over everyone who he found he could have power over, and, as his daughter and a fearful, meek and highly sensitive girl at that, I was fully at his mercy, emotionally, financially, mentally, in every way that a child needs and is at the mercy of its parents. In retrospect, I know now that my mother was observing that my father was brainwashing both my brother and me against her, and he was succeeding.
Presently I have no contact with my father and have not had any for three years. I’m not so emotionally well-off that I could or would re-establish any form of contact with him at this time, and I don’t miss having contact with him in any way, as having contact with him would inevitably drag me down at a time when I am still struggling to get on my feet.
During this chapter in my life, I had some other bad experiences, all of which were either direct or indirect results of the divorce. One of them was that I began to get maliciously teased and bullied in school, most cruelly by girls. Eventually, my lifetime best friend, Ann, completely defriended me. One day she walked into school not speaking to me and pretending as if she didn’t know who I was and from then on she only associated with the popular and pretty girls in school. She and I haven’t really spoken since then. I think she was the first and the last friend I ever really had, because I’ve never really trusted another person the way I trusted her, the way you are supposed to trust a friend. I know she was deeply embarrassed by me because I was being so badly teased. She also contributed significantly to the bad image I have of girls as being shallow and preoccupied with vain aspirations to pretentious and insincere personas, popularity, money, looks, status, etc.
The final important elements to mention from this chapter in my life are the recurring nightmares I had. After the divorce, I had at least 3 recurring nightmares, all of which I remember clearly. I had these nightmares frequently and they didn’t stop until I left my hometown and my parents to go to college. Because I used to wake up frightened in the middle of the night from these nightmares, I slept with a nightlight on and a security blanket right up until I left for college, at 18 years old.
Chapter Three – Debris in Life’s Wake
20-40 years
In the third era of my life, I took my junior year at college abroad in Sweden, then transferred to a Canadian university and moved to Canada and finished out my studies there, moved to Sweden, moved back to Canada and moved to Finland (and I’m sparing you all of the moves I made within each of those countries), where I stayed for ten years. I left Finland at the beginning of June, 2007, after my ultimate emotional meltdown had already begun, also beginning the prelude to the next chapter of my life, which I am currently in.
At age 20, all of the damage had already been done. I was already highly dysfunctional and completely unaware of it. No matter what I went out into the world and did, my fate was sealed–I was to fail and suffer repeatedly, all the while trying to figure out what was going on and why.
At 20 years old, I traveled to Sweden to do my junior year in college abroad there. That year, 1988, was the first time I became suicidal. That was also the first year I began spontaneously and uncontrollably crying for no discernible reason at any given place, at any given time. I was beginning to learn how frightened I was and how horribly amiss things must be in my heart and in my mind. I prayed and bawled my way through this era, bawled until my stomach hurt, literally. In frustration and desperation, I begged God– I didn’t understand why things that made me suffer so unbearably kept happening to me. I had never hurt anyone, I had never even had the power to. I couldn’t understand the endless punishments that were being inflicted on me. I pleaded for a friend, someone to talk to, to help me. But the only answer I ever got to my prayers was more suffering. The endless punishment, as I felt it, really caused me to hate myself ever more as the years went by.
Through all of the moving around I did during this era, I was in and out of love several times, and this constituted much of my suffering. Each time was worse than the previous one. The damage I had sustained in my chaotic upbringing and hostile familial environment came to manifest itself in increasingly painful and dysfunctional love experiences. I was also beginning to experience a highly developed empathetic ability, which increased in intensity the more people I came into close emotional contact with. This only confused me more, aggravated my dysfunction and intensified my suffering.
For many years, I interpreted the empathetic connections and intuition, on several occasions even clairsentience, that I experienced when I loved a man, as being indicative of a deeply spiritual love between us, which convinced me that he, in particular, was “the one”.
I began to pay attention to the fact that this empathetic connection I would have to the man I loved only worked one way–I had a connection to him, but he hadn’t a connection to me. I then I eventually figured out that this empathetic connection I was having with men I loved had nothing to do with the specific man I loved, but that it was something in me, my inward nature, and I realized that I would have that intimate empathetic connection with whatever man I loved, and, ultimately, as I matured in time, I would probably have it with any given person, no matter who he or she might be.
Basically, when I stepped out into the world and had my first relationship with a male, which began when I was 21 as a love at a distance in letters, I had sort of embarked on a learning experience, or a life education–I began learning about life, I began learning about the world and about myself, especially about how emotionally fragile I was compared to most others, how much I cared for others’ feelings over my own, how others were much more willing to hurt me than I was to hurt them, I began learning about society, about men and, ultimately, that this was not a world in which I could realize my idealistic spiritual dream of love, it was not a world that shared my idea of love, my morals or my values, but, most of all, I was realizing more and more how my past and family had affected me and malformed me, in such a way that I simply could not function in the world, and I really didn’t know how to live in this world. And I am still learning.
Specifics of this era are well-documented in the collection of poems that I call Debris in Life’s Wake.
Chapter Four
40-
We’ll see…
Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.
Tags: recovery