Picking at Scars

Don't hide your face, what you were before

It doesn't have to be you anymore

Maybe you've been scared and that's what you know

And all the shame gonna call you home

It's gonna call you home

Never was your fault but still a part to play

You carry it so close you can read its name

In a lot of ways you're still that lost kid

Yeah, You can still survive but not exactly live

No, not exactly live.

- "Surviving", Jimmy Eat World

 

 

Woo, look who's figured out how to format!

I mentioned that the two character concepts in Ratty's games touch this "little kid" I've buried/well-protected and how sensitive anything related to that feels. That thought keeps bouncing back to me as something to dig into; it's the layer where I'll find the steps I can take to re-integrate those parts of myself without, you know, feeling like I'm touching a raw nerve. 

With Ratty's game last week, I think it was this new/unprocessed feeling running into a bad day. I'm not sure my feelings about what happened were overblown, but I don't think it's something that I need to be worried about happening all the time. If it does happen on a semi-regular basis, I think I can handle it better at the table AND take the space to pinpoint what I don't like and what needs to change. I don't like feeling like I have to engage with a situation that feels like people are expecting a right answer that I don't know, but I could also look for ways to meet people where they are at the table.

Filbert hasn't really done a lot of work to understand exactly where other party members are coming from, and as time's gone on his relationships with the rest of the party have eroded. His (and my) natural inclination is to place a bid for connection through gift-giving, small gestures. But that's not how everyone connects, and the ways toward that are varied and complex. Gifts are a low-stakes way to offer someone your regard, but it doesn't really lead to meaningful, deep bonds.

The big issue for me is this "little kid", and why it's so hard to engage with my inner child. 

Whenever I think of my childhood this feeling of deep grief and sorrow washes over me. It feels like where most other people have these core memories of love and acceptance, I just have this wire facsimile of a family. 

Some part of me knows that's the story I tell myself and that my childhood wasn't ALL bad. I had friends! I was smart! I developed my lifelong love of libraries and bookstores as a kid! There are core parts of myself that come from that place, and they didn't even come from trauma!

But the day-to-day? I was always scared of being hurt by my parents, my schoolmates, or just random kids on the way to and from school. I knew most people at best pitied me and at worst hated me, and probably for good reason: I was so weird and dirty and unsocialized. My childhood was marked by the sharp ache of loneliness with frequent spikes of fear and sadness when something bad happened. 

And something bad was always happening. Dad's alcoholism, then my parents' divorce, then the long months where Mom would just leave us in the house. Mom finding her next boyfriend, who was a decent guy actually, but who got her in trouble with Jehovah's Witnesses. Dad's slow cognitive decline, his disappearance in the blizzard of '96, never to be found.

My mom nearly being shot picking us up from elementary school. Being selected for a Quaker private school only to learn I couldn't afford to go. Being selected for gifted and talented programs, summer schools, camps, workshops -- and never going to any of them because we didn't have the money. 

I'm pretty sure I had a nervous breakdown in high school. Failing 10th grade English -- the first time I ever failed a class. My mom leaving when I got a word wrong in a spelling bee and *never* coming to another competition I was in after that. 

My mom hitting my sister and me with a belt in "sessions" over an entire afternoon without telling us why, only to apologize later when she found out the porn magazine in our bedroom was left there by our uncle. Long days planning to run away with my sister, only to chicken out at the last second. My sister actually running away one summer for six months, just disappearing without a trace like my dad did. 

Being bullied all through elementary, middle, and high school. Being shunned by my peers in Jehovah's Witnesses. Being harassed weekly by neighborhood kids, robbed twice, once at gunpoint. 

I was outed by my therapist in college and told not to come back home by my mom -- but not before she told me she didn't even feel close enough to hate me for being gay, or that I couldn't kiss her because she "didn't know where my lips had been", or force me to call everyone I knew in my extended family to come out to them too. 

Learning I was adopted, and that my biological mom is a paranoid schizophrenic. Knowing that the one memory I have of my mom is hearing her go into a paranoid spiral on the phone. Seeing mental illness spread its tendrils through my family, touching biological brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews. Knowing that its tendrils are in me. 

When I think about my childhood, I think about this sensitive little kid who somehow made it out of an environment he should not have survived in. And in so many ways I'm still this damaged little boy who doesn't know how to be himself and be happy because surviving is all there is. 

More later, maybe. But...geez. I've been through it. I'm not the only one, but I just...don't know how to really heal from all of this.