Date: 2nd Dec 2023
Ok, hello online diary. This post is a combination of one I wrote back in mid Nov and I elongated it this month, having taken it down due to not feeling 100% ok with what I had said about various things to do with my parents fostering situation.
But anyway, HOW IS IT DECEMBER!!!??? Where the heck has this year gone? Wanted to kick this post off with some fab news, being that I got my grades back for my MASC thesis and GOT A FIRST!! Dream come true and we're (hopefully) going to be publishing it in the near future - project partners permitting! I could have a paper with my name on it soon, mental!!
Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. I actually wanted to note my thoughts down on a topic I rarely discuss because I never quite know how to phrase things without seeming to come across as ungrateful for things. Which, in case it’s not clear, I’m very much not. I wanted to talk a bit about how I sometimes feel sad about how I was raised and how (unfortunately) how I was raised and the lessons I was taught by my parents at a young age, set me up for falling straight into Saras arms at 16.
I think it’s really important before I continue for me to state I’ve had a lot of privilege in my life, I never had to worry about food, or whether the house was warm. I had a bunch of fun things to do outside of ‘school’ and always had presents for my birthday and xmas every year. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t experience trauma as a result of being undiagnosed neurodiverse for my entire childhood. Growing up (as my therapist puts it) ’neurospicy’ I didn’t receive important context that my parents would always love me, no matter if I was not ‘helpful/good’. My dad was not around much, always doing up houses and my mother and I have never really seen eye to eye with communication styles. For as long as I can remember, I've always felt like I wasn't what she wanted and that she didn't love me. I genuinely cannot remember a time in my life where this fear of her not loving/wanting me, wasn't around. Also, in case people don't know, I'm the eldest of four. My younger brother rocked up when I was a year and a half old and was shortly followed by my younger sibling and youngest sister by the time I was 5 and a bit. As far as I am aware, nobody else (bar my dad) is autistic or even neurodiverse in my family, so yeah, home life was chaotic from a young age and my parents were stupidly young - like 25 and 26 when they had me.
As I briefly mentioned, at a young age I very firmly formed the belief I was ‘too much’ as I was. This was mainly related to my relationship with my mother. She's always told me I am too much and in some cases, suggested I scare people off by being me. Because of worrying over her leaving me because I was 'too much' to handle - whatever that even means! - I quickly learned to suppress the parts of me that may end up being ‘too much’ for people to handle. That meant most emotions got suppressed and I very quickly grew up, helping out around the house and doing practical things to be useful and therefore, in my head, being at a lower risk of being left by my mother. I avoided boundaries/saying no, avoided anything that looked vaguely like arguments, confrontation, disagreement… the list goes on. I basically spent the majority of my life in a numb, shut down state, similar to what burnout feels like I guess. And when things inevitably did get too much, my parents didn’t really try to understand why I was having violent outbursts at 8 or why I would suddenly panic if new people were around etc.
I never really had anyone teach me that emotions were good things to do or how to have an open, honest conversation. There's still things I feel really embarrassed about that are a SUPER natural part of growing up. Like periods, acne, injury/accidents, sex (not that that's ever really been something I've been interested in lol). Things like that weren't ever spoken about openly, ditto difficult emotions. In short, my family were like the opposite of the Addams family. Very bright, smiley and happy all the time but this was only ever surface level. We had a lot of tension in the house and a lot of undercurrents of struggles, arguments, miscommunications etc.
As a result of all of this, not only am I incredibly reluctant to ever approach my mother with sensitive topics - like pregnancy scares, sexual assault and even health concerns - but I also have very insecure attachments to both my parents as a result of their inability to reassure me they would stay. My attachment to my mother is worse than that of my father but the niggling worry they won’t want me around if I stop being helpful does hurt sometimes. And OMFG does it rear its head countless times when I am living under the same roof as them. Space does me and my relationship with my mother a world of good. Anyway, this insecure attachment unfortunately opened the door for the likes of Sara and Claudine - whose real name I may well reveal at some point as I honestly am fed up of feeling like I have to hide who she is. Anyway, side tracking myself, my insecure attachments to my parents basically made me think that so long as I had SOMEONE around, it didn't matter if they manipulated me, abused me, hurt me, tramped all over my boundaries, feelings, emotions etc, so long as I had someone I deserved to do (and take) whatever it took to have them stay.
I have far too many massively shaping memories from my early years to write in a single post and many are ones I'm still not hugely comfortable sharing with anyone outside of my closest friends and trusted therapist. My earliest one of feeling inadequate and like I was 'too much' was when I was super young. As an autistic human, I have always had a deep rooted dislike of fan noises, from hoovers, to bathroom fans, anything that whirred made me feel super scared. I used to avoid a bathroom in my grandparents house literally because it had a fan in it haha. But I have a very core memory of being scolded for reacting to a hand dryer in a public bathroom. I remember it was on the wall above me and logically that means I cannot have been more than 7 (max). More likely I was under 5. In the time I felt fear and reacted to it like anyone would have done to something that scared them, I had no support or care offered to me and to this day, I still don't like hoovers or fans when I don't know they are in a room. I had persistent nightmares of my family leaving me in a street - the ones where you're glued to the floor and trying to move but can't, or are moving through treacle. I also had some really horrific ones of them all dying as a result of bombings (learning about WWII did a number on me) and me being the one to try and throw the bomb out the house to save my family, but failing every time and either dying myself or watching them die. Not fun.
My therapist asked me this week what my life might have been like if I'd had secure attachments to my parents and it's such a bizarre thought because I can't imagine what a secure relationship with caregivers might look like, let alone how that may have changed me today. But I said to him that I think if I’d grown up with my parents the way they are now (they foster and are much better with the kiddos on their (parents) worst days than they ever were with us on their best days), I would be a lot more emotionally in tune with myself. I’d feel like emotions were ok and that I knew how to deal with them. Being in tune with my emotions and knowing they were ok, would likely have then led me to NOT self harm, not develop a eating disorder in college due to needing to control something and likely would have also resulted in better friendships. I also think I might not have slept with people for the sake of feeling something, even if that was fear and putting myself in unsafe situations would then have never resulted in the health scares and pregnancy scares I've had over the last 2 years. Nor the sexual assault.
I’d probably be a lot more confident in relationships lasting and maybe have even realised when relationships were no longer working and called it off before my world fell apart. I’d not struggle so much with saying no to people. And this would have meant both Sara and Claudine would have had nothing to pry into. I’d have been able to set boundaries with them both and know that if they repeatedly stepped over them or broke them down, that I was worth more than that. I may even have gone to my parents about my worries over my relationships with Sara/Claudine and have been able to ask if I was doing the right thing. I'd have known I was worth more than their abuse that relationships with people in power should never result in blackmail, fear, insecurities in support or wondering if things would stay the same from one day to the next. I also wouldn't have stuck around Sara as long as I did, because part of the reason I stayed close to her for as long as I did, was BECAUSE she offered me comfort, even if that was at the cost of something personal for me. She listened to me and made space for me to fall apart. She physically comforted me, with hugs. She provided for me, with coffee and mental health tactics. But this support came with the cost that I did exactly what she wanted, when she wanted and never said no. It came at the cost of feeling scared of her, uncertain if she liked me, where we stood, whether she would stay, if she meant what she said. But she gave me comfort, something I craved and in my mind, it was worth it because our relationship was somewhat similar to that of mine and my mothers.
And if I’d never been broken by these two tutors, I can’t help but wonder if I would have reached the lovely place I am in with all the people in my life right now, a lot sooner. I wonder if I wouldn’t have been so hesitant to talk to or trust Luna and Jack. That the moment something had come up, I’d have immediately gone to them, trusted they would do their jobs and trusted in myself to notice if (heaven forbid) they’d turned out like Claudine/Sara - that thought makes me shudder Luna and Jack are far too awesome to become manipulative but I know they're also not perfect and will inevitably make mistakes but not with malintent. I wonder if now in November, sat on a train going back to London to speak to Jack about PhD topics, if the nerves around asking him questions, approaching him about anything and the fear of him turning around and stating he doesn’t want anything to do with me if I ask too many questions, would be gone. And in their place, would be (more) excitement, joy and intrigue. I also wonder if I would have felt comfortable accepting physical comfort from one or both of Luna and Jack this year. I’ve seen them both hug other students (more so Luna but have seen Jack do that every so often) and the pang in my heart of knowing I was not in a place where that was ok for me to do, kinda sucked. I also wonder if the mistakes I made this year, would not still be haunting me. Because lets face it, the worry and the fear and the anxiety does sometimes hold me back and make me question if it’s ok to do something, to ask something of someone and makes me feel stupidly guilty when I eventually do ask for something small from someone.
Even though Jack has happily agreed to this meeting tomorrow (and actually was the one who suggested it, I was content with an email), my brain STILL feels bad for pulling him away from his job and his (much deserved) research leave. And this is when HE’S SAID YES AND IS SOMEONE I TRUST!! You can imagine what my brain is like before even asking something. I waste countless hours pondering over literally everything I have ever done and or said to some people and it annoys me to no end. I humour it these days but I do honestly sometimes think, that if my childhood had been different, a lot of the internalised struggles, would at least have had the potential to disappear or be smaller. But hey, that’s what therapy is for right? It’s working too. Two years ago, I would never have thought I’d be willingly chatting with Jack about PhD ideas amidst a blurry boundary of not quite a ‘tutor’ but not not a ‘tutor’ and the knowledge that he has seen me at my worst. But here I am, happy, content and actually stupidly excited to hear his thoughts on my (admittedly ridiculous) amount of ideas for future research based on my MASc thesis he helped supervise. And who knows, maybe tomorrow I will find the words to finally ask this man if he might actually be interested in continuing this research with me at PhD level. I’m imagining I’ll flake out but we can dream! Maybe he’ll already know I have him in mind - because I do genuinely think he might be able to read my mind at times….
But regardless, I cannot change the past. Much as I would love to. And while I will have to live with what happened throughout my entire past up until now, I do not have to live with the consequences of other people's actions. I am able to heal. This past year has shown me that exact thing. Therapy is helping me to unpack relationships with Jack, Lune and the rest of my MASc friends. As well as my upbringing and the complexities around how I feel about my parents, their relationship to each other and to me and my siblings. I hope that one day in the future, I will feel safe and secure in relationships and that the ones I have built over the last year will continue to flourish and grow into stronger, healthier, happier relationships that are built on a super strong foundation of honesty, trust, respect and love for our genuine selves.
Comments