When I go to a medical professional who treats me the same as any other patient, I feel like an interloper in a world I’m not technically allowed into, and wonder when they’ll discover I’m not allowed and throw me back.The way I relate to this statement is in a totally different context - in the music world. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop - for them to notice that I don't have the same 'credentials' (training) as my colleagues, and to rescind the opportunities they've given me up til now.
But it goes deeper than that, for me - for me the roots are in the way my father always treated me, as if I deserved nothing, as if I was taking up space that was meant for someone else.
(Warning, this is going to go sideways now...)
He loved to tell the story of how they expected their first child to be a boy, had a boy's name picked out and everything, were going to name it after my dad's favorite brother. When I showed up instead, he made a big deal of how it was So much trouble to come up with a new name that they couldn't be bothered with a middle name, and gave me just an initial instead.
It's always shocked me that mom just went along with this story, as if it didn't matter - as if dad's thoughts and opinions were so powerful that she could just never stand up to him. It was as if she was in awe of him, or something.
So I was the kid who was born a nuisance, who was considered a trouble-maker for being born with two x chromosomes. Poor little kid! Dad had it in for her right from the get-go...
Now things might have been ok if I hadn't unmitigated temerity of being annoyingly precocious - dad grew up with an older sister who (I'm guessing) made his life hell because she was quicker, smarter and more perceptive than he was (not to mention older); he also had a mom who was sharp-tongued and unafraid to subject her family to its edge ('nearest and dearest' held no water with grandma).
Damn that smartass little kid! Always showing me up! Just when I got the idea she might be shy and self-effacing, and maybe just a cute little critter to show off to friends and family (like a pet, Dad???) alla sudden there she is, sharp as a whip (or sometimes a tack), makin' me look like an idjit, and she's not even three years old yet! Got to take her down a peg or two, or she'll soon be insufferable.
And so began the 'hacking-away-at-the-daughter's-sense-of-self' routine. It became a daily ritual: Any time I showed any slightest sense of pride in something I did, needed any attention of any kind, or simply even asked for help, I was met with the rudest, most scathing, caustic contempt you can imagine. It was like being boiled alive in an acid bath every day...
Mom just stood by and watched, because of course she'd grown up with the same thing, and so she probably couldn't even see it for the destruction it was. Any time it broke through her fog of blind denial, it was probably such a painful reminder of her own childhood that she immediately just shut it out, literally turned her back and walked away, and left me alone with my raw, painful, unsoothed little nerve endings all jangling and fearful. I soon learned to hide all that away, to the point where I never even knew what I was feeling; it got to the point where I couldn't have described it even if asked. I was totally and completely cut off from anything remotely resembling a feeling - I had no way whatsoever to cope with any of it, and didn't try. I escaped instead into my books, which were alternately terrifying (I seemed to choose stories which echoed my experiences of the weirdness and unpredicatability of my childhood) or beautiful, lovely, peaceful escapes from the torment of having two parents who didn't have a clue how to properly nurture and care for a little girl.
Linking it back to the original quote, and to my speculations elsewhere about power plays and such, I'm thinking I had any aspirations toward any kind of 'power' hammered out of me in the most brutal ways possible from very early in my childhood, such that I didn't feel entitled to have any power whatsoever, up to and including any sense of myself.
My father saw to it that any time I began to try to 'own' some of my own power, he took it away from me, knocked me down, verbally and emotionally; I think the only reason I survived intact is that I learned to hide my 'power' away from him so he couldn't hurt it. I became 'invisible' to escape his wrath. And I'm sure no one else saw his 'rage'; everyone else saw him as a gentle man; I showed a picture of him to the therapist yesterday (the one I was interviewing), and she said he looked 'playful'. Which annoyed me, because I realized she was right. He was playful, even sometimes with me; but this was within a context where there was so much pain so much of the time for me that I could never really enjoy it - I was always on guard, never knowing when he would suddenly turn on me and cut me down.
So ballastexistenz' quote struck home because, whenever people are actually nice to me, there's this huge part of me that just feels like I don't deserve it, and I'm fearful that that kindness will be taken away arbitrarily and unexpectedly at any moment, with me never knowing why, or whether there's something I've done that precipitated the change in attitude toward me.
Another quote from a commenter further along in that same thread:
Impertinent is a good word. I always liked “uppity,” because it was basically invented to describe people who didn’t believe in their own inherent inferiority and refused to accept discrimination.
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