How about this analogy - you take a newborn bat and completely restrict them from any opportunity to learn to fly, meanwhile trying to teach them to walk, and by adulthood they’re a bat that can neither fly nor effectively walk. Because they never got the opportunity to learn to fly and now their wings are atrophied so it’ll be difficult or impossible to fly, and they never were designed to walk.Fits in with an analogy I was thinking of earlier today in preparation for interviewing yet another shrink (and dreading yet another disappointment/letdown, fearing yet another encounter with a so-called 'helper' who doesn't understand me).
This is what it feels like: People don't like you the way you are, so they wrap you up in duct tape like a mummy so you can't move your arms and legs, you're trapped.
You see that big roll of duct tape sitting over there and you're afraid to talk for fear they'll put it over your mouth, too. Already you can't breath very well because fear has such a death-grip on your innards that you breath shallowly and fast.
After all this they want to know why you want to end it all, why it hurts so much? Can't they see your pain and frustration? Fucking morons. Tell them: You just want out. To no longer be trapped in this place where everything you do is wrong, there's nothing you can do, no place you can be where you're ok.
The fact is, they can't see you. Because they see you only as 'not-them', as somehow wrong, and therefore not human and not worthwhile and not valuable. Only an object to be restrained and contained so as to make you the least trouble for them. Selfish bastards. ASSholes.
You're so scared you can't breath. You don't dare make a noise at all for fear somehow they'll misinterpret it and limit you further in some way you dread but can't possibly predict. It's a horror show, a living nightmare, the Cask of Amontillado, The Telltale Heart and The Pit and The Pendulum all wrapped up in one. And they can't see it.
They just laugh at you - your fear, your tears, your quivering, powerless shame. They rip and rend and tear your delicate flesh until you feel flayed alive - until all your nerve endings are raw and vulnerable and absolutely overwhelmingly in shock.
And then they have the temerity to say, You're so sensitive. Stop that. As if you're doing it simply to annoy them, like the Red Queen said in Alice,
Speak roughly to your little boy,***
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he know it teases.
I say, I used to fly high because it felt good and it was fun.
But every time I got too high someone would grab my ankles and pull me down and say, You stay here, you don't belong up there. You're not good enough. You don't deserve it.
So then I'd try to make myself smaller and quieter and less noticeable because I hated being strapped down to my chair and made to sit and be quiet (sounds like a description of half the children on the planet).
***
Why is it that parents act like everything kids do, they do merely to torture their parents? Why can't they remember that kids are kids, and do kid things? Why do they act like children doing the normal things that all normal children do are somehow criminals performing horrible acts of personal vengeance against the parents, doing it just to make the parents' life miserable, and that the child should therefore be punished, yea even to the point of making said child wish she didn't exist?
***
The most painful thing, as the analogy quoted earlier captures in much fewer words, is the sense that you've missed your chance - that your life has all run away down the drain and you'll never get it back, and all the ripe potential and possibility you once had is gone, never to return. As if the cherry blossoms only ever got to be buds but never bloomed - destroyed by a killing frost before ever getting to open.
And this happens, yes; life is unfair. But it doesn't have to be that way. People can make choices about how they treat other people - it's not random like the weather. Or, at least, so we're taught. But it makes you wonder: Maybe human nature is not as changeable as the shrinks and self-help books try to make it sound. Maybe we just have to get used to the fact that the world is full of all different kinds of people, and the very best thing would be for us to all try to accept each other as best we can, to help each other get what we need and not encroach on the others.
Of course, if some people are weeds, they tend to take up all the available space and kill off or suffocate the tender perennials... never a simple answer, is there.
Parents can choose to try to bonsai their little child-plants into some shape the child was never meant to be, and miss entirely how beautiful the child could have been if only the parents had allowed the child to grow to her own limits, rather than stuffing her into the straitjacket of the parent's expectations.
And those branches, once pruned off, never grow back...except in weird, distorted, misshapen ways - never freely, never as nature intended. We never get to see how beautiful she could have been if only they'd left her alone.
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