what is it like

to have a family that is never there to catch you when you fall?

You can give them warning, and they'll come and watch,
sightsee,
as if you were some roadside spectacle
nothing to do with them
at all.

You smash to bits on the pavement,
shatter to smithereens.

They remain motionless, unmoved
by your pain,
your suffering,
your tears;
your terror,
your anguish,
your shame.

You are that moth beating itself senselessly to death against the shuttered flame of the lamp.

They make no move to stop your self-immolation.

How can they say "I love you," and yet watch you be destroyed? How can they stand there and do nothing? Are they stupid? Afraid? Both? What is the matter with them? Why do they just stand there and watch?

I do not understand.

You are a shattered being
who has fallen so many times
there's nothing left to put together. Not enough solid bits to hold the glue...

They don't understand caring.

They only understand a distant sort of vague sentimentality - their definition of 'love' is - what? I don't know. I've never understood it. I only know it has nothing to do with any of the things that love is to me.

They are the ones who, seeing the beetle stuck on his back for the thousandth time, crush it, instead of gently turning it over onto its feet again, helping it along its way, helping it to find a safe place.

They don't understand. They aren't even as good as the Pinball Wizard, who, though he was a deaf, dumb and blind kid, could at least play a mean pinball... They're just deaf, dumb and blind. See nothing, hear nothing, speak nothing, understand nothing. They might as well all be deaf mutes for all the fellow feeling they show.

***
It is empty, and alone, and frightening.

Terrifying in its vastness, that essential abandonment of a small child's spirit.

There is no mending it, ever, except by the hand and heart of another lost soul who seeks the same repair and understands what is needed. Who can be both giver and receiver.

Where are you? I need you, now. Not later - now.

***
I do not know that I can ever capture the echoing emptiness that is the feeling of 'belonging' to this family. It's like swallowing a vacuum, like having a giant sucking sound in the middle of your being where love ought to go.

Where there ought to be a warm fire burning there is instead: A hole. A space. Nothing. No one there.

This is the feeling of the child, the infant who emerges into the world, into being, after a long battle with darkness and terror. Emerges screaming and fighting and gasping for air and - terrified. She is born terrified. That there will be no one to care for her.

And she was right. No wonder she never wanted to be born in the first place.

***
They think I'm crazy. Because they're men, and they believe that women are supposed to do all the feeling for them.

But I'm a woman, and have had to make my way alone through most of this life, just as if I were a man, but without any of the myriad supports society provides for men.

I am not even spared the misery of being heterosexual - I have longed to be attracted to other women, so that I could escape the prison of heterosexual 'romance'. But I am, instead, simply a failed heterosexual - one who sees no point in the rubbing together of various bits for some fleeting moment of sexual gratification.

I feel caught in the middle, squarely and painfully astride the fence. People seem to think that I've chosen this place, but I didn't. I never felt that I had any choice.

I've been accused of being both 'too tough' and 'too sensitive', so many times I've lost count.

Of course I had to be tough - to survive my mother's neglect, my father's sarcasm and verbal abuse, the bullying from my brother, the endless misogyny from all the men in my entire family.

And a person gets sensitive from being stomped on so many times, oddly enough. Oddly enough, getting stomped tends not to 'toughen' one - one develops a tough outer shell to protect the fragile inner bits that have been so repeatedly and ruthlessly damaged, nearly beyond repair. One develops a rapier tongue and a lightning-fast left hook out of a mere need to survive those who claim to 'love' you. It's all about survival, man.

So don't blame me. I did, and continue to do, what I had to, what I have to, to survive.

****
Denial and repression only get you so far. I find that beyond a certain point, I have to resort to external escape mechanisms.

The only problem is, they're not working any more. My escape hatches are like some kind of nightmare maze that only lead me right back to the very thing from which I seek relief: The truth. Reality.

They don't care.

They never have.

They never will.

No matter how loud or how long I scream and rant and beg and plead.

They just turn their backs on me and walk away, indifferent. Uninterested. I simply don't matter to them.

It is truly like the wolf who must gnaw off her own hind leg to escape the trap: There is no other way out, except death.

And having made this choice, she chooses only another kind of death: The death of her soul, that fragile, precious, unique, irreplacable light that is the flame of her being.

They would extinguish her, through their mere indifference.

How can they not see how bright she is, how beautiful? How brilliant and shiny and special and unique, an opal, full of fire and ever-changing color. She is like a diamond - all facets, flashing every color in the rainbow. She is beauty, embodied.

***
I feel as if I am only holding myself together through sheer force of will, through pure and indomitable stubborness.

But even granite is eventually worn away. And that which is too brittle shatters...

She seeks only to be seen and loved for who she is - "like any bright blade of grass, any shining stalk of wheat."

And so they do, some - some see her in this pure, this simple way.

But it is not enough.

There must be one, at least one, who truly loves every bit of her being, exactly as she is.

Where is this person? I am waiting. I am ready.

Will you come and take care of me now, please?

***
It is as if, if I let down my guard for even a moment, if I relax for even a split second, it will all come tumbling down - it will fall apart, I will explode in in a shower of springs and sprockets and un-reassembleable bits that will never go back together again.

So I can never stop, can never rest, can never let down.

Because if I do, I will see that there is nobody here but me, and never has been...

And then I will fall to bits, and no one will see, or care, or know, until it is too late, and I am gone.

Even if the empty shell of me remained, the essential I, the me inside will be gone.

That beautiful and irreplaceable spark that no one ever saw but me.

That is why the narcissist must spend so much time looking in the mirror: Because no one else is paying any attention. She is afraid she will disappear the instant she looks away. The sense of 'self', oddly enough, is assembled from all those mirror fragments that a lifetime around other people who care about you enough to show you a piece of yourself that you can hold in your hand, your mind, your heart, your soul. A piece of yourself that you can carry away and cherish, and feel to the depths of your being to be true.

Right and proper parents know how to do this instinctively; but most parents are neither right, nor proper.

****
The pit of despair is not so bad. It's actually rather cozy here, though the decor is a bit tedious - black everywhere you look. We could do with a bit of color.

Who's 'we'? Well, it's the schizoid persona that we'll be forced to take on should the raw force of our willpower fail to withstand the relentless onslaught of cognitive dissonance. At some point the twain shall be parted, never to meet again. Or something like that. Couldn't put Humpty together again - he was a frickin' egg, after all - whaddya want, anyway - miracles? Shit. I'll be satisfied just to get through this damn thing - life, that is - which is how my grandfather put it.

***
I seek some kind of reconciliation, some kind of peace, some way to think about all this that makes sense to me, that allows me to walk out of the maze, to be free, to escape the family trap, for good and forever.

The madness that comes from being alone with such thoughts for too long - for most of one's life - lurks at the edges, in the corners of my eyes. Just out of sight, I catch a fleeting glimpse, but it is gone when I look squarely at it. I see just the very tip of its ratlike tail twitching out of view constantly, but can never see the whole beast.

Maybe that's a good thing - the day I can see the whole beast will be the day the world no longer parses at all for me, and they really will have to wrap me up and cart me away to be lumped in with the other vegetables.