Recurrent flashbacks to things like when I was being gaslighted about how I was never going to be successful at anything have been a daily thing. It's exhausting and depressing. It is hard to time orient yourself when your heart is twenty to thirty years behind the game, stuck in a moment where you were savaged for expressing an opinion or daring to do something that made you different from the rest of the family. I was in that house for the better part of twenty years. Through all of it, there was some form of abuse going on most of the time.
The time I did get out, I was financially held captive to their whims. The threat that if I didn't do what they wanted that they'd pull my financial aid out from under me and kick me out of the house was always there. I hid my writing in my trunks that I carried my goods to college in. I still knew that they were going to read my daily journal. I still knew that they were going to try to find out what was going on in my life through things like denying me privacy, making me have 'conversations' where I was interrogated as to if I was taking drugs, and attempting to just straight up bully me into telling them what they wanted to know, regardless if it was the truth or not.
I finished college and my mother wandered around claiming that she was the reason why I did as well as I did. I remember my instructors looking at her in confusion. She was quick to change her tune when I didn't get a prestigious job as soon as I was home. She started telling me that my college degree was wasted. I knew that what she and my father wanted was for me to get a job with a fat paycheck that they could basically retire on at my expense. They pressured me hard to find work immediately and to start climbing the corporate ladder.
After a few months, I did find a job. They didn't like that I was working in a call center. Then I got sick and my position was made redundant/I was fired for being sick. I was having really bad asthma attacks on a regular basis. My mother claimed that I was over reacting one time when I was in the hospital getting a nebulizer treatment. If I had enough breath to scream at her that I wasn't over reacting when I can't literally breathe properly, I would have done it. She told me to envision/remember her making pickles when I was a small girl and get control over my breathing.
About a month after I lost that job, my parents threw me out of the house and moved me down to a duplex my grandparents owned in Wellsville, a town all the way by the Pennsylvania border and at least two hours away from their house, one way. I desperately tried to find work with my parents threatening things like not going to pay for my wedding if I was going to be a 'layabout'. Fortunately, my grandparents didn't ask for rent beyond my upkeep of the place and mowing the grass. And they covered things like utilities when it became clear that my part time job wouldn't provide enough income for me to get groceries.
Every time we spoke on the phone, I was told how I was a disappointment. I was told how I was taking advantage of my grandparents. I was criticized for how I wanted my wedding. In the end, everything got planned according to how my mother wanted it to be and the only consessions she made were the unity candle and my cake. I'm not going to go into how traumatic my wedding day turned into but there's a lot of pain on what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life. I literally have vast amounts of that day that I don't remember not because things were too busy but because my mother made a point of triggering my ptsd multiple times.
When I started blogging, my mother was scornful and said it was dangerous. She said that I was going to be doxxed and harassed for what I wrote. She said that I was going to embarrass the family. She said that I was going to have no audience. She said that blogging was for 'losers'. She had similar comments on my poetry. She had similar things to say about my novel that I was working on. My mother wanted to control my career and live through me. She wanted to be my manager and handle all of my finances, for a fee of course to ensure there was no nepotism.
When my first novel was finished but before I could edit it, I was a senior in high school. She insisted that it get sent off to a competition that promised a publishing contract, provided that I paid the entry fee. That turned into a fight to get the manuscript back. I never did get the whole thing back. I got half of it. They had 'lost' one hundred and fifty pages in the course of things. My mother deleted the manuscript off of her computer once it had gone out in the mail.
I had to rebuild the story under the cover of doing homework for college. Mom decided that the fact I didn't win the competition meant that I was writing in the wrong genre. She decided that I was terrible as a novelist and that I should be writing children's books. I took to hiding files on my computer so that she couldn't get into my book work and edit it. I took to writing out scenes in notebooks that I hid among my course notebooks.
Now that I have self published a few books, my parents came around sniffing for money. Apparently self publishing meant that I was on the road to a 'real' book. I haven't spoken to them in a few years since that incident. I'm still just this side of dirt broke. I have no idea what I'm doing marketing my books. I have to edit them myself because I can't afford to hire an editor. I have to design the covers and such myself because I don't have a publishing house working with me on that.
I have good days where the words come easily and I can write for hours. I have my bad days and it is all of the above hammering in my head to the point where I have vivid flashbacks to the ways that they hurt me when I was young. I don't know why I am writing this. I don't know why I am posting it. Perhaps it is because I'm done censoring myself and hiding. Perhaps it is because I am done keeping secrets.
As a wise person once told me, your history is your story. You're not obligated to keep quiet. You can tell all the horrible things that were done to you. If the people don't like it, they should have treated you better.
No comments:
Post a Comment