There is a permanent feeling that I’m looking into the world, looking at people’s lives and movements, yet I remain not quite invisible, but unseen in my physicality. I feel like the gum hardening on the bottom of a table in a lunchroom, eventually to be scraped away and deposited in a fashion that means I’m never thought of again.
I served my brief purpose, have been discarded, and hear the universe around me while I remain matter that takes up physical space in fact alone.
I sometimes wonder how long I could remain silent, remain disengaged from my own pain and autonomy.
I wonder what it is like to be cherished, loved beyond belief, or thought of when I’m not in the room.
As I type, I’m aware of the depressive state that many would assume I occupy.
The truth is, the feelings of innate inconsequentialness aren’t based in self-pity or in a take that professes shame onto others for not being good enough. It isn’t a narrative that I’ve been perpetually a victim or a resistance to accountability for my wrongs. It’s what I feel is my truth and purpose. I have always felt defective, broken, and not thought out clearly for a higher purpose since my creation. I feel that I’m drifting along, a piece of driftwood in the sea, using the resources of the body of water to keep me afloat while not truly belonging. This has paradoxically given me comfort. While there has always been a yearning to feel as if my place has been established amongst others, the resignation of being wrong has allowed me to excuse hurt and trauma as simple reasoning for my hardwired purpose of serving none. If, as a human, my greater purpose is to serve as a reminder of the importance of conscious parenting and the wrongs of not treating children as the human beings they are, at least I have one after all.
I have also been hardwired for survival.
As an aware species, as part of the equilibrium of this existence we cohabit, we fight death. While none of us can be sure of what all this means, what comes after (if anything), or how and why it happened, we are born with the ability to root for a breast to find sustaining life as a newfound autonomous and sentient being. No longer free-flowing in the womb of the mother who carried us into infancy, we are born to survive.
I am not sure when I was first confronted with the idea of death. I am not aware of when I first felt the pangs of hunger and knew I would have to leave my home with my sister to find someone who would be willing to give us sustenance, as our mother either chose not to be there at all or to be in that apartment, drowning her pain under the wings of methamphetamine.
I vaguely recall being introduced to the church by a friend, learning about the biblical scripture that was interpreted as promising an afterlife of bliss for those who adhered to its guidelines of purity, while those who rejected the ideas were condemned to damnation. I could not wrap my head around what life without pain was. I could not comprehend a system where our basic needs were met, or rather, not needed at all. Rather than spending nights in bed praying to a deity that apparently loved me to save me from the trauma I was currently experiencing, I prayed for those who inflicted said trauma. Their choice not to attend church was met with members inferring that their path led to hell. While I had not felt the warmth of love or devoted adoration I heard about, I saw glimpses of what they could be. I was allowed to live under their roof, something I was not always invited to do. While sadness regularly enveloped me in the hugs I wasn’t invited into, it was what I knew. The idea of being separated from my mother for eternity scared me. I had been separated from her before. I had spent long periods wondering when I would see her again. The dependability of hurt was less terrifying than the unknown of unpredictability.
While I had immediately questioned the structure of religion, the hierarchy of members, the cruelty of peers that made youth group another place of rejection, and the nonsensical stories of people living hundreds of years, talking animals, and arks that were able to hold two of every species, I had longed for the belonging I never felt. Certain members of the church saw me and my sister. While I can now recognize that the indoctrination they were able to see was ripe within our youthful naivety, I had desperately felt that maybe I had found a place that wanted us around. I had hoped that maybe my mom would see the light. That my grandma would occupy the pews next to us. That maybe, one day—a permanent possibility of someday—we would all inhabit a space of happiness and met needs. If all our needs were met, maybe we could experience the familial happiness that was so foreign to our dynamic. If my mom didn’t need to work, if she didn’t need her personal space, if she didn’t need to feel numb, perhaps we could exist in a space of togetherness without the stipulations of obligation.
Eventually, the church had left me cynical, with messaging of group judgment rather than leaving said judgment to the God they claimed to praise. While I had been invested in the stories of Jesus recognizing the humanity of the needy and of women who had been societally rejected, and feeding the hungry, I felt sad by the time spent dehumanizing the very people Jesus had preached to show mercy to.
Does anyone feel as if they belong?
I am not sure if this is an attainable feeling, a goal that we all speak of desiring while each of us perish without knowing this sense of unity. As pack animals, it is understandable that we would strive to feel that we are under the protected shield of community.
Throughout the stages of our lives, pack animals are either protected or protectors.
I was born the protector; the role of the protected was never familiar.
Being a protector has given me purpose, given me a reason to truck on. While I have not found my roots, the essence of who I am outside of what I offer to others, I have found that staying alive has allowed me the ability to take care of those I love. It is not that I doubt the ability of others or am unaware of the power they retain in sheer will and drive…but having been familiar with the feeling of being an outcast member of a pack, I have chosen to ensure others are not met with the jarring loneliness of being unseen. I have become unnervingly familiar with the intricacies of others’ tones, words that precede anger, movements that reveal distress, and the terrifying reality of happiness setting in after a long period of depression and numbness.
Being a protector has made me immobile in terms of self-improvement. I have been unwilling to explore a reality in which I take precedence or have any importance at all. I have been taught that self-love is conflated with selfishness and greed, and that boundaries and self-care are the whims of self-serving mercenaries. Becoming my mother’s escapism of affirmative reassurance has molded me into someone incapable of looking at myself as someone who is able to occupy the space of being protected.
I often dream of disturbing events where I am powerless to help others. The imagery is often grotesque and disturbing—scenarios in which I am shaken by my mind’s own capabilities of envisioning these situations in the first place. I am the unwilling witness to harm to others, powerless to save them from unimaginable trauma.
I find myself overtaken with guilt and shame when reading about world events, laws broken against humanity, and the of those unable to gain tools of autonomy.
I am not yet in a place where I am able to find worth in myself outside of what I can offer those around me. I still find myself programmed into eternal dejectedness and universal misalignment. I struggle to understand what self-advocacy looks like when pertaining to my own worth.
While I have had suicidal ideation in the past, while I’ve stared longingly at bottles of pills or imagined a reality in which I would be able to throw myself over a bridge at the right time, I have found that my programming also makes me unable to put into action a world in which I choose my own rest.
Learning to survive at an age when unfamiliarity with death was an option has made me almost frustratingly incapable of exploring what else can exist outside of this. It feels familiar to coloring outside the lines, no longer scraping crumbs from the butter, saying “bless you” when someone sneezes, or repeating an inside joke at the perfect opportunity. While all these are certainly possibilities, while they are habits that can be broken, they remain disturbances to my universe, where I have found rare familiarity. Lacking control for the majority of my life, except for my ability to survive, has been the sole source of predictability and dependability.
Removing my mother’s constant hurt from my life has allowed me to explore possibilities outside of the predictability of heartache. Keeping the consistency of suffering has been what I know. It has been the role I know how to dutifully play. The synchronized dynamic of excusing trauma done to me as understandable effects of hurt before me has given me a sense of familiarity that ties me to at least somewhat recognizable excerpts from my childhood. Choosing to no longer play this part finally feels like a possibility. It feels as if I can create my own story, my own autonomy and narrative. While I have always been told I was difficult, dramatic, a bitch, or ungrateful for the privileges I had, now is the time I am able to know who I am and what I can be. At the tender age of 36, I feel that my life has started in a way where there can potentially be an absence of being a pawn in someone else’s validity in causing trauma. I can detach the hurt I cause by recognizing that the danger is not allowed back into my space. I can find who I am able to be without the preface that I am inherently flawed and wrong.
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