A Hard Saturday Night

I want to pause the EMDR button and talk for a moment.  I have to process something, and I do that most often through writing.  This is germane, I think, to this blog’s content in some way.  So, I’ll do it here.  Plus, it just might speak to someone.

Have you ever felt completely misunderstood? Not in words.  Not as if you misspoke.  No.  Something worse.  Existentially misunderstood.  As in you were unseen for who you are.  Worse, not seen, accepted, or understood by someone you thought actually did understand you.

I had that moment a few weeks ago, and the feeling won’t leave me.  It comes back to me on and off when I’m not even thinking about anything related to, well, anything important.  It just appears, and I’m right back in the moment.

I had been in my house, doing whatever, and I was asked, out of the blue, “Do you ever do anything fun? Like…ever?” Actually, it wasn’t really even a question.  It came out more like a statement.  A judgment.  And it landed hard.  I felt stunned.  I didn’t know what to say.  I was instantly hurt, but I lost my words.  I wanted to stand up for myself, but I didn’t know how.  What could I say? I felt awash in inadequacy and shame.

Do I ever do anything fun? How do I explain this?

I am a single mother with four daughters, but in order to explain this I have to go back in time.

I write another blog all about my experiences with mental health and my daughter, Grace.  In 2011, unbeknownst to everyone, she was in the prodromal stages of what appeared to be childhood-onset schizophrenia.  Frankly, it was nightmarish for my entire family.  My youngest daughter was born screaming.  Literally, she was pulled out of me screaming, and she did not stop screaming.  The nurses had to move us to a separate room away from the other new mothers and babies because she was causing such a disturbance.  She continued to scream for two years solidly.  For real.  She rarely slept for four years.  I developed terrible migraines due to extreme sleep deprivation and the car accident I experienced while pregnant with her.  She was diagnosed with a slew of developmental issues one of which was, of course, an autism spectrum disorder.  I thought that she was going to be it, so to speak, in terms of stress.

Nope.  Schizophrenia in a fifth grade child is an entirely different sort of terrible.  I had little to no rewarding personal life when Grace became ill.  My entire life was about caregiving and special needs advocacy already.  Grace didn’t achieve meaningful stability until 2013, and, by then, I was a shell of a woman.  For a year, I could not predictably take Grace out of the house.  I had to let all ambitions for a personal life or even a future go.  No.  I did not have fun.  Ever.  I lived and breathed caregiving.  Social workers and therapists were in and out of my house weekly because Grace could not go to them.  Her diagnosis was so serious that we qualified for state assistance.  Every therapist and social worker we saw had never met a child with her diagnosis.  It was a terrifying time.

All I did was go to her school to meet with someone.  Go to specialists.  Go to the hospital.  Meet with neurologists and neuropsychologists.  Try and build a care team that could help her.  And, I did this entirely alone.  I had three other children whose needs were skyrocketing.  Plus, I had a husband who decided to entirely check out of the marriage as well as all parenting responsibilities while generously deciding to throw in the occasional round of abuse when it felt good.

No.  I was not having fun.  I was getting very sick.  First, my neurologist thought I had MS.  I had multiple MRIs.  I had a lumbar puncture.  Numerous blood tests.  I was put on more and more medication.  I was sent to a rheumatologist.  I was diagnosed with SLE.

No.  That was in no way fun.  I had no family support because I have no family.  I have a few friends.  That’s it, but who wants to rely too heavily on friends? Friends have lives and their own responsibilities!

These were very dark days.  There were moments I just wanted to fade away and die.  I started to lose hope.

So, here I am now.  Building something from the ashes of a former life.  I feel really good about it actually.  My daughters are very proud of me.  I’m proud of my daughters.  We pulled together, and we took steps to turn our lives around.  I’m not in a domestically abusive relationship anymore.  My health is improving, and I am learning to have fun again for the first time in literally years.

So, to be judged so directly for having a life that doesn’t measure up to some arbitrary standard of what “fun” should look like when I’ve come so far was very painful for me.  And, I have not even discussed the effects of domestic violence on one’s identity.  Even if I were to have had completely healthy children, I endured years of abuse in my primary relationship.  Learning to recover and heal an identity after that takes time.  Learning to speak up, learning to practice self-care, learning to even know what you want when you’ve been deprived of being allowed to want, learning to stop hiding your personal tastes lest you be mocked, learning to relax enough to engage in fun, learning to give yourself permission to enjoy life again…this is all part of the healing process.

I thought, perhaps naively, that this process was understood and who I was as a person was seen.  To feel “on the outside” in a relationship is painful.  It’s alienating.  There is no intimacy there.  Just a feeling of bleakness.  Desolation.

I don’t wish to experience these kinds of interactions.  Sometimes I find myself wanting not to disclose anything to anyone.  It is far easier to simply play a part.  No one needs to know anything because it feels as if one is judged anyway.  These are my feelings speaking right now–not my reasonable self.

Yet we are wired for intimacy and connection.  There are people in the world, very rare people, with whom we do connect.  Those kindred souls who truly get us.  When we are with them we feel like we’ve come home.  We are on the inside of something grand and almost magical when we are with them.  Sometimes I find this human need for others almost unfair.  As my daughter says, “I just want to live with the cats and not bother with people.”

But my cat puked on me when I was sleeping last night.  So, I don’t know what to say about that.  Alas, we humans are not meant to be alone.  Sometimes feeling truly understood for who you are, where you’ve been, how you’ve suffered, and why you do the things you do is the most healing thing of all.  It is exactly how you need to be loved in order to recover and grow into the next stage of becoming.

It’s just a hard Saturday night.  That’s what it is.