My Gian Invisible Birthmark

[Patimatsu]

Just sharing my story...

 

My Giant Invisible Birthmark

 

It feels like I was born with it. I suppose that through the bare nakedness of conception and birth, some elements of my future were already decided for me – being female for example, and with that the future life sentence of being hormonal (yes, I admit it, and all women should really). There then comes the development of conscious thought layered with emotional development – and that is from where the pit in my stomach originates. The ache that propels the need for restoration, to bring equilibrium back to the space between my heart and my mind, deep inside the fabric of my soul wax that springs into consciousness from the moment I wake up to the moment I find respite in sleep, when I can get a restful sleep. Even in sleep, my mind conjures images and situations that feed and illuminate the ache. But what is the trigger, where does it come from. It sometimes feels like a hole that no amount of patching, mending or stitching can be closed. I see the hole, I know its there, I know other people can see it, I feel I cannot conceal it, and it opens up and consumes me when I need it to the least, like a hole in my stocking that I realise is there when its too late, and people are staring at it and thinking – yuck. Insecurity.

A peculiar thing, insecurity. It has beginnings that are different for everyone. And whilst not everyone may suffer from it, there are certainly varying gradients that for those who do suffer from it, finding it creeps into life’s situations in a whole manner of ways. If I had to set a scale for it I would say it goes from – 1 being ‘yuck – I have a hole in my stocking’ to 10 being ‘a maniacal bunny boiler’. If I had to place myself on said unofficial scale today, I would say I am a 6 – being ‘aware of my destructive behaviour and as yet unable to harness & keep a lid on it’.

My life has set out so many opportunities for insecurity to creep in, but why does it affect me so much? Why can’t I get back to where I used to be on the scale before I met him, which was more a 0 to 1?

For purposes of this purge, it is important to say that I am in a relationship with an amazing man. This man, like any other human on earth, is not without his own fears and worries, but a man who at his very essence of being is a compassionate, understanding, accommodating and a safe harbour in times of ill. There are many other light hearted qualities too like funny, silly, and generally a guy! We have been together for nearly two years. We live together, with our 2 dogs, and my son. Yes, my son – who is six years old. My son who is, to say the least, a challenge, but my joy. When he was 18 months old I made the most difficult decision any parent can make, and for what I believe were the best reasons, I ended my relationship with his father. I may go into the nitty gritty of this relationship later on in this diatribe, but for now it will be sufficient enough to say that the person I fell in love with turned out not to be the person I married, and it was with him that I bore a child. The person I thought he was when we met was, if I am being completely honest with myself, was someone who in the fundamentals of insecurity fulfilled all the characteristics of ‘restoration’. He was older than me by seventeen years – almost as old as my own father (I was 26 when we met). He doted on me like, I at that time in my life felt, my own father had not. As I started to realise this, the characteristics of this man’s personality soon started to wear through the aura of restoration I had created, and I was able to see that these were not characteristics that I wanted to pass on to my son. They involved things like physical, mental & emotional abuse and were veins of his character that ran far too deep for me to continue trying to repair – like varicose veins of emotional immaturity which for all his years he was unable to acknowledge let alone fix the situation. So I did. Which in my opinion was an act to save my son, and to some extent myself, from this man. I say I saved my son more than myself, because any parent will know that once you go to the ‘other side’ and have a swaddling babe of your own, the selfishness of being one’s self is rapidly replaced with selflessness and a basic instinct of protection.

Which brings me to the conundrum? Protection. My son is ‘safe’ now. Remarkably, he was only 18 months old when it happened, but the effects of that relationship and the period after that is like the ripple effect of a rock dropping into the centre of an endless, fathomless lake. The ripples are most defined at the epicentre of the event, and normally fade to calm as time and shallower water take over – but instead, these ripples continue on, as if the rock were actually a mountain that was dropped and consumed the lake. I’ve experienced these ripples throughout the entire period since I did ‘it’, in observing, and contributing to, my son’s emotional & social development. I’ll be the first to admit it. I split from his father, and as toxic as that relationship was, I longed for the one thing I knew that if I had stuck it out, and lived with the emotional mental & physical abuse, I would have had, and that would have been a person to spend the rest of my life with. There was a very dark period not long after the break up where I thought well… something is better than nothing… and almost gave in and went back to the toxicity. I gave myself a shake and recalled the reasons why I induced the split, and took comfort in the fact that for my son, and for me, it really was the best decision. It did not, however, help the feelings of anxiousness I harboured about feeling like I was unworthy. Unworthy of having a loving, reciprocated, healthy relationship wherein I didn’t feel like I had to put up with all manner of things in order to find security in not being alone. This, I believe, is where my journey of realisation started. I was alone, with my son, and nobody to love me in the way I needed to be loved, a very young child who depended solely on me for everything, and nothing left in my emotional coffers to give back to myself. I worked fulltime during the day to pay the bills and keep the roof over our heads, and worked fulltime every other waking minute to insure the best possible upbringing I could for my child. It was exhausting, and on top of all that – I had nobody to share my life with. A feeling, that for anyone who has experienced the albatross of insecurity will know, is all consuming.

I searched and searched for the ‘restoration’ of feeling needed, being wanted, being loveable, adored and cherished. I searched in all the wrong places and led myself through a path of disappointment until I had reached so far into the overdraft of the coffers of self worth that I was on the brink of emotional bankruptcy. And then I reached out to my father. I asked him all the things I wanted to ask him for years about my childhood. And then it hit me. That my insecurities stemmed from my upbringing and the longing I had as a child to feel loved, important and special. Armed with that self realisation I questioned myself long and hard and connected my dependency on others in my adult life with the way that that as a child I would have been feeling from having an emotionally absent mother and a physically absent father. When I was a child, I was not nurtured in the way a ‘traditional’ upbringing might have provided. Leaving me with a very low sense of self worth and a deep seeded fear that all my relationships might be like this.

Relationships. I tend to feel the poorer relation in my relationships. I seek out reassurances that the other person loves me. In a bid to prove to myself in some way that they love me as much as I love them. This often leaves me with a sense of disappointment when the affirmation doesn’t come as I had played it out in my mind. I am expecting a response that doesn’t always come in the way I had envisaged and it is this that produces the fear that the relationship is slipping away from me, inducing a cycle of behaviour that if I could put myself outside myself and watch what I am doing and be on the receiving end of what I am saying, would make me cringe, slap myself silly, then run far far away.

Basically a form of perpetual relationship & self destruction. I am so afraid that I will experience the same emotional abandonment and rejection ingrained from early developmental years without my awareness that it was happening, that I start to look for any signs that it might be there. Now that I am an adult and am capable of realising what happened and the effects of that on my need for protection from basic fears, which when the fears are valid is a good form of self protection – as you can imagine our hunter & gatherer ancestors might have in their most very basic forms a sense of danger in the form of predators posing a valid life threat – but this form is not good. It’s as if my own conscience is my own predator. A cycle of affirmation is induced where when I start to seek out what I think is the truth – when I seek out the truth, no matter of whether it is valid or not, I ultimately find something – and it normally exists within my imagination.

I watch. I listen. I wait. I search. I conjure worst case scenarios.

I watch for the signs that affirm the fear. I subconsciously set traps to confirm that my fear is valid. I don’t know why I do this, it’s like an attempt to convince myself that it’s not imaginary, that I’ve not got a problem… but it’s a mind game I play with myself. Such as, getting out of the shower and wearing some new lingerie, parading in front of my boyfriend when he is involved in a video game or chat online with a friend and expecting a certain type of response. When I don’t get it, I think he isn’t interested, doesn’t think I’m sexy, and generally unwanted. I then get embarrassed and angry, and take it out on him. When in the middle of that, he is totally innocent and hasn’t actually done anything wrong.

The fact is that if you are depending on someone to provide you with affirmation, you are always going to be stuck at the disadvantage. The key is in self assurance, and this is what I strive for.

Why, I ask myself, do I even care that people might be looking at the hole in my stocking ? Why do I care what other people think about me. Am I cool enough ? Am I pretty enough ? Am I funny enough ? What are they thinking ? It makes me feel like I am at a party with everybody in the world and I am standing in the middle of everyone, but am the loneliest of everyone - not interesting, and not worthy of attracting the interest of anyone else. But the truth is that chances are nobody is looking at that hole in my stocking… they might be looking at the holes in their own stockings, worrying that they are being perceived as ‘Yuck’ - or maybe, the lucky ones, are looking out the window at the wonderful world that is now.

The conclusion I come to is that I have an overwhelming need for acceptance, and this is derived from the feelings of rejection I have from not having my mother there for me emotionally and a father who was not there physically. <Footnote to add more on the familial histoire here>

Nice huh ? Not really. But I haven’t always been like this. There was a period of enlightenment that I enjoyed in between my ex-husband and my now boyfriend where I explored all these insecurity induced anxieties and consciously decided that in order for me to be happy with someone else, and not be dependent on them for my emotional well being, I needed to happy and self assured in myself. It wasn’t an overnight process – but slowly I nurtured myself into emotional health through finding outlets, like writing, photography, reading, cooking and physical activity that made me feel good about myself and proud of my own accomplishments. This was a fantastic period of my existence. The regular chats with my dad, and the realisation that if I did not snap myself out of this cycle I would do serious long term damage to my own son through being emotionally unavailable to him, were the tonics needed to catapult me out of the gutter and into a healthier place. Of course, this happier – emotionally healthy place was one that I was experiencing on my own – without a ‘relationship’ outside the close friendships I had with my 2 girlfriends and my dad – all of whom I know well and they know me.

The next step came as a surprise to me – as the old adage goes – you find love when you least expect it – and enter stage right, my now boyfriend. Bless him – he brings so much joy to my life – when things are good, they are really really good – we had so much fun in the early days, waxing lyrical about everything and nothing and not really caring about much except the happiness and love we had between us. I’m not speaking in the past tense intentionally, we still have love, it’s just that …. And this is where, enter stage left, comes the insecurity – reminding me that the cracks are still in there… its being tarnished with unhappiness. It’s not his fault, but slowly this birthmark that is my insecurity grows, taking me into its grip – and my relationship along with it. If I don’t do something now to address it, the understanding and compassion I have been gifted will be extinguished completely.

It’s like I have to learn all over again what it is to be self assured and not divest my emotional health to someone else all over again. After all, as a child, you have no choice but to do so, but as an adult – you do.

I suppose in hindsight I could be accused of getting into this relationship too soon. On the other hand, when you know something is good for you, you run towards it – which is what I did. I don’t want to lose it – but I also don’t want to smother it. So I will back off, restore myself within myself and not with the dependency of expectation for someone else to do that for me – and hope the damage isn’t irreparable.

- PD

Edited July 12, 2013 by Patimatsu
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