How it Began, Part III

This will be the last in the ” How it Began” series (I hope).  It’s the story of how I dropped out of college–and the horror my mother manifested.

So I managed to get through high school with a good GPA. The plan was to go right to college and eventually get a master’s or a Ph.D.

I fell in love with Sigmund Freud and psychology when I was in the 9th grade, so I went into college as a psychology major.  College was a much better atmosphere. Everybody there was there because they wanted to be, not because they were only clocking time until they were old enough to not have to go there anymore.

And there was psychology. I’ve always liked trying to understand why people do what they do, and what makes them the people they are, so this was a great fit for me. I loved every class I took (except statistics–math and I are mortal enemies who circle each other warily with weapons drawn and only engage when we absolutely must).  I was really happy.

The Keeper of the Holograms was happy too; every time I turned around she would be telling people that I was a psychology major who was going to get a Ph. D. and thus “be rich and set for life”. Her exact words. I didn’t like how smug she sounded, but I was happy pursuing the study I wanted and tried not to pay much attention to her.

As my studies stretched into years, though, KotH got fidgety. She told me I was taking too long to finish, and asked me why I was taking so long. I told her that not every class is offered all the time, so I might have to wait a semester or so for a required class to come up. And even if a required class was up, sometimes there was only one being offered, and if you didn’t register for it in time, you were stuck until next time.

I was a full-time student, and so I took required courses as well as “just because” classes–those classes that I took just because they sounded interesting. It was college, and I love learning things, so I figured why not? I took religion classes and philosophy classes, classes on gender studies, mythology classes, even a class solely about the Puritans and the Salem Witch Trials.

KotH didn’t like the just because classes. She said they were unneeded and a waste of time and I should just concentrate on the classes I needed to take so I could graduate and start making money.

There were other ways she let me know she was unhappy. She would tell me about her coworkers kids, how they were graduating from college and they’d only been in for three years. Or she would mention Coworker Kid  #251 who was only 20 and was getting ready to head to graduate school. Or she would mention an ex-boyfriend of the Bestower of Righteous Silliness, who went to Job Core and was working already, “and he’s younger than you, too!”

And then, in my sophomore year of college, came her ultimate salvo: I should change majors, go into nursing. Nurses were in very high demand, she said, and the program was short. I could be out in a couple years and be making money before I could say Jack Robinson. Psychology was good, but what could I really do with it? According to her, I couldn’t make any money with just a B.S. in psychology, and a master’s program would take too long.

I had never been into nursing. I didn’t like like the idea of  dissecting things (in fact when I was in high school, I deliberately took chemistry as my science so I wouldn’t have to deal with biology, where I knew they dissected things). But once again, I thought that maybe she knew more about this than I did, and I thought that if I did become a nurse she would love me and stop pecking at me.

So I did it. I changed majors. It was the biggest mistake of my life.

The classes were boring, full of medical stuff that I didn’t really care about. The anatomy classes were boring, and yes I had to dissect many things, which I hated.

I wasn’t so happy about school anymore. I didn’t like my required classes and so I poured myself into the just because classes which still pleased me–at least for a while.

I gradually found myself wishing that classes got canceled, just so I wouldn’t have to go to them. I began wishing for massive traffic jams or other things that would delay me so much that I couldn’t get to class.  I wished to be involved in a massive car crash just so I would have an excuse to not have to set foot in class.

I started to skip classes. I wasn’t looking too closely at why I was doing this, but I felt better if I wasn’t in class. This general unhappiness began to seep into my just because classes too, and I stopped going to those as well. I would go to school and sit in the university library until it was time to go home.

I would spend a lot of this sitting time talking to myself. “Come on girl,” I would say to myself. “You’re just sitting here. Do you know you’re probably in danger of flunking right now? Don’t you care about flunking?”  Apparently I didn’t because I just sat there all day.

Then came the day I woke up and realized I had a problem. There was a midterm in one of the nursing classes, and I knew about it. Before this day, I would always go to take the tests, as I knew it was the tests that mattered. I would never skip a test day. But that day of the big nursing class midterm, I couldn’t move from that library. I literally could not make myself get up and go to class for the test.

The scary thing is that I couldn’t make myself care about the fact that I’d failed the class by missing the midterm. When I told myself that, I felt nothing. Just nothing.

I went to the counselor’s office the next day, sufficiently rattled to be worried that I was spiraling into a deep depression again.

Going to the counselor was too little too late. If I had woken up earlier, I might have been able to stop the downward spiral–and I might have actually finished college. That was my fault. The counselor helped a little–enough that I realized I was breaking down and had to stop. I withdrew from college. I’m sure that what was left of my sanity by that point thanked me for it.

But the hard part was yet to come: telling the Keeper of the Holograms. You’ve read enough of these by now to know how she reacted.

It was like I had barbequed her sacred cow. “Normal” people didn’t break down over something as small as school. There was really no “breakdown”; I was just using that as an excuse to cover my laziness. I was a disgrace. School was easy for me; why should I break down now, for God’s sake?

It didn’t matter to her that I told her that sitting in the library all day was not the action of a person who was healthy. It didn’t matter to her that I told her I wished for horrible accidents so I wouldn’t have to go to class. No, I was lazy and disgraceful, and what would her friends think about this when she told them?

All this happened some years ago, but I still feel the backlash from it. From that moment on, nothing I have ever done has been good enough in KotH’s eyes. She pushes me to go back to school, even though I don’t have enough money to finance it (and even if I did, I’d go back to finish my psychology degree, not nursing). I run her house for her, and that’s not good enough. I do my absolute best to make her and my father’s lives as stress-free as I can and that’s not good enough.

She dangles other people’s accomplishments in front of me, as if she expects me to be sorry that I haven’t done similar things. She expects me to lie to her bosses and coworkers when I see them.

I have spent my entire life trying to make her happy, trying to fit into the image she has of me. She even denies that, saying that I stopped trying to make her happy at 15. I wasn’t in college at 15, folks.

Maybe I shouldn’t be angry about it. It happened–is still happening–and perhaps I should try to deal with it.

How it Began, Part II

WARNING: This post talks about suicidal feelings, and describes a near-attempt. I don’t want to bring up any bad memories for anyone, so please skip this post if you find it hurtful or triggering in any way.

This isn’t something I mention to very many people, so I am surprised that I’m going to talk about it here. But it is yet another instance where my feelings were invalidated and I was made to feel small and unappreciated by the family.

When I was 14 years old, I almost committed suicide. It was only because I couldn’t bring myself to actually do it that I’m here to talk about it today. There are a lot of days now that I doubt the wisdom of my choice.

By the time I was 14, I had been living in a pressure cooker for many years. My parents had locked me into this role and there was no way I could get out of it. Maybe I had had something to do with it too, I don’t know.

By the time I was 14, KotH had stepped up her campaign to make of me a social success, like BoRS.  She was always on me to be pretty, to be lively, to go to parties and not hide myself. At the same time, if I slipped an iota in my studies (which didn’t happen very often, as school was easy for me) I would be punished.

I still wanted her to love me, so  I threw myself into these things with a will. I didn’t care if it killed me; I was going to make her proud of me, no matter what.

But it began to wear on me. The pressure to preform, to produce, got heavier and heavier. For every social triumph BoRS made, I could feel her comparing us and finding me lacking. But her approval for the one thing that took no effort for me died off and became a demand for more and better grades, as now she was comparing my progress in school to her friends and co-workers’s children.

I began to have trouble sleeping and my appetite dropped off. I didn’t pay attention to these signs. I kept on studying and doing schoolwork like I was expected to, and trying to find a happy medium for the social things KotH wanted.

When I began bursting into tears over small, trivial things (once a cake I was baking fell apart as it was coming out of the pan and I cried for hours over it), I began to think that perhaps something was the matter.

When I went to KotH, she told me that I had no reason to be acting and feeling this way as I “had it pretty good”.

So why, I wondered, was I starting to feel worse and worse every day?

This went on for months, with nothing helping me to feel better. I stopped trying to talk to KotH or anyone, as I felt that they would all tell me I was crazy.

Then, a couple days before Easter in 1995, I decided that I couldn’t handle it anymore. KotH had a big bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet and I grabbed it, intending to take a bunch of them and go to sleep.

I got a sheet of paper and started to cry as I wrote a note. In the note, I said that I loved them, but I couldn’t handle the pressure I was under anymore. I couldn’t be more than I was, and I was sorry that I couldn’t be different. I assured them that I wasn’t angry with them, and that this wasn’t a vindictive thing I was doing. I just wanted the pain to stop. I put the note where they would be sure to find it, then took the pill bottle to my bedroom.

I opened the bottle and poured out a handful of pills. I stared at them. There were maybe 15 of them in my hand, and I wondered how long it would take for them to take effect. I debated just downing the entire bottle, so I would be sure to die.  I wondered if it would hurt.

But just before I took that first handful, a small voice piped up and said that killing myself was the coward’s way out. If I killed myself, it would be letting them win, proving to them that I was indeed a weak and spineless person. No, said this small voice, the best way to deal with this would be to live, to live and to fight, and be damned to them for thinking they could crush me.

To this day I don’t know if that was divine intervention or my own stubborn nature. Whatever it was, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I put the pills back in the bottle and returned the bottle to the medicine cabinet.  Then I went to bed and cursed myself for being a coward.

KotH and Volcano found my note the next morning, and they sat me down, full of shock that I actually considered doing such a thing. They kept asking me why, why did I feel like I had to kill myself? I told them exactly what I wrote in the note, but my explanations fell on deaf ears.

There was no reason to want to kill myself, said KotH. Crazy people did that. All that stuff I said about pressure meant nothing, as what did she ask of me except that I did well in school and was the best I could be? “I just want you to be happy,” I remember she said.

I was sitting in front of her, crying as I tried to explain to her. Obviously I wasn’t happy.

In that whole exchange, not once did they try to actually hear my reasons. They were interested only in shooting me down, telling me that Reason X wasn’t a real reason because of  Defense Y. I felt invalidated. I felt like nothing would change, and I might as well have killed myself anyway, because being dead had to have been better than this constant tearing down.

Up until my booting from the broom closet, this was the most damage they’ve ever done to me.

How it Began, Part I

My eviction from the broom closet is only the latest of the hijackings I’ve endured from the family.  There have been many smaller ones throughout my life.

These next few posts will detail some of these smaller hijackings, and why I felt the need to be in the broom closet anyway. They won’t make for pleasant reading. While there may be a bit of hyperbole in these recollections, the core of them all is still essentially true.

And so we begin.

How did your teller of tales wind up in the broom closet in the first place? I think it’s safe to say that I’ve always been in there, from the very beginning.

I was born the first child of Volcano and the Keeper of the Holograms. Of course, they wanted their kids to be happy and prosperous, and they set themselves to that end, even though their Child Version 1.0 was not quite what they expected.

Young Nyght Mist was a quiet, bookish child. I was not very social, and preferred to spend time alone than with most people. My idea of a good time as a child was somewhere quiet snuggled up with a book or three (this sentiment has not changed overmuch).  I wrote little stories and poems and three-act plays that I would dragoon the Bestower of Righteous Silliness and the Lord of Lassitude into helping me put on for the amusement of the parental unit (that is, for the amusement of KotH, as Volcano was a hands-off sort of parent, invoked only when discipline was to be doled out).

The parental units praised your heroine as a prodigy, and gave her to know that she—and only she—was the one who would raise the family fortunes and status to places it had never been before.

But there was a problem. Your teller of tales is by nature introverted and inclined to keep to herself. She socializes with a very few dear people and has never been given to gabbing all night on the phone.  These things did not sit well with the Keeper of the Holograms, who is something of a social butterfly and believes that her children should be as well.

I was seven years old the first time I discovered that the person I was wasn’t acceptable to my mother. It was summertime, and my brother and sister were outside playing with some of the neighborhood kids. I was in the back playroom with a book. I was happy, I was quiet. Most moms wouldn’t worry about that, right?

Not mine. She came into the room and asked me why I wasn’t outside with the other kids. I told her that I was reading my book and didn’t want to go outside. She told me that I had to go outside. When I asked her why, she told me to stop asking her questions. Then she got angry for some reason and said, “Nobody will ever love you if you don’t go outside and be around people.”

I still remember the hurt I felt at that. Did that mean that she didn’t love me because I liked to read and didn’t want to have to deal with the other kids? Was I a horrible, unlovable person simply because socializing was not one of my favorite things and I avoided it when I could?

I wanted my mother (and through her, other people, though I didn’t think of it in that way then) to love me, so I decided then and there that I would just hide the parts of me that she (and therefore, the faceless “everybody” she represented in my child’s mind) didn’t like. And I would never let her see them, because I wanted to maintain her love.

That was the first time I had ever stowed any part of myself in the broom closet.