2 MUCH THINK 2 SLEEP

I don’t feel like I remember a lot of my childhood.

At least, not the same way other people do. I feel like I see people around me pull treasures from the recesses of their mind, “hey, do you remember that time…” – followed by some fun thing with a family member or friend.

I can pull lots of fun events with friends, probably because we did stupid adrenaline producing dangerous things that could excite my neurodivergent thinky-noodles – but my life at home, not so much.

I more remember a tone, a general feeling, a sense – and it’s not a good one.

The memories I can access? Well those are also more extreme, and I’m not sure if any of them are good.

In addition to the awareness that I can’t seem to access those memories very well, psychology teaches about how unreliable memory can be, and if I recall correctly, that fine details over time can easily become distorted. Given that we tend to be biased towards ourselves, well, I’ve always believed that puts me at risk of rewriting myself to be the protagonist in my story; when I really should be remembering accurately how my actions may have impacted others.

So, trying to offload some of my trauma back into the court of the parent who loaded it onto me has felt… uncomfortable at best.

(I’ve been a fucking mess)

When I started this process, a family member mentioned still having copies of the letters between the abusive parent and I when I left home when I was seventeen. I asked for them, I wanted to see if I could add some definition to the anxious fog that feels like my childhood, and maybe feel a bit more confident that I have a valid reason for challenging this person and setting these boundaries.

Welp, I didn’t get them before I decided to move forward on starting a dialogue with the abusive parent, because I didn’t want to start lobbing emotional hand grenades any closer to Christmas than it already was.

Aaaand that dialogue suuuuuuuuuuuucks. It’s feeling very much like an absence of accountability on their part, and a lot of telling me how I’m making them feel bad.

So anxiety brain tells me, welp, maybe you just were a shitty kid, maybe you acted out too much, maybe you were an asshole…

Wait – I was the child and not the parent right?

Couldn’t it be that perhaps, a child having an accident doesn’t require it being drilled into them that it is due to them “being fucking careless” or “fucking stupid”. Maybe they’re fucking seven and you need to chill the fuck out.

That’s not too unreasonable right? (Even if you agree, I spent so much time editing every ‘fuck’ out of the dialogue in our current exchange – because I don’t want to repeat the tone if my goal is to try and undo this cycle)

Anyway – unexpectedly, I got my hands on the previous letters between me and the parent today.

It was so strange reading what I wrote then… and how much it sounded like the same things I was asking for from him then.

And how much of what I read from him then… read like him offloading the burden of responsibility to me.

A seventeen year old child who was ready to kill himself because he was so tired of hurting so much from being around a parent who couldn’t find a way to deal with his anger other than taking it out on the people he was supposed to love the most.

That last part, about being ready to kill myself, I didn’t need the letters to confirm that part. Those memories haunt me. I talked myself off that ledge – but the intrusive thoughts never left.

And what I’ll never tell him, is that I was ready to hurt him to make it stop too. It feels so awful to write that. It would have solved nothing anyway. It would only destroy me and my family in a different way.

But when you just want the hurting to stop – your brain goes to some wild places.

I worry about what that period in my life did to my brain. It took me years of work to feel comfortable enough with myself, and that I could own my anger enough to even live under the same roof as another person again. Not only own it, but do the work to dismantle the behaviours that could hurt the people I care the most about.

I’m still a work in progress – but I feel like I’ve built some pretty good communication skills, and my partner and I work hard to have good honest chats to grow together – both trying to figure out how to each own some pretty traumatic things in each of our lives and how they’ve impacted us.

So in my last communication I sent in the current dialogue with the abusive parent, I said I was taking a break from the dialogue, and would return to it in the New Year.

One of the things they did to be dismissive of me in the first communication, was belittle my age and experience of seventeen years.

Twenty-one years later, things are still lining up the same though – the commitments they made, they did not follow through and harmed me again after that. Multiple times.

I didn’t need those letters to move forward – and I hope to not bring them into my current dialogue with my parent. At some point I worry I might be compelled to, simply to try and show them, “look, I don’t think you lie to me, but I don’t think your memory is able to tell you that you didn’t show up the way you think you did!!!”. It’s enticing. I don’t believe it will help, and ultimately, it feels more like me trying to confirm that I’m the protagonist in my story – and I don’t want this to be about that.

I don’t want to bring up getting smacked with kitchen utensils during dinner, being smacked upside the head, getting picked up by my throat. Those are some of the extremes that also stand out in the fog. It’s not the Trauma Olympics, and if it was, I know he’s got me beat (honest to god, pun not intended – but that was a doozy when I saw it typed out).

I’m old enough to be a parent now – but I never will be. That’s my decision, and there are a lot of reasons for it. I can’t say my childhood experiences with him aren’t part of that. Wish I could.

What I really feel I’m not going to do now, is parent the parent. I’ve had to spend the past couple decades piecing myself back together, and at the same time rewire the parts of me that learned some pretty toxic reactions, attitudes, and behaviours. I’m so fucking tired.

So, one way or the other – I have some decisions to make coming up. I think writing this one out is also trying to build the courage to come to terms with a possible outcome. That this may be the end of a relationship with an abusive parent.

Uh-oh.. anxiety brain realized there’s a whole other domain of guilt around, ‘well, you’ve made it 38 years, isn’t that just quitting’?

Shutup stupid. I’m going to bed.