I am never OK, and if you ask me, I’m not going to tell you.
This week, when I was talking to my therapist about one of the more hurtful things I’d experienced since last seeing her, where a family member said something absolutely unspeakable about me behind my back. Her suggestion was that I should e-mail said family member about it, because I “seem to express myself better in writing than when talking to people.” There might have been some low-key contempt for me in that, but it is true, and there’s something to be said for explaining why that is.
I have a really hard time ever opening up about the problems I’m dealing with, to anyone. For reasons I’ll get into in a moment, at avery young age, I developed a defense mechanism to never, ever, let on that anything is wrong, and I swear, every time I have ever made an exception, it has lead to further trauma.
My mother has a lot of mental health issues, including one where seeing me upset has always made her unreasonably angry. The logic seemed to be that if I was ever upset, it was because she was doing a bad job as a mother. And since she was doing her best, damn it, that’s an unfair criticism I needed to be punished for. Her go-to being threats. If she ever caught me crying, or frowning, or moping, or being too quiet, or any of a dozen other things, real or imagined, that indicated to her that I was insufficiently happy and content, she’d insist I improve my attitude, or else she would send me off, either to live with my violently abusive father, or to a mental institution, or that she’d take my cats to an animal shelter. Terrifying things to say to any child, and I absolutely believed she meant it.
I worked out such a poker face that when my best friend was having a crisis and I tried to offer sympathy, I was told “you wouldn’t understand, you don’t have any emotions!”
I was regularly beaten at school. I never let on, because I’d been taught not to. One day I defied the wisdom that it would get worse if I told someone. Playground aids are there to prevent kids shoving you down and kicking you in the kidneys, right? And they’re all volunteer mothers of kids at the school. … Who look out for their kids when someone snitches on their son for being a bully.
When I came out as trans to my family, I lost my family.
The first friend I was ever totally honest with about all of this turned out to be seriously abusive, and I don’t feel safe getting more specific here.
When I opened up to people about that abuse, they cut me out of their life completely and without a word.
Stalkers monitor this blog for any signs of weakness, hoping they can use them as a wedge they can hammer to push me to suicide. Writing something like this, I always have to weigh whether it’s going to be worth the weeks I’m going to have to spend deleting hateful messages and blocking spam.
And then of course there’s my therapist, who I theoretically can talk to about some of this, but she’s a transition gatekeeper, and take a look back at the lead-in to all of this.
So, if you’re ever wondering how I’m doing, odds are very very good that I am dealing with an incredibly dark, dangerous, and frightening situation, but every instinct I have is to never say or do anything to indicate my distress, because if you find out, my personal experience is that it will in some way make everything so very much worse for me.
