Disinterested in my personhood. I am a function.

I’m trying as best I can to accept I have a mental illness. Some days I can. And some days I can’t. But all-in-all I know that I have come a long way these last 18 months. Some days I even feel lucky. There are other people so much more incapacitated than me. I see myself as one of those people you meet in life who has had a lot of terrible luck, inside a lot of great luck. Blessed and cursed.

But unlike my mental illness, I find my child abuse, neglect and maltreatment so much harder to accept. I know intellectually I am just one of millions and millions and millions of people who have experienced it. I am hardly special there……..but the pain of not being seen by either parent is so deep and so raw, I seem to always come back to the same place inside. The loneliness is just unbearable. I feel like an orphan some days and that I just don't belong.

At times when I was younger I thought that my parents self-absorption was just another part of their mental illness. I get it. I have experienced how insular the mind becomes when you're really unwell. You must shut people out, you are so desperate. I guess it does that for survival. I know it's hard to be around, it drove me crazy as a little kid to come home from school and my parents were asleep in bed or off the planet entirely. I know I am hard to be around at times when I am unwell.

I will never forget the feeling that I felt when I was in hospital and I over heard the nurses telling the guy in the room next to me, that if he didn't want visitors, or to see, or contact his family that, that was totally cool and his own choice. He could have a break from everyone.

Oh my god.

I wept.

What do you mean I didn't have to be considerate or fake OK-ness, or force a smile, or participate in banal conversation for anyone.

I felt like a person.

Who was entitled to privacy.

Entitled to a break. And had the last say over where and for whom my energy, resources and body was expected to labour for others. In fact, I didn't have to labour, all I had to do was finally sink into and acknowledge my own experiences, hurt, trauma and pain, and nothing more was required of me.

My father was somewhere on the narcissistic spectrum. I refer to him as a deeply insecure ego maniac. A very defensive ego, who was entitled and angry at everyone. He had two gears. Aggressive and not so aggressive. My eldest sibling often says to me that this is a very generous assessment I give him. She believes there were elements of psychopathy. He literally derived physical pleasure from inflicting pain upon me, withholding physical affection, or brooding in silence to punish us for some unknown thing we had supposedly done. He knew that I was an innately, very affectionate child and could see it from a young age. My siblings and I used to barge down my grandparents bedroom door, we'd practically kick it in for a cuddle and to jump into their big bed with them when we woke up in the morning. My Auntie said we opened our grandfathers heart. This innate self just made crushing us even more pleasurable for my father.

I was reared by a narc-needy, domineering, violent father. Until you have experienced narc-needy over a long period of time…….it’s hard to describe what that does to you. People talk about narcissistic supply, that people like that need victims to survive, but when it’s a parent, it completely constructs your self-worth and identity. I was not worthy of anything. Not even worthy of my time. It was all his to dictate how I spent it, and for what purpose.

It’s incredible how people like my father are so adept at finding a spouse. They’re rarely single. But where there are plenty of narcs out there, there are also plenty of people perpetuating their abuse. Feeding them.

What it requires is not only someone that loves them, but someone that reveres them. Reveres their suffering and lot in life, and ultimately evangelises them. I used to think that this was all part of Mum’s delusions and insecurities. She just had low self-esteem because of an aloof father and being given the label that a lot of people with schizophrenia do – mad. She was desperate for love, and her mental health condition warped her judgment.

But talking to friends who have similar dynamics between their parents but neither of them has any mental illness whatsoever, all the women are the same. They are all the same. Co-dependent, addicted and insecure doesn’t even sum it up……..I don’t really know what the hell to call it, where that tendency towards excessive reverence for their spouse comes from……

I can’t handle it.

It is so frigging weird to me. It puts my head in a negative place, triggering all sorts of female betrayal and grooming memories I just can’t handle and puts my dissociation into over-drive.

I feel so betrayed by the females in my early life. But I don't want to give them more energy than I already have.

I don't know how to move on, past it, or accept it......maybe it's not even possible. A decade of constant therapy later and I'm not even close.....