Saturday, June 30, 2018

Feeling emptiness from personal achievements.

Hi. I've been lurking around here since a long time ago but today I decided to post because I just realized how I feel. It has been a long day and I'm a mixture of sadness, anger, emptiness and loneliness.

I had been in doubt about my mother being a narc for a few years, then it exploded in my face after I had my daughter last year. She used to stole my achievements to tell the world how she sacrificed for her children to be “someone” in this life, but after my baby was born and I decided to keep studying (after she told me several times that I wasn't going to be able to and calling me “absent mother” for going to class while my partner was taking care of the baby) everything is facebooked and she brags about it to everyone by telling this disgusting meritocracy fairy tale where I'm the struggling mom that battles the world with a pencil because she adopted me, raised me and gave me the inspiration and support to keep going no matter what.

What a fucking lie.

If there is something my mother did is to pressure me to be perfect and that means shaming and making me feel worthless if I don't reach her standards. “Her daughter” is a beautiful girl, so how could I allowed myself to look like this? I'm fat, I'm under-dressed all the time, I bite my nails, my hair has split ends and I got melasma and stretch marks after having my daughter 1 year ago. Her daughter is polite, so how can I be so vulgar sometimes? I have such a bad taste in humor and arts, such a creepy and nerdish view of life and no one (she) can understand some of my references when I'm talking (with somebody else and she can't intervene). Her daughter is intelligent, so what about this low grade (she calls anything below 85/100 a low grade)? Somebody's grown child got a job at a good place and is earning a good salary, so what about you? I'm studying to be a teacher and I deeply love it. She was an elementary teacher and moved to directive for the money, I'm studying to teach in secondary school and doing some extra courses to get the chance to teach in university (that is my goal). I will never make “good money” so she despises my choice of job.

As a child I used to enjoy being praised but as I grew up and I struggled more and had doubts about “my goals” (her goals) the pressure destroyed me. I started having panic attacks and just couldn't stay in the room when I knew I had the risk of doing something wrong. I over-analyzed everything, grew anxious and depressed. In 7 years I tried and dropped a few undergraduate degrees, had a year I was unable to leave my (own) home and only the idea of the burden for my SO having to take care of my remains stopped me from taking my own life. I eventually had the courage to get out and start my training as a teacher and loved it. Since then I'm fighting with paralysis analysis and my black-or-white mentality. Got pregnant and had a baby girl a year ago so I had to slow down the pace, got stuck with obligatory general class subjects so for this year I can't do anything until I finish 3 courses.

My family, I mean my real, own family that I created with my SO gave me the strenght to try new things. And I wanted to expose myself to my worst fear, the fear of failing so I started a second career as a Chemistry Engineer while finishing those damn assignments. I enrolled in only 2 courses this quarter thinking that if I passed only one I would be so happy.

Today I passed my second test for Mathematical Analysis I, so it means that I'm ready for finals. This is the first time in my life I didn't tell anything about it to my parents. I'm keeping my mom in an information diet and sadly my e-stepdad has the same treatment since he always gives her drops of data “without noticing”.

I wish there was a happy ending to this story but I just had a panic attack and I'm still sobbing because I don't have the capacity of feeling joy about what I did. It feels to me like having a good grade was what I was supposed to do anyways and even if I'm surrounded by loving people who told me they are proud of me, I still feel like I don't deserve it. I feel guilty about being unable to feel good with them. I should be feeling relieved, not broken.

Sometimes I feel like I have her speechs ingrained in my head to the point that I torn myself to pieces with criticism and today I realized that, paradoxically, that's one of the things that keeps me going: in my head there's still a little hateful gremlin with my mother's sweetest, cruelest voice telling me that failure is not an option. And also there's a special place for a troll with my late n-dad's voice (her ex-husband) telling me that as a woman it's enough for me to be a homemaker and breed a few babies, but that's another story.

After my father died and my daughter was born I was able to see the full picture. Before all I knew was that I had an helicopter mother and a traditional rugged and detached father. Now that I can see through it it eats me inside. Suddenly I saw my own FLEAS and since then I catched myself gaslighting my SO of 10 years (I'm now aware of it) and using “sarcasm” as defense when I feel threatened or even just for laughs and hurting people in consequence. After I realized this for the first time I tried therapy. She insisted that I have to let go the past and live in the present, as if it was that simple. She also suggested to take distance and I did. Can't afford it anymore, and it didn't helped me to stop the random poking from intrusive thoughts in my head.

Is this really something I want, or is this something I'm programmed to do since I'm not allowed to fail at anything? Is this really my choice, inspired by wanting to follow my taste of natural sciences or is this another way to prove I'm worthy of love? And if it is my choice, how can I feel so empty about it? Will I ever feel satisfied with anything?

I have a strong painful urge of praise, but not anyone's praise: their praise that they will never give me since daddy is dead and even if he was alive he didn't understand why I wanted to study and mommy thinks that this is not an achievement because “people less intelligent can reach the same point” and I'm “wasting my time if doing this just for teaching”. I feel ungrateful for not being happy for my SO's congratulations or being greeted by a happy baby after I came home.

My eyes hurt and I feel like crap. My SO is sleeping and I don't know how to talk with him about this. I'm at loss of what to do. And I feel totally stupid because all this was triggered by passing an exam.

I apologize in advance if anything here is poorly written, English isn't my mother language (I'm self taught, and happy to receive feedback to improve).



Submitted June 30, 2018 at 11:43AM by IgneousDicranopteris https://ift.tt/2KmseVA

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