I have an aunt – no, maybe two – who seems to perform for other people every day of their lives.
It must be such a stressful way to live.
But I also think about my mum, who was and is someone so raw that she could not hide any of her emotions.
All these things combined, I think it meant that I didn’t know anything about love.
I think my aunts, at least the elder one, had the tendency to over-solve and rescue everyone.
I guess if I didn’t feel love from people (or they failed to show, or knew how to show it), they I didn’t really know how to show other people love, either.
Sometimes the best thing to say in a situation is I don’t know, and I never got that when I was growing up. Everyone was always trying to fix something or do something for me, but the odd thing was, anger as an emotion was never that big for me until I was over thirty.
The performance aspect of my aunts seemed to have stemmed from a lack of self-esteem. Maybe this is why they never really understood how to love me. I’m not even sure they know exactly how to love, if it didn’t come with fixing.
And the culture of of over-doing was strong at home. But at the same time it felt like there was no protection. I don’t know how the two things came together, because they seem so distinctly apart. But if it was negligence addressed as love (this reminds me of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, I don’t know why) it would explain why I had to spend all those years being addicted to something. How would I be able to see clearly when I had been told how to act my whole life?
It also made me very averse to people with whom I didn’t have to try that hard. What I had learned from my family is this ethic of over-doing, and the most toxic part of this is the ethic that if you are not busting your balls to please someone, then you’re not showing them love. This, on top of the fact that the woman I loved the most in the world – my grandmother – would most likely die, when I was still very young.
For a while it will make you addicted to over-doing and drama. It felt and still feels like a cycle or a loop that continues going on, and that doesn’t stop, a bit like a rollercoaster.
I was also thinking about my aunt – the younger one. She had her own mechanisms for staying sane with this family during her life, which was to disappear occasionally and not be contactable at all. In her own way, when she was able to go into her hiding place she was able to hide from this family.
It was this obsession that my family had, of always having the “ON” switch, and never being told how to switch it off. It was in my late twenties that I realised I even had an “OFF” button. So like a overrun wiring in a circuit, it was going to burn itself out.
I had always grown up with two identities, and therefore I think I have always confused people. People always take one or two looks at me, and look away, then look again.
Did I become obsessed with the emotional life of myself because of the lack of interest in it by my parents? And was my grandmother the only one who cared?