There had been too many nasty surprises in my upbringing and past. I can count so many of them.
Sometimes I feel as if I have a lot of choice, and at other times I feel as if I have none at all. It’s a shame that I had to be someone who went through so much already so early in her life. And as a result of that I had to learn to self-soothe. But even the self-soothing didn’t help, because I ended up just needing more and more sensation as well as more and more stimulation.
And because of that usedness to over-stimulation, I chose to be heartbroken again and again, not just because it was something that I was familiar with, but because I thought it was something I had to choose. Because of the way I was passed around like a football between different relatives, even though ostensibly I had parents, I chose to be treated this way in real life as well. I was just in survival mode, but my version of survival mode was to choose what was familiar to me.
I had to remember myself that that darkness wasn’t real. And I had to get rid of the toxic people in my life, but it was only done slowly. And I had no idea what I was doing when I was doing it. I mostly attracted toxic people in the early stages of my life, but I think that was because I was one, too.
I don’t really know how I stopped this pattern, except that I stopped it. It wasn’t really a force of will or anything, it just naturally stopped. I also stopped being ultra competitive, which I think was part of it. I think when you are taught a scarcity model of life, it’s what makes you competitive.
I never really understood competition, except I was raised with it, in some ways it’s in my DNA. I was taught what exceptionalism was, because my family, and therefore by extension me, were exceptional. And we’re also exceptionally guilty, because we were raised on very little self-esteem, which seems counter-intuitive to the exceptionalism. But I have found lately that the reason people acted that way was from a sense of low self-esteem, because it was from a feeling of not feeling good enough. When you don’t feel good enough, it can affect everything, including the way you act with others. You are always trying to please other people, and trying hard to get them to like you, when in fact there’s no point of doing this.
I didn’t really understand why I was reaching for all of these toxic traits, but I do know I also had another one, and that was perfectionism. It was perfectionistic to have grown up in the family that I did. And that perfectionism was wielded like a weapon above us all. And I clung to this perfectionism because I didn’t have anything else. When people hear my story, they think about what a sad one it is, and to a very large extent that is true.
But I realised something about my grandparents, and especially my grandma. It seems that she has routinely gotten me, and her children, used to abuse.