My traumas will be so much smaller than of most people here, if not actually everyone else’s. The most traumatic of those single things would be difficult to choose, but the most traumatic thing is probably the combination itself, how things form a chain…
Outside family, being picked on. For being smarter, for going to church, for being fat, for wearing glasses, for liking books, or classical music, or not caring about sports or youth bands, or being friends with someone or using nice language. Anything. Teachers? Shared some of the kids’ attitudes, actually. In retrospect, I still claim there must have been some personal dislike (inherited by mum when she dealt with them and she often had to). Eh, one of the kids, a girl, even accused me of beating her up (kicking actually) so she was afraid to come to school. Not like she was the only one or beating up was the only thing they invented and teachers were happy to believe without investigating. Not like that stuff didn’t happen home with siblings and parents. You can probably now see why I hate lies so much. And the only people to have collected more insults would probably have needed to be ethnic minorities in multi-ethnic societies. Physical violence? Sure, as well. And even ending up punished for attacking someone for defending myself, actually. Lying and accusing me of lying at the same time, people I loved or respected or feared believing in it. It was horrible.
Then add the inability to satisfy my family. No grades good enough, always could have done better. Max grades weren’t enough, actually, when obtained, because I should have gained some special honours and whatnot. My hobbies were bad, my friends, my choice of clothing (not like I picked the clothes to buy, nada, just stuff I wanted to wear on a day or how to combine - I rebelled in mid-teens because it was too much to take, kids picking on me and my own hating the matches). Always the one assumed guilty in a conflict, always the liar if one side must have been, wrong by default in case of simple variance. Dignity, freedom, tell me more (the ugliest of namecalling was justified on the grounds it was “true”, while I was wrong for denying anything or trying to defend myself from a charge - getting a liar to recant wasn’t enough, either). Always being blamed for something, accused of something, never believed. It was horrible. Some of it still lasts in family relations. I have no desire to please their visions of me and I realise I never will. It sucks, but I won’t let it pain me forever. As a result of certain conflicts involving physical power (and sometimes the police), I know how it feels to be a teenager sleeping in bed with a knife or actually threatening to use it in defence of one family member against another and I know how it feels to prepare for some violence coming, verbal or physical or both, threats of death by raging people included.
As for girlfriends and such, well. One who climbed into jocks’ laps as I lay in bed ill. Another who decided on the following day she wasn’t ready. Yet another always having the time to flirt with someone but never to talk to me. An online relationship of 9 months in which I had been deceived from the beginning about pictures and perhaps even identity by a religious person (and got to know some of the friends and family even, albeit just online, so it might as well have been multiple personalities, but still). And let’s not forget the one who kissed with some guy as I was waiting for her at night (for the talking, not the sinning), only to come on the following day and tell me how great it was. One who took a whole hour to shift attention onto a younger guy than even she was. I’ve lost the count but I topped 20 before. The last one was actually a lovely, lovely girl, good and kind, who in the end couldn’t decide if she would ever want to have children, also deciding she wouldn’t want them to be brought up Catholic. There it went after 1.5 years of a relationship and spending several hours a day together, preceded by 2.5 of friendship in which we built up each other a lot, helped rise from previous bad relationships, shared a lot of joys and sorrows, subconsciously starting to behave like a couple.
The result is my charming personality. The fact that I, logically, overblew a lot of that stuff or took it out of context or exaggerated or misunderstood it, and that in a lot of cases I was (probably) really wrong or guilty, doesn’t help. It just makes it worse by removing legitimacy from the hurts. I have no doubt that God loves me, but I have a real problem believing I can and will be happy one day. I know enough to realise that with that attitude, one just won’t be happy. And it does look like I just can’t. That I’m always smiling according to people, or even a cheery person, doesn’t change this. Cheery people want to be happy all the more, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, sorry for taking up all this room especially among people with real traumas.
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Weird… I think sometimes talking to another mere human can make things worse… because it may be that God has you going through something that only He can understand. And, of course, only He can understand anything perfectly… Maybe he wants you 2 rely on him alone… (??)
