serious

 

So I'm not really dwelling or even thinking about stuff very much, but once in awhile I remember something back on the old pinky blog, like this video, and totally remember how I felt writing what I did with that video in the post. And now I can see how jumbled up that was, misinterpreted through filters that couldn't allow me to see bigger picture at the time, which displaced loads of blame for emotions I was processing in the wrong direction and whatnot.

Being able to look back and assess without all that in the way is incredible, but the vid still holds a huge load of layered meanings because it was part of thinking through all the stuff that rolled out the way it did.

I know that is ridiculously cryptic, so basically, that video was me vs my mom in my head. The imagery is a bit over the top, but the emotions aren't, the character fit the way my head was working, and the lyrics were perfect with the imagery to help me with another puzzle piece. Even when you get a piece of puzzle put into the correct spot, you still can't see bigger picture for awhile, and without some kind of guide like the original picture before it's cut into pieces, it's hard to tell what the original picture was till you get more pieces into place.

Over time, yeah, turned out to be my dad, and my mom and I were caught in his wake, as it were, which greatly complicated my relationship with my mom in ways that no one else in my entire extended family will ever understand, although I bet they'd agree with some of the conclusion I am arriving to. I won't elaborate because entire blogs have already done that, but going back to this video is no less meaningful, because now it allows me to go back and see and remember how I felt then in my mixed up skewed point of view state, and I can proceed from there to better emotional healing. Inner peace.

The reality, as mixed up as it was, was reality. I experienced that reality. I've been asking what reality is all my life, determined to define it somehow through science or philosophy or whatever. Reality is my experience. I can see that now. I can define till I'm blue and I'll never get it right until I accept that the way I see, hear, feel, and react is reality.

At some point, actually many points, I was able to understand in bits and pieces that I can change my reality. I can change the way I see it, perceive it, react to it. I can change the things around me I am seeing and reacting to. I can change me, and by changing me I can change others around me.

My contention with Goethe last week kind of sounds like that. He noticed he could treat others differently to get a different person out of them. I've noticed that ALL. MY. LIFE. And I have hated, loathed that it was so easy, that people are that easy to manipulate. So I have been working for years on the flaw that is that way of seeing the world, the flaw of me being in 'the way' of everything else running smoothly around me. I am a monkeywrench in other people's designs and intents. At least, that was the way I felt growing up. The opposite of feeling loved.

Feeling loved, liked, appreciated, and any other life validating maneuver put upon me by others was rejected as manipulation. Love was conditional in my world. When you grow up with angry or bitterly disappointed and hurt parents, divided in their beliefs and approaches to life, you grow up feeling unforgiven. In the way. Unnecessary.

The way Goethe figured people out was the way my father figured them out. Treat people the way you want them to behave. He completely missed treating people with kindness for the sake of kindness, empathy, compassion. He argued that he didn't owe his neighbor anything and would ask everyone who his neighbor was, based on a bible story. He tried to persuade us all that what we thought it might mean was not the point at all, and in so doing, created a justification in his mind not to be a neighbor, whatever that meant to him.

We could extend that to what he must have thought being a father meant, but that was so utterly lacking in my life due to his emotional deficiencies that it quickly became its own null set, and I failed to think of him as a father figure for most of my life. He was my dad by a role definition. I couldn't even confidently define it as something genetic.

By the time I grew up, everything I thought about my mom was in reaction to him. She was weak. She was actually very strong to survive him as long as she did, but I couldn't see that, and I was as unforgiving on her as I misunderstood my parents being on me. I was smarter than my dad, I could plainly see that, and I had much different thoughts, so when I went to her with my own thoughts, I expected to be accepted differently. I didn't realize I was behaving like my dad. I had learned to survive by cutting off my emotions that same way he had, and my mom reacted to me the same way she did to my dad.

Inside of us, underneath all that pain and disagreement, we loved each other very much. Life was too hard to feel it without falling to the despair, so we kept on with everything being hard. My relationship with my mom was likely very different than all the other kids, and now I am dealing with being the firstborn that came between two very different people, setting the stage for the rest of all our lives.

I stepped into this life taking on the hard role. Autism spectrum notwithstanding, my mom learned hard and fast the cruelty of my dad's love, if only out of sheer stubbornness that didn't allow her one inch of fairness, empathy, sorrow, or softness. He was right, always. And if she resisted that, it was only because he allowed it. It took time, years, for her to grow a thicker skin, but it wasn't in her nature, and she suffered for it anyway.

Emotional entanglement can be sweet or bitter, happy or sad, a lifelong song or sorrow that we live with. That is the way of this world. We find ourselves through others. We find who we are as we inflict or are inflicted upon. We create who we become either on the wings of helpfulness or in the face of resistance.

I survived my parents. I can look back now and see that the tangled mess inside of me is slowly untangling and falling off.

My biggest challenge with myself this entire time has been the kickback I feel against how stupid life has felt. How could they be so dumb? How could they not see? But we are human, aren't we, and I had to learn to forgive as much or more than anyone. All my years of anger may have fueled my survival, but that cannot be who I continue to be.

But I remember when I was that close to becoming a supervillain.