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Third Hike
Written by Chloe on Sunday, May 31, 2009
Don’t worry, I’m not going to use the f-word. I’m also not going to describe much about the hike. You already know what I do: bushwhacking, snowfields, glissading, limping, freezing, cussing at myself, etc. No, this is about psychotherapy; not the formal kind; the kind that happens on this website.
A lot of things suddenly seemed to come together to make a bit of sense. Sophie said that she hates herself. I said that I hate myself (sometimes). Wheelman said that I am uncaring about my life. Sean and others talked about their parents. Phil said (commenting on my First Hike) "You talk to yourself like parents would do who don’t love you but want to force you to do what they want, regardless of your own feelings." (How’s that for psychotherapeutic insight!) I showed my partner what I’d written about my First Hike, and also the comments, last night. We had a long discussion about it. In summary she said "You need to get angry at your parents." This is getting to sound a bit like the Oscars, so I’d better move on.
As I set out on the hike this morning the cogs are quietly turning in my brain. I head north, along the east side of a stream. After a while it becomes impassable, and I figure I need to get to the top of the ridge on the west side of the stream. No reasonable stream crossing in sight, so I wade through, soaking my feet. The bushwhack to the ridge is long and very steep, through a dense mixed forest of maple and blue spruce.
My bare arms are getting pretty scratched up from the tough bushwack; little trickles of blood starting. I look at the blood, remembering the words of my partner last night "You punish yourself because you’re not good enough." What was that Phil said? "Don’t punish yourself." But I like the blood. I like bleeding. "Remember after your second surgery? You went to go pee, and the blood was pouring out much faster than the pee. You liked that." "Boy, you are one sick ****!" I look beyond the blood, at the barely visible scars from all those previous hikes. I like the scars.
The going is tough. Many times I have to stop and search around for a traverse that shows promise of leading upwards once more. Each time, I want to turn back. Each time, the voice says "Keep going you ****** sissy." (Insert an expletive of your choice). What’s with all this "sissy" stuff? I do exactly the same thing skiing. Every time I hesitate to ski off a cliff, or hesitate at the top of a terrifying looking run, I call myself a sissy. And then I just do it.
Eventually I reach the top of the ridge, and the vegetation clears enough so that I can look all around. I immediately burst into tears. I figured out why I call myself a sissy!
Big gulp. Sensitive subject. Perhaps the hardest thing I’ll talk about on this website. My parents wanted their firstborn to be a boy. That was my sister. Boys are better. My sister wasn’t good enough. My parents didn’t hide the fact that boys are better; boys are smarter; boys can do anything; girls can’t. My sister has spent a lot of her life proving our parents wrong. How much is good enough? She and I share a number of psychological issues.
Then there was me. Is it a girl? Hard to say. I knew I was a girl. Nothing seemed to contradict that until I was seven. I was happy until I was seven. No nasty psychological issues until I was seven. Well, there was the BIID but it wasn’t nasty; just the conviction that I would become paralysed, probably pretty soon, nothing nasty about it.
At seven, my parents made it clear to me that I was to be a boy. There, I said it. My opinion wasn’t asked. I had an opinion though. My parents had the perfect excuse to get what they wanted: ambiguity. "Force you to do what they want, regardless of your own feelings." Wow Phil, You sure hit the nail on the head! Oh yes, I had feelings. I wanted to scream at my parents "CAN’T YOU SEE THAT I’M A GIRL!" There’s more. I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to talk about it openly. Sean knows.
I figured that if I needed leg braces, then it would prove to my parents that I’m a girl. It didn’t happen. Failing that, I needed to prove that just because I’m a girl it doesn’t mean that I’m a sissy. How much proof does it take? Am I angry yet? Not enough. Wheelman told me that I tend to take things to an extreme. Well, if I didn’t I would be a sissy wouldn’t I? If I didn’t somehow succeed in becoming paraplegic, I would be a sissy…
On top of the ridge I can see in all directions. I get out the topographic map. It’s too confusing. There are too many ridges going every which way. Too many streams curving around. No distinctive peaks. Yes, people do get lost out here.
My hikes often turn out to be a metaphor for life. I’ve been struggling up through the thicket, step by step. Now here I am out in the open with a good view (BIID and depression both in control for now). But I still don’t know where I am! The only reasonable direction seems to be to keep bushwhacking upwards along the ridgetop to find out where it goes…
There is a large steep snowfield to ascend in order to make it to the peak. A thunderstorm rolls in. "Good!" I think, "Maybe once I’m on the final ridge I’ll get struck by lightning and die." I don’t find this an unusual thought at all. I’m not suicidal. I’m not even depressed (by my standards anyway). "Uncaring about my life" Wheelman said. Yes; that’s perceptive. My partner is the one who is caring about my life; the one who is keeping me alive; by the look in her eyes every time I go off on a hike…
Halfway down, more tears suddenly come. This time they come with anger. Anger at my parents. Anger about the worst thing they did. My sister and I had sanitised parents. They didn’t have any problems. Only defective people get depressed; only defective people get angry; only defective people cry; only defective people don’t have enough money; only defective people commit suicide; only defective people become disabled. OH SUCH LIES!!!
Three years ago my sister and I were reading through our parents’ diaries. SO much depression in those pages. SO many suicidal thoughts. My sister and I hugged each other and wept together. We had been cheated! Cheated of having real parents with real emotions. And because of this they had been cheated of having real children. "Did you think that by sanitising your own lives you could protect us? You were WRONG! Both of your kids are taking antidepressants. Sometimes we can barely keep it together. All you did was cheat your children out of knowing you. And you never wanted to know who your children really were. When our cousin committed suicide, you went on about all her defects. YOU HYPOCRITES! I’ve read your diaries!"
Sadness, the taboo emotion. "All you succeeded in doing was making me feel guilty whenever I am sad. Was that what you wanted? Why can’t I just be sad? You made me feel like I have no right to be sad."
Anger, another taboo emotion. "How convenient it must have been for you that I wasn’t allowed to show my anger at you for not being allowed to be angry! How can I really be angry at you? Weren’t you just doing your best? I know about your depression, your sense of failure in life. You have my love. You have my compassion. What is the point in being angry at dead people anyway? It makes me feel guilty to be angry. You did that to me. Only one person is on the receiving end of my anger: myself. My partner says that I need to get angry with YOU (oh, yeah, almost forgot, lesbians are defective too, aren’t they?). She says that then I’ll go through the anguish. After that I’ll be able to start loving myself."
When I returned home from the hike, I cried in my partner’s arms for three hours…
I’m tired of being messed up. I don’t want to be messed up. I expect everybody is messed up anyway. I don’t expect paraplegia to cure me of being messed up. But I expect it to help quite a lot.
Tags: Anger, BIID, Blood, Depression, Leg Braces, Paralysed, Paraplegia, Parents, Scars, Suicide
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7 Comments
Thank you, Wheelman1912, for your subtly powerful and yet–amazingly relevent words. :)
~Alicia
You and Chloe are very welcome and I as well as many others here are willing to listen, help, and offer advise anytime we can and to be supportive…that’s what this whole sight and community is about, acceptance, love, support, and being there for each other.
I have just generally made a big mistake in my life today. I am a pretty big writer and for years have been a active journalist/blogger about my life. 3 years ago my parents, after years of fighting back and forth about my pretending and who I was as a pretender, kicked me out of their house and out of their lives. On the day that happened I wrote about it on a public blog where a lot of people were supportive of me and very understanding. I printed out every thing that I wrote and every response that I got from them for about a month. In all it ended up printing about 500 pages of writing.
When I moved out I just took the pages and put them in a file cabinet and that is where they have set until today…just a stack of unorganized papers. I finally got a notebook and thought it would be good to go back and organize the pages. As I began reading over the past…immediately I began to drown into the thoughts of the past, remembering the hurt, the pain, and the things that happened between me and my parents. Then there were the post from all those people offering me support and friendship…saying they understood and cared and thought my parents were wrong. Who are these people? I don’t remember any of them. I can’t say that I formed friendships with any of them…I go back over and read what they wrote…they were all very nice people to me…but yet none of them I know or can remember being friends with.
Going back and reading those memories…bad idea. Some things are just better left in a stack of organized papers.
Thank you for your feedback and kind words, Wheelman. If only I could internalise at an emotional level some of the things you say. The impasse is to become truly angry at my parents. I’m not there yet. Only then can I truly forgive them… And only then can I forgive myself.
This may all be something that only my sister and I can do for each other; together.
Yes Chloe, your right, it probibly will take that end result for you to be able to forgive not only yourself, but even them. I am not so sure that it’s something that you can do for each other…but rather…something that you and your sister can do together…I don’t think your sister can make you feel differently and I don’t think you can make her feel differently. You both have to do it for yourselves and maybe at the same time, help each other threw it together.
6 On 3 June, 2009, Phil said:
Hi Chloe,
thank you for your new hike report and for the nice words you found for my stammering around.
Why anger? Because anger gives you power. It makes the lines clearer (maybe clearer than they are, but so what?). Anger is energy.
You wrote: “and only then I can forgive them”. I don’t like sentences with “only then”. As if life were determined and there were only one way. Life is open.
The past is gone. It’s us who transports it into now and into future. And we can decide what to transport and what burden to lay down.
It’s not easy, though.
My childhood was much easier. I just was a bit of a sissy boy. Never made it to overcome this.
And I had and have BIID. I don’t know if BIID has to do with my childhood. But it does me good to work at my life, not necessarily at my past.
Be patient with yourself. You’ll have the feelings you can bear.
Is my sensing wrong that you even accuse yourself because you like to see your blood flowing?
Maybe you have a habit I have, too: Even for my suffering I am accusing myself as if I had done something wrong.
Compassion and love heals, but everything we fight just becomes stronger, bigger, harder.
So if you like to feel pain and see your own blood - so what? You like it. Fullstop.
Do you feel the pain at all?
Best wishes
Phil
Hi Phil.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. I think there must be something wrong with me because I like to see myself bleed. And yes, I blame myself for all my faults, all my psychological dysfunctions.
Your last question, about pain, has my thinking so tied up in complex knots that I should probably try to unravel it in another post. There’s definitely BIID connections.
You ever thought about becoming a psychotherapist, Phil?
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1 On 1 June, 2009, wheelman1912 said:
Wow…ok…where to begin…I am glad that you are realizing these things in your life and that we are able to help you to see them…I think our analysis can be good, until such time that that inner voice of yours begins to use it against you and to further torture you with it, such has been my experience with Sir John in some of my past life.
I do tend to agree with your partner…you need to let go of the high demands, dicipline, and expectations that you were brainwashed into believing and trying to live with growing up that your parents made you to believe and to realize they are completely unfair to you and to let go of them and to make your own rules and expectations for your life. Only when you do this and realize that your parent’s desires and rules for your life were unfair and too drastic for a human to achieve…will you begin to let go of holding onto the belief that you must punish yourself and dicipline yourself because your not living up to that expectation that they brainwashed into you…and start getting upset at the past and at the people who have made your life such a mess.
You ask what good it will do to be angry with dead people…well…anger is a way to relieve stress, anxiety, and personal unhappiness. To put it simply it’s a relief valve. Society tells us that anger is bad and that we should never blow off our relief valves…well if we never do that, our bodies build up all the anger and feelings inside at ourselves and we never let it out at the thing or people who are frustrating us and treating us unfairly. If you never speak out about or deal with things which are unfair to you…then how can you live a normal fair life?
My parent’s used the “Saint” thing as well. Being Catholics I was brought up being told that we had to be little Saints and to be better than everyone else and to be better than other families…to be perfect for other families to look up to. However, if we look at the Saints a little more closely…they are Saints because they lived their lives not following the guidelines of society. They were outspoken, and demanding of what was right even when it wasn’t popular, and they were willing to take whatever punishment came their way for treating themselves and others fairly and to live life as a human being has a right too.
Your, “liking the blood, Liking the punishment” is not really so strange and is something a good number of people experience in their lives. To them it is a way of reminding them that they are not perfect and that they deserve to be punished for it. The pain is a relief mechanism because it makes you feel as though your paying the price and that your sacrificing or paying for not living up to the expectations…that you are human and not perfect as you should be. I too have self punishment thoughts in my life at times…usually they turn into dreams or visions in my mind…but rarely do I act on them as mine are not so strong.
The scars are a remembered of the past…that you are never good enough and never will be. They are constantly there as imperfections, a constant reminder. You like them because they make you feel human and normal.
You are not a Sissy, in fact your probably one of the bravest people that I know. You put yourself and subject yourself to situations that are not only dangerous to you, but that also are completely crazy. Why do you do this? Probably because you feel that you will not meet the highest expectations that you are supposed to be (falsely due to the brainwashing growing up) unless you prove to the world that you are super human and that you are the toughest and most powerful person there is so you will be “good enough”. The thing you make yourself out to be though is crazy, scary, and dangerous. People probably don’t look up to you and go “That person is so tough” they probably more say, “That girl is crazy…why would she do such a dangerous thing?” The people around you don’t know your expectations…all they know is the world around them and their own personal levels, unfortunately your way of viewing the world is that your never good enough…which isn’t true. You are good enough, you have proven it over and over.
The biggest thing to remember…the next time your up there on a clif looking down scared to death and that voice inside is saying…”you sissy, your such a baby…you won’t do it…your too scared…etc” just look around for a moment…remind yourself…there is no one there who you are trying to prove anything to. You are yourself and you need to feel happy with yourself…you are important to yourself. You don’t have to prove anything to yourself. Then…think about your Partner…do you have to prove anything to her? She loves you in ways you can’t even begin to understand…but she loves you and you love her. Do you really need to punish yourself? You are perfect for her…and you are perfect for yourself…who else matters?
Your uncaring about your life because to you…you feel your never going to be good enough in life…your a complete failure and it would just be better if you were dead because you have failed…once again…is this true? Think about your life…are you happy with yourself? Are you happy with your life? You have a person who accepts you and loves you completely…yes she wants you to be alive and keeps you alive and yes she accepts you completely and wants you to be happy in life…what more do you need than that? If you were dead…what would be the point then? You are good enough…you are.
Your parents were emotionless in their outward appearance towards life. They made you to believe and they preached about all the imperfections of the world to build themselves up and to make themselves seam like gods and to be a more powerful person. To give them authority in life so they would feel better personally about their lives. If you think about it…aren’t you becoming like them because of the teachings they had on your life? Your trying to become the perfect, to become the highest form of human and to become a authority on humanity. You now know the inner struggles of your parents, yes they have made your life living hell up until now and have caused you and your sister to have inner physiological struggles, but let’s look at this from this context. Your parents lived a secret life…they displayed on thing to the world trying to seam like saints, meanwhile inside they hated themselves and had as many suicidal and hurtful thoughts of themselves as you have…so what’s the point of living an unhappy and hypocritical lives as they have? Why not live a normal happy life…a life of acceptance and love with your partner…you don’t have to prove anything to your parents…they aren’t gods over you…and their dead.
By who’s Standards are you messed up? Your parents, maybe…but we all know how wrong they were. Are you messed up according to your Partner? To other people in everyday life? To us? No, No, and No…your a perfect human being who has a lot of inner struggles but you are beautiful for who you are.