At risk of boring the two people that I've already complained at, I want to dedicate a piece to something stubbornly in my mind since the weekend: My immediate family, aunts, and grandparents got together recently and I wasn't invited. My dad sent me a video of everyone saying hello mid-gathering, after I sent something unrelated first. I feel strangely ashamed for my reaction, which was to burst into tears. I like framing my parent's lacklustre parenting as something to be grateful for. When I was 15 and discovered my parents didn't notice my absence for 24 hours, I rehearsed "Oh good, now I can do whatever I want". I still felt like shit.
I had one of my "I'm alone" moments yesterday. It's a frame of mind that manifests after any support-system failure. The moments are tinged with deja vue. The statement is not rational; I have great people in my life. It's rather that my worldview distorts for a few hours, before I mostly snap back to my usual philosophy. For a few hours, I see the world in a new light where I am in a brave battle against the disinterested masses, AKA every other person. My mental check of debts and debts paid doesn't lend itself to friendships. In these moments, life is a matter of surviving other people, even if that means pre-emptively applying odious motives to everyone. I presume that my friends hate me, and find me difficult to be around, and then - if I can just accept that! - I am hardened and cannot be wounded. And then the "I'm alone" mantra becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because paranoia isn't a super attractive trait. If I'm stuck in protection mode, I'm not going to be the best friend or partner or family member. One of the my other consolation philosophies is that being aware of myself as an expense or annoyance fosters gratitude and humility. The gratitude and humility is riddled with holes of misplaced anger - it's difficult to conceive of oneself as impossible to love and to love others fully. Moulding trauma into a positive narrative is so tempting, and puts a convenient cap on self-reflection, but at a certain point, gratitude clouds a reality that telling children they're annoying and expensive is bad, actually, and now I have to go back and rewrite all the tough-love bullshit that is way more pervasive than I initially thought. Believe it or not, I am not a better person because of my parents. That comes from me.
In terms of parenting, I am grateful for a vague absence from otherwise reasonable people, rather than having crazy controlling parents. The experience of forced independence is inherently contradictory. There is relief at the same time as disappointment. I have permission to stop caring about my parents, but I'm not ready to yet. From my perspective, two decent people, who have lived lives I thought worth modelling, have lived with me for 18 years and concluded that they don't like me as a person. Now I'm a proper adult, and maturing is so often sold as forgiving your parents! getting past that teenage melodrama! that I don't know what I have the right to expect. I talk about this all the fucking time - my parents have totally fallen out of the habit of calling me. And I can recite the same reasons to myself: my dad hates phone calls, my mum has ADHD - but my dad plays video games via voice call twice a week, and my mum dutifully calls her parents every Saturday night. I think it's me. They don't enjoy spending time with me. I'm curious to know why, but I can't imagine any answer that isn't absolutely devastating.
When my mum says she's been thinking about me, my knees go weak. She remembered that I start school tomorrow, and that makes me want to cry. Thoughts of rebellion seem destructive here, because in these moments I have what I want, and what I have always wanted, for a moment. These are backward steps, I think. Each text leads me to a day's worth of daydreaming. It's a daydream.
My parents are the only ones obligated to care for me, and they mostly don't want to (fair enough, I think, before figuratively slapping myself). I'm kind of in awe how there are people who, despite a total lack of obligation, care for me so much. It's scary. I don't like how I look at either side of this and it feels bad. I don't like how quickly a reaction to something my parents have done seeps into other parts of my life. I don't like how it determines how I see myself, unless I make conscious and constant efforts to rewrite it. And what to rewrite it to?
Anyway, the "I'm alone" phase has passed. I listened to comfort podcasts and eavesdropped on the hosts' platonic love for each other. I watched my comfort TV show. I thought of things other than myself, and came back to earth. I don't doubt that I'll have to relive many more "I'm alone" moments before handling rejection with grace, and that I'll have to dismantle many more consolations as I discover and rediscover truths. In time I hope my worldview stops being dizzying - that with age and stability, my values are a solid foundation to build a person off of, instead of a collage of what I think my parents think of me. And in terms of other people, I want to be more at ease with some purposeful not-aloneness - to stop carrying the angst of a TV protagonist and start being a side character instead. I look forward to it.