lotesse | (no subject)

Ok, more about the inner child stuff - I'm gonna write in chronological order, because I don't have another way to make sense of the matter as of yet.

The first two questions, roughly, were about places where I'd felt good in my early life. I talked first about my early childhood outdoors play, growing up in the country, and then about experienced I'd had as a young teen when I'd been in joyful work communities with other young people, the charter school where I was from grades 6-8, the Stratford Shakespeare School in Ontario. part of what I talked about wrt Stratford was the way I'd had my Ex to moon over at the time; we'd been dating for about five months, and I was REally In To having a Boyfriend At Home To WRite Letters To. But it was less about him than about the idea of him.

I started crying; it hurt remembering those periods of wholeness. It's hurting right now to write about it. I don't know if I'm ever going to get to feel that way ever again. Crying - going to go watch ATS for a minute, and restabilizing.

("they gave you a soul, a filthy soul .... you're not like anyone, get out!")

Ok. I am jealous of that little girl, and I've been guilty about her, because she had so much promise and I feel like I was neglectful and let my Ex kill her. He did it, but I let him, and either way the little girl is dead and whatever she was going to be or do are dead too.

So at this point of the session we derailed, we'll work on the next three questions next time, because the whole mess between this inner child and myself had basically punched right out and the brawl was making a mess and taking up space. I swear this is how it always goes for me, it's never slow or gradual or easy, the truth comes out swinging and I get mown down in front of it. Instead of going on to the next question, we talked to the child. The insight that J. was able to give me was that the child isn't dead, she's way too pissy and pushy and active for that. So I'm not a murderer; but she's still really fucking mad at me, the child is I mean.

When I asked what it was about, at first I got this rush of scorn about "typical women." It matters in this context that I was brought up without much gender constraint, but then developed a spectacularly feminine figure during a fairly early-onset puberty that nobody handled well; my eating disorder/body dysmorphia comes from this period of my life. I was supposed to be more like my mother, tall and statuesque and high-achieving, not distressed by gender and also not particularly bound by it. But I'm not. I'm soft and excessive and emotional and intuitive and sensitive and femme and I don't like it. The inner child part of me doesn't like it, with an almost revulsive intensity. I used to have - do I still have? maybe? - terrible problems with mirrors, because they didn't show me what I thought of as my face.

(I say I was brought up without gendered constraint, and that's true, but neither of my parents identify as feminists and my dad has some definite weird streaks of misogyny. They did not do a good job supporting me through puberty because they to some degree saw my new softness and femininity as a problem. Mommy made me eat processed diet foods, something that really shocked and distressed me because it ran against all my previous understandings of health, and dad suddenly got weird about modesty when it had never been a thing at home before. My adolescent body was unacceptable to both of them. Mother has apologized since but I'm not over it, I don't know if I'll ever be over it, it was a big part of my Ex's appeal that our relationship was a judgement-free food-and-body zone.)

I think I started reading feminist theory because I needed someone else to help me, since I couldn't rely on my family. And I found MZB before I made it through to Simone De Beauvoir, a stop-over that seems relevant to all this somehow, don't ask me how

I kind of want to yell feminist theory back at the child, what the hell, little brat, you dare look down on me? I want to catalogue all the other ways she failed in compassion, the way she didn't understand about Dan, didn't do enough for Eggs -- was she judging Erin then the same way she's judging me now? So much for her vaunted goodness! But I also think that this layer of self-victim-blaming is an ink-cloud cover for something else; she never was good at identifying the right targets for her anger, she always did lash out at the safe ones instead of getting productively mad at the ones that ought to be blamed for things. I'm trying to acknowledge the ways that she's being wrong and ugly without writing her off all together -- god knows we hated it back then when people wrote us off instead of trying to find out what we really meant, it's why I tried so hard to elicit that from my students when I was teaching, because that's what I wanted someone to do for me. So that's what I'm going to have to do for her.

More to come about the underlying causes, maybe, of the child's anger; that's enough truth-telling for tonight.