Existence-based guilt

I meant to write a post on this before. I have meant to do it many a time. Fear of making some invisible descent into irredeemable humourlessness/congealing self-pity held me back. Plus, y'know. It's BIG SHIT. It's like serving up an elephant turd in a kitty litter box. Haha. I would be presenting you with the elephant turd (existence-based guilt) in the kitty litter box (my blog) and your eyes would roll collectively back in your heads before you fainted. Or you would go 'That's not cool, man. Get over it' before continuing about your business.

But - y'know what? THIS IS MY BLOG! That basic elementary fact eludes me sometimes - rather too much - and that in itself says a lot. I've never really had a physical place in which I felt 100% 'safe,' especially not a place which could be accessed by others. That's probably why I forget that my blog is such a place. No-one has tried to hound me out (yet). It may never happen. The length of my posts probably wears them down. Haha.

Anyway, the nub of my gist is that while my place is 'publicly-accessible,' I don't have to tolerate whatever. I take a similar line to many feminist blogs, although I've not had anywhere near the level of trolling that they have. I set it up and it belongs to me, hypothetical bitches! So now, I can proceed at last to offload.

I think I've mentioned this particular issue of mine before. In this post, here <--- look! :-D I brushed over it quickly though, as if I were simply glazing pastry with milk, or egg or... Anyway. I need to explain the whole meguillah properly. 'Existence-based guilt' is when I want to die. It's not that simple, though. Take two. 'Existence-based guilt' is when I am hurting inside - for WHATEVER REASON - and then I proceed to reach into said pain, pick it up, stretch it out even further and then stab metaphorical sharp objects into it. I make it bigger and more acute. I try to make a whole, functioning personality from it, because, you know what? When I am depressed, I am like broken pieces of a mirror. Lots of little fragments which should be related, but which aren't. I chose the mirror image not for emo appeal, but because a mirror shows a reflection. It passes no judgement in its own right. That is what my mind does when depressed - it doesn't pass judgement, it simply reacts to external stimuli in a completely irrational and suspicious manner.

I don't know who I am. That's not me being melodramatic, it's the result of a very genuine FEAR and confusion. Do you know me? Have you met me in real life? Whether or not you have, let me tell you something now: I have lived my whole life rooted in fear. You may reflect now, and think that actually, yes, you can see it. You can see slices of the fear and uncertainty in my responses to things, in my social interactions. I don't think I hide it that much, though I have been told that I am 'remarkably well-adjusted.'

Plus, y'know, you get used to living a certain way. You can FORGET that that is your life until the mirror breaks.

Ever since I was little, I have been very emphatically 'the odd one out' of my family. Now, this is nothing new. It led to a situation which was also 'nothing new': the second-generation liberal Asian female child rebelling against older, more conservative, more religious Asian parents. That is FOINE. Well, it's not, but for now it is.

The problem is not that particular conflict, but another one altogether: that of the crazed, wrong and abnormal VS. the sane, right and normal. My mother must be singled out and accorded special status here. Bluntitude time: this woman should not have had children. Or married. She should have been working on projects at NASA.

However, she was born in the India in the '50s, so... dream on. Here we are today, and here I am. For whatever reason (and I strongly suspect that it emanates largely from her own disappointment and resentment), my mother has somehow bypassed the whole 'maternal instinct and human empathy' bit.

I am extraordinarily sensitive. I don't know why, I didn't ask for it and that should be the end of the story. Unfortunately, I was (as I said) born into a family much in the manner of a cuckoo appearing in a nest. I had two older sisters who were 10 years above me, and then I got a brother who was two years younger and the youngest. My sisters hence were on the receiving end of my parents at their most energetic, erratic and maladjusted. Immigrants to this country, they underwent cultural displacement, racism and a late swing towards major religiosity inspired by guilt. Great. Naturally, the deeply-conservative values that this all reinforced, were passed on to my sisters.

Social conservatives, let it be said, do not generally look kindly upon difference. Maybe, if I had not had two older sisters, or if I had been the youngest, things might have been different. I found out years later that apparently my parents thought I was going to be a boy, which may have explained a lot.

My mother despaired of me as a child. From the start I was shy, artistic, imaginative and rebellious. She thought for a while that I might be autistic; I apparently refused to do anything but draw, and would not learn to read English until my drawing was threatened. Eventually, I started to get it together and by year 2 I was top of the class and apparently 2 years ahead of my peers ability-wise.

Then, disaster struck. I got into books. My mathematical ability vanished; my artistic inclinations deepened. My natural shyness and bullishness prevented me from being especially sociable. I've pretty much been that way ever since.

My mother despaired. She couldn't understand me - so she condemned me. In the harsh Indian world she grew up in, her father smacked her hand repeatedly when she said she 'couldn't' learn times-tables. The fact that I wasn't like her, or any of the others, meant that she had nothing with which to 'manage' me, and my brother, the much-longed-for boy, made an appearance before too long. Instead of taking time to treat me as a human being, she criticised me incessantly. Why was I so slow? So lethargic? This lethargy was not only physical but mental too, according to her. Why did I not have Asian friends? Why did I give her trouble, by refusing to acknowledge teachers who were mean to me?

On its own, I might have dealt with this. However, seeing the love my brother got made me intensely jealous. One of my earliest memories of him is of scratching out his eyes in a picture everyone loved, and being put in the garden as a punishment. I paced, weeping 'Nobody loves me, nobody loves me.' I knew that what I had done was wrong, but my parents didn't allay the terrible anxiety that I had about being replaced. My brother was beloved, and I was a problem.

My sisters, supposed to be the elders, also could not help being resentful of the lenient treatment and spoiling that my brother received. While my parents constantly made a show of how we were all equal, the hypocritical truth was always there. One way my parents made us equal was to turn any telling-off of one person into an attack on all the others. Imbibing this, my sisters were resentful not just of my brother, but of me too. In some ways, this was useful for me. In many others, it wasn't. Both were training to become healthcare professionals in the NHS - a stressful job - and had to look after us too while my parents worked. Hence it became 'OK' for them to take this out on us, particularly me. My brother, detecting his inborn advantage early on, started exploiting it before very long and would cheek them constantly. In a strange way, I think they themselves ended up seeing him as superior; he was rarely punished though empty threats were frequently made by my parents.

I took their attacks because, well, I couldn't not. When you are one of six living in a house and the second youngest, where do you go to escape? I didn't have my own room, and the toilet was hardly a place to relax. I had to deal with being told that I was fat, lazy, useless etc. etc. constantly. My brother and I bickered a lot, and soon my sisters refused to intervene at all, so the only one who could avenge what he said to me was ME. That got me in further trouble. I ate my sisters' low-fat snacks because... well, it was something to do, I suppose and eating made me happy. More trouble for me. When my sisters had PMT, I knew I was going to get bullied. They often ganged up on me, making bitchy comments together. My boobs were too big. My dress sense was weird. I breathed too loudly. I dragged my feet. I thought I was 'so clever' and a 'tortured poet' (as if! Just because I wrote). My mother in particular gave me life-long insecurities about my nose. She kept saying I looked like a duck, that I had a 'duck' nose; she would then say it was going in the wrong direction, seize it and try to 'pull it back.' The others subsequently made the same comment, and I became paranoid about my nose. I only tried to stop her yanking it - and stopped doing so myself - after blood came out. Even now, I do it without noticing.

My brother joined in with GLEE when I got older, and then I was well and truly alone. My family repeatedly impressed the notion of not trusting anyone outside the family on me. I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about what was happening to me anyway, because it was normal. They all told me it was normal; no-one behaved in any way that indicated that my position was especially hard. When I threatened to commit suicide, I was laughed at. Everyone just thought I was a weirdo. It didn't matter that I was good at some subjects because in my family's eyes, they weren't useful. Besides, they were not subjects we had ever done in our family before. When I said I wanted to study English, my older sister said 'Over my dead body'.

The thing that I learnt better than anything else was that you could not question ANYTHING. Question my sisters' authority, and they and/or my parents would punish me. Do the same with my parents and ditto, but even worse. Question my own or my brother's position, and I would be made to feel guilty. Any deviance from their beliefs was asking for trouble. I spotted my family's hypocrisy over religion early on, because I became devout for a while. I did a lot of reading and realised that a lot of their actions and claims didn't match up with how Sikhs were 'supposed' to be. This led to me becoming agnostic.

The turning point came when I confessed to being agnostic. Big fucking mistake. My whole family sat opposite me. Now that I reflect, I remember that I was literally up against the wall. As if I were facing a firing squad. I sure felt like it. My second-eldest sister, who I partly wanted to be like, smugly asked me why, what my arguments were. I could make none, I was terrified. My father had just accused me of betraying him, stating that he couldn't believe that a child of his could live under his roof and say that. My brother thought it was hilarious, naturally. I didn't want to be kicked out or shunned. They kept me there for three hours, until I was wilting with tiredness, then I was watched like a hawk for months.

(Apologies if I've described this incident already...).

See, I got into a relationship and my ex-boyfriend slowly started to make me see that what was going on wasn't normal. My family had no right to shoot me down just because I didn't agree. My mother had no right to say that I was a psychopath just because I refused to obey her. I got the courage to tell friends, and slowly but surely I got to the stage where I am today.

However, the problem is that along the way, I lost my anger. Much of my teens were consumed in a burning rage, I would literally sit in my room, reflecting on things that had happened, until I was shaking with rage and crying hot tears. I wanted to kill one of them, but I sincerely believed that I would be arrested and/or killed myself if I tried. I came close to striking my mother once, and she used the guilt against me like a billy-club.

Just as girls are trained to do, not just in South Asian culture but very acutely and particularly in SA culture - I began turning the anger and hatred inwards. My parents HAD worked hard to support us, my sisters HAD been like mothers to me. I couldn't reconcile these facts with my anger at the way they'd treated me. So, I absorbed them. I got myself into a destructive relationship, repeating the same dynamic of harsh criticism and inferiority that I had with my mother. He was always seeking to change me, to 'improve' me somehow, and I thought that was good because of my messed-up values.

This relationship absorbed a lot of my self-loathing. In some ways, it was a coping mechanism - though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I spent five and a half years not being quite right, pouring all my energies into my partner who had problems of his own. He emotionally blackmailed me; I gave him money. I don't even think he was doing it consciously, but it happened nonetheless. My outbreaks of PMD (pre-menstrual depression) which I was then unaware of, baffled him. He could not listen; he tried to tidy me away. Like my mother, intense emotion was beyond his comprehension.

Away from him in France, I got myself into a similar relationship with a friend. Our intense friendship impacted upon my mood severely when it was in a 'down' (which it was for many months). At one point, I deliberately endangered myself, subconsciously hoping that something bad would happen to me. I wasn't sure what, but I 'reasoned' with myself that I didn't really matter enough for it to be an issue if something did. That was the first time my mind 'fragmented' and the evil depressive demon appeared. It justified my decision to me, and after I took it, I regretted it. I was reeling with guilt, and my then-boyfriend's reaction made me suicidal. The friend who had 'replaced' him expressed relief at my safety, and that brought me back to something resembling normal.

When I came together with The Libertarian, I finally got what love was supposed to be about. I realised early on that I was going to fall for him. The day we met after kissing for the first time ever - it was our sixth meeting - I told him how my sisters had shredded my self-confidence. He did not respond. He stopped walking, let go of my hand, turned me to face him and then pulled me into a tight hug. Things finally made sense in me; I felt delighted. This, THIS was what I needed! How could he understand that so instinctively, so easily, when my boyfriend of five-and-a-half years couldn't?

In a relationship with a wonderful man and realising that I had trustworthy friends after all, it was me VS. the demon depression. I determined that I was NOT going to let it wreck things like it had with my ex, even if he was wrong for me. I would prove my mother wrong; I was NOT going to turn out to be a serial killer. I was NOT a psychopath. Sadly, it's taken a lot of hard work to convince me that I can trust people and believe in myself. Even now, I belittle myself and my needs, especially when PMD strikes. I cannot believe that love - whether platonic or romantic - is unconditional.

That is where existence-based guilt comes in. A lifetime of negative thinking that was both passively inherited from, and actively reinforced by my mother, kicks in. This links neatly up with the ongoing pressure on women to be perfect, especially in SA culture. Add fear of being 'unwomanly' and a desire to change the order of things as a feminist, counterbalanced by the ugly knowledge that nowadays 'feminist' is a dirty word that carries a huge burden. I cannot settle for my contradictions, like most people can. Ever since I was young, I have to 'choose' whether I'm British or Indian. However, it's always other people who set the parameters of those categories for me. My mother framed the choice cleverly, in terms of health and the greater good. My family specialise in hyperbolic distortion with a tiny grain of truth embedded in it - and when PMD strikes, that little grain flies like a fishing hook, embedding itself in me. I wish I had never existed, I wish I was dead. I wish this because I cannot wish to be what my parents want - for emotional reasons (my mum's never happy and it's already ruined our lives) and logical reasons (they already have my brother).

I wish death upon myself because it would be 'easy.' I am not an 'easy' person, I'm always analysing shit and refusing to be gift-wrapped as 'Asian' or 'English.' After my family's bullying, the LAST thing I want is to identify myself with a group of people. A whole, hurtling boulder of pain and guilt is too much for any individual to bear. I do not want to wear out the love and patience of those who I always turn to. There are no human Atlases for me; I have outgrown mythology. That is when posts like this one pop up, and I tip the load off my back and into the depot of cyberspace. Forget gods, forget humans - machinery's the future!