Asking for help is generous

I just want to say that giving people a chance to be in your life, especially when you are down and needy, can be a gift to them.

This week someone I barely knew committed suicide. We only had one interaction, but we had a lot of mutual friends, and I feel like I can see her story clearly because we shared some similar life experiences.

I am going to resist turning her story into a neat narrative or object lesson. She was in pain, that makes me sad. Maybe I know some of the reasons, maybe I don't. She didn't want to share that with me and that's her right. But I feel sad about all the barriers that made it difficult for her to talk about her pain. Maybe it felt like an imposition. A lot of people would have related to her story of pain though, whatever it was.

This week a person reached out to connect to me through my blog. She had questions and needed a community to support her, and luckily we were able to quickly connect her with that. She and I both have had bad things happen in our lives, but it makes those experiences feel meaningful that I can help even a little bit.

Every single person alive has asked for help before and will do it again. All you are doing, when you ask, is saying: "We are connected."

Connection is a gift that anyone can give.

Recovery, Then and Now

Before, recovery meant focusing on all my mistakes. 

As a result of being homeschooled, indoctrinated and sheltered, I saw my poor life skills result in real world consequences. Starting from the day I left home, I lost friends, I misinterpreted situations and conversations constantly, I lost professional development opportunities and distanced potential allies and mentors, I despaired at the complete lack of romantic interest from anyone. Most people were too baffled by my all-consuming incompetence to care about whether I had good intentions (here are some of the gruesome details if you're curious).

When painful rejections happened, I carefully analyzed what I was doing wrong and tried to fix it. I learned to constantly monitor my performance, to slap my own wrist and adjust course. It was a way to survive, but in the process I started to be cruel to myself. I was constantly telling myself that my appearance and personality and feelings and insights were not good enough. At first this message was reinforced by rejections from people around me. Over time my relational and life skills improved, but my self-perception didn't.

Now, recovery means learning to be kind to myself. 

I have successfully learned how to make friends, be polite, play respectability politics when useful, even appear professional for short bursts of time. I have to say, I learned a lot of this with the help of Mean Sara. I'm not angry at her, she was doing her best. But it's time to retire Mean Sara. I've learned everything I could from her.

Mean Sara won't be happy with me until I'm perfect. I'm not perfect, and I never will be.

I will always mess things up. But I have survived some pretty colossal screw-ups, and I will survive my future screw-ups too. Luckily, my mistakes now are usually not so extreme and costly. My life is actually a lot less destroyed than it could be by growing up super-sheltered and controlled by fundamentalist ideas. I have a job I like, a caring spouse and friends. I am doing ok.

But I think kindness and patience is what I always deserved, even in the beginning when I was screwing everything up right and left.

Wanting school

I read a great story today about a homeschool mom whose kids asked to go to school. She took the time to find out what they felt they were missing and let them try it out. She made sure her kids got to feel like they had a choice in what happened to them. What a great mom.

That was not my experience. When I was twelve or thirteen year old homeschooled kid, I told my mom I wanted to go to boarding school.

It seems likely that my inspiration came from British fiction, but also boarding school seemed like the only option because my parents always talked about how the local public school wasn't academically challenging. Come to think of it, most of the things I wasn't allowed to have were described as "not good enough," including friends. And we lived an hour away from any reasonable private school.

My mom was immediately angry and responded that "Boarding school is where people send kids that they don't want."

And I just stared at her and wondered how not being wanted felt any different from my experience of being ignored and isolated and dismissed every day, until she walked off in a huff. And we never talked about it again.

There was no curiosity about what I might be feeling (insane loneliness for one thing), no concept that I had any stake in my education and daily experience, no discussion of why they made this choice, just angry silence.

Sunday is the day I play Dungeons and Dragons!

Sunday is no longer the day I go to church. Sunday is the day I play Dungeons and Dragons!

My first exposure to RPGs was in an Adventures in Odyssey radio show designed to scare good Christian kids into avoiding them, presenting the games as gateways to Satanic Worship. It sounds fringe, but the radio show, produced by James Dobson, was syndicated to a bunch of Christian radio stations. All my friends growing up listened to it.  (Did you?)

You can actually listen to a recording of the two-episode segment here. It even has a special introduction from James Dobson warning parents that the content may be too scary for children, but explaining that the dangers of seductive RPGs are so pressing that it's worth frightening little kids. The show doesn't depict a realistic game of D&D, because how boring would it be to listen to a group of young adults having slow-paced, harmless, nerdy fun?  So of course they make up a sinister plot with eerie supernatural tones, imply that the gaming leads to a nefarious end for a family pet, a candlelit ceremony that is straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and all in all it is a very silly exercise in attacking a straw man.

Here are the REAL reasons that my corner of Christianity* was not open to D&D:

I'm proud, I'm lucky

I am so fucking proud of myself for graduating from college.

This week my spouse is going to be at a conference. He is about to meet an acquaintance I barely knew in undergrad. The acquaintance was a super nice person and I never had any unpleasant interactions with him. But just because he knew some of the same people that I did back then, he is a witness to a difficult time in my life. A humiliating time. I went straight from remembering how nice he is, to being afraid that he remembers some of the lowest points in my life, to feeling those low points like they are still happening.

Thankfully therapy has somewhat prepared me for these times when a trigger brings back a flood of dark feelings. Those feelings are real, but they aren’t the whole story.

I overcame unusual obstacles in college and was able to achieve academic success and grow as a person in spite of them. I am so proud of that.

Here’s a little overview of what I was up against when I showed up as a freshman: When I arrived in class my first day, I didn’t know that I should bring paper and writing utensils.

Found a happy memory

I found a happy memory of my mom, sister and me. We were in kitchen doing dishes and mom taught us to sing "I've been working on the railroad." Then we started singing it in harmony.

It became a little thing that we did every now and then.

I was surprised to find a happy memory of being together. The moment of remembering it literally felt warm and fuzzy.  

I remember all of them

People who tried to help? I remember all of them.

1.  My aunt is a nurse. She gave us vaccinations in the living room at my grandmother's house when she found out that we weren't getting them. She tried to reinforce basic health information for us like washing your hands after you use the bathroom. The way she did it, though, was to catch us and ask on the way out of the bathroom in front of everyone, not to tell us before we went in. Maybe she didn't realize until then that we didn't know. She would tell us very pointedly that she loved us every time we saw her, but then we wouldn't see or hear from her for 11 months out of the year. Probably because she was single mom with four kids and had her own shit to worry about. My mom hates her.

2.  There was some kind of counselor who attended our church and worked with prisoners. I was at an alternative Halloween party where Christians gave candy to Christian kids so they wouldn't go out trick-or-treating. He noticed that I was just kind of standing there, probably overwhelmed by all the bustle and not knowing anyone, and started gently checking in with me.''What's your favorite part of your day?" I didn't even understand the question at first, so he had to explain what he meant. "I dunno, lunch I guess." I was noncommittal in my answer because at the time there wasn't really any good part in my day. He followed up: "So does your family all have lunch together and take a break from school?" And I honestly explained that lunch was me scrounging food by myself, by myself just like the rest of my day. And that there wasn't anything cooked for us or any food that was designated for lunch like the ingredients for sandwiches. I didn't add that after lunch sometimes we would arbitrarily get chewed out by my mom for eating "dad's tuna" or "too many bagels."

I think this person may have later encouraged my parents to attend parenting classes at the church, but that's just a guess. Certainly they wouldn't have gone without some social pressure. The class was based on the Ezzo's "Reaching the Heart of Your Teen" and so it was problematic, but honestly it could have been a big improvement in my life because of the sheer lack of any attention before. The main thing I remember coming from that class was this conversation with my mom:

Mom: "So, what love language do you think is your main one?"
Me:  "Quality time." (I had realized that when she told me she loved me I didn't believe it, and that I didn't feel cared for when she hugged me, so I assumed the form of love I wasn't getting must be the one I liked best.)
Mom: "Ooooohhh, you picked the hardest one."

3.  Doctors. The tiny local Christian school let homeschoolers join their sports teams. This was one of the only ways I socialized in high school, in a structure sports practice girls-only Christian-only environment. The school required two sports physicals for me. My mom insisted in coming into the exam room with me and the doctor the first time. He was nice to me and told me I had good ankles for cross country. He also made sure we talked about my nascent sexual development and even birth control, though my mom tried to blow him off.  She changed doctors. The next lady, a nurse practitioner, didn't let my mom in the room. Points for her. She didn't believe that I wasn't sexually active so she used her hands to feel my abdomen and make sure I wasn't pregnant and made me give a urine sample, but she didn't try to talk to me to find out if I was safe. I never saw her again either.

4.  Mrs. Uber-mom. There was a very generous nurse mom in our church who also homeschooled. She was constantly adopting strays, including letting a women with cancer die in her home. She was one of the only people who was kind to me. She told my mom that she had to take my brother to the doctor after his foot was broken for three days. My mom fought with this friend and stopped seeing her, like she eventually does with all her friends. It wouldn't surprise me if some of this was related to her opinions about my parents choices. Now Mrs. Uber-mom is going through a hard time and I really wish I could be there to help.

There are some others - the babysitter who noticed I couldn't see without glasses, the friend who helped me stage a conversation in front of my parents about a health problem, so that they would be embarrassed and take me for needed treatment. (It worked.) The dentist who confronted my mom about our obvious neglect. By the way, all this medical neglect happened while we lived in the nicest house of anyone I knew at the time. It wasn't about poverty, it was about shitty priorities.

I am thankful that there were some people around who noticed that my siblings and I needed help. But I also wonder what stopped them from doing more. I want to ask them to explain to me what was more important to them than protecting children. We were a mess, clearly, visibly.