Secure attachment patterns with parents determines the pattern of love/hate or in between that we condition ourselves to attach to. If the attachment style is insecure as has been in my case with my mother, my only living parent, then what happens beneath the quiet, observant, and "she is weak" projected child is unimaginable anxiety. Hyper vigilant would be a better word instead of observant, and repressed, a better substitute for quiet as in my case.
My body has been on high alert for criticism from my mother which has been a play, rewind, repeat thing from childhood - it was as if I could never be enough for her just as I am and she went back and forth between the past and the tragic incidents of losing my dad when she was pregnant with me and the challenges that she had faced to deliver me which became an extension into who she thought I was as I was to her not a separate life, an individual self, but a product of her efforts that she had to justify as a single parent.
She lived more like a victim and wanted me to follow suit and hence my attachment to her was conflicted, i,e, depended on her for my physical sustenance as I grew up feeling still the same as what I used to feel way back in childhood - fearful, abandoned, and insecure. My craving for her unconditional acceptance just lay buried within the chest of my inner child as she felt stressed from time to time for not knowing how to regulate or express her feelings when she was around her mom for fear of being criticized again for all the sadness and confusion that the inner child absorbed and just didn't see any ways to outgrow this emotional state. The inner child remained locked, frozen, and stuck in all the layers of piled up feelings of inadequacies, suppressed anger, pain, and just numbness for want of freedom of expression and release. This anxiety for lack of clarity of becoming aware of her reality just kept the growing up me an emotional juvenile who stayed too quiet, too withdrawn, and just escaped further and further into reality like fantasies where she is the assertive, outspoken saviour, a justice providing knight, and sometimes a practically fun person who's having a good time with her friends, maybe some old and some made up within her fantasies.
I learnt to feed off my fantasies in order to cope up with my reality. I had this constantly disappointed feeling about my health, my body, which somehow could never be fixed even after numerous visits to doctors for migraines, heart problem that I developed due to an infection in the blood, gastrointestinal issues, severe menstrual cramps and so on - my body seemed to squeeze in and out of pain while I seemed to cave in more and more into the colorful darkness of my fantasies in order to accept my mother's default criticisms and her comparing me to my dead father for his lack of good health as well. I felt like I was living a curse that seemed to cloud my mother and didn't give her the respite that she needed to want to move on peacefully with her life.
I believed in my weakness physically which came in some form or shape and never seemed to leave my side no matter what my age and how badly I wanted to feel "healthy and normal". I just settled with the feeling that I need to cope up with this perennial unsteadiness which made me depressed, self neglectful as I just seemed to look toward my mom to help find a way out of this, but again was met with her frustrations and just numbed my responses and bid the pain away with more and more doses of free flowing fantasies - it felt addictive, real, liberating, and indulgent to make me feel important in that.
I didn't realize that it was insulating the crumbs of mindfulness that I had to force myself to be in only when I had to sit down to eat with the rest of the family (my uncles, aunts, few cousins who I lived with in addition to my mom), when I had to sit with them (which was only sparingly) to watch tv (I preferred to watch tv with one or two of my cousins) because my personal space was already overshadowed by my mother's excessive indulgent control and left me with no choice but to withdraw more and find my safe space which was in my fantasies, and it was simply overwhelming to spend longer time with the other members of the family at the risk of losing out "quality" isolation time with myself.
Just simply being me was an unthought of idea but I wanted my writing to do that for me - just present me as clearly, as realistically, and with other characters if possible to be altogether my unspoken narrative in writing form which was not as free flowing as my fantasies were, but if I can be one kind or more in my fantasies, then why can't I display that flexibility I thought through my writing? I self criticized for lack of words flow sometimes and just kept journaling with circuitous expressions which never seemed to fully convey what my problem was and I used to resort to staying stuck with my fantasies where I had accomplished far more than what my reality managed to reflect.
My broken feelings didn't make any sense to me any more than what they could convey through writing and it felt cold that I was not warming up to freestyle writing the way I expected myself to be and be an acclaimed author at that, which was a fantasy that didn't come true. Not yet. If there was an accurate expression for frozen living then I lived that. And my ice house can get broken in the face of everyday reality that I had to wake up to but I was only too happy that this ice house can get remade with my fantasies unlike the concept of my authentic self which lay anxious and in hiding in the frozenness as I was obliviously witnessing my selfhood melt away.
When did I die on me I cannot tell but I endured this suffering in silence way beyond than necessary while my mother, my uncles and their families just gave up on seeing me lock myself up in serious fantasy building and not career building as I was supposed to be into and did not have proper idea to help me out of this fractured mess of myself that I was too anxious not to talk about and could not bring myself together clearly to ask for support for lack of understanding of a condition called Avoidant Personality Disorder.
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