Self-realization

Do you ever find yourself laying awake in bed at the end of the day and your mind starts racing? Sometimes you go over the events of the day, while other times you think about things that happened weeks, months, or even years ago. I had such an event occur on Monday night that finally gave me some clarity about the biggest mistake I ever made in my life, which was to get married when I turned 30.

Prior to this realization, the last week has been rather trying for me. I've been arguing with my parents over a friend I have. The issue isn't really about the friend. It's something my parents and I have been at odds with for over 20 years. They perceive her to be a danger or threat to me in some way, and I don't. They think I'm gullible and will easily be influenced by someone or manipulated by someone to do things I don't feel comfortable doing, and I'm not.

One good thing about having a history being treated as an outcast in a small town was the realization that I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn't. If I liked something no one else liked, I was ridiculed about it. If I liked something everyone else liked, I was ridiculed about it. I began to realize that it was pointless to try to gain love or approval from anyone by trying to fit in, and learned to be proud of what it was that I liked, and what I didn't like. I was never the type to give into peer pressure of any kind. I was never pushed to do drugs, or drink even. In fact, I remember one friend I had in high school who doubted that I would avoid alcohol at all, as that was one of my goals in life—to never drink alcohol.

Part of the reason was because I was around too many drunk people in my life to realize it's pointless and there's no real benefit to it. People act rude and obnoxious when they are drunk, then of course the day after hangovers was just proof to me that it was ridiculous. Another reason was because I was on a medication at the time that I wasn't supposed to mix with alcohol, so I could always use that as an excuse if I really had to if I was ever pressured into it. But the largest reason is that I know I have an addictive personality, especially with oral fixations. I am so addicted to food. I had issues with sucking my thumb until I was 9. I know that if I were to get into something as dangerous as alcohol, I would get addicted to it and it would cause nothing but problems.

That friend in high school didn't believe that I could do it. Well, here I am at 40 and I'm proud to say that besides one sip of wine (that I hated) on my 18th birthday, I have kept that promise to myself.

I also noted as a young kid that most adults I knew who were smokers, which in the 1980s in Alberta was pretty much every adult I knew, all said the same line "some day, I'm going to quit smoking." My childhood logic made me wonder, "If everyone who smokes wants to quit, why start in the first place?"

Anyways, getting back to the point of this blog. My parents and I have been arguing for a week now about a friend who recently came to visit me for awhile. My dad apparently believes he saw her in front of a well-known drug house down near where they were staying at the time she was actually on Vancouver Island. In fact, they both believe my friend has a drug problem and that she is taking advantage of me and lying to me about stuff.

The thing about this is I know my friend is not a saint. I'm certainly not a saint either. We all have our issues and vices that we use to cope with those issues. I don't judge her and she doesn't judge me. That's why we get along so well. So there would be absolutely no reason in the world for her to lie to me about where she was.

I will point out there have been numerous times my Dad has said things that aren't even remotely true. I have caught him on a few of his stories that I don't think for the life of me are true. So at this point, if it is my Dad's story versus my friend's, based on a fairly long history of misunderstandings and lies from him, I will believe my friend. Again, I don't judge her and she has no reason to lie to me about anything.

It has led me to make one of the realizations about my Dad last Monday night. His sister had a mental illness and issues with paranoid schizophrenia. I have heard his birth mother had some kind of mental illness issues, and am now wondering if that was also schizophrenia. Is it so far fetched to believe that maybe he has issues with it too? It is hereditary. It also explains a lot about him, if you look up the symptoms of schizophrenia.

I realize that by writing this blog I may upset or anger my parents. They don't like how open I am online. But this blog is about me discovering who I am and why I am the way I am, and how to go about changing that. I can't just hide things and pretend everything is fine. Everything is not fine, and this is what I do so I can identify my problems and issues.

The long list of mistruths and misinformation from my Dad, as well as his inability to form any real social relationship with other, now has me convinced he has this problem. There were many times when I was growing up where he would say news events or stories he either read about in the paper or heard on the news. When I would get to social studies class and talk about those news stories, no one would know what I was talking about. I quickly realized he either misinterprets what he reads, or lies about it for some reason, so I stopped repeating his stories, and stopped believing him whenever he said he read it in the paper. Sometimes he hears things from someone he works with. Usually the scenarios are dangerous in some way or to try to prove his fears are real.

I haven't really seen many occasions when he was fearful towards himself or his life or even if he hears voices at all. I do know he is ultra paranoid when it comes to me and my brother and constantly fears the worst case scenario is the likely scenario and has tried to protect us for far too long. All of this is why I don't believe that he saw my friend in front of a drug house.

But this part of the realization isn't what sent off the "BING!" moment last Monday night. It certainly explained some things, but I had another breakthrough about why I even got married in the first place.

I might have mentioned in the past about this already, but one time when I was around 5, my parents got into a heated argument over money. It was really scary for me when I was that young. They were screaming and yelling, throwing things, and even swearing a lot. I remember feeling so scared that I didn't know what to do and felt like I couldn't move. At the end of their argument, my Dad picked up my newborn baby picture and nearly tore it in half and exclaimed "the deal is off!", or something to that extent, and stormed off. He left for a week or two.

At that young of an age, that sent me a message that I was the reason why my parents were not happy. Whether or not that was true is irrelevant, because that's how I interpreted it. After that point, as I felt responsible for their unhappiness, I decided to try to do whatever I could to hold us all together as a family and keep everyone happy, even sometimes putting my own happiness aside to do what I thought was the right thing to do.

When I was starting to get into my teens, as inevitably it happens, I started to form my own opinions and ideas about things, and quickly realized that I was not really like my Dad that much. I know at times I have his mood swings, but everything else was beginning to become very different. He is very right wing, I am very left. He supports Trump, I support Sanders. It's like that. In my teens, I also began to resent him and saw him as being constantly angry. I can't remember ever seeing him happy for the life of me.

When I was 19 and about ready to head off to college, I discovered a truth about myself that my parents had concealed. My brother and I were going through my parents filing cabinet that was beside their bed, as it was like the weekend before the weekend I was leaving for college, and they decided to leave us alone for the weekend to go camping. We were looking at our old school report cards and mocking the teachers' comments and so forth. I really don't know what made us do that, but it is what it is.

Inside my grade 4 report card envelop was a one sheet form indicating that my last name was changed from my Mom's maiden name to my Dad's last name, about two months after I was born, and a month and a half from when they were married. It made me realize then that the reason why I felt responsible for their unhappiness was because I was seen as a "mistake". It made me remember that event when I was 5 and realize why that photo ripping incident happened in the first place. They got married after I was born and felt obligated to do so.

At that point I had begun the process of distancing myself from feeling responsible for their unhappiness; after all, it certainly wasn't my fault I was born. I remember when I was a teenager in fact asking my Mom how their anniversary could be after I was born, and she told me they married a year before I was born, which I accepted at that time. But whenever I would ask them how long they've been married on their anniversaries, she would then ask me how old I was and add a year to that. I certainly saw the signs along the years, and they make perfect sense looking back, but yeah I didn't get it at that time.

I also began resenting him even more. It started to drive a wedge between us. Leaving for college made me make some decisions for myself that they had no involvement in, so they started to think I was getting influenced by someone. Like, I chose to become a vegatarian for my 1997 new year's resolution. My whole life I've been really sensitive to animal rights issues, and even my brother has recently recalled me saying when I was around 9 that if I had the choice, I would choose to not eat meat. So the decision was in fact inevitable. To this day, they still do not accept that decision. In those days, they thought it was my friend who influenced me to be a vegetarian, which wasn't even true. I was in Alberta: Beef Country, to be precise. I knew only one person who was a vegetarian, and felt it was more for superficial reasons than animal rights issues, and didn't really get along with her much as it was. It was a decision I felt I needed to make for myself and my conscience.

Another decision was to not get into "the rez" in my third year of college. I didn't like being among all the partiers and felt it was getting more and more expensive every year to be there, that it was actually way cheaper to find a room or apartment than it was to live there. I first rented a room that my Mom found that was so far away from school that it was way too inconvenient. Then I moved in with my friend. This is where they got the idea she was influencing me or a danger to me, as they thought it was her her pulled my strings. It really wasn't.

With my parents pressuring me and trying to convince me that I'm making huge mistakes, combined with a lack of sleep and serious stress over college, I was about ready to have a nervous breakdown. I must have looked really upset or something, because out of the blue my friend gave me a hug. It was at that precise moment that I realized she was a good person. No matter what happened in her life, what choices she's made, what mistakes she's made, she is a good person. No one had ever really hugged me like that before, or since for that matter. I never asked her for it, she just gave it to me. In fact, the only thing I think she had any kind of influence in me was acceptance.

That third year of college saw me arguing a lot with my parents. On my part, I was trying to become an independent adult, trying to make my own choices in life, without feeling like I had to have their permission to do things. And it's not like I would do illegal things, as earlier paragraphs allude to. But they were losing control over me and felt there had to be some external reason (i.e. my friend influencing me) as to why I was being so "rebellious".

A few years later, when I was around 28, my parents separated for about a year. My Dad was tired of my Mom controlling his money at that point, as the fights were always about money, and decided to leave her and stayed with a woman he worked with at the time. I have no idea what the nature of that relationship was, certainly wouldn't hear the truth from him about it, and I'm not sure I want to know to be honest with you. I know it ignited a deep resentment within myself towards him at that point. I felt he was being so selfish and cruel and kept trying to convince my Mom that she was probably better off without him.

It was a very tough year for me. My Mom would call me up complaining about Dad, I would try to advise her to just move on with her life and let him go, thought I had convinced her of that, but then would hear my brother tell me she'd call him right back after talking to me, crying and begging him to come home. After all I tried to do to help her with this, she ended up taking him back after making some concessions about the control she had over his money.

I felt very useless at that time and worn out by it all. After all, when I was younger I was trying to hold them together and solve their problems for them, and when I got older began taking her side and trying to do what I could to help her, but it was pointless and I lost the battle.

Very shortly after that was when I suddenly felt this urge that I had to get married. Then I found my now ex-husband.

I previously thought that I believed I felt some kind of pressure from my Mom that I needed to give her grandkids or something like that and just chose the first random jerk who came along, because I didn't think I could do better than him if I tried.

Here comes the "BING!" realization I had just last Monday night. It wasn't random at all. I knew exactly what I was doing, though it was subconsciously. I sought out a relationship very similar to my parents, in fact it was practically the same. We fought over the same things, he had a similar job as my Dad; Hell, even our initials were the same as their's (M & D). It was eerie how similar everything was. I married him because I was still trying to find a way to solve their problem. I gave up on trying to help them, but continued to try to solve it by replicating it.

After 2 years of marriage, I finally realized I couldn't keep this up anymore and decided to end it; after all, I was resenting him more and more every day, to the point where I was giving him dirty looks behind his back and so forth. I call that moment I decided to end it a moment of clarity, but it has also left me feeling empowered as a result of that. I don't think I ever had an ounce of relief as great as that feeling when I decided enough was enough.

Now I don't want there to be any misinterpretation of these events. I'm not trying to come across as I blame everything on my parents. It was my decision and I own that. I just finally made the connection between the year they were separated and how soon after I suddenly felt the need to find someone to marry.

It was a major "BING!" moment for me. One that will have me thinking for a time. After all, you can't change what you don't acknowledge. Now that I know what my issues are, I can finally go about changing it.

This is a long post and I apologize for it, but it needed to be written. Take what you want, and leave the rest. If this causes another fight between my parents, I hope they understand that I don't carry any more resentment about it. After making this realization, it has made me feel very empowered.

Thanks for reading, for those who do.