I’ve always been overwhelmed by certain strong personal feelings and thoughts. By overwhelmed I mean I can’t even handle them, let alone contemplate what they mean for me. In fact, every time they come into my conscience a circuit breaker faithfully kicks in to make them disappear.

This has lead to a bifurcation of my self. Having a single self or identity would mean I have fully processed whatever came into my mind at an earlier age in order to “integrate” it. I understand this is how the vast majority of people develop a healthy personality. How nice.

By writing this blog I’m trying to integrate my own uncomfortable feelings and truths. I want to describe what makes me most uncomfortable and understand it through the writing process. When not writing here, I’m often thinking of them.

In trying to work through my issues, I’ve rediscovered some childhood memories and how indifferent the world seemed to me at the time, as well as how not even my parents gave a shit about my fate. For most of my school years, I also got confirmation of my lack of worthiness from just about every adult in my life (at least from teachers and many family members). From the time I switched schools at age 10 to my last year in a public school (age 13), I was bullied and put down by someone nearly every day. I had few friends and school felt like a penetentiary.

I don’t mean of course just that it sucked generally and I hated being there. I was literally always alone and the only way to express my angst is to compare it with the feelings of a young, weak inmate who just got sent to state prison. He’s all alone in his orange or drab garb and is desperately trying to avoid angering someone by standing in front of the wrong wall. Everyone else in the communal hall is clustered in a group, talking and laughing it up, and they treat him with contempt. No one invites him into their circle, and some even feel they can freely walk up to him and punch him in the face or make them kiss their shoe with no consequence.

How’s that for an outlook? Those were my “formative years,” and although that situation is far removed from me in time and space, that’s who I am and will always remain. The scared inmate.

An empty childhood

There’s a very eloquent statement of how AvPD starts from someone in Psychforums:

I don’t know about social anxiety but here is my experience with Avoidant PSD.

The symptoms showed up when I was 13, or at least I started reacting to them. I was accused of stealing, and treated like a nonexistant piece of trash by the adults, I was suspended from school and had to deal with my mom who was home at the time and did her usual excellent job of reminding me what a lower than life creature I was. Ironically I didn’t steal anything, but when I was supposed to return to school, I instead chose to sit across the street in a park watching my classmates and wishing I could be with them, but terrified of joining them after being accused of something so life altering.

At 14 my family moved and I was in a different school. This time I was bullied by the “stoner” kids because I seemed prissy, even though I was scared and insecure. I stopped going to school and spent the days sitting in the desert near the apartment we lived in.

I was always depressed and hated who I was, how I looked, and instead of being just afraid of new situations, I NEEDED to avoid them. From childhood I created a fantasy life, an alternate life that was without a drunken step father, a cruel bitch mother, and without people who hated me. I was always normal in my alternate life, and what happened in life was normal but happy. In real life I was stuck with a drunken step father that wanted to have sex with me, a mom that hated me and my brothers literally, and a world that did not only remain indifferent but used that very stuff to make us feel like we were even smaller than we already felt.

It’s all in quote as far as I’m concerned - the contempt by parents and adults (in this person’s case abuse by her stepfather), hostility from peers, lack of perspective or horizons, and “a world that did not remain only indifferent but used that very stuff to make us feel like we were even smaller than we already felt.” I couldn’t have said it better.

Like her, I would have gladly skipped and left school but the problem was it was not close to our home. I had to catch the bus every day. At that time, caring administrators bused us around town in the name of desegregation so my school was far away. I was also afraid of my father’s wrath. But I did create a fantasy world. I read incessently and the best moment of the day was after I entered my front door every afternoon (the worst of course was going back the next morning).

Only today as I begin middle age am I discovering that real life can have satisfaction and pleasure, and that I don’t need to deceive myself and convince myself I am someone else, someone stronger, more capable, and whom everyone will like. Today I’m not as hung up on whether people value me as I was for most of my life.

But today it’s still hard to understand why everyone was so indifferent and disappointed. Seeing my daughter growing up in a culture that so prizes the young doesn’t make it easier. I remember my parents always telling anyone who would listen how misbehaved I was, or how bad my grades were. In this way, they made sure to inform everyone how bad a kid I was, and I used watch the dreadful transformation of an adult’s face from one pleased to see me to one of gravity.

My worst memory was at the pediatrician’s office when I was about five or six. He was a big man with a cowboy hat. He greeted me with a big, booming voice and then asked my mother to sit down across from his desk. I stood next to her and listened as she related how I was hyperactive and prone to misbehavior. Then his entire demeanor changed. He wouldn’t even look me in the face anymore as he curtly ordered me to sit on the patient’s bed and take off my shirt.

At the end of the visit, I sullenly said goodbye to him and he replied, “Get outta here,” and kicked me in the backside with his big boots. It didn’t hurt but I was utterly humiliated and never forgot the shame and rejection.

Years later I asked my mom about this and she laughed and said he was just kidding. In fact she found him amusing.

Such incidents seemed to happen again and again. Some adult initially pleased to see me would start conversing with my parents, who reported my “bad nature” and cause my interaction with the adult to change. Was I such a bad kid? I was hyperactive and the doctors took me off soft drinks. My grades were generally average to bad and I hated school, preferring to run outside. At 14, I finally decided to escape from the empty, unrewarding, and sometimes hostile environment to the confines of a military school.

But the pattern was there. Lurking within me was a bad nature that I still believe in and makes me ashamed. The adults who knew better discussed it quietly among themselves. My parents wanted nothing to do with me. No matter what my intentions were, no matter what I wanted to become, I was a bad person with evil intentions. In my middle school years my father mentioned several times he regretted having me as a son, that he didn’t know what he had done to deserve me. I grew silent every time he said this, and felt guilty. I didn’t need to try to understand him because I already did.

A bad person?

As I write this a few things strike me. First, my parents didn’t speak badly about me to everyone in every instance. I remember a few specific instances of it but they were generally disappointed in me. I also grew up believing there was something secretly wrong with me that would embarass me if it got out. Secondly, it’s easy for me today to see the person I have become through this experience. It’s incredibly hard to feel confident or at ease in a room full of strangers. I hate working in an office for this reason.

Writing about this and feeling the full extent of any associated feelings is also hard because I was raised to belittle my own emotions. My father frequently mocked any sadness in me by mimicking a crying little baby. From my earliest age he discouraged any closeness by openly mocking me as weak. My mother had more sympathy but she was generally passive (and depressed), and preferred distance from me.

It was clear from the very start of my life that I am, and will always remain alone. I grew to appreciated this as an adult, finding it hard to keep my fear and embarassment in check when working with people (I have to compensate it by believing I’m someone else, or simply better than othrs).

Inside of me, within my deepest self, I know I want to bring good to the world, despite being hobbled in such an unwelcome way. This may sound trite and overused, but I want to leave the world a better place than I found it. I’m sorry if, through my cruelty, I ever hurt someone, and really wish I was capable of joining the rest of humanity without feelings of being unwothy or fake.