Content Warnings for discussion of childhood trauma (specifically neglect and abuse at the hands of my parents and brother).

I wish yesterday’s good mood had lasted a bit longer [it did eventually pick back up again, but today did not help much]. I made it through an entire day with it intact, but it did not survive a night of poor sleep and an unfocused day of finding myself browsing the internet because I needed something more engaging than my work to keep me awake. At least nothing bad has happened. I came by this poor mood honestly. It is a melancholy of my own making. A sadness of my own. Pure, homegrown sorrow. It was, of course, influenced by outside sources, as all such things are. It’s not like I want to think about my miserable childhood. I’ve gotten pretty good at not thinking about it, most of the time, but there’s little I can do in the face of something that will push past the blanket I’ve thrown over that portion of my mind and draw bits of my past out into the light. I’m only half to blame for it this time, though. Sure, I chose to watch last week’s John Oliver deep dive about homeschooling knowing that I was going to get myself caught up in the misery of the past, but I wasn’t exactly expecting it to be so focused on how homeschooling is used by some parents to avoid scrutiny while they abuse or neglect their children. Nor was I expecting an incredibly brief conversation with my friend about her trip to her local county fair to bring up oddly strong memories of the fairs I went to ask a child that eventually revealed to me that all the happiest memories I have of my childhood are from when I was alone or at least away from my entire biological family. But they did and now I’m trying to figure out if I have something I need to work through here or if I need to allow myself to be sad for a while since that’s a pretty reasonable reaction to my reflections and minor realization.

That’s sort of the nature of going through therapy and unpacking the past, unfortunately. I might be able to put it away when I’m not in the right mindset (or active therapy session) to work through things, but none of it is as tightly locked up and tucked away as it used to be. It’s not strewn about my mind in a minefield of metaphorical tripping hazards of course, I’m far too organized a person for that. But the tradeoff is that there’s a strong associative connection to it now, just like everything else in my head, so anything similar to a memory from the past is likely to bring something up. It’s just how my mind works. I couldn’t sing the lyrics of most Weird Al songs on my own, but if you started playing one, I could easily finish it unaided. I might not be able to produce most of the German I learned in high school and college, but if you prompt me with a question or a couple bits of vocabularly, I could definitely provide the correct response or build a few sentences. It’s why I was so good at rote learning, multiple choice tests, and most scholastic pursuits when I was younger. As long as I got even the barest hint of something, my mind could produce the rest. Nowadays, that just means that I’m good at remembering stories, recognizing past conversations that I wind up having again, and accidentally stumbling into things I haven’t thought about in years since I stopped actively hiding my past from myself.

During my trip back to my choldhood hometown to attend my grandmother’s funeral, I had a long chat with my siblings and one of my sibling’s friends about the past. She was sympathetic and understanding of our situation (which is why my sister brought her along to our grandmother’s funeral for emotional support) and the group of us got to talking about our emotional states. As that conversation progressed, I eventually remarked that one of the signs of progress I’d discovered while working through everything I’d been through, all the trauma I remembered and everything else I’d forgotten in order to protect myself when I was too young to do anything about it, is that things that used to not bother me started to bother me. The general table seemed unconvinced that this was progress since it feels fairly counterintuitive, my sister’s friend remarking that maybe it was better to not leave oneself so vulnerable, and I did not have the heart to clarify that I meant it much more broadly than they expected.

I was starting to be bothered by any horrible thing I saw the way a “normal” human adult would be, the way that most of them would be. I would recognize some kind of atrocious event and, feeling discomfort at witnessing it, attempt to avoid witnessing it. The best example I’ve got is an infamous mission from one of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games where, posing as a terrorist in order to infiltrate some fictional group of terrorists, you have to participate in a terrorist attack against unarmed civilians they’re carrying out (which winds up with your character killed since their identity was not as secret as they thought and their participation in the event used to frame the US government agency your briefly-played character actually worked for). I played through it without feeling anything when I was younger. When I went to replay the game during the pandemic, as an adult, I got to that level and couldn’t bear to do more than be loaded into the mission, choosing to just exit the game and uninstall it rather than just skip past it as the game allowed.

The key thing to understand here is that it bothered me when I was younger, too, I just didn’t feel it. I was so scarred and hurt as a child that I couldn’t let myself feel hurt about anything, especially if I didn’t want to draw undesired attention from my brother or punishment from my parents for being “moody” or whatever. It took a lot of years to unpack everything to the point where I could allow myself to actually experience the horror and emotional pain of these events as they happened. I mean, I’ve never enjoyed asymetrical violence in video games. The reason I play video games at the highest difficulty I can handle isn’t because I enjoy being challenged. It’s because I can’t stand to hurt even fictional pixel people who can’t stand up to me. Sure, they might be horrible people and their deaths might align with my moral beliefs, but I can’t stomach having to hack down an HP bar against an enemy that doesn’t stand a chance against me.

If I can just take them out quickly, in a single quick maneuver, that’s fine. It’s even fine if they’re not aware. But if they’re a noncombatant or I’m forced to beat them down, I will probably stop playing before the fight is over. I don’t like such significant power imbalances in any kind of media, not just video games. Hell, I almost made myself sick playing an evil character in a D&D game because I was able to single-handedly demolish a bunch of minorly evil baddies via assassination and merciless sneak attacks in combat. I was so reviled by what I’d done that I wound up changing the entire character’s arc after that session just so I’d have a reason to never put myself through that again.

While this is one of the most extreme examples involving a personal trigger (torture or asymetrical power dynamics involving one-sided violence), this awakening to emotional sensitivities is true up and down the spectrum, from the aforementioned horrible stuff to even something as mild as being forced to repeat myself because someone wasn’t listening. So it is not shocking that I feel upset after realizing the part of every fair and carnival I enjoyed as a kid wasn’t the lights, rides, and games so much as being in public because it meant my brother wouldn’t hurt me and my parents wouldn’t bother me. I could just exist in a space without needing to be on-gaurd all the time. Feels like a pretty legitimate thing to be upset about, that my standards were so low and that something I hate with my whole heart nowadays is something I craved when I was younger because being alone was better than the fear, pain, and anxiety I felt around my parents and brother.

The thing that’s the most upsetting about the homeschooling stuff is that my parents didn’t do it with the intent to hurt me. I was just the price my family paid to maintain the image of being a perfect Midwestern Catholic family that my parents desired. My parents absolutely did it on purpose though, even if they aren’t aware of the underlying motivations, but I was so systematically isolated from anyone who could have intervened that there’s no way it could have been a coincidence. It is upsetting that I will never be able to hold them accountable for this stuff in a way that I will find satisfying because they have so repeatedly proven their inability to truly understand this stuff that I’ve given up on anything but acceptance and letting go. Accepting that it happened and that I will not be able to open their eyes to the horros they inflicted on me and letting go of any thoughts that they might eventually be a part of my life again.

I guess I had stuff to work through. I don’t exactly feel better after writing my way through all of this, but I do sort of feel better. Now I just have to let myself feel sad and upset about this and I’ll be able to move on. As much as it sucks to feel emotionally impacted by things I could effortlessly brush off before, being able to work through something like this on my own in a fulfilling and healthy manner is pretty great.