Quote from Deleted user on September 2020, 4:15 pm

What is the pay-off for holding onto the harmful myths I promote and believe about myself?

I have an understanding of myself. The observer colludes with the observed to create a story about men and women. This story has kept me safe, comfortable, and fat for most of my life. I am no longer fat, but the myth persists.

The myth, I am sure, is familiar to most people; only today, I see it with fresh eyes. All the fantasy, all the food, all the make-believe romances were not bringing me comfort but shielding me from expressing rage, indignation, and ire.

In my parents’ house, women were not allowed to be angry: they could be sad, weak, indentured, and crazy. I understood this message very early and made my escape to freedom by translating my mother’s sorrows and emotional vacancy into a fanciful dream. In the dream, I was pretty, like my younger sister, and wanted, like my older brother, and loved unconditionally like my other five siblings.

I have no idea what my brothers and sisters experienced from my unskilled parents, but there is the truth we live as adults. We are very close; my older brother died last October, the circle gets smaller but more substantial.

My youngest sister is getting ready to move and is sending out all these pictures of us as young children, our faces pure, no damage has been done. As I look closely at my young face I want to run away screaming. That child is doomed.

My anger is vindictive beyond measure and hesitates at nothing in my bitterness. I direct it at all men. That’s why I run away from every man who pursues me because I know I will kill him. All this negativity needed to be mitigated,  and I did so in my work life, hiding it in ambition, competitiveness, and arrogance: strangely, these qualities made me quite successful

At nineteen, I turned my natural female sexuality into an aberrant myth that allows me to touch myself with shame. It’s such an old mental structure, like scaffolding that is swaying in the wind about to fly apart into pieces. It no longer serves me, but how to create a new story?

I’ve read that a forest of trees has an underground communication system composed of all the individual tree roots. That is how I feel about myself. Standing in my underwear, in a Nordstrom’s dressing room looking into a three-way mirror, feelings rise from my feet, and I despise myself in three dimensions.

Later in the car, I would tell myself; you’re not that ugly; people see you as you are every day, and they don’t run away screaming like you are an anomaly. This gives me perspective. I am but one person on a planet of seven billion; no one is looking at me. Then I turn my thoughts to my dream lover and listen to the radio and pretend the love songs are about me.

I believe anger is a healing emotion if properly directed and expressed, but as a child, I didn’t learn that.

 A few years ago, I was at my friend’s house; she was hosting a large party. Her husband was grilling hamburgers for the guests, and he came in with a question, and she was so busy she answered him curtly. He said to her, “I am confused,” she looked at him and yelled, “Be confused”! I was sure this was the end of their thirty-eight-year marriage. Of course, I was wrong; it was an interaction with an absence of malice.

Even today, in the late stage of my life, relations between men and women perplex me. My observer is witness to the past and present but does not have an eye towards the future. Will I ever be lovingly touched?  I am comfortable being safe, but am I willing to sacrifice the fantasy for the messiness of true intimacy?