The Logic of Familiarity
Looking back, I notice how often I gravitated toward people who couldn’t tolerate my pain but expected the world to organize itself around their pleasure. When they were uncomfortable, everyone rushed to soothe them.
What’s especially painful is this: humanity was withdrawn from me when I was small and needed it most. There was a kind of protected harm at work. Each time I struggled, my sister’s standing rose, and my mother’s case against me grew. Anyone could see how that drove beliefs about worth and entitlement—how my suffering had been useful to my sister. She was not only pitied and comforted when I suffered, but rewarded for not being me.
It has been like this since my first breath. And I repeated this dynamic in which I consent to mattering less, in almost every relationship I chose.
There were exceptions. Sweet Greg. The love bomber, obviously. And the sweetheart I’m seeing now—kind, present, generous, not looking for a reason to deny my comfort or my reality.
Still, nothing replaces a family that shelters you—parents, a big sister, your own children. I remember when we moved here and my mother and sister swooned over how sweet my boys were, what a good mother I was. Even that disrupted the familiar roles. Me forming a family of my own threatened a long-standing narrative: one child – the problem, another elevated in contrast, and a mother sustained by sympathy for having such a difficult child. Looking back, it’s devastating to see how carefully that arrangement was preserved.
The measures I go to in order to heal, recover, and live, seems diametrically opposed to those to whom I’m genetically linked. I read this the other day: “The way is the goal.” It captures it perfectly.
It reminds me of the Set Aside Prayer—and of one of my favorite tattoos: the word –align– inside of an arrow.
