Defining My Own Happiness

I often found myself wondering how I could let myself be used by so many people.

Rose and Hope certainly weren’t the only ones, just the ones who made the largest impact on my life. How could my fear of people run so deep from so early on that I would be incredibly blind to the people who treated me decently? After years of thinking, I truly think that a big part of that problem was my upbringing. I need to say first that I do believe that both of my parents love me very much, wholly and completely. They both care for me deeply and want the best for me in life, but I also think that their own childhoods and life experiences made them into people who could have trouble expressing that love…and that turned into its own form of abuse.                  My father, for many years, was a verbal abusive. I don’t have many good memories with him from when I was young, I’m sure we did have some good moments together, but the memories just didn’t stick, I guess. Until I was about 12, his verbal abuse mainly consisted of screaming at me, saying I was “nothing but chicken shit” whenever I got scared or when I was upset, or bellowing that if I didn’t stop crying, he’d “give me something to cry about.” I was terrified of him. I never knew what to expect out of him and his temper flares could come out of nowhere. One day, he came into the spare room and saw that I had not put my VHS tapes away. He got so angry that he started shouting and throwing them at the wall directly behind me, a couple of them even broke upon impact. Growing older didn’t help. Even in high school, he would constantly berate me over little things and yell to the point where I would end up hyperventilating in a corner. He would always come apologize shortly after, but those words became hollow after so many instances. I thought he didn’t love me, and I couldn’t honestly say that I loved him. When he was diagnosed with cancer, both times, I was caught in the cross hairs of “my dad is sick — this is horrible,” and “maybe I can finally be free of his anger.” That killed me on the inside, and made me feel like such a monster for having those thoughts, even for a fleeting second. Thankfully, he survived both times, and as I grew enough to go away to college, things finally started to change. He became calmer, not the dictionary description of calm, but calmer. He’d constantly ask my mom if I was coming home to visit, or if they could come visit me. Things got even better once he retired from his job, which was rife with harassment and abuse on its workers. He seemed much happier most of the times, and there hasn’t been an eruption between us in a few years. He spent a lot of his childhood never really experiencing how to show love or positive emotions, so seeing the change is beautiful. He gets proud over things I accomplish and is fascinated by the actions of one of the pets my significant other and I own, and you see the gears turning in him when he is trying to find the perfect way to express it. Even though things are pretty good between my father and me, there is a lot of healing left between mom and I. As a child, we were very close. I have so many fond memories of us carving pumpkins on the picnic table outside our house, sledding with my dog, playing games on the living room floor. We used to start games of Tetris on the PlayStation and she would stay up until two in the morning because she just had to finish. She was always there for me, and more than willing to go along with my silly escapades, like building a zoo with Beanie Babies in my bedroom. Things changed quickly when I grew older. Beginning sometime in grade school, she started getting overly concerned with how I looked. My staple wardrobe was usually jeans, shorts, skorts, tee-shirts, tennis shoes, and some nicer shirts. I was never dirty or smelly or poorly dressed…I just wasn’t what my mom wanted. I wasn’t into fashion, and she wanted someone who was. She would always bring home clothes that I wasn’t comfortable wearing (too low cut, too tight, etc.) and would get angry with me if I didn’t wear them. She would constantly yell at me, saying that no one would like me and that my friends would abandon me if I didn’t dress the way she told me to. She was always “trying to help” as she put it, but it left me unable to be me. There were times where she would force me to wear something, just to “try it,” and she would scream and cry if I didn’t like it. It didn’t matter the reason, whether I just didn’t like it or if something about it made me deeply uncomfortable. I always felt so guilty…she would tell me that I was ungrateful and that I didn’t appreciate anything she did and it cut deep. She wouldn’t just do that with clothes. She did the exact same thing with makeup, hairstyles, and things I wasn’t interested in. I absolutely loved books and video games, and all other kinds of nerdy things. Yet, she always emphasized that any friends I had would no longer care about me if I liked certain things (like those listed prior) or didn’t wear enough makeup. I believed her. There were so many times where I was afraid of people asking me what I was listening to, what I was reading, what I was watching, because I was afraid of my answer being the “wrong” answer. I spent so many nights crying just because I thought I wasn’t good enough, because my interests were “weird,” because I didn’t like to dress a certain way — because I was me. I was always afraid to talk to her about it. Every time I tried, it started a fight, and she wouldn’t let me finish what I was trying to say. So, one day I wrote a note. I told her that I felt like I was being used as her dress up doll and that I was feeling pressured and hurt. I told her that I thought she was jealous of my friends for being able to spend time with me. Nothing I said was put rudely or hurtfully. It was all truth and needed to be heard. Instead of having a discussion about it, she cried and told me that she felt like everything we ever had was a lie. She told me that she felt like she “buried her only child.” She told me that she would save that letter forever, and threatened to leave a letter for me when she dies that “will hurt me just as bad.” She still has that letter. I’ve seen it, and even though I wrote it years ago, I can still see nothing that warranted that kind of response. Officially moving out of the house to attend college an hour away didn’t really help things like I hoped it would. There, I was free to be my own person. I didn’t have to worry about someone looming over me, telling me that I was wrong for being me. Coincidentally, that kind of freedom (as well as the distance from a homophobic location) allowed me the space to realize that I am both asexual and bisexual. When I look back at my life growing up and how I felt about friends and some of the people in my life, it makes a whole lot of sense. I might have well been wearing a “Hey! I’m gay!” shirt for the entirety of life before college. Mom, of course, didn’t take it well. I am her only child after all, and one of her biggest dreams is to be a grandmother and have her daughter marry (a man). Despite the fact that I never had interest in having kids, she took it as a personal blow. All of the fights that went on between us made me feel so selfish. She constantly cried and said that she didn’t have something to look forward to in life anymore, just because she wouldn’t be having any grandbabies. For a long time, I felt extremely guilty for it…as though I should force myself to go through a pregnancy I would never want and bear a child I did not want, or marry someone just because it would make my mom happy rather than it be someone I wholly loved. There were so many days where I felt like I was going to be torn in two. I felt like I was completely responsible for her happiness, rather than my own. During my senior year in college, I met someone: a remarkable lady who was unlike anyone I had ever known before. She was intriguing, a person who loved sweaters year-round and was into old 80’s cartoons. During my time in college, I had made some great friends, people who supported me and who I still talk to and love deeply, but this one person ended up being the one who took me by surprise…and I knew my mom was not going to take it well. I tried playing it off as we were just friends. That we met on an Asexual Community Site (which is true) and we hit it off really well. I don’t think mom was convinced. The first time my mom met Sophie, she admitted (afterwards) that she had tried her very hardest to not like her, but she just couldn’t do it. Sophie was too likeable of a person to dislike for no reason. Despite that, things were still a hurricane of emotions with my mom. She was furious that I was interested in Sophie, that I would want to date a girl. She forced me into promising her that I wouldn’t start dating until after I graduated, saying things like “You were on such a great track. You have great friends, you’re doing well in school, and now this is going to ruin it all.” Over and over again she hounded me with threats of my friends leaving me for being gay and having feelings for another girl. Over and over again those friends proved her wrong, every step of the way.

Things got worse as I just couldn’t ignore my emotions. One November night, I asked Sophie to be my girlfriend, and she said yes.

That was almost two years ago. Mom completely lost it when she found out. She started with the usual threats of friends leaving me, but also said that I didn’t care about her at all. She said that I broke my promise, and that she could never trust me again. I felt that sickening downward spiral of guilt when she said that, even though she had forced me into making it, even though it was the only major promise I had ever broken to her, and even though she had implied that it was “for my good” that she was worried about. I knew well enough that having a significant other was not going to slow me down on my track in college. I found out later that she wanted me to hold off for her. Her mother had been sick and dying at the time. She was someone I never really got close to because we didn’t see her much, but the whole thing was just horrible timing for mom and me. She took it as if I didn’t care about what she was going through, and that I asked Sophie out just to snub her, even though that wasn’t the case at all. Needless to say, that last year of college was rough emotionally. I couldn’t even talk to my mom without her breaking down or fighting with me over Sophie. It was always the same thing: that she didn’t believe I was really gay, that my friends were going to get sick of me, that I hurt her. She said so many mean and hurtful things, things like she would much rather be dead than have me be with a girl, that my friends were just faking it and being nice, that I was going to fail in the future if I stayed with her. It cut deeply, the fact that my own mother couldn’t accept who I am, that she felt so against my own self that she would prefer to no longer exist than have me be me. She made insinuations that if she didn’t have the dogs, she would probably just kill herself and there were days where I feared constantly for her. I don’t think I would have made it without the friends I made there. My friends, along with God, and some of my close professors were the anchors that held my sanity and guided me through the year. Sophie was always there too, of course. She never made me feel like I had to choose between her and my mom, and she was always determined that someday my mom would stop lashing out and that they could truly get to know each other.