Letting Go of Why

I'm rusty.  I haven't done this in awhile, so I hope that you'll forgive my potentially less than musical prose as I warm back up.  "Words on page, pen to paper," was the mantra that my first sobriety sponsor gave me, and I noticed as I followed that advice that I got better at the art of telling - both to others and myself.  I haven't done it in awhile, haven't needed to do it in awhile, but I've gotten good at nurturing the faith that all things become better with practice.  Here we go.

I've been reminded of something important by the Major Kerfuffle happening over the weekend as Upsi's excellent blog was waylaid by a harmful presence.  It created excellent discourse and tweaked me down a path that I haven't explored in a bit.  I wasn't as intrigued by the original creator of the anarchy - a sort of wolf in sheep's clothing who stirred up a battle from first one side of the fence and then the other - as I was by the reactions of all the good people in ACoN blogland.

There were some ready to pull out the Red Queen's axe - "Off with her head!"  Some were ready to pull out the Forgiveness stamp and send the memo on through.  Most of what I read, though, involved the classic ACoN, and hey, let's face it HUMAN trait of simply seeking to understand.  (Please note that I'm not judging these reactions, I think they're all valid, I'm just noting the differences.)  We want so badly to know the source, don't we?

We are largely broken people, even though we come to this place by all sorts of different routes and intersections.  We share a lot of commonalities, both the horrors and the happinesses.  We reach out and we help and sometimes we reach out and we hurt.  We observe in silence and we speak out loudly.  We try, always, we try, to understand who we are and how we got here, and I think that there's a deep and significant part of all of us that's, really, at the end of the day, aware of the fact that once upon a time... we were whole.  And that someone else broke us or taught us how to break ourselves and (since we're talking about Narcs here,) taught us that we deserved to be broken and to stay that way.

I wasn't always broken.  For a long time, I could argue, I was well and truly held together more cohesively than anyone else around me.  I was, after all, just absolutely full to the brim of all the super glue I'd had to pour in the vessel of my soul just to keep myself together.  I was rock fucking solid, baby, and I could take care of me and you and them and she and he and all of it.  Of course, it was a farce.

One day I had to see it for what it was; bullshit.  I had to wake up and look, really look, at the mess of my shattered soul and make a decision to start picking up the pieces and decide if I wanted to put those shards back together again or if I wanted to go find a new potter's wheel to start over.  We all get there.  Some of us make it out shiny and new and some of us spend the rest of forever trying to find better glue.  But we all spend time in that decision.

For me, a natural progression of the agonizing journey of re-building my heart was to want to know why.  Why me?  My Nparents had three children and they treated us all horribly, but I was always the scapegoat, the whipping girl.  Why?  Because I was a middle child?  Because, with a first born older sister and a younger only male brother I was the disposable girl?  Why did they do this to me?  Why did they blame me for their actions?  Why did they take those actions?  Why did I have to be the truth teller?  Why was I the only one who remembered?  Why didn't they love me?  Why didn't I leave sooner?  Why did I expose my daughters to them?  Why did I see the truth and walk away from it?  Why did I wait so long?  Why did it hurt so bad to walk away from people who allegedly loved me and why did I ever believe that in the first place?

Eventually I was able to see that this questioning was driven by two aspects of my personality: first, I'm curious.  I think we're all curious, we want to know how it works and how it could be different.  If we didn't ever have the curiosity to question the status quo, we'd still be embroiled in the Family Line and wouldn't be here at all, right?  Secondly, I was trained to do this from an early age.  I was trained to believe that I couldn't trust the truth.  Hell, in my NFOO, there was no truth - only a ready made and infinitely changeable Story of the Family that was designed to be twisted to gain the most benefit from the current situation.  Narcs are able to fit in anywhere with their ability to attune to their surroundings, for a while.  Basically, I think, they're glorified scam artists and thieves.  You want conservative God fearing folks?  By God, they can be that for you - for a price.  You need a little bit of loosey goosey free loving down home?  Pull out the guitar and stoke up the bonfire, folks, we'll sing you a family campfire song if that gets us what we want.   I was always the only one trying to figure what was real.  In the middle of that gaslit and thinly revised hell, I was the only one unwilling to lie to myself, which I why I collected facts and stored them in my formidable memory.  NM used to accuse me of cataloging everyone's mistakes for later use.  Well, somebody had to keep the story straight (even if I did have to pretend to forget pieces of it in order to survive it, for awhile.)

So, I was always looking for the root causes, the catalysts, the reasons.  The WHY?

And when I got away, I continued to try to understand why?  I had hours long conversations with NM where I thought we'd resolved something, where she'd really listened... and then I'd get a call from someone else in the NFOO minutes later asking why I had said all the things that I hadn't or hadn't said the things I did.  It didn't matter what I thought we'd resolved; it only mattered what they wanted and needed for me to be for the game, the lies to continue.  I asked for no contact outside of a counselor's office and they redoubled their efforts to contact me any other way but refused to go to counseling.  It didn't matter where I felt safe or why I needed protection, it only mattered that I get in line, now, and do what they said and understand that it was their world and they'd decide if I got to live in it.  I wanted to know why they did what they did because I harbored some hope that if I could just understand WHY, I could change it.  Make it better.  Make it stop hurting.

And do you know that I finally got an answer to the why?  I really did and here it is:
Sick people do sick things.  (Of course this is emotional sickness I'm referring to here, not physical.)
Bad people do bad things.
Good people do good things.

I was looking at them all backward, you see.  I kept saying to myself, "Well, this is my mother and she's a good person, I've known that all my life right?  And so these things that she's doing, they must not be that bad, right?  Cause she's good right?"  And it just never made a lick of sense, because she was supposed to be good, but she was doing bad and sick, and I couldn't wrap my little heart around it.  I wanted SO badly to believe that she (and ENF and NSis and GCYB and on and on) were good and maybe, just maybe, I was looking at it all wrong.

Just because someone tells you that you can trust them doesn't mean you can, you know.  I can ask the man with the gun pointed at me if he's going to hurt me, and he can shoot me as he tells me he means me no harm.  It's about the action.  People who do bad things as a matter of course are, sorry to say, bad people.  People who do sick things as a matter of course are, sorry to say, sick people.  People who do good things as a matter of course are, glad to say, good people.

That's it, that's why people do what they do.  I believe that sick people can get well.  I believe that bad people can get better.  Of course, the problem with that is that those people have to want to get better, and it's a small percentage of sick people and a virtually non-existent percentage of bad people who want to change.  To hurt another person is a choice.  To hurt another person repeatedly is a confirmation of bad character.

Once I got that, I stopped asking why they did/do what they do/did, because it doesn't matter anymore.  All I know is that they don't get to do it to me, and the answer to the Why on that is simple:  Because I am good enough to deserve better.


Love,
Vanci