Do you see what I hear?

Since I'm spending this week in a state of stressed, a litle emotionally unstable, and feeling slightly unreal, I might as well take a little time to write about my mother some more.

This is another one of those iconic fight moments, where all the context is gone as irrelevant, but there's this one crystalline statement that just stuck in my head like shrapnel. This time, the statement was:

"Your father treats you like an adult."

I was probably fifteen at the time, ish? And being fifteen, my (unspoken, because I knew better than to say it) response was something like, "And that's why I actually like him."

From, y'know, twice that age, I think it was more a case of ... my father treats me like a person. Someone who might not have experience, knowledge, accumulated wisdom, to alays make good decisions, but did have some right to have input and opinions. But that was my first clear, if only half-articulated at the time, recognition of the pain of not existing as yourself -- there was this whole undercurrent to that fight about whether or not I was human enough to make decisions for myself.

Whether or not I was real.

Today, I'm feeling slightly unreal, a little sort of ... above and behind reality, watching myself watch things, my proprioception not quite synched up with my motions. It's a familiar old feeling, probably one of those things that author Jo Walton once commented, "The hardest thing to put down is a shield you no longer need" about, a way of dealing with a world in which asserting my reality was met with that sort of dismissal, that sort of ... you are an object, you are not someone with opinions, with independent self to assert. You are a pawn. You serve rather than exist.

Asserting reality, speaking its name, has always been so important to me; so much fighting against this constant pressure to be Other, to be normal, to be an extension of my mother or any of a number of other things, so much that I need to dig my heels in against and say, "No. I am, and I am this." Writing letters from Gehenna, where they look at the world from an angle.

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