My last entry, Welcome to Alyson’s Old Story Mind, was necessary in order to demonstrate the fact that I am just like you – I am a unique human being, born with unique interests & abilities, into circumstances over which I had zero control. Those circumstances – i.e. the families into which we are born – GREATLY influence our journey, hence the immense responsibility of being a parent.
The beliefs and values taught to us, either directly with words or indirectly with behavioral examples, develop into very, very deeply ingrained patterns and habits. As a result, we become adults often with no conscious awareness of how little input we actually had on these patterns. We leave our parents’ homes, trying to build a world for ourselves, with no real idea how the wiring of our brain patterns, combined with our personalities, is about to translate into what becomes our perceived realities.
I was simply trying to make my way in the world up until 2 years ago. I was doing the absolute best I could but I was barely surviving in the sense that I was miserable & unfulfilled. The world around me did nothing to inspire me and in fact, only increased my levels of hopelessness. As I did what I was taught – keeping abreast of the news as an educated, intelligent woman – I only feared more for myself and the human species. How could this possibly represent the living that we came here to do?
What exacerbated my situation, as it turns out, was a very damaging, underlying belief pattern of comparison. One, that in this paradigm, and in this country especially, is introduced to us and encouraged in every area of our life from the moment we are out of the womb. In my home growing up, the direction of the comparison, however, was extremely unique. What I observed in most was the tendency to compare oneself to those who had more. In our world, we always compared to those who had less.
We grew up learning about the struggle of everyone else around us – namely, the experience unique to that of African Americans. I am eternally grateful for my Dad’s influence in making us aware of how fortunate we were to not have had those sorts of circumstances to overcome in our lives. However, this tendency to always compare our situations to those of the less fortunate has been one of the most crippling of all my beliefs. We NEVER took into consideration the relativity of the situation – anyone’s, least of which, our own.
I was living in an unbelievably stressful setting given my unique personality. I never had a childhood after 6. At 8 I was doing things around the house that most teenagers don’t even do. At 11 I had my first job with my paper route and at 12 I became the neighborhood baby-sitter, pet-sitter, and house-sitter. I was a very capable kid who was actually quite happy with all the responsibility – it was natural & fun and I loved becoming friends with all the adults & kids on my street. In 7th grade, though, everything changed significantly. I was finally able to begin playing school sports for the very first time.
I was in heaven immediately and it introduced me to the world of extra-curricular activities. There wasn’t much I didn’t do. By 8th grade I even entered the arena of politics as I became the president of our 1000-student middle school. There was no stopping this train now, but that meant I was no longer the rock for my single mom at home. This ended up being devastating to our relationship.
Mom didn’t intend to make me feel badly about getting a life of my own. I was aware of this even then – she was so tired all the time & was barely surviving with all three of us & a teaching job (meaning the work is brought home too). She had papers to correct every night on top of trying to prepare a meal AFTER a full day of teaching!! She had nothing for just her. She deprived herself of everything – namely, happiness – for her family.
I had helped a great deal managing the home until this point. Now, I was not only not helping as much but I also needed rides to/from practices?! Double-whammy! She was hanging on by a thin thread & I knew it. But I just couldn’t do it – I just couldn’t not live a life for me. The guilt that was at first only energetically placed upon me was plenty enough. But once I was verbally called selfish regularly, I couldn’t take it. It was unbearable.
Unbearable because as a child, which emotionally I still was, all you long for is your parent’s unconditional love & acceptance & communication. More than anything what I longed for was not the money we didn’t have. I longed to not hurt. I longed to not feel so misunderstood, so lonely, so unhappy – in my own family, no less. I longed to feel like I was part of an actual family. I longed for experiences with people I loved – especially, with my immediate family because I witnessed & absorbed all of their pain too. I knew I could never express this to Mom. I had already learned (via a lesson in 4th grade) that emotionally, I was on my own because she was on empty…all the time. To this day, I cannot allow myself to focus on this thought for very long. The magnitude of sadness that fills my heart is almost intolerable.
I felt her struggle every day & tried like hell to not give her anything more to worry about with me. And I was driven in my heart to do nothing but get out in that world as soon as I could to earn the millions that it appeared you needed to possess (and that I already knew I was capable of earning) in order to change things. My only goal in life was to ease or to better yet, prevent situations like ours from any other family.
Our parents do the absolute best they can. And mine were no exception. But, because of their own suffering & lack of awareness, they were incapable of acknowledging the pain I was living and experiencing. They discounted every complaint. If I ever felt badly, I was made to feel even more guilty because there were millions of people within hours of me worse off. The Catholic guilt permeated every orifice of our home. From the time I was consciously able to identify when I wasn’t able to get something I desired, I was made to feel guilty about wanting anything more than I had. This was all I knew for the first 18 1/2 years of my life. How or why would I do anything but solidify this belief pattern as I moved out into the world as an adult?
Kids just want attention and they want to be loved and they want to be free to have fun & enjoy discovering who they are in this world. If kids don’t get this – and depending on the degree to which they don’t get these things – they turn into adults with unbelievable amounts of emotional baggage to work through. And often times, you don’t become aware of the fact that you have a lot of shit to deal with until you are already committed to employers, home mortgages, spouses, and children. Then what? You repeat the same situation that you swore you wouldn’t repeat because breaking the cycle is really, really, REALLY hard. And it is THAT much harder when you don’t have money.
So, in a very noble attempt to create good citizens of their children, my parents unwittingly ingrained in us belief patterns that have debilitated us as adults. There was never relativity in the comparisons we were making. There was never discernment regarding the mass generalizations that we were being taught about the world. All we knew was that there was no way we could ever discriminate against anyone and we certainly were not going to be a part of any employment that was contributing to the proliferation of injustice.
Well, I had no way of figuring out my way in a world where these days it doesn’t take much to connect anything to some sort of injustice being committed. How does someone as bright & accomplished as I was exiting college end up stalling out so quickly in the “real” world? Underlying belief patterns regarding personal responsibility & money that were incongruent with the “truth” I now know about both.
To be continued…
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