Dear friend
Happy new year.
I've been thinking about how overbearing I became to my friends who matter most. How I kept seeking validation, how I kept asking them to soothe me and ground me because I - somehow - failed to self-soothe.
It's funny. You mentioned the solution many times but in my arrogance, my ignorance, or both, I failed to understand and integrate it. “Talk to your mother”. I realised that I've been using you and many of my other friends, people who should make one feel safe and nourished, as caregivers. I put you into a role you never meant to fill - to soothe every bad moment, to reassure me at every doubt, to ground me during every attack.
The reason is complex and layered, and frankly goes deeper and more personal than what I'm prepared to share openly on this blog, alas I will say this: I never communicated with my parents. Every failure and bad day, every schoolyard fight, every bully, every heartbreak, my parents were always the last to know. Every win, every achievement, every certificate and hobby, I strive to make as secret as possible, for receiving enthusiastic praise is still something with which I'm learning to be comfortable.
“How was your day?” my mother would ask after school, “yeah good I guess” - not mentioning when I was a monitor for the line back to class one time.
“How was school today?” she'd question curiously, “fine” - omitting the part where I got so angry at a bully earlier that day in class, that I threw a chair at their face.
Good or bad, rain or shine, every day was simply “fine”. I never found solace in sharing my wins and my losses with the people who are supposed to be my caregivers - and so what is a young me to learn to do? Lean on friends and force them into that role. I never got the validation I needed as a kid to grow up confident and self-sufficient (for reasons that - again - are too personal to share here), and so for better or worse I would dump years of trauma on the people I feel I could trust.
My friends.
I used them. Not intentionally, mind you. This is not a pity post, and I'm not going to sit here and say "I'm such a horrible person, how could I do that?". I know full well why I did that, and I do not blame myself. Beating myself up over it isn't going to make the situation any better.
Understanding this pattern will make the situation better. Realising that I should not distribute my trauma all-or-nothing with people will make the situation better. Learning to recognise the difference between reality, and my own fears and insecurities, will make the situation better.
And that's what I have been doing. Quietly, behind closed doors, I have been equipping myself with the tools I needed since the age of… oh, y'know, birth. I dare say I have been better at self-regulating than I have ever been before. I question most every emotion to understand its root, I check every insecurity to determine whether it is based on evidence I see in front of me, or pareidolia established from yesteryears. More often than not, it is the latter.
It always was, wasn't it?