“I Am Broken”

I was chatting with an online friend (whom I excruciatingly briefly met in 2005) about Lazy Bear Weekend and I was being snarky about meeting him in person again because of some reason or another.

At one point, I said “I am broken,” to which he replied, “How come?”

How come?

How come?

How come?

I’m broken because I cannot forgive myself for holding on to the emotional impact of words said to me 32 years ago by my mother. Between my older sister’s and my birth, I think my mother had a miscarriage. I can only imagine how she must have felt. But I suspect that my folks were pretty devastated, and that they probably figured that one child was blessing enough. So, when she became pregnant with me, that came as a surprise. But for some reason, instead of saying I was an accident, or unplanned, or something similar, she said I was unwanted. I remember crying on my grandmother’s porch when I heard what she had said. Little did she know how fateful those words were to become to a 9 year old boy.

The other moment that seems to have been a decisive turning point for me is the weeks of ridicule I endured as a result of the large bandages I had to wear as the result of an accident that put thirty-two stitches in my scalp, and a small skull fracture. This happened not long before the “unwanted” episode.

I can remember what happened after that. I stopped caring about school. Became a smart-ass, disorganized, sarcastic, passive-aggressive, hystrionic, narcissist. I became unwanted.

I think that this is in large part of why I became so rejection-averse. Why I feared to take risks for so long, unless taking the risk would bring outrageous attention, not all of it good. I set up a feedback loop in myself to continue to feed my aversive behavior. In many ways, I manipulated people into rejecting me so that I could just confirm my own view of my self.

I’m tired of hurting people in order to satisfy the sense of security I have by remaining in the distorted world of the rejected and broken. Somehow, I have to learn how to forgive my mom and myself. Well, no, now that I sit here pondering forgiving my mom, I realized that had forgiven her already when I understood her mis-spoken words. So the task before me is to figure out how to forgive myself for carrying this around still – how to become unbroken. And if not unbroken, then at least how to accept myself more as broken.

Tagged as: depression, Family, sick, Spirit