Working on it

It's important to reiterate:

What happened to me back in the Academy days was truly bad and as result, I hit bottom. I have never hit bottom like that before or since. 

I do not want to just walk up with this battered old suitcase, unlock it in front of you, and sift through all the tattered memoria of horror. Forget the crushing grief, that was the aftereffect. What actually happened around me and directly to me was truly horrifying and deliberate and it happened multiple times and I do not wish to relive it nor burden anyone else with it. 

However. 

I emerged, emotionally disssocated, an abuse survivor, slowly reassembling myself out of the remaining pieces. I did not die in large part because of empathetic women, mothers who stepped up for me when my mom and dad let me down.  Who loved me and acknowledged me and my queerness, which was a huge risk in Indiana, and later my spirituality, which has always been a challenge.

I realize when I look at myself all these years later, is that in several key ways, *I am those women.*

I think the mistake that everyone makes (myself included) is this: *You are not looking at a kind man.* That presumes that I had kind men to model myself off of. 

My dad was a ghost. I barely know anything about him because he never  talked. He had all his personality  beaten out of him by Catholic nuns because Indios were not allowed to speak anything other than English back then. 

When people look at me and see these masculine traits they are actually seeing a lot of my own mother. 

And when they see my care and generosity, it's the care and generosity I mirrored from other women. 

But there is a fatal flaw in that mirroring: 

That mirroring invariably contains the Midwestern wife view of what one might need *to take care of a wounded man.*

...

It's a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone that I have had a serious relationship with has had a abusive relationship and estrangement from their mother. I appreciated that, I thought the trauma bonding helped. 

But this might explain how I tend to attract so many people with a mom-shaped hole in their history, and then utterly fail to take care of them in the way they need.

...

The other day I spent roughly two hours observing a lady friend of mine ask her male friend a bunch of questions, after being told from another close friend that she needed that kind of social interaction from me. 

I like to ask questions, but they are dumb 2:30AM questions like what is the evolutionary purpose of believing in one's agency, or what smells do you associate with your memory of being a toddler, or what are your core beliefs and goals and how did you live up to them last week. 

I never liked the small innocuous questions...

I am working on it though.

---

"Was I better? Before Stropshire I'd felt broken, as though I would fall should the scaffold of my work be removed. I didn't feel that, but there was a fine crack through the middle of me, and I suspected it might never end. I remember Lizzie apologizing to Mrs. Lloyd the first time she stayed to chat for the chip in the cup. 

"A chip doesn't stop it from holding tea." Mrs Lloyd had said.