context

I just read RE's post about class and how she grew up. Combined with a prompt on I wanna say Fetch Me My Axe about parents and how they've shaped how we think, I'm now thinking about the ways in which I'm a product of my upbringing.

First off: rich white American. I often feel a sense of distance towards a number of social concerns because I've never been there. I've always had enough to eat, I've always had somewhere to live, I had a good education. Hell, I've never in my life been beaten up. I've never been harassed on the bus. Bandaids match my skin color It really blows my mind to think about how things are overseas, where things like having clean water are a concern. I pretty much can't imagine them; I have always been comfortable. It seems like a different world.

My parents both have graduate degrees in the sciences. I grew up in a house full of books, and learned to read before I went to kindergarten. Nature and nurture conspired to make me the kid grade-school teachers love. Intellectual curiosity was fostered, and I never got yelled at for asking questions. My parents put a high value on education. This was both good and bad, really. I wound up internalizing the academic barometer for success in a big way. Maybe this works for some people and they feel great about themselves. Not for me. Every time I didn't finish something on time, every time I did poorly on an assignment, I knew I was disappointing my parents and my teachers, and I felt like a bad person. Four years since my learning disability diagnosis, three years out of a hellishly stressful high school environment, and I'm just starting to break free of this mindset. I am finally starting to realise that no individual action defines my worth. I don't think I have to be The Best at everything. I point to this mindset as a significant cause of my daddy issues, my eating disorder, my academic anxiety, my general inability to have any sane perspective on myself.

My mother is the child of an alcoholic. She is spectactularly good at sticking her fingers in her ears and ignoring anything bad. She sees what she wants to see despite any evidence to the contrary. Not only did I inherit this ability (which sucks) but I was shaped by it big-time. I wound up with the idea that I need to take care of all my shit on my own without help. I wound up feeling like bad things need to be a secret, like I need to shield people from things in my life that might upset them. Amazingly enough, this extends to therapists! It's very hard for me to ask for help. I often feel like my negative emotions are insignificant, overreactions, whining, or otherwise invalid and not to be brought up in polite company.

I think I got my LD from my father. All of his social skills were learned intellectually, by rote, after long practise in a managerial job. In thirty years I may be the same. I don't know if growing up with him, not having the usual interactions, influenced anything, or if my neurology makes it moot. I suddenly wonder if his amusing overplanning, the colored file folders he brings on every trip with printouts of his rental car, hotel, flight information, and any interesting tourist sites, is all just overcompensation for organizational skills as sucky as mine. I wonder if he gets so cranky when he's planning and leading things because it doesn't come naturally and it wears. Hopefully in thirty years I will not be like this. I am lucky here: I can rely on my boyfriend for these things and it's socially acceptable. My father is The Man Of The House. Maybe he doesn't want to be, maybe after taking care of his four younger siblings as a child he's stuck in a role he never wanted but doesn't know any alternatives to.

[This part is a bit of a tangent] I took a year off from school between high school and college. I hadn't realised previously that I could have a life that did not revolve around school. I didn't know there were alternatives. You go to school, you go to college, you Get A Good Job. Then what? I think next on that calendar is dying. I don't like that plan anymore. I see a big contrast between how I live now, even when I am in school, and the way I approached life before. Freshmen who didn't take time off seem to be different. Or maybe other people realise how to live on their own, and I was just slow to pick up on it. I think some people do, but so many remind me of myself in high school, fitting a life in around the edges of class and work.

It's late, I'm getting distracted from my topic, I'll leave it here.

more introductions

So now that I've done an overview of my feminism, I'll start in on the other things in my little bio.

My interest in mental health issues comes from having them. My mother sent me to therapy at age eight, because I was depressed. Amusingly enough, spending so much time (10 years, really) with the same therapist was a really bad move -- I got to know him so well that I came to see him as another person that I had to keep up a front for. So I didn't tell him how everything went to shit in high school. I went from a small, close-knit middle school where I knew everybody to a comparatively big and scary high school. My social skills are not the greatest today, after years of practice and extensive therapy that actually helped. They flat out sucked then. I didn't have a whole lot of friends, or in fact talk to anyone. I started cutting myself. Eventually I started to starve myself. I was miserably depressed. By that point I had close friends, but there was a lot of unhealthiness there and they had their own issues, so we all, as Pigeon in a guest post on LL's blog put it, "signed off on each other's behavior".

Eventually (April of my senior year), it got to the point where I scared myself. I got dizzy and eating didn't help, I spent an afternoon in bed because I couldn't walk across the house. I told my mother. My parents, especially her, are masters of sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong (I inherited this one but good), so every time I told them I was "fine", they believed it. After I told her, I got put on medication, which (after a few tries and some nasty side-effects) helped. I got into more therapy, which both helped and made my life really hard. I was taking a full class load at a tough prep school, driving myself there and to five hours of therapy and tutoring a week, and all my friends lived half an hour away. I was run ragged. My grades plummeted, not that they'd been great before. The learning disorder I'd recently been diagnosed was something nobody, not even I, knew how to get accomodations for. I call the second half of my senior year "my nervous breakdown".

My therapists and parents started talking about inpatient treatment. We flew out to Utah, one of the few states in the US where it's legal to hold minors against their will for treatment, and looked at a few programs. They were way more drastic and way scarier than I had thought. I freaked out and told my parents I didn't want to go. They wanted me to go. We had a lot of arguments that didn't go anywhere. I convinced myself there was something else I could do, that I wouldn't wind up in one of them.

The morning after my younger brother's birthday in June, I was woken up at three in the morning by a couple of people whose job it is to take kids to the airport for things like this. My folks said goodbye and didn't go to the airport, which hurt. I got on a flight with one of these people. She let me use her cell phone at Salt Lake to call my boyfriend. Then I got handed off to the looney bin people.

I spent ten weeks in the high desert in Utah in what's called a wilderness treatment program. We hiked, set up shelters from tarps, dug holes in the ground to shit in, cooked ove propane stoves and fires. It was extremely hard for me, and looking back, not all of it was just shock and self-centeredness. I was very underweight and, I know now, very anemic. Hiking was fucking difficult. Some of my difficulties adjusting and learning new skills, I now put down to my LD -- I don't learn things the way people expect. I have an unituitive skillset and I didn't mesh with what they were doing. A lot of it, however, was just me. I was in serious denial when I got there. I cried for a week or two. Solid. I had a lot of dreams where I was back home, and it was very hard to wake up from them and be in Nowhere, Utah, in a blue tarp tent. I didn't try to hurt myself or run away, it wouldn't have gotten me anywhere.

I did, I suppose, enjoy some of it. I made friendships, of a type, with the other girls there. A particularly impossible day hiking led me to a feeling that I can only describe as "divine serenity", something I've experienced a few times since and consider incredible. I learned a lot. I lost a bunch of bad habits (which I promptly regained upon reentering my circle of friends). My communication and introspection skills went through the roof. I forgave my parents for sending me. I think.

I got out on my eighteenth birthday because it would have been illegal for them to keep me any longer. I spent some time with my parents and promptly got the fuck out of Dodge. I now live in Portland. I rely on my parents financially, but I hardly ever have to see them and they have very little control over me. This works a lot better than when we lived together. There was a period of a year or two after I got home when things continued to be pretty crappy for me, but after a certain person moved away, I discovered that it was a lot easier to engage in healthy behavior without a nutjob around (yes, this is supposed to be funny). My experiences with that person (toxic is a good word) have made me very sensitive to manipulative behavior and self-deception. I consider myself stronger for it, but, like the looney bin, wouldn't do it again given the choice.

I have some stuff written up about my time in Utah that I'll probably post later, but this is plenty long now. I'm very willing to talk about this, I'm pretty zen about the whole experience, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.