Therapy? Yes, Virginia, and How!

Let's get it all straight here, folks. Any of my close friends could tell you that I've struggled with emotional problems for a lot of my life. I don't know if this is too personal for something so superficial as a blog mostly concerning music and whatnot, but I feel it's worth talking about.

Today was my intro session with my first real therapist. She seems quite nice, and she was surprisingly positive about my situation considering my reaction to it. To be honest, though 22, I don't drive just yet, I have only had a semester of college, and I don't have a great paying job. I live with my paternal grandparents, my twin, and my father, who has a terminal illness. I struggle daily with resisting the urge to collapse into despair. That's quite a personal thing to say, I must acknowledge, but I hope that in some ways this blog is not just entertaining but also instructive for those who read it. People should know that they are not alone in feeling useless or powerless, or trapped inside their own lives. The anger and resentment present in my life needs an outlet, and it is my aspiration that if even a single reader can gain wisdom from my experience, this will have been worth it.

My problems began early with my premature birth. Being three months prematurely born, I was very small and sickly, not expected to live. As I grew up, I always knew that my mother was a terrible person. She never gave a thought to the consequences of any of her actions. She constantly lied to and manipulated the people around her, and I was often the one ensnared in her web of lies and deception. I may not have been physically abused as far as I know, but I was heavily damaged emotionally thanks to her sociopathic actions. I was used as an emotional bludgeon against my own father, and our relationship has never recovered. Countless lies were told, insane accusations flying, always the hate and corruption and manipulation. As a result, tensions pervaded my every interaction with any of my family, and I learned not to rely on others for my emotional support.

In school I was intermittently a good to excellent student, obviously gifted, but the fact of my small stature and the uniqueness of my being a twin and an intellectual made me a target early on for ridicule and sneering jokes. Girls laughed at my pathetic social skills and nerdy dress, guys jeered at my constant reading and quiet, polite nature. I oscillated between achievement and just scraping by, the isolation and loneliness deepening from grade school on into junior high and high school. Even in high school where grades really counted and the academically gifted were encouraged, I could find little companionship among the so-called 'smart kids'. They studied, they worked hard, they worked in groups and palled around together, forming their own semi-cool clique. I slacked off and made the grade anyway, everything came to me easily, and I stood alone even in a group. I had a few close friends, but in the wider social scope of the high school, I was a freak, a misfit. I wasn't even geeky enough to be a full-fledged geek, because I adored vulgarity and high art, punk rock and D&D, drug culture and French novels. I existed in the area between the freaks and the nerds, belonging to neither.

All this would have been enough for an angry and confused teenager just trying to make his way in the world, only wanting to be noticed by somebody, anybody. But at home, I had HER, my mother the cunt. Her drunk breath, her cowed gaze, her constant fighting and bickering and bullying. Always acting the martyr, she heaped on the guilt and paranoia when she wasn't ignoring me entirely or out sleeping around. She latched onto men left and right, slithering up to them with sweet talk, feigning interest in their hobbies and lives, and crushing the life out of them like some fucked up anaconda.

When I was old enough to think for myself, I began to question Christian dogma. I had never believed in fairies or Santa Claus, and I only believed in one real monster, who lived in my house and for whom I had, even after all she had done, the obligation to feign affection. I never had faith to lose, but once I began to question, it never stopped until the whole Christian system fell apart. All the rationalizations, the childish insecurities, the most obviously invented ad-hoc explanations. After a while it became so ridiculous that I realized that I had been an atheist since the day I was born. I had stopped going to church for a number of years, and once I was no longer immersed in an atmosphere of Christian indoctrination, I felt free to self-identify as an atheist. This became (of course) a huge source of tension on my mother's side of the family, who were mostly nominally Christian but who couldn't allow a young person to think for himself. I was constantly emotionally assaulted over the issue for some time, most of the family believing that I had been pressured or manipulated into renouncing my faith by my paternal grandparents.

My religious non-conviction also put me in stark contrast to most of the people I knew at school, and became just one more factor separating me from them.

Every facet of my life pushed my further away from other people. I stopped listening to the radio, I stopped watching TV. I began to cultivate a distinctly hipster taste, delving into avant-garde and art rock music and foreign films. For me, the mainstream became boring, uninspiring, catatonic in its mind-numbing stupidity.

Other people became my enemies, and I cut them down mercilessly in my assessments. "Too dim. Too vapid. Pseudo-intellectual. Fraud, fake, pissant, jerk." No scorn was too viscous, no one was to be spared. I judged them all and threw them away. However, I took no pleasure in belittling them, because I turned my sights on myself. "Loser. Child. Weakling. Freak. How can you even stand yourself?" I had always lacked confidence, but soon developed a full-blown self-hatred, cutting myself down constantly, undermining my abilities, accusing myself silently without cease.

I lapsed often into depression, even when I went away to college and gained my freedom. For a semester I slacked off, stayed up, secluded myself and shut down. Managing a couple of credits, I asked my mother to pay up for a loan she had promised to take out. Her response was a stark no. She gave no reasoning. I argued, I pleaded. I said that if she was declined (as she claimed falsely to be in bankruptcy) I could get a loan myself. But it was to no avail. She didn't care whether she paid a cent or not; she only wanted to watch me squirm. So I did, as I had to, and when all was said and done, I left school and moved out, deciding that my father and his parents would take me in.

In the years following, I kept up with my friends from high school, got a job at a fast food place, started saving some money. Things have been calm these last few years, but time is passing me by, and I can't seem to escape these same problems of isolation, loneliness, and frustration.

But that brings us back to today. I've been on medication for a couple of months, and now with today's session, I'm in therapy. I can only hope that I achieve some small breakthrough. Or maybe I can upsize it for just a dollar more....