This article provides a background on who I am and how I am who I am. It is quite long. I may wish to reference this background elsewhere and I wished to do it some justice. Despite its length it is a less detailed version of the first cathartic process that resulted in this post. Where specific recollections from my early years are included they are just that; my recollections, from a child, adolescent and young adult perspective. Others that were involved may have different recollections and attribute meaning differently.

Trigger warning: trauma and abuse, mental illness, suicidality, alcohol/drug use, body image

People always called me weird.

I recall myself as a strange child. My mother called me fey. I had blond hair and light blue eyes where my immediate family were all brunette with deep blue eyes. When I was an infant I would not immediately go to sleep, and instead would climb out of my cot and toddle into the lounge to my parents. I loved textures, and would run my fingers gently across the satin edging of my blanket. I was highly sensitive. When I was about two, I would enter the kitchen and start screaming for no apparent reason. One of my earliest memories is of being in the dark laundry, which is where my parents would put me to calm down. I recall it like waking from a dream; looking at the bubbled glass of the laundry door to the backyard, in darkness, small and alone and unsure what was going on, feeling the dissipation of something heavy.

I was a nervous child by school age. I spent a lot of time reading, playing alone, and otherwise in my imagination. I was hypersensitive to potential negative judgment, and just generally sensitive to other people’s presence. I recall being anxious in my early school years to the point of anxiety attacks. I remember once specifically in junior primary when I shimmied up a pole after becoming overwhelmed by my crowd of classmates during a schoolyard game. I was wide eyed like a startled deer, clinging as high as I could climb to keep myself away from the crowd, until a teacher told me to get down. There was another in primary school. I became panicked by a friend chasing me with handfuls of dried leaves, and ran to hide in a bathroom stall. She followed me in and kept trying to get at me. Feeling cornered, and when she stuck her head under the wall of the bathroom stall I kicked. I got her in the head and she reported it to a teacher. I said that it was an accident and I didn’t know her head was there when I kicked. It wasn’t entirely untrue, I hadn’t actually wanted to hurt her. I just wanted her to go away and she wouldn’t. I was frightened by my reaction and didn’t understand it.

I was called stubborn a lot as a child, mostly by my grandparents. I was once called self-righteous by a teacher. As long as I can remember, I believed my purpose was to make the world a better place. I was quite discerning even when young and I was always insightful and intelligent ‘for my age’. Some adults didn’t like a discerning child with a mind of her own. I suppose stubborn is one name for that. I started to believe there was something wrong with me. My sister, who I very much looked up to, called me judgemental in my teenage years. Bit by bit I was shamed out of trusting this discernment, my insight and intelligence. Gradually my instinctive responses and tendencies became entirely muddled. I resolved to be more trusting and give the benefit of the doubt, to put in effort, which ended up translating to permissiveness and one-sided giving that many times resulted in regret.

My home life as a child was, on the whole, extremely difficult. None of what I recount negates the love I felt for my family, not the love they felt for me in their capacity, and that there were of course some happy memories. Despite relationship difficulties and even cessation of contact, I felt a strong love and bond to my sister and mother during my growing up. But it is not the happy times that fed my weird, so that is not the focus here.

The essence of my childhood was instability; my adolescence, fury. Both my parents came from their own challenging family backgrounds, with dysfunctional patterns passed down generation to generation.

My earliest memory was of my mother. She was very upset, sitting on the edge of the bath in the bathroom. I was walking but very small. My mother was beautiful, as all mothers are to their children. She had an aspect of her appearance that she always felt self-conscious about. My father made up a derogatory name around this sensitivity that he would use to upset her. He found it amusing to make her cry. She didn’t just cry, she sobbed. It was heartbreaking to her. Small me was distressed. In that flash of memory, at the time, I know I recognised that something was terribly wrong. I knew my mum and dad were supposed to love each other, and what I saw did not look like love.

My father’s family was an example of entrenched abusiveness. His father was physically abusive while his mother was psychologically and emotionally abusive. His mother even called him a fuckwit to my sister and me, when I was too young to know exactly what it meant but it had an ugly sound and the memory of her using that word remained emblazoned on my mind. If he had spent any time with his mother, I knew even as a young child to stay away from him after he returned home. He would be so volatile. She was ruthlessly cruel to him. He could never do anything right in her eyes. I have never known anyone so full of hate as I remember her.

My sister and I used to joke that we would sing ding dong the witch is dead on her grave when she died. She did eventually die. We did not dance on her grave. Dad had eventually stopped seeing his mother at least, but he never healed. Healing wasn’t exactly something that was done in my parents’ generation.

My father was abusive in our household. It was mainly psychological and emotional in nature. And yet, my father could be such a gentle man. He had a soft, tender soul; that of the small boy who used to find comfort and escape from his own abuse playing with his pet guinea pigs. What I lived with though was a broken shell of a human. By my preteen years, he was a vortex of agony that pulled at us all the time.

There was a corresponding vortex in my mother of unmet need, both emotional and physical. My father did not work at all for many years, leaving my mother solely responsible for the financial wellbeing of the household. She was perpetually unsupported by him, and unable to be sufficiently emotionally stable and available for me and my sister, or to address her own unmet needs. All the while he maintained the lord of the household, holier-than-thou attitude. My dad was in fact a highly intelligent and brilliant man in his profession, yet persistently unsuccessful. Brilliance alone does not overcome untended inner destruction. His presence, as he was, was a burden, and the dynamic of their relationship was an added weight.

When my parents finally separated during my University years, he left the home and it felt as though the whole house just exhaled. My mother and I would sit together in the evenings in silence, marvelling at the quiet. Who knew there could be peace in that house? My dad was brutalised by his upbringing, and even his premature death due to prostate cancer was used by his family as a weapon to suit their grudges. His life was a tragedy. His family was deeply damaged, and tended towards controlling through relentless, remorseless punishment.

My mother’s family, on the other hand, was more an example of complex trauma. It was a kinder family, there was a lightness that I didn’t feel with my father’s family, times of fun and joviality. And there was a lot of covered-over pain and deep suffering. Pain masked by substance use and dark humour. Less open meanness, but a very black and white view of the world; right and wrong, good and bad, little room for flexible thinking. Life was hard and unfair. You had to be tough, particularly as a woman. That was that. It was a different sort of brokenness, a subdued despairing anguish with no hope of resolution. It came through more as we grew older, and there could be frightening eruptions of anger and volatility.

So it was that neither of my parents had received what they needed growing up. As a foundation for me, it afforded one of high stress. There was an ever present hum of danger and latent threat. It was not a place for being and growing. It was an environment engendering a constant guardedness and survival state.

My childhood and adolescence was undercut by an abiding sense of not belonging. On my father’s side, our family was the black sheep. My father’s family never accepted my mother, and his mother was persistently abusive towards her as well as my father. On my mother’s side, I was the black sheep. This was exemplified in my relationship with my Nana, though it was evident with my aunts and uncles too.

I knew that in my Nana’s view, the rigid thinking of good or bad, right or wrong, that I was wrong and bad. I did not know why. I just knew that’s how it was. My sister was a part of the family in a way I never was. They were a support for her later in life that I could not even imagine asking for or receiving, because I wasn’t really ever part of the family.

At an older age, I became aware of a resentment my sister held towards me. In her perception, I was favourited by mum and dad, and there were ways I did receive more leniency at home. As a child I had learned how to play the role of a good girl to best survive a hostile, unstable environment, and that role served me relatively well for a time. I came to perceive that my sister blamed me in some way for the different way my parents acted towards me, as though I was doing something on purpose to her. My sister complained about our different treatment at home and Nana sought to rectify the supposed imbalance.

But I didn’t know any of that or have the ability to understand in that way when I was a child. When I first became aware that I was ‘wrong’ it was incredibly distressing and I thought if I understood then I could fix it. But there wasn’t anything, only the message itself, so eventually I did the only thing I could do in the face of relentless rejection, and internalised that there was in fact something inherently wrong with me.

I got along with two cousins in that family, black sheep like me. I felt an affinity and acceptance with my great aunts and uncles. They were the extended family that felt most like family to me, but I didn’t see them very often. I otherwise attracted people to me easily, and while this meant I always made friends I was also painfully shy in primary school years. Ring the doorbell then hide behind the bushes so I could reveal myself gradually kind of shy. As I grew older, I moved through always feeling a wrongness, to always feeling like I was acting. I learned how to appear confident on the outside, and I had learned how to suppress my weird. I was able to wear a mask more and more convincingly.

During my sister’s preteen years we somehow became aware our father was having an affair with a family friend. Mum didn’t know at that time and I don’t know how we knew. I was still too young to understand it all, or to retain any clear memory around it. I recall it was a big thing to my sister though.

As she grew into a teenager the volatility in the home shot up 1000%. My sister was a black ball of rage and she turned it outwards at everybody. She hated our father, she hated our mother, she slammed doors and screamed and put a hole in a wall at least once. She didn’t turn her hate on me though, not yet. I was so good at taking it all in and on. In fact I idolised my sister, and her distress brought me distress. I found her rage overwhelming, yet I recall over and over trying to comfort her and help carry her suffering. My parent’s fraught relationship and the emotional damage they both carried met my sister’s fury to create a constant seething chaos.

During this time I earned the name ‘peace angel’. I was the one that went among everyone trying to make peace, trying to soothe and settle the energy of the entire household. I was desperate to feel safe, for peace and quiet in my increasingly troubled mind, and I was quietly driving myself to shut down.

By the time I hit my stride as a teenager at 14 I too was full of rage but unlike my sister I had turned it all back on myself. When my sister left home the direct abuse of my father fell on me and the rage began to consume me. I cut myself, I starved myself, I routinely berated my reflection in the mirror, telling her I hated her and how ugly and ‘fat’ and stupid she was. I regularly drank myself into a stupor, not infrequently to blackout, and combined this with weed when I had access to it. I had problematic drinking from age 14 for about 10 or so years. I was also exhausted from what was diagnosed as chronic fatigue that hit me in the middle of my 14th year, combined with relentless insomnia. I was anxious, desperately miserable and suicidal. I cried a lot alone in my room. I was in pain, and I. Was. Angry.

Before my sister left began the incessant lectures of my father. He was a wild hypocrite, with rules for everyone else that he never followed himself. He would get agitated about something and just go on at us. On and on and on. And on and on and on. There was no way to turn it off, there was no way to turn it down, if I tried to walk away it would follow me. Many times I was in my bedroom, my back against the door, my feet against the dresser, my body braced to hold him out as he pushed and battered to try and get in to just keep shouting on and on and on. I would brace the door shut with my body, my hands over my ears, until it stopped.

I inherited a bigger bedroom after my sister’s departure from home. It sat at the other end of the house from my parent’s. Originally built as a home office space, it had its own toilet and a door to the outside. Best of all, it had a lock on the door to the rest of the house. I had to hide the key eventually. My father was always coming in while I was sleeping to use the bathroom, waking me early in the morning. Asking him not to had no effect. He knew the insomnia and fatigue I suffered from, but he said it was all in my head.

At the worst of my systemic crash, there had been mornings where nothing would wake me. The first time it happened I came to consciousness as mum was shaking me by the shoulders. She thought I was unconscious, or in a coma. It was frightening. I had often only been asleep, finally, for a few hours when my father disturbed me. I had recurrent nightmares for years of running into that room, closing and locking the door behind me just in time to escape the pursuing fury. My sanctuary, such as it could be.

During one defiant period, I locked myself in my room for weeks and refused to communicate. He changed the handles to ones without a lock at one point. I found the old knobs and I put them back on in the dead of night. I constructed a system of ropes tying the door shut from the inside. I blocked the door to the outside, but he still found a way in during the times I left the house (through my window). This was a time of extreme desperation. Living with him was torturous. His efforts at absolute control were relentless. There were periods where I fought for my sanity every second of every day. A modicum of peace came through compliance but it was a false peace. It seemed preferable to me and tended to be my choice, bringing with it intense self-loathing and death fantasies. Throughout my adolescence and adulthood I have skirted the edge of madness many times; opened my eyes to the black abyss yawning to take me in; close enough to taste it, so close at times, but never falling in and becoming lost in it.

There were times I was literally writhing in pain with what I felt inside me, when I didn’t drink myself blind instead. I struggled to survive, and I knew I had to. I wrote a lot of poetry to process my pain during my teenage years. The final lines of one poem I can still recall; “all I need to learn is to survive”. I had decided there was some point to it all that would someday make sense to me. There was something I needed to learn. I made the decision not to give up and I promised myself that I would not kill myself, no matter what. That promise held me through multiple bouts of suicidality over the years, from my early teens and sporadically throughout adulthood.

Through this tumult, I learned the value of connection to animals and nature. I loved our pet cats fiercely and connected with them in such a deep way, finding solace in their constancy and simple love. I grew up with regular bushwalking, affording me the opportunity to see the actual land on which we live, to feel its spirit. I can’t imagine what it would be like to never have had the opportunity to be outback and in the bush, miles from any township, surrounded only by the sounds of nature and the majesty of the natural Australian landscape. Animals and nature were stable, reliable, and generous with what they had to give.

I met with the shadow of death a few times. I fell in a swimming pool when I was very small, and my mum jumped in to save me. I slipped in a spa pool in early school years; I can still remember looking up from under the water and seeing the shimmering light I needed to return to. I hadn’t yet learned to swim, still somehow I kicked my way to the surface. At age eight, I was strangled unconscious by a disturbed classmate. The school, in their utter dereliction of duty of care, left me weeping at my desk and moved on with class. That led to my first panic attack; the first of many. I almost slipped down a huge waterfall on a bushwalk. A man was at the top of the small climb, helping the kids up one by one. As I took my turn, my sister scrabbled up faster beside me, gaining the help of the man before me. I felt a shot of fear as I slipped, but the man was in time to get me before I lost my grip. I passed out at university, during a bout of gastritis, and choked on a mint I’d taken to calm my nausea. My body went into shock and convulsed when I could not draw breath. Fortunately the lecturers moving me to the floor jolted the mint free and I was able to breathe. I remember an expansive nothing in my unconscious state, and a male figure sitting beside me, talking with me in the quiet dark. It was surely stressful for everyone else but peaceful for me.

I ‘saw’ things. I don’t remember it all, not much from early years. But I know I was obsessed with spirits, or ghosts, from quite young. I always had a strong imagination and was fascinated by the supernatural. I recall strange encounters of figures, footsteps and rustling in my room, cutlery rattling in the kitchen and chairs banging on the dining room floor in the otherwise quiet of the night. During my teen years they were very active and even responsive to my request, when I asked, for example, for them to make this noise or that while I lay awake in my insomniac state. But they frightened me too.

I felt watched, very prominently during my adolescent struggle. It was a strange sense, not malicious, and it faded as I grew into adulthood. I knew I perceived differently to how others perceived. It’s like I have a second layer of perception. It’s not always pronounced or shouting at me, mostly a background awareness. As it’s always been there I don’t know what it’s like to not have it. In this other perception, there is a different layer of reality, and in that layer I am never alone.

Sometimes I perceive specific things, whether I ‘hear’, ‘see’ or just ‘know’. I saw the moment my mother decided to leave my father; like a rubber band stretched so tight it finally snapped. She told me the next morning she was thinking of leaving him and I said “I know”. She wasn’t thinking of it, she had already left, at least on the energetic level. The material reality just needed to catch up. I saw my beloved great aunt’s energy body, full with love, filling the room as she lay birdlike small and non-verbal in the final days of her life; so much love, around her and between us.

I saw energy when a guy I had been casually seeing decided to break it off with me after an awkward refusal of physical intimacy. As he spoke I could see a shimmering silver cord between us. His energy was trying to pull me closer. In the moment I perceived he was in fear and rejecting himself, and I felt compassion and smiled. He grew agitated that I should smile instead of being bereft. I allowed him to end it and I left. He was not acting in integrity.

Romantic or intimate relationships proved especially difficult. I always felt like I was trying to be seen. Men I knew in that way seemed to want someone to fill a specific concept or role, and that was all they were capable of seeing. I, the actual me, was invisible. Some men tried to get me to stay with them where they were in their concept of reality, in their story, moving to their beat. But I needed something they could not offer, something intangible; mutual evolution and expansion and true connection. Expecting more from them, beyond a certain point, would have been like expecting a stone to sprout wings and fly. No surprise that I could not learn to dance to the tune of men when I was destined to dance with dragons.

I left a lot of people behind. People, places, things. I’ve done a lot of grieving at that. It has always seemed as though things just fall away eventually, whether there was a leaving on their part or something shifted in me that I lost any impetus to remain. I learned to let go. Friends, family, jobs, men. Alone, without attachments, I found the peace I craved. I found the freedom I craved. No need to be understood, to be seen, to be heard, to be known. Less doing, more being. All those times that I wanted to die, what I really wanted was just that; peace and freedom. At least death would be stable. Quiet. Constant. Reliable. Honest. No subterfuge. No manipulation. No malice. It would be simply what it is.

Yet each day I opened my eyes with at least a small shred of hope. I hoped that I would find my way, that I would make sense of all that I had lived through, that I would learn one day what it feels like to live in love. When I didn’t have even a shred of hope, I held tight to a small faith that hope would return.

We were each of us gifted with the birthright of our consciousness. We have been duped out of our birthright for generation upon generation. Centuries. Millenia. In our current world, unconsciousness is normalised, deeply embedded, even celebrated. Holding on to consciousness through upbringing among unconsciousness is a monumental task. There are so many forces pushing us to ingrain ourselves entirely in the material world, to believe in it completely as the full extent of what it means to exist as human. Even the strongest may need to shut down at least in parts to ensure survival of the vessel. The desire of consciousness to return, however, is always present in each of us. The arc ever bends back towards the natural state.

My last two years have been a time of miraculous experience and awakening, and my past has begun to make sense. While I am ever learning, I have come to understand that there was no one quite like me for a reason. Connection was difficult because I require connection at a level that most have forgotten exists, including my conscious self for a long time. I appreciate that the trials of my life have tempered a formidable mind, and the courage required to come through it untarnished has forged a powerful heart. It has allowed me to experience things I could not have imagined. There is a sacred design to my life that I am still coming to see fully, one that serves a meaningful purpose. If it had been otherwise, if I had an easy life of softness and deep human connection, I would not be who I am.

People always called me weird. I came to accept it. I figured the alternative was to be normal, average. What person in their right mind aspires to be average anyway? I was weird. I am still weird. I am only getting weirder. I tried to be other than I was. I tried to be what I needed to be in order to fit the pattern of this man made world. Now it is time for the pattern to bend.

It is time for the pattern to break.

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