Total Media Fast: Day 13, Letter to a Friend

Mørketida is more than just the depression that comes with the dark.  It is a time where all of the loss experienced over a two year period is compressed into 3-4 months. These losses starting with the death of my mother and proceeding to the loss of 11 other people from my life. The darkness takes me in--revealing secrets of my past that have guided me blindly through life.  Giving a name to the "gaslighting" experienced from being my mother's son.  I am amazed that I (*cough*) "thrived" in such an emotionally volatile ecosystem where the weather changed so much on a whim. Perhaps it was her absence--as much her presence--that help me grow.  But that did not come without damages...that are experienced by my sisters and myself.  Damages that are confounded without accountability for them.  And in mørketida there is no escape.

As I extricate myself from the media shit-storm, I cannot always silence the demons that then awoke.  On the contrary, it is as if an obsessive-compulsive confirmational bias kept them sleeping in the first place...mollified that there was someone out there that somehow "knew".  Rankled by the media and unmollified by disengagement from the "fix", suppressed memories, feelings, and experiences are served with a vengeance.  Memories and instances where my sense of agency and self-confidence took a back seat to upholding my mother's self-contradictory narrative.  A narrative undermined meaning rage, suspicion, and being labeled as a villain--as abusive.  Eventually, I said "enough".  Eventually, I said that my sense of anger, my experience, my intuition, my self-respect, and my boundaries deserved as much respect as hers.  And then she died six months after I last spoke with her.

In the media feeding frenzy on the sexual misconduct charges great and small I hear the amplified echo of my mother's voice. Holding me, somehow, accountable for all that has been done in the name of my gender. Trying to remake my masculinity into a shape antithetical to her fear. Triggered into a shame-inspiring rage by my words or actions reminding her of some abuse, I learned early to tip-toe through these triggers. A dance tragically transferred to other relationships and disabling me from that which I deeply craved--connection.

I reflect deeply on my mother's experience.  I see that she suffered from bipolar disorder--to say the least.  I see that she created a narrative of an intentionally abusive world to shield her from the sheer rawness of existence and the fear of dying.  A narrative that both gave her a sense of power and masked the depth of her insecurity.  Mere power was not "empowerment" and she abused that power when confronted with the narrative undermined.  In both a depth of love and compassion, I am grateful for her gifts and her genuine love. However, in compassion and love for myself, I name what she did to her children as abusive.  I say no less about the amplified echo I hear of her in the culture around me.