In the Midst of the Debris- Growing Up in a Hoarder's House, Energy Webs and Why I No Longer Really "Do Facebook"

I am about eighteen years old.  As I climb into bed, I check my feet for fleas, I see several, perched there, ready to feast.  I pick each one off, slice it in half with my thumbnail (the only way I have found to kill them without bug spray) and I lift my legs into the sheets.  This is my usual pre-sleep routine.  It is my norm.  No vacuuming helps, no "bombs" help.  There are always fleas on me.  Always.  I am sure there are fleas in my bed as I sleep because I wake up with bites all over me yet there, in my pre-sleep ritual, I find the only way I can actually bring myself to occupy the mattress.

At lunch I will seek a piece of cheese or cold cuts from the refrigerator, its interior covered in mold.  My mother asks me to find something in her bedroom where I will literally have to climb over boxes and rummage through piles of clothes like a squirrel foraging for an acorn that it knows must be there.  Before I shower, I wonder where I will find a towel, the linen closet long occupied by countless magazines from decades gone by.  The hallways and stairs are narrower each day, but I learn how to maneuver through them without falling or stubbing my toes.

I walk the floors and am careful not to slip on a cat's hairball, vomit, or feces.  If I find them, I clean them, yet there are always more.  When I do clean them, I incur the wrath of my mother, who takes the gesture as a direct insult toward her housekeeping skills.  The house wreaks with an odor, which most would find nauseating, though I have grown used to it, my asthmatic lungs taking the full brunt of its force.  Friends no longer come over because they are not invited, for I fear for their safety and know that I would not be able to handle the embarrassment of these conditions.

I live in filth.

This is the home in which I live.  This is a hoarder's home.

For years I had no name for the space in which I lived while a child.  I did not know it was a "thing" until I was channel surfing and came upon the show, "Hoarders".  Poof!  There is was!  Like a light coming on, all of a sudden I knew what to call it and I knew that I wasn't the only one who had lived in it.  It was strangely comforting while being distressing.  I felt for the children.  I remembered what it was like, it all came back to me.

There is no true way to describe what it is like to live in a hoarder's house.  The only way I can articulate it is to say that it is a consuming feeling, like you are being swallowed up.  By stuff.  Your room gradually getting smaller and smaller like you are Alice in Wonderland, growing larger, while your surroundings shrink. It is pure chaos and confusion.  It is like living inside of someone else's "mind clutter".  All of their inner turmoil being forced upon you like mental vomit, manifested in physical form.  Spewed out into every corner with a strange sense of nothing being important and vitally important, all at the same time.  All things are laid out on an even plane with almost no way to decipher value -- countless volumes of magazines saved in the same haphazard way that a family photo album is stored.  You are in a negative energy web and there is very little hope of breaking free.

So, you may be saying to yourself:  What the hell does this have to do with Facebook?

What is has to do with Facebook, at least for me, is that feeling of negativity and being closed in by other people's "stuff".   All of their "stuff."  Every day.  Good, bad, mundane, important, positive and negative all being played out on a level plane.  But, it is mostly negative.  Overwhelmingly negative.  So and so is complaining about her job - AGAIN.  So and so is complaining about the weather - AGAIN.  So and so emailed me about my inappropriate humor - AGAIN.  Yup, I was surrounded and it felt familiar.  I was in the spew.  I was surrounded by the mental clutter of 200+ people's heads, some posting  15-20 thoughts day!  I was in the energy web, and it wasn't a good one.  I began to get more migraines, partly from staring at the computer screen and partly out of feelings of irritation.  On advice from my migraine doctor, I took time off from social media.

And....

It. Was. Awesome.

No more "stuff"!  No more negativity! No more mental clutter occupying my time!!!!

Ahhhhh...

Oh, I tried to go back.  I felt the pull.  But, when I did, it was way too hard to catch up, and I wasn't sure I wanted to catch up.  I wanted to be free of the need to catch up.  I wanted to be free of the pull.  I deleted the app from my phone and breathed a sigh of relief.

 While you could feel offended by my statements of disdain regarding my news feed, if you are logical, you will realize that you are in the spew too.  You know you roll your eyes more than once as you scroll.  You know you tell people to "shut up" in your head.  You know it's a love/hate roller coaster that you are riding.

I just came to a point where I wanted to get off.  I wanted out of the negative energy web.  I wanted a positive space to occupy.

Of course I do have another small Facebook account for people whom I encounter on a regular basis, who are not overwhelmingly negative.  However, it too, remains deactivated at the moment.  Because I just don't feel like it.  No offense.  No hard feelings toward anyone.  No lack of kindness in my heart.  No lack of caring about anybody who is my friend or acquaintance.

I may occasionally pop on and post a status or check in with some friends, or I might start a blog to log all of my random odd thoughts.  Who knows.

But, for now, I just don't feel like it.

That's right.  I just don't feel like it.

And it's great.

Yup.

What Gets Left Behind-The Bricks and Mortar of a Loner Personality

I am five years old.  I feel my mother's hand on my forearm and I hear her speak the words: "No, you stay here, I will be back in a little while."  But I want to go with her.  I do not know this place and I do not know these people.  I smell smoke from cigarettes and it is dark.  I hear the man we are with, the man who delivers milk to our house each week from a white truck that has "Christiansen's" on its side, tell the guy behind the bar that it will only be about an hour.  I assess from their interactions that they might be brothers, as I continue to plead with my mother to go with her.  She insists.  She pushes me toward the stool and I feel the loosening of her grasp, then the distance, then the absence.

I expect her to come back inside.

I wait for it.

I feel tears on my cheeks.

I am afraid.

The first sting of being abandoned, even for a short while by my mother, rises in me.

I run from the stool to the door and am stopped by the man who has been behind the bar.  He tells me it will be okay, and I find myself looking eye to eye with a stranger.  And there, in that bar on North Main Street in Providence, now known as "The Parlour", began a series of being left behind and the foundation for severe separation anxiety was poured.

I would find myself at the bar once a week for what seemed like years.  Often, I would wake in the car in a parking lot after falling asleep, while my mother shopped, not knowing where to find her. Other times I would await my mother in the school yard at length until she arrived, numerous calls to the house made by the principal to retrieve her, reaping no reply.

Desertion is insidious.  You anticipate being cast off at every turn.  A child, unlike an adult, is trapped where you leave them.  They cannot leave the space for fear you will return, while they simultaneously desire to leave and search for you.

I wondered for years why no one intervened, why my mother got away with leaving me.  I have come to determine, from talking to my father, who I never told because I thought he knew, that she was "responsible enough" to not cause alarm.  She left me at the bar with the brother of the man she left with, she left me in the car at a time when there were less fears about your kids being harmed or taken, she left me standing in the school yard from time to time, with an irregular pattern.

Ironically, this woman, who has an extreme fear of abandonment, had seen it fit to leave me, whenever she felt the need.  So instilled in me was the fear of her leaving me behind that I could not be left anywhere, even with relatives, without crying and vomiting. I was inconvenient, a burden to her plans and her desire to do what she wanted. Yet I forgave her each time and although I ran to her when she returned to me, filled with relief and love, she did not comfort me, she did not apologize, she did not seem happy to see me.  And in such, the realization that I deserved to abandoned grew.  I struggled with separation from her for years, causing issues at school, with family, and with the formation of friendships.

But the thing my mother did not know is that with every abandonment, with every hour that I waited for her to come back, with every moment that passed, I was changing slowly.  The thoughts of deserving desertion were being hard wired in my mind and sadness and mourning were being replaced by bricks that I was adding to the wall I was building around me, and my mother was the mortar that would make the wall impervious to most.

Neglect seeps in with a slow bleed.  When you are young, you feel the hurt, the damage pervades the psyche until you cannot be damaged any more.  What was sensitive becomes calloused like palms forced through hard labor.  Your mind will do anything to protect itself.  It learns to adapt to the environment which aims to destroy it.  Every ounce of me, which once sought the comfort and the companionship of my mother, began to encase me with an improved design:  a design that did not need the things that were not provided to me.

To this day I have the wall.  I let very few people in to get to know me.  I am not sure if it's because I want to "leave" you before you leave me, or whether I don't want to commit for fear of making another person feel abandoned.  I will only get close to some, and those who I do feel a connection have to understand that I spend a lot of time alone.  I cannot need them.  I cannot feel the pull of a necessary relationship.  I will never again be that little girl who waited in the backseat of the car, bound to the space I occupied because I did not know whether I should search or stay.

I realize that this is not a great quality.  I work on this everyday.  I am trying.  I know that people who try to befriend me become frustrated with this aspect of my personality.  I want to tell people who attempt friendships with me that it is not them, that my elusive ways are my survival mode.

The wall is thick and high, but not impossible to transcend.  It takes time, sometimes very little, other times endless hours.  I cannot predict how someone with affect me or how I will be moved to make a relationship work.  There are some people I respond to immediately, something in them stirring an element of safety in me that negates my fears.  If I feel safe, the bricks come down, one by one. I will let know me, you will see what lies behind the wall, and you will know me as a friend.

I am now a parent myself and I simply cannot imagine doing this to my child.  In fact, the experience has left me somewhat paranoid and overprotective.  I make my son, who is seven years old, hyper aware of my whereabouts when we are out and about.  I have never and will NEVER say, "I'm leaving without you" to him.  Because I know what it feels like.  He will not know the pain of intentionally being left behind.  He will know that he is valued and loved and that I will always embrace the opportunity to reunite with him after being apart.

The Power in a Bad Example - Putting Forth the Energy You Want to Receive

There is power in the image on this page.  It speaks volumes about my upbringing; it gives a glimpse into the world that surrounds my mother.  Look carefully here - notice the facial expressions, notice the only one who is smiling.  There she is, content, while my sister, my father and I stare blankly at the camera.

Ahh yes, my mother; the master of image making in the moment-- in a social setting, putting forth for a brief period of time what she wanted people to see and think of her.  But the truth is that my mother was and is misery itself.  And in that, she makes those around her feel the same.  But, while this might have a negative connotation to some, it has served as a learning tool for me.  There is so much to be learned from a bad example.

I know now that I am much more like my father in the energy that I put forth in this world.  While I have my bad days, like all humans, for the most part, I know I am received, not just perceived as a positive, pleasant human being.  I say this not to brag or pretend to be better than others, but to expound upon the capacity of the energy that you put out into the world.  I say received, not just perceived because the energy I am putting forth is genuine and heartfelt.  You feel it, you draw it in and, if you are receptive, perhaps it will pull you up with it. 

Part of me has always been this way, part of this I learned from my dad, and oddly enough, part of it I leaned from my mother's consistent negativity.  Unlike my mother, I embrace contentment.  I feel it in the smallest things and I know that happiness is not the true pursuit.  Contentment is the baseline for everyone.  All other emotions fall above or below this line and to pursue constant happiness will leave you falling short and miserable.

It is so much better being a person people who others want to see, who people want to be around.  And we have all been around people like this, people who make you feel comfortable, who exude contentment and who help you to see your own.  I look at my mother and see a person who has been abandoned. She is alone in her negativity both literally and figuratively.  The energy she set forth in life now returning to her ten fold.  It is a sad thing to witness.  I feel for her, even though I know she has been the architect of her own fate.  I wish I could teach her what she has taught me, I wish she could become receptive to the energy that I put forth.

Because I believe in the power of osmosis.

The Wounding Hours - The Destructive Nature of "Calm"

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there was
A time when it was not.
It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

-Emily Dickinson

During my fourteenth year, I began to recover from anorexia and returned to high school.  It was then that I discovered the poetry of Emily Dickinson.  Unlike so many poems I had read which required discussion to be understood, I related to them immediately and in her words I felt an instant connection. I would find out later that Emily's mother suffered from severe depression and was very aloof.  In regard to her mother, the poet herself wrote:

"When we were children and she journeyed, she always brought us something. Now, would she bring us but herself, what an only gift."

Upon reading that quote, I suddenly grasped the connection and felt a kinship, more deeply than I wished and, in her verses, I felt acknowledged.

To say that my mother was always aloof or cruel would be a lie.  She had moments that felt like true caring.  They followed the harsh times and when they arrived, I embraced them with everything I had and hoped that they would not end.  But, just as times of cruelty ended, so did moments like these, followed by an odd neutrality, or calm that left me alone with my own thoughts.  For those who have never experienced abuse, this would seem the best reprieve-- a time of freedom from misunderstanding and mistreatment -- a time to breathe and recover.  But for the mind of someone who is abused, whether psychologically or physically, these are the most wounding hours.

All forms of abuse take on the same pattern: tensions building, incident, reconciliation, and calm.  While no two incidents of abuse can be equated, the moments of calm are the same, these are the hours and days that are consumed by self-blame and self-doubt.  While these hours initially start with the question of "why", over the course of time, they get answered with "me".  You wonder what you did to deserve the punishment, you wonder what you should do differently to prevent it from happening again, and you wonder what you did right to get to this calm.  You are the common denominator in the equation and the outcome always comes down to you. There is never a  moment when you blame the abuser. NEVER.  It is a jarring reality that the interior of one's own head is often the most savage environment one can encounter.  But there, in the content of your mind, you construct the walls that confine you.

I spent many of my wounding hours within the confines of my closet.  In that space, I felt secure.  The drape of the clothes touching every side of me in the dark felt like a womb.  Yet, as time went on and I grew older, my thoughts of blame grew darker and my constant wish for death turned womb to makeshift tomb.  By the age of ten I longed to die and had a morbid fascination with my own demise.  While other kids dreamt of Disney World, I contemplated suicide.  The darkness had a grip on me and would not set me free.  There were no longer steps in the cycle, there was only pain.  An infinite loop of pain.

I often wonder when things changed for me.  I wonder when the wounding hours stopped.  Perhaps it did not stop at once, perhaps it was a subtle process initiated by that surge of self worth on that cold January day at Bradley Hospital while I was suffering from Anorexia Nervousa.  Perhaps, as I got older and encountered people who loved me, accepted me, welcomed me, nurtured my self esteem and embraced all that I was, the grip loosened its hold.

Whatever is was and however it occurred, I know now that while I am still not the most confident person you will ever meet, I am not my own worst enemy.  I am kind to myself.  I did not stifle myself with self-blame.  I speak to myself on the inside just as kindly as I speak to myself on the outside.  I know that to do otherwise would welcome the pain.

I now choose to embrace every right thing and every wrong thing about me.  I accept the past and I accept that I cannot change things that have happened nor things that I have done.  I am the best imperfection that I can be, and it that I am content.  And in that, I am loved.




Be kind to yourself.


Let the voice in your head be that which pushes you forward toward better things, not the voice that saddles you with self-doubt.  

You are the only person you will spend the rest of your life with, spend the time wisely.

Mind over Mattering: coming out of the shadow of an egocentric parent

I am about six years old.  I stand on the walkway of my childhood home, the heat of the flames stinging my eyes and warming my face.  As I move toward the fire, I see my mother, looking at me with fury and I suddenly realize what is burning in the pile on the walk.  It's my favorite toy, a stuffed Snoopy that I sleep with every night.  I fall to my knees crying, and I beg her to stop.  She does not stop.  She adds things to the flames and my screams grow louder.  She walks toward me and whispers, "it will be okay, next time do what I tell you to do".  And I am engulfed in her will , her needs, her wants, her anger, her interpretation of events ....

And I wake.

But it's not just a dream, it's a distant memory.  An event I was told about long ago that I could not remember, blocked out and buried, only to revisit during a shift at work, as I walked by a stuffed Snoopy, almost exactly like the one I had as a child.  It is the memory that influenced the title of this blog.  And there, in that passage of time, is the epitome of my relationship with my mother, my mother's relationship with all people really: her feelings and needs always usurping those of others.

I cannot recall what I did to anger my mother, and to attempt to remember is pointless, since very often with those who have Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) there is no reason for the punishment. Or more likely, there is a perceived offense that never occurred and all attempts to plead your case to the contrary do not matter and neither do you.  Such is the nature of someone with this mental illness-- the world revolves around them.

To matter to a person with BPD is impossible.  Well, not possible in the way that it should be, and for me, not possible in the way that a child should matter to its mother.  Humans are "causes" to their "effect" and all sense of caring comes down to their wants and their happiness, and to whether they feel safe, protected, and free of the fear of abandonment.  And, in such, you are left to their whim, and are the recipient of the aftermath.

When she had a bad day, she would not pick me up at school.  When I miscarried, she wished me dead because I did not comfort her for her loss.  When I was in labor, I had to talk to her on the phone to squelch her fear that I would die and leave her alone.

I get it, I understand how she works.  I don't need sympathy or pity or anything of that nature.  I know it is not my mother's fault.  I know she knows no other way.  I do not place blame.  I am used to it.  You adjust.  You let it in and you let it go.  I do not cling to the anger or the hate.  But doing so does not negate the fact that you do not matter to the person whom you should matter most.

When I was young, I could not let it go, the lack of mattering worked its way in and took its toll.  I drowned her out with food.  It always made me feel good and it didn't require constant attention and comforting.  It insulated me, and I knew I could always eat to make myself feel better-- eating to the point of obesity to dull the pain.  As I entered my teenage years, the pain literally started to eat away at me, and I developed anorexia nervosa, plummeting from two-hundred pounds to eighty pounds within four months.  It was what I was taught; it was the foundation that had been laid out for me.  If you are not listened to, if your emotional needs are not met, if you are not understood, if you do not matter, you learn to treat yourself in unkind ways, until you know better.  For me, that "knowing better" came when I was fourteen years old.

They say that there are defining moments in your life-- moments that you will never forget and that change you permanently, and this defining moment arrived on a cold January day.  I was in Bradley Children's Hospital for the treatment of anorexia nervosa and bulima.  My parents came to see me and I remained silent during their visit, furious with them for putting me there.  In the silence, I could see my mother's agitation and, as it grew, she rose to leave and screamed, "How dare you not speak to us?  Don't you know how much this place is costing us for your treatment?!"

And there it was again.

Not mattering.

I was the cause to her effect.  I was near death and there was no affection, no concern, no words of comfort, there was just her and how I was hurting her in some way.  I was costing her too much money.

I was an expense.

She made me angry.  I was filled with rage for this woman who had, in some way, pushed me to this point and the fact that she could STILL see nothing but herself.  And, for the first time, I felt my own worth.  I could feel it come up from the depths of who I was, like an animal rising up to attack its prey, and it felt different; it felt better.  That point, as vivid today as it was when it occurred, changed me.  It changed the very core of who I am, and I tear up thinking about it.  I felt the power of knowing that I mattered to me, even if I never mattered to anyone else.

And, in that space in time I could more clearly fathom my affect on others and my interactions with them.  I understood at that moment, how much it hurts to have no importance, to feel misunderstood, to have no value.  And, today, while I am still "broken" in so many ways in my ability to form friendships, those who I do care for know it.  There is no room for any doubt.  You feel it.  I check in.  I listen to you.  I try to understand things from your perspective.  I care, and you will know it.  You will feel valued.

You will know that you matter.

The Space Between: finding a sense of "self" in a lack of memories

My counselor once asked me what it felt like to have a mother with Borderline Personality Disorder and I told her that it felt like falling backwards.  When you fall forwards,  you see what is in front of you, you know the good, the bad, and everything in between.  You are aware of your outcome and can, in some way, brace yourself.  Falling backwards is trickier.  You don't know what's behind you, amplifying the fear.  That was my mother:  a fall backwards, where you didn't know what would happen, but you knew there would be no safe place to land.

From my earliest memories I recall feeling desperate for my mother.  Yes, strange and hard to articulate, but I truly felt that she and I were connected and that my leaving her would be detrimental to both of us.  I could not be separated from her without screaming or occasionally vomiting and had an extremely difficult time socially and in school for the early years of my life because of this fact.  There was no division. When she cried-- I cried, when she hurt-- I hurt, when she hated-- I hated. There was nothing for me but her and I did not know where she started and I began, and she wanted it that way.

To understand why I felt this, you must first understand that those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have an extreme fear of abandonment and isolate their victims, creating an environment where the BPD person is "God" --sending a consistent message of everyone else being evil or wrong.  Couple this manipulation, which is akin to brainwashing, with a child being raised from birth in this world, and you realize the unhealthy bond that formed between my mother and me.  An insecure attachment, where inconsistent affection, intermingled with abusive language, aloof interactions and threats of abandonment were the norm. I needed her. She was my only salvation and she wasn't going to let me forget it.  Yet the salvation was never there, and I clung to the edge always hoping it would come.

"Insidious Rift", graphite drawing on vellum (2010).
  The image represents my feelings of separating
 from my mother after several years of therapy,.
being torn away from what I once thought
was my "whole".  The reversed faces, a reflection
of my love/hate feelings toward her.

While I can recall my desperate attempts to stay connected to my mother, there are many moments that I cannot remember at all.  In those passages it feels like I didn't actually exist, much like the dreamless sleep of anesthesia, where you remember before and after, with nothing in between. Fragmented bits that occasionally flash back when provoked to the surface like a boil, influenced by a present day event or occurrence.

It is this absence that makes it difficult to view photos and feel a sense of attachment to the child in them.  I cannot see "me" or recognize any relation to who I am now.  All except for one. There is one photo where I am present.  I am sitting at the kitchen table with my legs bent up under me, I am painting and I am content. I am fully me.  I can feel it.  I am there in the space between.  The margin that existed between me and my mother and the girl I presented to the world.

I know now that that is where I would go in those moments when I would "break" from my mother.  I know this is where I was when I was drawing, when I would hide in my closet from her fury, and when I would escape to the woods to sit on the ground that absorbed my tears.  I am there in that photo, in the space between.  I am there in the space that saved me.

And we all have that space.  The gap that exists between what we want the world to think of us and the person who is perceived by others.  It is the expanse that defines the real you.   Maybe you feel it when you are walking alone, being creative, or as you drift off to sleep.  There you are, wearing no other hats or bending to the whims of other people. There you are, fully yourself, being the person you were before the world told you what it expected from you.

As I sit here and type, I am in the space between.  Since ending therapy two years ago I visit more often and with intent.  It is the sole reason that I spend so much time alone. So much of my life used to be intertwined in another person's personality and I was lost in the chaos.  But I no longer feel that chaos.  I finally know who I truly am.

Here I am, and it is a pleasure to meet me.

The view from here

I have spent most of my life being the funny girl, finding humor in most things and trying my best to make people laugh.  But, truth be told, I'm not sure I was born funny. My humor, I believe, is the direct result of growing up with a mother who was mentally ill-- a mother with Borderline Personality Disorder; a mother who was always sad and could never find contentment.

Although I spent many years in therapy discussing my experiences with my mother and have had my negative thoughts and feeling about her, I find myself now striving to see how many of the less than pleasant interactions I had with her actually helped shape the person I am today, with an oddly positive result -- like my wacky sense of humor.

This blog is being created to let others hear my voice regarding my relationship with my mother and my never ending attempt to put a positive spin on almost every ash that came from her fire.

And we all do this, don't we?  We all salvage things from the fire, from the bridges we burn, the battles we fight, and the moments that break our hearts.  So, maybe on some level, you will be able to relate.

While I will be speaking of someone who is mentally ill, I will attempt to be kind and understanding and it is never my intention to insult any person with mental illness. However, I am telling my story and giving the view from here.

I am currently working on my first entry, and I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read them.