And now comes the business of living without the shackles and with the freedom inherent in not being enmeshed with N's. It's no wonder I feel like a much younger person - it's when people are young that this freedom should be experienced! It's an opening up of the world that adolescents and young adults feel when they're in charge of themselves completely for the first time - I was so bound up in fear and anxiety, so convinced that I'd fail, so sure that I wasn't capable that I missed it the first time around! It's amazing that Nparents can give the message simultaneously that you're 1)incapable of making it on your own and 2) on your own without a net. Right after my sophomore year in college, I decided to drop out - I couldn't decide what I wanted to do and it just seemed silly to continue without a goal. A friend convinced me to apply to college abroad and I did and was accepted.. When I told Nmother, she said I could go as long as she didn't have to do anything to make it happen. And this, believe it or not, I viewed as encouragement! Yes, I was taught early to expect nothing and then if there was the tiniest bit of positive anything, I saw it as encouragement! Is it any wonder that my life has been somewhat odd and that I've stayed enmeshed in NFOO for so long? I feel like a mist has disappeared and that I can see life more clearly. It's very odd to have such clarity and I'm relishing it - and dreaming about how different life can be now... Ah.
One of my great fears as a child was that I'd be crazy. I know, I know, there were all those spiders and monsters and things that go bump in the night, but I feared going crazy. When I learned about narcissism, I was sure that the reason for the fear was that Nfather looked nuts when he was raging and I didn't want to be like him. The real reason, of course, was hidden (because that's what NFOO's do) - my maternal great-grandfather (grandfather's father) had committed suicide and my maternal grandmother (mother's mother) had been confined to a mental institution and received electroshock therapy. These were things I didn't find out until I was much older because family secrets are just that - secret. But apparently I had absorbed that fear as a young child and lived with it a long time. And of course being a scapegoat made manipulating all of that easy - anyone not marching to the correct beat was crazy, unreliable, unstable. It really is amazing that I made it out alive...
And now my life can be different - I have so many choices and decisions to make, but for today, I'm going to have coffee and weave and take a walk - and enjoy life!
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