violent-darts:

thebeadmusetx:

star-anise:

grrlcookery:

violent-darts:

As my Rainbow Fish post pushes towards 16K notes, the thing that always breaks my heart is the tag-cloud stories and sometimes replies. 

Some of them are clearly from childhoods that would have been abusive no matter what – the person’s giftedness happened to be one of the tools, one of the things about them that abusive parents or teachers or peers turned into a club to hit them with – and those are fucking tragic and I’m so sorry. And it’s not your fault: when all a parent can say they like about you is “you had so much potential” it is not your fault, that is them being horrible. Every fucking child is lovable, likeable. For a parent to say that says there’s something wrong with them, not you. 

And then the other ones that break my heart so bad are the ones where … the parent meant well. Or the teacher. Or whoever. Or where it was kids being horrible little shits but the actual problem was (and always is) the adults who didn’t intervene because seven year olds are always little shits, they’re seven, they literally did not come with kind generous ethical behaviour installed. We have to teach them that. We have to teach them what’s good and what’s bad and that means you don’t sit there and enable them harassing their classmate because a) it is hideously horrible for the poor target and you have a responsibility to protect them but also b) you are doing the bully NO DAMN FAVOURS. 

But also: do not tell your eight year old it’s up to them to save the world. Especially don’t tell your fucking hypersensitive hyper-intellectual eight year old it’s up to them. Do not tell a child who’s just been hit by the overwhelming weight of the chaotic difficulty that is decency and humanity in the world that it’s their job, their responsibility, to “use their talents” to fix things. 

They’re eight fucking years old. Their job is to learn how to be kind and learn how to tie their own shoes, to learn how to regulate their emotions and behaviours, to let their brains expand, to learn how to think, to do all the things eight year olds need to do in a safe space so they can be best prepared to join the huge overwhelming effort of making the world better, with the rest of us, when they’re grown up. 

Nobody can save the world by themselves. It’s possible we’re not even up to it en masse and there’s seven billion of us and counting and it’ll probably still take another hundred years or so before we get our shit together enough that we can save ourselves. One eight year old sure as fuck can’t, and the best that any one of us can really hope to do is figure out how not to make it worse. 

Which is a much harder proposition when you’re exhausted, anxious and miserable from the three mental health disorders that you developed because when you were eight and your ability to cognitively grasp the vastness of human suffering massively exceeded your emotional ability to process and deal with it AND your critical thinking skills to take that apart and grasp the impossibility of it, someone loaded you down like Atlas. 

Do not tell your eight year old that they owe their soul to the world. Or that they’re letting people down by not “living up to potential”. Your eight year old as a human owes other people basic decency and human consideration, and their best “potential” is a life wherein they have found themselves a space to be content and sturdy and solid in the world so that they can best act out that decency and human consideration. 

That is the only “potential” anyone needs to worry about. 

This has been your intermittent Feelings-Dump by Feather about Kids and that post and how she just wants to go back in time, find all of you when you were six, tell you you’re good enough, and take you to play in the playground. Or read a book. Or get ice-cream. Or whatever. 

This is why I love and have major problems with series like The Dark Is Rising (the writing is still so beautiful) and HP and Naruto. There are so many stories about Special Children Taking On Scary Shit They Shouldn’t Have To, and hardly any of the adults involved express any discomfort. It’s a trope and it was a comfort to read examples of people being scared and doing stuff anyway. But it also left me with a pretty scewed sense of responsibility, and more importantly, there were very few models for me of people asking for help, being helped without being shamed, and just adults saying, “I can see this is hard and that’s ok.” If I could write stories, I’d focus on that. Because I didn’t even know how badly I needed it.

This is the heart of why I say, “What we need is a new myth.” The Campbellian monomyth–a child leaves home on a journey, achieves great things, and becomes a hero–is not, as has been theorized, the symbolic path of every soul’s ascension to adulthood. 

It’s a result of place and time. Folktales used to be a lot more diverse; there are thousands of tale types. But this one in particular started taking over everything during the Industrial Revolution, during a time where people stopped being able to live on traditional farms. When Billy Begg’s mother says, “This land cannot feed us, so you and your brothers must go and seek your fortunes,” that isn’t because land is fundamentally unable to produce food; it’s because the economy is changing, rents are rising, the price of grain has dropped, smallholders are being squeezed out by enclosures, and the only escape from desperate urban poverty is to take a ship across the ocean to a colony far away from everything you’ve ever known.

Modern takes on European mythology are so fanatically obsessed with survival of the individual, with independence from traditional communities, because that’s the legacy of European colonialism. Our schools are designed to help us tolerate displacement and disconnection, first with a new teacher every year, then a new school, then new classes every hour; this prepares us for the need to leave our communities to find schooling and work, to move thousands of miles to suit our employers’ whims, to be prepared to be young and alone in a city where you know nothing, eating takeout surrounded by your entire earthly goods packed up in cardboard boxes.

And we blame ourselves for being weak enough to fall into loneliness and depression.

We need to mine our lives for the ways we have found richness there, and we need to mine old stories for the tales of a growing network of allies, favours traded and love given; and we also need to try to change the material circumstances that privilege profit of the rich over the wellbeing of their workers, when we reach places so bleak stories cannot change them.

I just read all of the original Rainbow Fish post and then all of this.

And I started crying while reading it aloud to my husband.

I’ve been doing exactly what Violent Darts wrote about. Inadvertently. Because my mother did it to me.

I grew up with narcissistic abuse. I’ve finally discovered it, and I am trying to come to terms with it. I have started trying to heal from it by reading books and attempting the self therapy methods.
But I live in Texas. I can’t afford to go therapist searching. I can’t afford to go get the broken, impacted wisdom tooth pulled, or the other three impacted wisdom teeth. I can’t afford to go get a checkup to see why my breathing is getting worse or to go to a gastric doctor to check on my gallbladder and gallstones.

This past Tuesday, my husband’s job abruptly closed. Mismanagement by the owners is the cause.
Thursday, (yesterday) we got an investigation letter with a date and time from Health and Human Services because last year’s income is a disaster and they probably think we intentionally lied about it to keep our two girls insured. And on the way to have dinner at a friend’s house, the A/C in our van stopped working completely and it got so hot that our 1-year-old was sweating and red by the time we got to our destination. Even with the front windows down and the back vents open.

I’m at a loss for what to do. I’m a wife. A mom. An artist. A wildlife rescuer, a reptile keeper, and reptile enthusiast. I do my best to volunteer time to educate others about reptiles and wildlife, ecology, the environment. I consider myself a citizen scientist.

I was always told by teachers that I was awesome. Incredibly intelligent and worthy of going to college. And my mom, to this day (I’m 29) tells me, “those teachers all said you were soo special. That’s what’s wrong with the world today. Teachers telling every kid that they are special. You aren’t anything special. They need to stop coddling kids in school.”

She would tell me to “figure things out yourself” from an early age. I was forced to problem solve things because of how little effort she wanted to put into raising us.

There’s so much more that I want to write here, but I can’t.

I’m reblogging this in case followers I have who are in Texas might have some solid ideas of who @thebeadmusetx could contact for help and what services exist; I know these can be a bit thin on the ground depending on where you are in the USA, which makes local knowledge/expertise all the more important. 

Hopefully you don’t mind, @thebeadmusetx? (If so let me know and I’ll delete.) If anyone does, it’d be best to leave reply on their reblog, or reach out to them more directly. 

That said, as @star-anise said in a comment, http://www.211texas.org/ does seem to be a good start and while I am absolutely sure it seems overwhelming and horrible, I agree entirely with @star-anise: please reach out for the help you can – you deserve it, and it’s important, for you and for your kids. 

Being raised by a narcissist is such a hard thing, and sorting out the mess it leaves as an adult with all the (often incredibly hard) trials adulthood brings all by itself is more so. You’ve done amazingly to get this far, trust me.