Journal Entry 9.6.23

It is impossible to build your self esteem and have worth when your family requires you to relinquish your worth in order to participate in your family. Why be alive when no one sees value in or will recognize that you are of value? The loss of self is so intense that it is impossible to hold yourself up alone in the face of the of the degredation. I gave up on my family seeing value in me long ago. Probably when they showed me how they didn’t care if I lived or died at the time of my suicide. But I continued to show up for them for decades after then. Why? I’m not sure. Part of it was for my own comfort,—the illusion of being a part of a family created a buffer when I lived in a vicious world with abusive partners— part of it was in order to “not rock the boat” not to upset the rest of the family. I did not show up in deep or meaningful ways, and no one noticed when I had anniversaries, or promotions, or art shows, or when I suffered—my son was diagnosed with autism but it was ignored and I was expected to cope on my own even in family settings. But I arrived for family events, let them insult and debase me, let them count me among the family members present, and left each event numb and broken.

So how does one have worth and feel joyous and valuable in your own skin when you are not allowed to be valuable in your family of origin. The cruelest part is my family will not to this day acknowledge their debasement of me. I am scolded for being “too sensitive”, I am told that “everyone” gets treated the same way that I am—which, if it were true, would still be awful—I am told that it doesn’t matter because it didn’t matter to our parents. To say the pain and grief is crazy-making is an understatement. I think feeling crazy made me feel better because there were a lot of wonderful crazy people in the world of art and literature. Camille Claudel was too sensitive too and her work was fabulous. We still see value in her, long after her death.

Each loss, each wound, each layer of grief has to be revisited to be let go of, and to find redemption from. But there is too much to grieve, too many wounds to revisit. Waves upon waves. I have to find the metaphor, the gestalt, to grieve all the tiny cuts that have led to my despair.

I go to the shore and listen to the waves on the shale. The sound of the waves is the sound of loss to me. Each wave is evidence of presence and loss. The water is there and then it is gone. Over and over and over. I am drawn to the shore perhaps because it embodies that repeated loss that comes with abandonment.