I absolutely despise myself.
It’s not for the reasons my mom wants to believe. I don’t think I’m an amoral fool who’s deserted her family for the sake of her selfish adventures. That’s not entirely true. I am selfish.
I’m overemotional. I cry at least once every two days if not more. It’s usually sparked by my hatred for myself, after I’ve done something unnecessary to piss my boyfriend off or make my mother remind me she isn’t proud of me and doesn’t know what to say when people ask about me.
Why do some parents hate their children this way? In my family, it has been true that the more they know, the more they have to use against me. Especially when I only wanted to be able to be honest with them, even when they might not like it.
I want to be two people.
I want to be my mother’s daughter, loyal, honest, trustworthy, always knowing that no matter what, I had my family–that last one has proven to be horribly untrue. I want to have a house to come home to when things aren’t going well, and a place to have family dinners and game nights with Scrabble and chats on the back porch with a cup of coffee and our robes on in the mornings. I want to watch my dogs run in the back yard after the neighbor’s puppy and I want to talk to my brother about music. I want to make fun of my stepdad for watching the news all the time, and I want to talk to my mom about color schemes and the funny things my grandma says. I want them to be proud of me for becoming myself, and I want them to accept me for who I really am.
I want to be my boyfriend’s girlfriend. I want to be strong and independent, fierce, unafraid, and ready for whatever the next step in life is. I want to go on late night jaunts to the lake, and travel to see our favorite bands. I want to fight for the things I know I can afford, and I want to work harder to afford more and more of my own life until it is all mine. I want to get an internship in Los Angeles or San Francisco, and I want to work for a magazine. I don’t want to go to grad school until I know I can afford it, years after a steady job, and I want to have my own world with my own rules. A world I truly feel comfortable and accepted in for being nothing more than exactly what I am. I want to write, sing, paint, and feel everything around me.
The first persona makes me cry. It’s exactly what I miss. The second one makes me hopeful and gives me a future I can be excited about.
Whenever I try to make the two worlds intersect, they don’t blend. They collide. My parents want me to avoid debt. They want me to go to school and school alone; they want me to stop working a job, they want me to not pay my own rent, they want me to get my grades up so I can go to law school. They want me to stay here. They want me to stay a child. Meanwhile I–with the support of my boyfriend–want to start owning more of my own. I want to pay for my apartment. Not just so my parents can’t threaten to disown me when they find out my boyfriend spent the night again, but so it can be my place, and I can find another reason to be proud of myself. It’s the same with my phone bill, and my regular bills, and vacations, and concerts, and everything.
I don’t want to be my own person to be able to break away from my family, I want to be my own person so I can look at myself and see something of value. Something I know if no one else is, then at least I myself can be proud of. I look at myself and see someone who’s always made her decisions not because they would make her happy but because someone told her they made the most sense, instead of starting with something to make me happy that I could translate into making sense. I keep forgetting that people who make the most of life don’t do everything in order to be safe and keep everyone from worrying about their future, they do it because it’s what they believe in and because they believe in themselves.
What hurts the most is I can’t figure out why that’s not what my parents want me to become, too.
My mother is not proud of me. She can’t bring herself to tell people how I am, because she’s too embarrassed and doesn’t want them looking down on me. No. Looking down on her for being associated with me. I wish I could say I was being overdramatic and paraphrasing, but those are the words she said.
I am torn, in so many ways.
And how are things now?