When you grow up maintaining someone else’s emotions, you also grow up not having room and time maintaining your own. And if you happen to be a sensitive child, a crybaby, you end up swallowing a lot of feelings.
“And I tried like you never, you left me to teach myself.
And I cried & swallowed my tears, salty exhausted fears.”InMe – Trauma: Door Slam Crescendo
And when you swallow a lot of poison, frankly, you just feel like shit. You are bloated and full of anxiety, pain, nausea and feelings you can’t even name because you were never taught how to. You make yourself smaller, ask for less and demand less, because you grow up feeling you’re too much, your emotions are too much. When your whole family home is full of one person’s emotions, there is no room for anyone else’s. Some grow into good kids, who work hard and get great grades to get away.
Some grow up trying, and never reaching their goals, and burn out trying to reach goals that were not possible to be reached. When your whole life is built around trying to reach someone else’s version of you, you never find who you really are. Or you might need three years of therapy to discover, that you knew all along, you just buried it under other people’s visions for you. You failed, you keep failing. Not because you didn’t try hard enough, but because the system is broken and there is no other option than to fail. It does not make you a failure. The failure is that no amount of trying is enough because the whole goal is broken.
A child needs a guardian. A child needs limits, boundaries and a safe room to grow into. A child needs boundaries to safely test their own limits. When there are no rules, no boundaries, just endless space and room, and that space is filled by someone else’s unhandled big emotions, especially when it’s the one who is supposed to be the guardian, the child finds themself trying to be as small as possible. When there are too many options, anyone gets overwhelmed.
A child needs safety. Safety comes from the feeling of having a guardian, a protector. When the child has parents who are, in fact, just awfully flawed humans who have no idea how to emotionally support a child, the parent is not a guardian. Most parents love their kids more than anything, most parents would never want to harm or hurt their kids. But intent does not negate impact. Not everyone should be a parent if they cannot offer a child what they deserve. Parenthood is not a basic right, parenthood is a responsibility toward the child. Parenthood is a choice you must be able to carry, not something you’re owed.
Eventually that child grows into an adult, who feels chronically unsafe, doesn’t feel entitled to their own feelings and gives their body and soul to anyone who is willing to tell them who they are. An adult who spends years trying to find someone to tell them who they are, because they haven’t had the space to grow into themselves. An adult who tries to be small, not take up too much space. An adult who feels like they’re chronically on the way. An adult who feels uncomfortable packing their shopping because someone else needs the space.
That child grows into an adult, who writes their anger into a blog text while listening to InMe’s Trilogy: Dawn on repeat and takes breaks to dance the trauma away, because something triggered decades of trauma of being emotionally bulldozed. They chose not to internalise it anymore. I chose not to internalise it anymore. And next time I’m shopping, I will take my time packing the shopping properly because the person behind me can wait the extra 30 seconds.