Onions & Emotions....

Growing up was quite hard for me in many ways.....

Had a philandering father, who got involved with various women and converting his religion for them....

Had a mentally ill mother, who was permanently depressed and ever paranoid that her husband was having an affair.... of course, he WAS... so, I guess she was justified in her fears.

I always joked with people that my life would fit right into one of those thousand episode soap drama's..... More than once, I felt like my life was stranger than fiction. Among some of things I have gone through in my young little life; sleeping on the streets, trying to run away from home, , escaping from my mother who was trying to lock us up, countless fights and scenes in public & in my school, watching my mom strip naked in public, witnessing physical abuse of my mother from my father, being locked up for days, being arrested and brought to police station, being chased out of the house by relatives, 2 suicide attempts by loved ones, forced to call another woman 'mother', face off's with step mom #1, faceoff's with step mom #2, nearly loosing my own mother (read here)...... In more recent years, I even had to go on a manhunt and publicly 'kidnap' my own mother to send her to the hospital.

As you can see, a lot had to do with my mother.

Till today, people continue to praise my brother and I for the way we have turned out to be 'fine young men' despite all the traumas we faced in our lives. We could have easily gone wrong.. I mean, for all the shit that I went through, I do sometimes feel that I do deserve to go wrong.. so to speak. I've met countless people with lesser problems, who start doing drugs, mix with the wrong crowd, fail their studies etc etc etc.. What about me? I never did drugs, never mixed with the wrong crowd, and did quite well in my exams. Heck, I never even smoked a cigarette in my life (until recently, but that's a different secret of course!). I turned out to be everything opposite the odds said I would, and then some.

People ask me how I cope... and I never knew how to answer them. I only knew, I did cope. I could cope. I went through all the shit my father put my through, and I went through all the hell my mother's illness gave us, and I never lost my mind, or lost my grip on things. 15 years down the road, and here I am, with the tables turned. I'm still moping up the mess of the past, but at least now, I'm have control over my life. I shared these things with someone last night.. and suddenly I found myself confessing something I never ever thought I would.. and that was.. the answer to how I coped.

You know how people tend to unconsciously develop defense mechanisms to protect themselves? Well, I never realized I had one, until much later....

Its funny that the first insight into my own heart came on this matter, came at a most trying time. It was the second suicide attempt by others I had to experienced. (read here for full account), and I came out of it, cool as a cucumber. The turning point was when my friend asked "How come you are so calm about it." I could never explain at the time, and for a long time, I still could not. But I can now. I was calm, because in trying to deal with all of it, and not loose my mind at the same time, I had swept my emotions aside. Just like Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean show, I had taken my heart and emotions out, placed it in a nice box somewhere, and functioned without it. If I didn't feel anything, I could never be hurt. I could never be affected, and I could never loose my mind.

I got so good at doing this, that I found myself being able to cope with whatever trials and tribulations life had to throw at me for the next few years. Father getting divorced? Getting divorced second time? No money to pay bills and buy food? Mother run away again? She nearly died after a hit and run? I coped with every single one of them. I could take it, because I made myself void of any feelings. Though somewhere deep deep down in the recesses of my heart, I knew I was hurting, on the surface, I felt nothing.

So much so that I found myself to be a cold, emotionless person. Why was I not upset? Why was I not sobbing like an emotional wreck? I didn't shed a tear, or loose an minute of sleep. It didn't seem like my emotions were doing justice to the significance of the issue

In the same way, I found myself constantly reverting to this state of emotionless being that I never fully allowed myself to immerse in feelings of happiness, joy and contentment. I always smiled, but rarely laughed. I was always friendly, but never personal. I kept my emotions to myself as good as I kept all the secrets I had in my life. No one knew I had a crazy mom, no one knew I had 2 step mothers. No one knew anything personal about me... period. To divulge my secrets was to expose myself, to be emotionally vulnerable. I could not have that.

I built invisible walls around myself, always keeping this barrier between myself and other people. There is this once scene in the movie Shrek 1, when Donkey calls Shrek 'Onion Boy' because Shrek had this conversation with him:

Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
Donkey: They stink?
Shrek: Yes. No.
Donkey: Oh, they make you cry.
Shrek: No.
Donkey: Oh, you leave em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin' little white hairs.
Shrek: NO. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.
[sighs]
Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions.

It stroked a chord with me. I had layers too... and I kept my feelings in the deepest one. I had succeeded. I was not sad, nor depressed. But I wasn't happy either.

Since then, I have tried living life with my heart more on my shoulders. People have said I have become less patient as I used to be, or that I am not as giving as I once was... but I don't care (that much). I grumble when I'm upset, I fight when I'm angry. I laugh a lot more, and usually show it quite plainly when I am fond of someone. All with the aim of not burying my feelings the way I used to do so well. . To be able to express your emotions freely was nothing short of liberating.... Keeping my feelings bottled help me cope when the going got tough, and because if it, I survive. But really, it was eating me from inside. Like sunlight slowly breaking through a dark cloud... I think I'm finally learning how to experience emotions rather than experience incidences. I feel more true to myself than I have ever felt, and for once in my life, I no longer feel like I need to deny my feelings just to keep the ship from sinking.