Our Free Fall Friday writing was founded by Mary, a dear retired lady. As we met on Fridays to freely scribble away, she would sometimes speak of having “writer’s revenge.” Her mother had often been rude to her, so writing was Mary’s chance to tell her side of the story. Like I do.
Can you relate? Back in my family of origin, what I didn’t like was when “they” hurt my self esteem by abusively telling me I was wrong. Logically, you might well expect a younger child with four older brothers to be always in the wrong, “a minority of one,” and very frustrated too. But riddle me this: Why did I, somehow, file away ten or twenty memories? Ones where years later I would revisit a contention and say, “Ha! I was right!”
To revisit the past and check myself, years later, was important to me in managing my self-esteem. (Once low, now “new and improved”) As it happens, my family had violence, and so I guess it follows we were also going to be dysfunctional in matters of fact, opinion and reasoning. Revisiting my old incidents could produce something like the epiphany of a dwarf on the original Star Trek. Remember him? For years he has been kicked around by Plato’s Stepchildren. (Episode title) He realizes at last he wasn’t inferior, wasn’t deserving of abuse during all those years. He cries in outrage and joy “It was them!” It my case there was no joy each time I was vindicated, just a grim, time-delayed, “I knew it!”
Examples for you? I have not a single one left in my memory. Like a long to-do list on a white board, each contention was erased as I resolved it. Until this week, my riddle was not, “how could a former child have remembered down the years?” But rather: “How did a child’s subconscious know to file these things away?” How could a quiet corner of my brain, back then, have been wiser than my older brothers and parents? Strange riddle.
As an adult, I’m not always wise. When everyone around me suddenly gets a disturbed face because of something I said, I will instantly back pedal, admitting I’m wrong. And then, instead of escaping into forgetting, I can hold fast to that burning memory for hours, or days, until I can finally grasp why I was wrong. How else am I to mature? For this I can provide you no examples, as it’s been so many years, mercifully, since I messed up that way. Because I’ve matured. At long last.
So I grew up, made my way in the world, and years later, among university students, when they thought my terms like “indent” (for requisition) or my abbreviation of “nuclear” was wrong, well, I didn’t argue and say I learned it “for sure” from army magazines. It wasn’t that my spirit was broken, I don’t think, but I just couldn’t argue anymore. This was not from my abrasive army years, but earlier, from my family.
A few nights ago I solved my old riddle. As it happens, today I am the only one in my family (six kids) to have a university degree—just one parent has high school—but still, as a younger child, I couldn’t have been any smarter than they were. Nor, I know now, was I even half as smart as my subconscious. Below the radar my lower brain, looking out for me, must have decided when to file something away by noticing something that I couldn’t consciously perceive: …I was being “gaslighted”….
Strange. Although the term “gaslighting” came into our vocabulary after the 1940’s movie Gaslight, from a 1938 stage play, it’s only in the last two decades that use of the term has skyrocketed. In that old movie, a husband secretly manipulates the gaslight in their house in order to make his wife doubt her sanity. In modern life you may doubt reality when your spouse says, for example, “You’re imagining it,” or “I never said that,” or “You’re too sensitive,” or “Everybody thinks you’re stupid.”
I found a Youtube video where a lady gently explains the mental phases you go through when being gaslighted, and gives ten verbal examples. Below her video are many, many heartrending comments: Good decent people had suffered years of abuse from a spouse or family before realizing they weren’t stupid or crazy. “It’s them!”
While gaslighting may happen by accident—OK, by negligence—the true horror comes from malice. As Doctor Gregory House on TV often says, “People lie.” In my own family, stressed and poverty-stricken, “which could have been a case study for a social work textbook,” as my brother put it, I would compensate for our shame by saying we were honest. “Poor but honest.” Not now. We—they—gaslighted.
People often remark that I’m “honest.” Of course. But why? To be a Boy Scout? A scientist? A lamplighter in the twilight? Yes. And to not be a gaslighter.
Now I know why I despise social media and it’s twin sibling: typical village gossip. I have always noticed whenever a person wimps out instead of exerting enough self discipline to be accurate. Speaking of siblings, a few years ago I had to tell one of mine that I would no longer say to him, “I think,” or “perhaps,” or “probably,” lest he recast my words as being a surety.
At the end of the day, with memories like dear old Mary has, it’s no wonder I related to “women’s liberation.” In I am Woman Australia’s Helen Reddy sang,
“‘Cause I’ve heard it all before,
and I’ve been down there on the floor,
no one’s ever gonna to keep me down again.”
…
…
Sean Crawford
“Social media kills,”
South-southeast of Jasper, SSE
April 2021
Weather: Today five centimetres of snow, with pavement above zero, and below freezing tonight. And for the next week: above freezing every night, and double digit highs every day. Hurray!
