June 11, 2008 (An Excerpt From My Journal)
After visiting a Roman site, we went to a number of other places. There was just too much to name. These travel days are jam-packed with so many sites to see and trails to walk. The trees and all of the places so far have been just breathtaking!
And I have seen enough rocks to last me a lifetime. Do YOU know how much my heart has been filled? I just can’t seem to get past all that I’m sensing around me with certain people in this tour group though. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Please tell me.
I stood on top of a couple of mountains and saw the beauty of the land. It is spectacular! I could live here! I’d just have to get accustomed to the food which is surprisingly a bit unseasoned for my tastes. My stomach and some of the things I’ve eaten don’t agree with each other at all. Maybe it’s because my taste buds are so Americanized. I don’t know.
I saw sites and heard so much information that I can neither retain it all or contain it all. But coming on this trip has been well worth it. I’d just pick an entirely different tour group for the next experience though. This group of people is getting on my nerves! Some of the people I know haven’t changed at all. They just pretended to so I’d buy into the trip. At least the trip is nice.
After settling into our rooms after all the sight-seeing, we had dinner. I found it hard to get through simply because of where I chose to sit. Even though I was still with the tour group and sat at a table specifically designated for our specific group, almost everyone, including my dad, had a problem with where I chose to sit.
So I had to listen to a lecture from my dad about learning to get to know people. I felt like I was a child again. My dad was certain that I was choosing to isolate myself on purpose. Hey! In my defense, that’s exactly what I was doing. I wanted to say to him, “Yo, Sherlock! I’m an introvert, and I’ve been with this group all day! I need some breathing space.”
I was drained and just needed to find some time apart. My choice to not sit at the huge group table with everyone, but instead at a smaller table that was next to the huge table, didn’t really need to be that big of a problem. Plus, I’m a grown woman! I paid all expenses for my portion of the trip, and I treated my dad by paying his portion too. The last thing I needed was a lecture about where I chose to sit on a trip that I paid for!
I chose to sit where I sat because I needed down time. Besides, I’ve been with these people all day. Can I have a break? Explaining this to my dad was a no-win situation despite the fact that he’s known this about my personality ALL OF MY LIFE! According to him, though, “You’re withdrawing just like your mother!”
Oddly, I knew he’d said this for a moving effect. He knew that bringing up my mother for any reason would annoy me and possibly get me to do what he wanted me to do. My mother isn’t withdrawn. She’s manipulative, and he knows this. I wasn’t trying to manipulate anyone. I was trying to reserve what little energy I had left for myself. One more moment around these people would have caused me to dip into a freak-out session.
I’d have to honestly say, I felt nothing moving me to sit at the huge table with everyone else. It was much too crowded. I could feel my energy seeping out of me as I walked by the table. I could see the waves of energy in the atmosphere, and I knew immediately that I wanted to sit somewhere else.
The people on this trip who actually know me already know my personality anyway. They know that I don’t sit in close proximity with others, and if I do, my time with them doesn’t last long. I thought my dad knew me well enough in this way, too, even though we haven’t lived together since I was a very young adult.
I know how I am, and although it’s probably no excuse, I just didn’t want to be with a large group. Was I wrong for that? Was I really in isolation? Does this put another notch on my belt for why people don’t like me? Should I care? Why does this always happen? Why does what I do always matter to other people? This was nothing out of the ordinary and didn’t need to be a big deal.
Well, my thoughts are that I refuse to be controlled!!!! There was nothing wrong with where I chose to sit, and I shouldn’t have to give reasons why I chose where I sat. Why are adults offended by my choosing to sit apart from the group when most of them already know my personality … that I’m introverted? It just doesn’t make sense to me. If I were not me but knew me, I would have known that sitting elsewhere after being around people all day long would have been normal.
What am I? 12? Do I need a chaperone? This is giving cult vibes. I’m not even a member of this church as a tour group! I just agreed to go on this trip because I’ve always wanted to visit this country. They should be glad I helped to fill some type of quota for the amount they needed to help them lower the overall trip price.
The thanks I get is being treated like I don’t matter. Nah! Others might follow their ridiculous rules, but I won’t. No, no no! This trip was meant to be enjoyed, and I’m going to enjoy it! What does it matter where I chose to sit? What does it matter what I chose to do as long as I continued traveling with the group?
Do I need to go to the bathroom with everyone else too? Ridiculous! When I didn’t choose to sit with the pastors and some other group members while on the beach earlier today, they gave me their upper noses and lips of condescension. They showed me that they haven’t changed at all, but I don’t care. This is a trip, and as long as I do group things in terms of sight-seeing, I don’t see a problem with where I choose to sit when I am still with the group.
I just can’t believe this group of people I’ve known in the past is still doing this shunning crap! Ridiculous! Just ridiculous! This is not how Christians are supposed to behave towards others. This is not how mature adults are supposed to behave towards others either. Why should I have to give in to their wishes? I need to be by myself sometimes. I need alone time! I will go off on somebody if I can’t have some alone time.
When I think about it, I can feel my eyes want to blink and my body want to rock back and forth because of the stress of being around these people. I don’t care what they think about me. I will not be in misery while I’m on this trip. I paid too much money not to enjoy myself and be myself. I won’t allow others to guilt-trip me either.
Can I just be myself? Isn’t this how YOU created me to be? Yet, here I am on a trip being lectured like I’m a child. I’m being basically forced to comply and change myself to do something I simply cannot force myself to do. I let all my dad’s words go in one ear and out the other as my eyes rolled. Frankly, why does it even matter? My table was near the group – right next to the group. I was close by – just not at their table.
After about 30 minutes during the meal, we left to go sit on the beach. Again, I chose to sit at a distance, and then I retired for the night. I tried to contemplate over the situations of the day and only became angrier as I thought about it all. I saw four others choose to distance themselves away from the group at different times today too, but I don’t think they were lectured or shunned for doing so. Yet, I’m being treated as if I did something wrong here. Can people think for themselves here?
Why am I always the one who’s wrong, but I see and hear things I know are wrong? For instance, my dad, I’ve now realized, wants to be a part of the group. He’s a socializer. He wants to get to know people, but like me, he is still being treated like he is different or weird. The crazy thing is that he doesn’t seem to notice this like I do.
My dad wants desperately to be accepted by others. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed this before, but I notice it now, and it not only bothers me, it angers me. It actually infuriates me. Isn’t he projecting? I say this because I’ve noticed how many people on this trip – particularly the men – have behaved towards him. None of them have been nice to him.
In fact, they’ve been very rude, very condescending, and very demeaning towards him, but he seems oblivious to it all because he’s enjoying himself on this trip the way I want to enjoy myself on this trip. If he’s not worried about other people’s behaviors towards them, then why does he worry about my not being worried in the same way? It’s crazy to me.
My dad doesn’t even see these people are fake snakes. How I ironic when he is the person who’s always told me to be who I am since I was a child! Yet, here he is grasping at straws to be liked by a group of people who don’t even like him. The men have literally been making fun of him right in his face, but he doesn’t even see it.
Please tell me why I can see all of this right now. Please tell me what I’m supposed to be learning here. It’s interesting that the men and women in this tour group are mainly playing nice with me, but when they don’t think I’m paying attention, they are behaving passively aggressively cruel towards my dad.
How does m dad not see their behavior? Or are we alike in that we are innocently and foolishly often unaware when we are around snake-ish people? Is this the way I’ve been in situations when I’m blind to the hate that some people have had for me when I didn’t realize it? That’s the way it seems. My dad seems oblivious that he is being made fun of, and that their behaviors are hard to prove because they are the only ones who know what they are doing.
If I call it out, it brings attention to it. Plus, my dad is a man. He’ll have to handle his own business even though it’s bothering me to watch this as if I’m behind some kind of looking glass and can’t talk about it. Besides, I already know my dad wouldn’t want me calling it out like he’s a baby. I think that would be even more demeaning for him. So, I’ll just keep quiet unless YOU lead me to speak on it.
There must be something I’m supposed to be getting out of all this, but I won’t be putting up with anyone’s craziness, and I won’t be backing down on who I am either. Frankly, I think the main ones on this trip are showing their extremely nice sides to me because they already know I can see. They want to pretend they’ve changed, and that’s fine, but I can still see them. I know who they are.
As long as they don’t impose themselves upon me, things are good, but once they cross the line, I’m flipping a switch. I plan to get my money’s worth out of this trip, and I’m thankful that my dad is blind enough not to notice that he should even care. I just wish he wouldn’t try so hard to care what others think of me. It’s weird.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then
Back when I’d written this journal excerpt, I was on a trip surrounded by flying monkeys all catering to a grand, manipulative narcissist. I was the outlier, but I wasn’t the only one. There were a few others who didn’t attend the church with this group of people, including my dad, but were also on the trip too. They didn’t know these people well enough to know who they were really about, but I did. I knew them. I knew them well.
The main pastor was trying to change their image. I was trying to make sure I’d forgiven them for the past suffering they had caused me. So I went on the trip hoping to mend things between us. I invited my dad to go with me because he’d always wanted to travel out of the country. I also thought this was a way to bond with him and to get him to know me for who I am and not for who he’s wanted me to be.
I didn’t tell him anything about the people going on this trip because I wanted him to see for himself. He didn’t seem to see much though. He just saw enough to know that he didn’t want to be a part of the church. In the end, this was a good thing because it means that he didn’t allow himself to be caught up with the pastor’s magnetism and drawing effects. Besides, my dad lived in an entirely different state anyway.
Needless to say, I learned so much on this trip, and based on this excerpt out of my journal about some things that were going on while I was there amongst these people, I learned that I was more or less someone who kept her spiritual eyes open at all times. To be frank, I couldn’t help it. My spiritual eyes always stay open even if I am oblivious to the schemes these types of people have going on about them. I have learned to always keep my senses open and aware around narcissistic personalities. Always!
I learned a lot about my dad during this trip, too, and I realized that although I had acquired a lot of my parents’ ways, I was nothing like either of them. I have fears and insecurities, sure, but I have walked an entirely different path compared to the paths my parents chose for themselves. In fact, I was walking an entirely different path even then. I think this is why my parents often stayed angry with me. I refused to conform.
I once viewed my dad as being a master of all things when I was a child until I experienced a lot of troubles. He turned out not to be the great saving guy I envisioned him to be, and that was a little disappointing to experience as a child. It was far more startling to realize and accept this fact about him as an adult. I learned my dad is only human just like me. He was not above any reproach as I somehow had led myself to want to believe about him.
I learned that my dad has been afraid for me all of his life – mainly because I march to a different drum beat that he has never heard the sound of for himself. I saw my dad for the first time during this trip, and I was astounded by how young and childlike he could actually be and how insecure he actually was in the face of others. He desperately wanted to be accepted and like, and he was bothered by how little I didn’t care about that acceptance for myself.
My dad always talked as if we were the same, that I was his mini-me in some ways, but I realized during this trip that he projected what he wanted me to become – not the person he’d always been. He wanted to be fearless. So I became fearless. He wanted to stand up to people, and although he did in so many ways, I remember consciously how he’d back down in fear to keep the status quo.
I’d be the child to take a stand on so many things and against so many people even if it meant standing alone … a lot. There are so many instances, but one stands out the most, and that is the circumstances involving a martial arts instructor who molested me. An entire community took a stand for this instructor, and in the face of all that happened, my dad bowed out. He would have rather it been that I was lying about it than to truly take a stand. So I stood alone.
I remember crying when I gained this aha moment about my dad. The realization of this was so confounding to me that I cried myself to sleep. When I needed my dad the most, particularly when I was a child suffering tremendous trauma, he couldn’t always come through for me. I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that he didn’t want to because I could see that he did. I think he felt powerless in some way. I think he was afraid more about what others thought of him than he was every willing to admit.
I didn’t realize until this trip that he had a lot of insecurities. His insecurities turned his focus into being controlled by what others thought of him. He cared a lot about what others thought of him. He wanted to be seen as someone who was not necessarily important but as someone who was accepted by others. I don’t think he truly felt accepted by people, but again, I don’t know this to be necessarily true. It’s just what I observed on the trip.
In some ways my dad and I are very much alike in that people don’t like us because they find us strange or whatever, or they don’t like the things we choose to talk about. I realize, now, that in looking back that maybe my dad was more afraid for me not to partake based on what others would say since this has been an issue all my life. He feared for me based on what others thought about me because that has been my lot in life as it’s seemed … that I’ve not been liked very much for various reasons. I think my dad wanted to control what others perceive about me because of my past traumas.
Even stranger was that during this blogging post, I received a call from my dad. It seemed rather out of the blue but typical of him. He wasn’t really calling for a reason at all, but at the same time, it was sign to me that I had nailed my topic completely. I had gained an understanding of my dad’s fears and why he often reacted to me the way he did, and why he often seemed ornery and mean to just me alone.
I was that child that didn’t do as he wished I would do because it never mattered to me what people thought of me. In some ways, my siblings were the same way, but for whatever reason, I always felt as if my dad was extremely tougher on me and often more distant with me. This trip brought us closer together and distanced us farther away from each other at the same time. After the trip was over, I realized that despite all that I had learned, I was still growing apart from my family in general because of all the family dysfunction and toxicity.
I just saw my dad with newer, fresh eyes. It would help us both in the coming days when he’d need to see the same thing about me. I became the person he aspired for me to be – strong, bold, fearless, unrelenting, and unashamed to own the parts of me that others tried so desperately to deny, including him. Those character traits about me were the same character traits that baffled both he and my mother and often caused them to lash out at me throughout my life.
What I know now is that I was surrounded by things I needed to learn about and by people I needed to learn from to recognize the power within myself to be better and do better for me. The trip not only had had more to do with learning about the power I had to change myself and the willingness to grow past my fears, but it also had to do with learning to be patient with others who don’t often recognize their own power because they don’t recognize their own fears.
I don’t know if I’m making sense. It feels more like I’m rambling. I’ll just say that when I look back on this excerpt from my journal, I look back with fondness. It’s a time in my life I will never forget and will always cherish. It’s a time in my life when I finally got to know the real face of my father, and it was a time I got to know myself as a distinct and separate individual apart from him. I was no longer willing to exist within a narcissistic dynamic and function within toxicity. I was more willing to exist and stand up on my own.
My Voice Unchained 