Help
These thoughts were triggered by being the product of an environment…
I’ve met a lot of liars and I’ve taken the opportunity to tell a few handfuls of lies too. I always find a way to justify my mistruths but when I’m lied to…it feels like the end of the world. I never took time to source the genesis of what brings the liar out of humans who are born only knowing how to tell the truth but today it hit me. I went out in nature so that I could ground my energy because my eye started to twitch again. I slept in this morning so by the time I got around to my favorite forest it was 369 degrees outside. When I finally finished my hike…my melanin was thickly glazed with moisture. While trying to stay focused on keeping my consciousness and walking at an incline, in an open air sauna, the niece I was just blocked from speaking to crossed my mind. I started thinking about how she hadn’t said a word about the birthday gifts from me no longer being in her possession and without adding in my own projections…I tried to place myself in the emotions of a child who couldn’t speak up. When I finally felt what I assume she must have been feeling all this time…my guidance came.
It’s a running joke in most melanated communities that we don’t go to therapy. I’ve heard a lot of people try to downplay the seriousness of this generational ‘tradition’ and those who try to find the humor in it are usually the people who have been directly affected by ‘elders’ who abide by this dysfunctional belief system. When I started feeling those feelings induced by my assumptions…I traced where the aversion to calling out for help is birthed. There are many things my niece has kept from me that are really big deals. But I earned her distrust because when she tells me certain things related to her emotional state being tampered with…I’ve been known to turn into a tornado that no one can contain. That inevitably leads to her getting in trouble for telling the truth…and to me being excommunicated out of her life for however long her carrier deems appropriate. So she’s been conditioned to keep her cries for help inside of her…and I contributed to her conditioning. After a while…this kind of conditioning creates a repulsion for asking anyone to help with emotional needs, which introduces little survival lies that can turn into big ones over time. I honestly feel like this is why so many of us grow up and think it’s normal to keep everything bottled up…until we’re shaken to the point of explosion.
The desperation I feel to correct the course I misdirected my niece off of is pulling at my heart because now that I see what I did…I want her to know what I think she is experiencing so the seed doesn’t have a chance to settle in her psyche. But my little sister is determined to punish me for refusing to ignore her Peter Panesha syndrome. I want to be upset with myself for not putting my niece’s comfort first when I decided to do what I did because I knew how it was going to turn out. But if I keep swooping in to save the day of an able bodied mother who also has a cape…I’ll be crippling all of us. My little sister will just continue thinking I’m supposed to keep cosplaying her savior, my niece will believe that her help is supposed to come from someone other than the people who created her, and I’ll be forever stuck…playing a role that doesn’t belong to me. The only thing I want more than my niece feeling comfortable enough to come to me for help…is for her not to need the kind of help she is unknowingly coming to me for. And that won’t happen if I keep playing along with this helpless hyena role my little sister is acting out. Because my sister’s trauma response to not being taught how to exercise her right to ask for help…is by constantly putting herself in the position of needing assistance that she is fully capable of giving herself. This cycle has to stop.
Love,
Choosy
