Before I launch into another long post where I talk all about myself, and verbally masturbate until I selfishly orgasm, I’d like to say…
Thank you very much to the wonderful person who inspired this post, our conversations mean a lot to me… I’m not going to make you take the blogging stage, but if you would like to… it’s up to you.
And…
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Happy Birthday to everyone who has a birthday this year,
especially to those turning 40,
Congratulations…
Best wishes and many blessings to you!
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I turned 40 a few years ago, which makes me an expert on such matters (I’m putting on my expert expression – thank goodness you can’t see it, that shit is scary-stupid and includes a lot of giggling which is unseemly for my age!).
I can’t recall how I felt exactly when I crossed the threshold…from 39 into 40.
I’d like to pretend that I didn’t have all those things we humans get when we pass over into a new decade. I could pretend… but I really don’t like pretending even though I’m rather good at it.
I solemnly swear that if I’m not fine and I tell you I’m fine you will believe me – maybe… basically my games of pretend rely less on my ability to pretend and more on the ability of others to play along with me about whatever I’m pretending to be.
We all know when someone who says they’re fine isn’t fine at all, but we agree to be silent partners because we don’t want to invade their privacy, we don’t want to mess with their mojo of finery fakery, we also don’t want to necessarily hear about the not fine side of their pretending to be fine, and we may also be pretending to be fine when we’re not, and other variations on a theme.
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Aging is great when you’re young, you love that stuff and look forward to it because when you’re older you’re going to do all these things, big things, awesome things, make your mark, be someone, something, a contender…
… but…
… then you get older, and it’s not all that you thought it would be…
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… still…
… you’re still young so you look forward to getting to that age when all your dreams will come true, and stuff like that.
But then you get to that age which you’ve decided is a milestone in some way for you, and if you haven’t achieved all those things you had planned for yourself…
… it can get complicated, your relationship with yourself can become rather more difficult than it usually is. This tends to trump all other difficulties in other relationships with others…
If you hated yourself when you were young and hoped aging would solve it miraculously for you… you may end up having your expectations disappointed in such a way by yourself that you may never be able to forgive yourself for it.
We hate it when others betray our ‘trust’, but when we betray our own trust… okay, we may excuse our own shit more than we excuse the shit of others, but there comes a time when we have earned the karma of what happens when we blame others for our own problems with ourselves – it all comes crashing down upon us and our blame games get very up close and personal.
If you had issues… those issues can become more fermented with age. If you drink from a cup filled with that kind of wine or whine… intoxication ensues, and the hangover from it will be the least of your problems.
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When I turned 40… I had one of those moments of facing my own mortality which sent me into a tailspin, more than was usual for me.
My late 30’s included some physical ailments which made me confront some emotional and psychological ailments… our physical selves are often influenced by our other layers of self. Facing one part can bring us face to face with other parts. Whatever you’ve been ignoring may refuse to continue to be ignored… and demand your attention in a manner which is unavoidable.
Growing up and old isn’t always what we think it is going to be… neither are we.
The particular tailspin which came for me with turning 40… ended up with me entering the fray of Social Media…
I had reached my risk-taking age…
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via feel better through tumblr
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… that age when you decide that taking risks really isn’t that much of a risk anymore, you’re almost dead anyway (those older than me may see what I just said as the ultimate proof that I’m a 40 year old teenager who thinks they know everything but knows nothing at all), so if taking a risk kills you… meh!
At least you died in a blaze of some sort of glory rather than hiding all your life in that rather barren experience of being cautious, taking precautions, being sensible, providing for your future… blah, safety, blah… and boring yourself to death really slowly.
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I had so many cases of the WTF-am-I-doings after I turned 40 that I soon forgot the growing pains of aging and was more concerned about the fact that I seemed to be retrograding into some sort of… living the ages I’d missed when I was actually those ages… and it was such fun that it worried me – are we supposed to enjoy living this much!?!
I found myself being a teenager actually enjoying being a teenager – I hated being a teenager when I was an actual teenager, I wanted to be older then, and because of some decisions I made then to grow up early I missed a lot of what you’re supposed to do then. So… here I was being a teenage 40-year-old.
I middle-fingered my way through it at first…
Frankly… that’s so awesome, screw being grown up about it!
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I pretty much embraced the stereotypical midlife crisis thing, and rather than fight it, try to be different, be all adult-adult about it, I went with it and let it take me to places I had never been. A sort of reverse bridge burning… walk through the fire, see where it leads, even if it means tumbling…
Like tumblr… many people think that platform is mainly for teenagers… it was perfect for my regression. And I am grateful to all the teenagers (real and otherwise) who helped me not grow up while growing up.
TBH, the real teenagers I observed and interacted with taught me to be polite online, whereas those of my generation pretending to be teenagers… I knew they weren’t real teenagers because they behaved like adults pretending to be teenagers – they were rude as only those who are way past their teens know how to be especially when hiding behind a teenage facade.
When I was an actual teenager I behaved as though I was in my 80’s, but felt like I was 100 years old. I minded my P’s and Q’s in such a well-mannered way that I censored anything real about me.
This could be explained astrologically…
If you’re one of those people who is afraid of astrology and can’t accept that others like that kind of thing because… that shit is whatever ‘bad’ you think it is… dangerous to logic and all things sane and normal… and you need everyone else to confirm your views to you for you to feel safe, or whatever, even if you have to force others to do it against their will for the sake of your will…
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I’m at that age when I do and say as I please (with as much consideration for others as I can be bothered to muster) because I’ve finally come to some understanding that… we’re never going to agree no matter how bent over backwards I go for you, to please you… you might find my efforts to please you more annoying than when I don’t please you, being displeased may be more pleasing to you than when I’m trying to be pleasing to you… and… shit, that kind of calisthenics is exhausting for all of us…
And you may be younger than me trying to be older than me…
Age doesn’t necessarily bestow wisdom… but it may bestow a certain crazy type of wisdom worth giving in and giving up to…
Eff it! I’m a Capricorn Sun… we’re annoying to everyone, even ourselves and each other…
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Which reminds me that I have a comment from a non-Capricorn asking for my expertise on Capri-crones which I haven’t answered yet… who the eff made me an expert on Capricorns… oops! That may have been me while I was left unsupervised…
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As a Sun sign Capricorn I was born shriveled up, grumpy, the typical view of ‘being old’, a less spiritual version of the whole old soul concept, and… by some kind of effery of astro-karma this sign seems to lose our wrinkles (in an abstract, surreal way), our grump (okay, we never really lose that but it chills out and finds itself funny – expressed in deadpan style), and get with the whole being ‘young’ thing bit by bit as we get older.
We’re the frigging Father William of the Zodiac!
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This particular Capricorn devilish goat has Saturn squaring my Sun – that’s serious squared. Ugh, math!
And I lived that for most of my life, being all super serious, responsible, the scapegoat of the shit of others dumped on me so they could be free… until the serious squared was interrupted by an errant transiting Uranus…
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This is the dawning of the age of… me being an escapegoat, and finding fart-arse jokes funny… so funny I fart while laughing my arse off and laugh even more at that.
I’m no longer as afraid as I was of being myself, saying and doing things spontaneously, telling it as I see it even if I’m totally squiffy-eyed in the way I see things…
It’s the decade of embracing myself as I am, of welcoming the old Uncle Tom Cobley and all of messiness…
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via feel better through tumblr
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If you like it… thank you! Much appreciated (now, I’m worrying there’s something as wrong with you as there is with me… cool!).
If you don’t like it… please take your perfect carcass elsewhere! I’m a tiny speck in a vast ocean, why are you focusing your attention on me… shouldn’t that laser be directed on yourself?
I’m not going to change for you just because you want me to… I’ve tried doing that for others, that kind of crazy never works.
Want others to change for you, to suit you, to be who you want them to be for you to be who you want to be, for others to say to you what you want to hear, because you’re afraid of hearing anything else, taking that kind of a risk, a chance, as it might shatter your version of reality or… something like that… please go elsewhere, this place has had enough of doing that. I’ve done my time…
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I only play pretend these days if it’s fun and worth the risk… the risks I’m taking aren’t about playing it safe. You have been warned. Listen to the warning and don’t expect me to pretend I didn’t warn you because you didn’t heed it or though it didn’t apply to you.
I get it.. I’ve been there, done that… wished I hadn’t been there and done that because that was a waste of mortal years, but sometimes you have to waste mortality that way to find out you shouldn’t be doing that with such a precious resource… or whatnot.
You’re afraid, perhaps, that when others take risks for themselves, they’ll end up making things risky for you… shit happens… what you do with the shit which happens is up to you – is it fertiliser for your garden, or are you drowning in a cesspit?
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“If you took all my dollars
I wouldn’t shed no tears
You can have my souped-up fancy ride
I don’t hold it dear
The stickup kids know how I roll
I’ll shoot you if I like
I’m a gun slinging rambler
And I live a rambler’s life…”
– Gangstagrass – Gunslinging Rambler
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Happy Birthday everyone… sometimes every single day is a day of birth of something… and feels risky…
Sometimes just waking up feels like a bungee jump without the accoutrements of an actual bungee jump…
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An Upturned Soul 
Happy 40+ late birthday! 🙂
Keep being who you are, Ursula – a messy, farty yippee ki yayer who knows what’s what and tells it like it is. 😀
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Thank you very much 😀
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“Verbally masturbate while I selfishly orgasm”…I could say so much about that statement, so this time I’ll say nothing.
A question though…why ever ‘pretend’ to be anything? Trying on different skins at times to see what you prefer, maybe. Putting on a ‘professional’ side for the sake of keeping a job you may desperately need, perhaps. Staying civil when you want to explode because you can’t very well punch someone in the face…well, you CAN, you just…
And what the hell is with the noxious gas jokes?? Don’t misunderstand, I’m definitely not saying don’t be you, I wouldn’t want to get into that battle with you anyway, just curious. It’s a fact of life, I get it, but so is menstruation and I don’t see anyone waving used tampons in the air. 😉
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One of the first lessons you learn when you’re a child of narcissists is to pretend. Pretending is an important part of the cult of narcissist. They need you to pretend. In public you have to pretend that they’re who they’re pretending to be. You have to pretend that you’re a happy, perfect family, that they’re wonderful parents who love you. In private you have to pretend that everything they say and do is amazing. They expect you to worship them as gods. If you refuse to pretend, you get punished for it, and that punishment can be vicious, complicated, and last for ages. They never forgive or forget the slightest infraction.
You learn fairly quickly that pretending is a valuable survival tactic.
You realise that you have to pretend that you don’t care when they rip your heart out and use it as a pin cushion or a place to sharpen and store their extensive knife set. If you let them know you’re hurt, they’ll hurt you more. If you let them know you care about something, they’ll destroy what you care about or steal it from you and make it theirs.
In public you have to pretend you’re okay because if you try to tell anyone on the outside about what is really going on behind the facade of the perfect happy family, others don’t believe you so you’re branded a liar, and the narcissists will launch a defamatory campaign which will convince everyone that you’re evil and your poor parents are saints for putting up with you – no one seems to wonder why such wonderful parents have such a terrible child, or why such good parents seem to maintain their goodness while they are demonising their child. Apparently it’s okay for good people to say horrible things and keep their reputation of goodness. It’s okay for perfect parents to criticise, shame, etc, their child in public – it’s just not okay for the child to say anything in any way about their parents, unless it is to sing their praises.
The child of narcissists must behave correctly (according to the narcissists’ handbook of correct behaviour) at all times, make their parents look good, put on a good show, and, above all, they must pretend not to be an actual child.
The most important game of pretend which must be played is – to pretend that you’re not pretending. This requires giving yourself a lobotomy of sorts. Believing your own BS, the way narcissists believe their own BS.
When you get older and go out into the world, you already know that society plays pretend because your experience of society from the viewpoint of a child of narcissists has shown you that the reason your narcissist parents get away with their pretense as well as they do is due to others playing pretend with them. You hope that things won’t be as bad in the world outside the cult of narcissists, that the pretending will be less expected and the being real will be more encouraged, however, you soon find that playing pretend is endemic to humans.
If as an adult another adult asks you about your parents and you say – they were shitbags – you will then be given the – Oh, what an awful person you are to say such a thing, how deluded you are, your parents love you – lecture, and people who don’t know your parents will say this to you because they need you to say good things about your parents to maintain the fiction that all parents love their children, and when you’ve had enough of this sort of thing you end up saying as little as possible about your parents because you’re fed up of playing pretend, or you once again play pretend for the sake of others (and also for your sake because you’ve heard it all before and don’t want to hear it again, not unless someone pays you big bucks to listen to their lecture, and even then… ), playing let’s-pretend-my-parents-loved-me when people insist you say something about them.
People often say they want the truth, how much they value such a thing, but when you tell them your truth it’s not a truth they want to hear. Somehow your truth threatens their truth, and they need your truth to suit theirs.
Then one day you snap, you’re fed up of pretending that you’re not a basketcase, even though you’ve never been particularly good at pretending that but you tried anyway because you’ve spent your whole life pretending, being encouraged to do it, and it’s a hard habit to break, and you start a blog where you say all those things you’ve always been told (by others and also by yourself) you’re not allowed or supposed to say. And it’s frightening to do that but it’s so liberating that you go a bit nuts with it.
Hence the love of fart jokes. Btw, there are loads of menstruation jokes online, some of them a very sick and funny and include waving tampons around in the air. One very amusing woman suggested using a tampon (not a loaded one) as a self defense weapon to deter men from bothering you. 😉
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Sorry to butt in Ursula..but i have to thank you for describing so well what happened with my parents.I have doubted for such a long time about myself and I have finally understood that the worst aspect was to pretend to believe that theirs was reality.I did force myself to believe I had good parents and it was all my fault as they were very unhappy with the kind of daughter I was .In psychoanalysis this is called repression and apparently this is always a dysfunctional act of adaptating yourself to something unacceptable and hurting.
Still, i do feel conditioned by this distorted version I have lived for so long, and i don’t feel quite liberated, although I went NC with my “father”.
It’s a huge mourning as, after all, that was the only family i had and I have experienced, so i feel sort of floating as i can only imagine what makes a person normal, I mean without all the pathological mistrust, insecurity and low self esteem I feel.
I love your way of describing and analyzing the acon condition, each word you wrote ring so true to me, as an echo of not a distant memory.Thank you.
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Thank you, Seashell 🙂
It is a huge mourning, all of it. The parents you never had, the childhood you never had, the world which keeps telling you what you should have had, but you didn’t have it, so… you grieve, for everyone and everything, for no one and nothing, for all the selves you were, could have been and weren’t… and each tear, each sorrow, empties you out, there is nothing there, nothing left. E poi? E poi the emptiness becomes a fertile place to fill with your own things. A new territory discovered by emptying an ocean and this land belongs to you.
Migliori auguri per il NC, come ti senti di averlo fatto? Al principio è una strana esperienza, non sembra vero, ma lo sai che e vero e che lo hai fatto. C’è un silenzio pieno di voci… ma adesso tu sei in potere di quelle voci.
Take good care of your beautiful self, nourish your soul with all those things which bring you inspiration. ❤
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Now it’s a year and i have been discarded as i dared say I couldn’t take any more comparison and insults; my sister took advantage and became more and more N like so I said again I couldn’t take it any longer;I am alone on earth and i feel or i don’t feel at the same time, maybe I am a liar as my family say.being aware of having being abused makes me realize i will never be like other people, it’s like a brand on my skin and i am sick of explaining myself.My writing and the rest of my activites are stuck due to my angst. I cannot say if it was positive or else, but once you open your eyes you can’t really do otherwise. I wish i had the strength you have, but i feel deprived of something, of a family who despised me, it’s the Stockholm syndrome, isn’t it?
Sono molto affezionata a te, xxx
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It takes time to rewire yourself, to get over the attachment to a crazy family and the adjustments you’ve made to survive that environment and deal with them. Mind, body, emotion, and soul yoga is needed to realign the self with the self. You’re doing that at your own pace and you can’t hurry it up. Remember to be gentle with yourself, give yourself the nurturing care they never gave you (that’s what you were truly deprived of) – it’s healing but it is also going against the habit of a lifetime of not feeling worthy of being loved, not feeling you deserved anything but their hatred, and all that goes with that. You’re getting there, you took a powerful stand for yourself. You’ll probably be dealing with a world of guilt and shame for standing up for yourself and doing what is best for you – that comes with growing up with narcs.
No, you will never be like other people, you’re you. No one can be like anyone else, however, you’re not the only one who feels that way. There are many others who have suffered similar experiences and who feel like outsiders doomed to wander the periphery of society, never belonging. That theme is so common that worlds have been built around it, especially in art.
To others who have lived similar experiences as you have, there is no need for you to explain yourself. Anyone who needs an explanation will probably never understand. The only person who needs an explanation from you is you, and that is the only explanation which is worth the effort, because with it comes understanding of the self, compassion, and many other things which you can give to yourself, when you’re ready. No rush.
Keep following your path, doing what you are doing, moving forwards, pausing for rest, then continuing your journey. And you do have the strength that I have, you have great depths of strength. All children of narcissists do, especially those who go against their family cult of narcissism.
Besides my strength is mostly due to being very cocciutta. I refuse to give up on myself even when I want to. So, just don’t give up on yourself! 🙂
Baci e abbracci ❤
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A thousand million tears will be shed as a memory of how the child in us drowned under the deluge of negation but not entirely she went down full fathom five and somehow there learned to breathe under the huge wall of water until the time she could re-emerge no longer weighted down but light and full of the fire of love for the truth that had to be lived that is our true life and nature
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I suppose that’s all true, that role play of ‘happy family’ just becomes an innate response to most things. You wouldn’t want to rock the boat with certain people because of what happened if you did before, but I also think it gives a higher tolerance for that kind of similarity. You end up taking on some of those characteristics yourself whether you really want them or not and sometimes it’s impossible to change so when you see those similarities in others you have more of an understanding for it. I think that’s how those cycles continue, you either shut down and trust no one or you give the benefit of the doubt even if you see red flags because there are different levels of assholery and you never know what made people who they are. Maybe they do just suck, maybe they’re similar to you in a way and internally they’re really not that bad, either way tolerating things from one person does not necessarily mean you are willing to tolerate them from someone else. People do what they have to do to get through life, some people just excel at it better than others.
I’m sure there are tons of menstruation jokes and I have heard about the “self-defense tampon”, it’s kind of funny. Point well taken, I probably wouldn’t have come up with your rationale so I’m glad I asked. Happy lateish 40th? Or late-early? Capricorn is soon, so I guess early-post 40th?
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Thank you, it’s not my birthday anytime soon, I was just wishing everyone a happy birthday and chatting about being in the 40’s 🙂
It’s true that you can’t always know if someone is being an a-hole because that’s who they are or if it’s situational and they’re not always like that. It takes time to get to know people, as it takes time to get to know ourselves.
Sometimes we’re attracted to the traits we have in common with others, and sometimes we’re looking for something else, something different, and it can be confusing as we may project traits onto others which aren’t actually ones they have, so we may end up being surprised when they’re not who we thought they are. The surprise can be pleasant or not, and may deepen the relationship or end it.
Those moments when you refuse to be treated a certain way by one person, only to realise you’re willing to let someone else treat you that way – so intriguing and insightful.
Relationships are such a big part of being human, and we do absorb the traits and behaviours of others the longer we are in their company, as they do with us. So it’s natural to become like your parents in certain ways, but you’re still expressing what you pick up through who you are as an individual.
It’s funny when we get older to have one of those – OMG, I’m turning into my mother, my father, etc. – moments. Of course, sometimes it feels rather horrifying, especially if your parents are a-holes. But still, you’re you, not them, and a mannerism, behaviour, trait is neutral in many ways, and it’s up to us what we do with it.
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True, sometimes traits are projected, perhaps their similarities remind you of another and you correlate the two, sometimes it’s he said, she said and rumors fly, or someone overhears something they probably shouldn’t have heard and things just got misconstrued, as you’ve said many times, humans can be messy.
Putting up with something from one, but not another falls into the same messy category, everything is situational. In my personal experience, I tend to cut much more slack to those who have come into my life in recent years and almost have a zero tolerance policy for those who have been around for years. It seems backwards to the untrained eye, but really it’s not. Years upon years of bs with certain people cause you to cut them less slack, they’ve already proven they have the potential to do the most harm, the newer ones haven’t taken things that far, they just do things you may not always agree with, that’s life. Many people disagree with that way of thinking, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been told I don’t look at things the right way and I’m sure it won’t be the last. And, your last paragraph…love it! You really have a knack for writing.
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Thank you very much 🙂
I write the way my mind jibber jabbers in my head.
You’ve just given me an idea for the blog, for a series of posts about sharing our methods of dealing with things, and our thoughts about how others perceive our methods. Something like that. I haven’t thought this through.
I think your method makes a lot of sense. You’ve had time to get to know those people, and have the information you need from long exposure to them, from continued experience of them, to realise that they are consistently that way, and you’ve done the cutting them slack in the past and learned from doing it. You’ve reached your conclusion logically. Whereas with new people, they’re still an unknown potential.
You always come across as being logical and thoughtful. You think for yourself, are independent of mind, intelligent and insightful, an observer who is adept at noticing things and being a devil’s advocate because you like to question – some people find that to be unsettling and may deal with being unsettled in a dismissive or critical manner, they need conformity to some ‘norm’ which is their norm that keeps them safe in their comfy chair.
You have a knack for cutting to the chase – I love that, many people do, it’s refreshing and opens the mind to new perspectives, shines a light on what may have been missed, but not everyone likes that and they may experience it as being cut to the quick. And so it goes.
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Thanks! And I definitely look forward to that series of blogs. I always appreciate your perspectives.
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Thank you 🙂
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You go Ursula…. you describe it all so succinctly. Unless you grew up with this how can you know the territory.. others can try and lay their trip on you.. but you are so strong you busted the fucking bullshit out of the water… Ten gold stars 🙂
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Escapegoat😂😂😂 loving the energy Ursula🌞💖 serious squared😲
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Thank you very much 🙂
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“Fuck em’. Shortest prayer in the world.” Gary Oldman
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“I wish you luck with a capital F” – Elvis Costello (Love Went Mad) 😉
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