The Road to Rose

I was angry thinking about the past. There was a boundary between my life before and my life after I moved out of my mom’s house. Before I moved, my priority was to make sure she was okay. I would monitor her emotions and pour from my empty cup to her empty cup. She would be so stressed and I would try and fail to make it all better for her.

Some messed up things happened along the way. I was parentified, I was convinced to expose my secrets, I lied because I thought I had no other way. A messed up method of survival formed in the toxic moments of living at home.

Now, that that way of life isn’t needed anymore, and I’m left wondering what the point of all that was. I don’t have to tell my secrets now, watch my brothers, or lie. Things are different now.

I do carry resentment for her making me feel like I have to tell her my secrets. From her perspective, she just wanted to talk. It sounds simple enough. Okay, I can talk about work.

“No, work is just what you do.”

Alright, I can talk about my boyfriend.

“No, you talk about him too much.”

Do you want to talk about philosophy or aliens? No? What about my sex life? No, okay. How about my secrets? She said no, but I feel like she said no because it sounds bad. Living with her felt like someone was constantly trying to pry into my sanctuary. The thing was that there was nothing in there for her to do besides disturb my peace.

So after her begging, I told her a secret. She said she knew what I told her, so I told her a second secret. She seemed to calm down after violating my privacy. I felt like I was on fire, but she was calm, so I guess it worked.

There was also physical baggage. She gave me gifts and told me not to throw them away. Living at home, I always came to a new decoration or addition to the house. My mom benefitted from retail therapy. I swung the other way and ran to minimalism. I felt itchy in spaces where there was too much clutter.

Yesterday I filled a trash bag of stuff to donate. That was a big step for me. That represented releasing the limiting belief that I can’t throw things away.

It seems so unproductive to dwell on it now, but back then, my personal boundaries were systematically taken down. That behavior only made sense in a bubble. I’m away now. I can declutter until I only have 100 things if I wanted to.

And yet I still think about how messed up it was for me to feel like I had no personal agency. I felt so exposed. It felt like I had no skin to cover my muscles and I had to navigate the world in that state. That is just one carry on in my collection of luggage I would be better off letting go.

But I can’t untell the secret. Thankfully, I am at a place where I can say never again. And still, I dwell on it. When I should be letting it go, cutting it off, doing anything I can to move forward.

The reason people hold resentment is that the negative emotions feel like evidence that what someone did was wrong. It feels like critical evidence to a trial. A trial that will never happen. People don’t go to jail for being jerks, so we have to learn how to leave that negative experience in the past.

Letting go of the past isn’t just dropping all the baggage you have, it is actually letting go piece by piece. And making the choice everyday to move in the direction of where you want to be.