Down the Rabbit Hole

Impressions and Expectations

30 Day Blogging Challenge
PROMPT November 18th
What is something that most people misunderstand or wrongly assume about you?

I honestly don't know. These days its hard for me to tell if what I perceive in other's is a general lack of interest in me or lack of concern in my well-being because they wrongly assume I'm fine.

I have this one friend, we have been friends forever and she is the most kind-hearted, selfless person I know. I'm blessed to have her in my life. I can not count the times I have received a text in the morning just checking in on me or wishing me a good day, or words of encouragement. This small gesture has made all the difference some days. She knows what has been going on in my life and she has been a real source of comfort to me.

Her care and concern magnifies the indifference that others show me though. I don't think I've had any conversation lately with my sister than hasn't revolved around her and her life. My siblings never ask me how I am, I don't think they even consider it. I used to be close with my sister but in the last year, she seems not to see me at all. I thought us having Roo was going to deepen our relationship, that would bring my daughter and I closer into her world but in truth, it has been only to lead me to feeling more isolated and apart. I don't feel welcome very often and though I try to help out and be supportive, I feel her resentment and disappointment like a incoming tide sometimes. At a time when I could really use someone to talk to, my texts and phone calls rarely get answered. She has no real idea of how I've been feeling, how much I am struggling with my life at this time.

My mother and I are estranged and my relationship with my father is very complicated for me at the moment. My brother has never been a support system for me. Phone calls and visits with him revolve around getting our kids together and not any real sibling comradery. I don't think he's ever given thought to what I may or may not have going on personally. He just doesn't work that way.

This past year my youngest brother and I had a falling out. No, that's being generous. He snapped on me and sent a blistering series of private and public messages to me. He is an addict, and I have come to expect the up and down with him over the last few years. He has frequently said things or behaved in ways that lead to our temporary estrangement. This was different. He broke my heart and what is worse, he made me afraid. I have worked very hard in my life to overcome the imprint of fear left on me by another man...something he has first hand knowledge of. The fact that he brought me to a place of that kind of fear again by his own violent threats...is unforgivable. I cut all ties to him. It has been a devastating loss I have largely born in private. I felt mortally wounded by it all, and months and months later, I still feel the rage and grief of it all. If I had to pinpoint a time when I first felt my spirit weakening, it was when he told me I was a "piece of shit" and he hoped someone would "burn my house down on me". I had no words for how it felt to read those words, no way to equate them with the little boy I loved as if he was my own. I cut him out of life and as a result, I think I lost something of myself...something I will never be able to get back or replace.

In my family, I have always been a bit of a fixer. I've taken up the slack for others who are less engaged. I'm never one to ignore the phone or the needs of others in my family. I regularly get drawn into dramas to support or back someone else. However, I have come to understand that I am rarely the person they think about. I am not the person they call just to "check in on". Maybe they assume I don't need anything, maybe they think I've always been okay? Maybe they don't see a world outside their own? I don't know. It is making me dread the holidays all the more because my heart is 100% not in it. I live closer to my two remaining siblings then I have since we all lived under the same roof. I think I believed it would make us closer. I thought, given the parents we share, that it would make us closer. It hasn't. It is seemed only to magnify that the opposite is true.

Maybe they just assume I am okay with it all but they would be wrong.