Once upon a time, I lived in a world of disapproval and fear. I listened to a man who demanded I make him happy, then grew angrier when I could not. I thought something was wrong with me, so I sought to change who I was to become more pleasing to that man.
But as I changed my outward self, my inner self grew angry. I began to act out in subtle ways (like not packing his lunch as he liked – on purpose). And later, I heard my angry self yelling and screaming. One time I told that man to suck my balls. I called him a prick and raged at him. And he returned the behavior three-fold, desperately trying to re-create the princess he thought I was by intimidating the hate-filled troll, forcing her to disappear.
I didn’t know WHO I was. Was I hateful or loving? Was I a princess or a troll? What exactly did I want to be? I clung to his impressions of me, his analysis of why I did what I did. I listened as he told me I hated men, that I was manipulative, and that I was always looking for a fight. I sought to change those things about myself not realizing that he described himself, not me.
In me, he had once seen a fairy-tale princess and thought that living in a tower, isolated from the world except for him, was what I wanted. He put me on a pedestal with a tiny pin-point place to stand. Every time I lost my balance, he became upset – his princess should know how to balance on that pedestal and never lose her footing. He saw me as weak and fragile, unable to live up to even the basest standards of the cruel world he held in his mind, and he tried to be my knight in shining armor, my only connection to the outside world of which, he imagined, I had no understanding.
He tried to protect me from the world. And then he tried to protect me from myself. He tried to help in the only way he knew – by forcing me to be like him, or at least like the fairy-tale princess he imagined me to be.
And I wanted him to save me from the hate-filled troll I imagined myself to be. But no one can save me from myself. And although “myself” was horrid, it was horrid because I denied my true self. My true self fought to reclaim its place, its rightful place, by creating such an ill environment that I was forced to acknowledge its presence.
And when I realized that I was not hate-filled because that was who I was but because I was fighting for my life, it was the beginning of “The End.”