I recently mentioned to my therapist that I do most of my schoolwork at night when staff is less likely to come and knock on my door asking if I’m okay. She asked what it meant to me when people ask if I need help. To me, in a best case scenario the other person is needy and needs reassurance from me. But it also feels more likely that the other person wants me to need help because if they can get me to need help from them, they can force me to be dependent on them. Both of these things are ways that my mother operated. She completely stopped caring that I existed when I went to college, but before that, I had a spooky rendition of Toccata and Fugue in D minor as my cell phone ringtone because every single time it rang, it was my mother and every single time she had somehow convinced herself that I was dead. Whether or not I was actually okay became irrelevant in this situation, and all that mattered was keeping Mom’s emotions under control. One time my siblings and I were out at the park on an icy day climbing around and we joked that if we got stuck in the ice we could buy ourselves some time by calling our mom to check in and reassure her that we were okay. So when people ask if I need anything, it raises my blood pressure because I feel like now I not only have to deal with my own problems, but I have to conceal them from others in order to prevent a meltdown.
I can see how that would lead me to misinterpret a lot of situations as an adult. Most people who ask if I need help probably are not going to start howling and flailing their limbs around if I reply in the affirmative. However, I’m less convinced that the second possibility is not true. My mother’s main goal in all her relationships was to make the other person entirely unable to function in life without her. She would find vulnerabilities, or even perceived vulnerabilities, and capitalize on them to the greatest extent possible. For example, one time my aunt confided in her that she had been a victim of date rape, so my mom told everybody about it, but she always concluded with “…but don’t tell her I said that, because it would hurt her.” This line was how she ensured that nobody ever found out she was breaking their confidence. She also started the rumor that my brother was dyslexic (which she never had him actually tested for by any kind of professional) and spread similar hurtful rumors about everyone she knew, to everyone else she knew. She wanted to make everybody think that she knew people better than they knew themselves, or that she was somehow the keeper of deep psychological understanding. Honestly she was probably mostly making stuff up, but the effect was the same: people became psychologically dependent on her. Don’t ask me the exact mechanism by which she managed to be both a rumor mill and also everyone’s confidante, or how exactly she managed to manipulate everyone into not being able to function without her constant approval. She has some sort of very serious personality disorder and I don’t even want to know the details. I do know that my sister couldn’t turn in papers in college without asking my mom to proofread them for her first (and I give you one guess who told me). So if I’m in a state of weakness and someone wants me to confide, it’s terrifying to me and just incredibly threatening. I get the feeling that people think I should somehow be okay with potentially never getting off of social security or with needing services from the Department of Mental Health for the rest of my life. I want a life worth living (as they say in DBT), or a meaningful life that isn’t just about surviving from one moment to the next. When people who are employed by the state ask me if I’m okay, it feels like they’re trying to foster in me a dependence on their services so I will never be able to function on my own or escape. And although most people aren’t my mother, I don’t know that I’m entirely wrong in this. It does seem to bother a lot of DMH-affiliated people that I’m smart and I have goals for my life. It’s like they think that if they can dumb me down a bit, I won’t ever try to achieve anything and I won’t be disappointed when I fail. When people knock on my door to ask if I’m okay, I feel like it’s an existential threat to any meaning and purpose in my life.
So I’m tense a lot during the day. Pretty much as soon as I take melatonin I figure they probably think I’m asleep, and I can be Me again. I do all my homework late at night when I’m less hypervigilant. I don’t know the appropriate way to work things out with staff. Honestly, I still have a lot of trouble trusting them after the whole medication debacle when I first moved in. I had a medication that I had to take for prediabetes, and if it was administered wrong then I would get diabetes. They put it in a minifridge but somehow the minifridge was set to freezing, which destroyed an entire month’s supply of the medication. Their solution was to wait for it to thaw and then insist that it was fine because it was not frozen, ignoring the fact that it had been frozen previously. It got to the point where the director bought a new minifridge so he could say that the problem was solved. Every time I brought it up, he said the problem was solved because he bought a new fridge. Like by guilting me by spending money he could distract from the fact that a new fridge was not the slightest bit relevant to the problem. I figured out that there was nothing whatsoever I could do about the situation and just bided my time until the month’s supply was up. Unsurprisingly, I now have Type 2 diabetes, which is precisely what I told them was going to happen. They only cared about whether I was emotional or not, so they went out of their way to keep me from causing any trouble while completely ignoring the fact that I was “causing trouble” for a valid reason. They either didn’t care or didn’t believe me that my health was at risk, opting instead to buy a new refrigerator to shut me up (which was definitely cheaper than paying for a new supply of the medication), and now I have Type 2 diabetes which is permanent and comes with lifelong consequences.
So, seriously, with all that going on, how am I supposed to be happy about people knocking on my door to ask if I’m okay? Wouldn’t anyone be a little defensive?
