Miss Understood

"People cease to understand you when you need understanding the most." ~ Antony Baekeland, the Protagonist in the film "Savage Grace"
(Based on the true story of the incestuous/matricide of the Baekeland Family, heir to the Bakelite Plastics Fortune.)


Right. Besides being a pretty disturbing film, set on the even more dysfunctional spin of the actual Baekeland brood, that quote above kind of kicked my ass. It snapped me back into my own reality (thankfully out of the biopic reality of that fuct up family), and helped me see just how defensive I can get when I feel hurt. Sure, this is a common gut reaction for nearly everyone feeling the pinch of love gone bad, even if but momentarily...

I think I am starting to see that my approaches to communicate about said disconnects often leaves me feeling more disconnected, ironically. So, one has to wonder: Is that I am choosing to love emotionally distant people, or am I accidentally adding insult to injury when what I seek is intimacy?

Harville Hendricks (author of a million self help books that friends, former therapists, and Oprah all highly recommend) has a few great passages on this subject from his book (with the gayest title ever), "Getting the Love You Want":

In despair, people begin to use negative tactics to force their partners to be more loving. They withhold their affection and become emotionally distant. They become irritable and critical. They attack and blame: "Why don't you...?" "Why do you always...?" "How come you never...?" They fling these verbal stones in a desperate attempt to get their partners to be warm and responsive – or to express whatever positive traits are in their imagos. They believe that, if they give their partners enough pain, the partners will return to their former loving ways.

What makes people believe that hurting their partners will make them behave more pleasantly? Why don't people simply tell each other in plain English that they want more affection or attention... or whatever it is that they are craving? ... ((he goes on to explain why...))

...When we were babies, we didn't smile sweetly at our mothers to get them to take care of us. We didn't pinpoint our discomfort by putting it into words. We simply opened our mouths and screamed. And it didn't take us long to learn that, the louder we screamed, the quicker they came. The success of this tactic was turned into an "imprint," a part of our stored memory about how to get the world to respond to our needs: "When you are frustrated, provoke the people around you. Be as unpleasant as possible until someone comes to your rescue."

Damn, he really hit the nail on the proverbial head, didn't he?!? I kind of feel dumb for being so infantile, and cranky when my feelings are hurt. But his point was to illuminate that it is the only tactic we knew as language-less babies – one that worked quite effectively, if we have survived into adulthood. The thing is, our modes of communicating have often been stunted, and semi-permanently stuck in those less than mature stages of life. Not having further refined our communication skills not only kind of sucks for our partners' sakes, as they are on the shit end of the stick, as they say – but, it also prevents us from getting what we wanted in the first place. So, everybody loses! (Awesome! I wanna go crawl under some love-less rock right now...)

This author goes on to illustrate that the smallest alterations in our approach to love and the moments when love feels out of reach can transcend the gaps, and reconnect us in ways we have previously only hoped could happen. Of course, all of these practical applications seemed to have slipped my mind over the past year while wrestling with the loss of love, or the months before that when love was thinking of dropping in for a visit.

While dissecting my erroneous ways with my best friend, she helpfully pointed out that my big trigger issue is not feeling understood. She said that often times folks who take care of others ("people pleasers") seem to feel leveled when their beloveds don't return those same thoughtful gestures, and make an effort to really learn about their partners wants and needs. I could see that to be true... She said that people like us (her and I), want so desperately for people to understand us, and really intuitively *know* us at our core. My friend explained that it makes perfect sense if I felt trapped in the misnomer of being raised as a girl, when I have always felt "other/alien" in my body, but wasn't able explore the definition, identity and physiological modifications of being transgender until decades later.

Having to "fake" my way through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, pretending to be okay with that fractured and dislocated sense of self obviously took its toll on me, in the form of debilitating anxiety and depression for much of my life. Things that only started to lessen once I truly faced the reality of being trans, and allowed myself to delve in head first to see what resonated with this formerly unresolved sense of self. It's getting there. I am understanding more and more about myself, not only through my trans identity, and how that channels my experiences in the world at large, but also the intrinsic elements beyond the surface level of gender paradigms.

What I want more than anything is for someone to *get* the fact that I have struggled, and that I have worked my ass off to let those challenges inform the healthier ways in which I choose to live. I don't want to be cast away simply because I'm "weird" or "freakish." And I don't want to be discounted because I have battled with the depression of denying my truest self. I want someone to *get* that I am trying my damnedest, and to give me the benefit of the doubt, when I might get stuck in an emotional loophole that I haven't figured out yet. I want to be understood, and to be appreciated for how much more I still want to decipher.

I want to change my approaches to love, and those of whom I love, to ensure that I'm not that screaming baby in the corner ironically begging for closeness. It's time for me to learn how to transparently talk about the intimacy I seek, rather than have it coded in actions that seemingly disprove all of my chattering on about wanting to be sweet in love. It's time to be an adult, and break the patterns that kept me being misunderstood. It's time to grow up – that's MIZZ Understood, from now on!