Flaw Salad

Lately I’ve been dressing like I did in middle school. Grey, brown, tan, and olive take center stage, with particular emphasis on men’s sweaters. I’ve always liked their clothes. When Mom used to take us back-to-school shopping at Kohl’s, I often picked out shirts from the Boys department. She never troubled me about it, which was one of the many gender-affirming aspects of my childhood. I was always allowed and even encouraged to be a little genderless. I climbed trees like a boy and played dolls like a girl. I loved Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels and horses and construction equipment. I painted nails and talked about crushes with my girl friends and jumped from haylofts and set tennis balls on fire with my boy friends. (Okay, it was just one tennis ball. We lost it in the sewer. I’m sure that’s fine.) I was a tenacious and curious rascal, which was fine by my parents. My father wanted a son, and for the first seven years of my life, I was the closest he could get. He raised me just like he would a boy. As for my mother, boys’ clothes were just a little cheaper than girls’, so it worked out for her, too.

“Nonbinary” was not a word I knew. Nothing like it ever crossed my path in suburban Minnesota. I barely even understood the concept of a lesbian, aside from a vague awareness that Ellen existed. In the ‘90s, we didn’t have they/thems on TV. I certainly didn’t see any at school. There was a small group of “GLB” kids—the preferred nomenclature at the time—and I always regarded them with curiosity but as an unknowable other. They were cool and closed and not for me, I decided, ignoring internal signals pulling me that direction. They, like everything then, felt beyond reach. My worldview was oppressively limited. I lacked the emotional and intellectual freedom to even fantasize about alternate identities. One of my favorite movies was Some Kind of Wonderful, in no small part because the main character Watts was so androgynous with her swagger and bandanas and drums. I thought how awesome it must be to look like that, but it did not occur to me that I could.

Much of this was due to Catholic shame, but most of it was due to authoritarian parents who invaded their children’s boundaries without apology or remorse. No corner of my life was safe from their judgment, control, and censure. This included emotions, speech, physical presentation, friendships, schoolwork, family relationships, leisure, attitude, and aspirations. They pried and criticized and expected perfection. Mistakes were not tolerated, and there was no way to predict what a mistake might be on any given day. A common error was looking sad at dinner. Having conflict with a friend. Bringing home an assignment from school that stressed Mom out. Getting a stain. Needing a ride. Inviting a friend inside when Mom was already in her robe at 6 p.m. Once, my five-year-old sister got slapped for having an anxiety attack.

Living in our house required constant vigilance to avoid upsetting our parents’ short tempers. My siblings and I could be watching TV downstairs when my father bellowed a demand from upstairs, usually to bring him something from the pantry. If we did not comply immediately—that is, verbal response and movement within 5-8 seconds—we would be chided and called lazy. And heaven forbid we didn’t hear the request and had to ask for a repeat. “You never listen!” Like a limb, we were expected to respond to our parents’ will, regarded not as individual people but as extensions of themselves. 

Having your individuality and autonomy denied as a child and being berated for normal behaviors and emotions, not occasionally but constantly, as a matter of course, creates pathologies. You learn to deny yourself. You learn you don’t matter. You suppress your needs and desires to the point that you can no longer access them. This lasts throughout adulthood, unless you work hard to undo the damage. Which is what I’m doing now.

It was just a sweater

Around age 13, I became aware I was doing “girl” wrong. Because there was no blueprint for me to conceive of not being a girl, the possibility of choosing an alternate, nonbinary identity could not occur to me. All I knew was that I was incorrect and needed to change. I asked my mother not to bring me any more clothing from the Boys department and expressed my intention to wear only girl clothes going forward. My mother agreed and promised any clothes she picked up for me would only be girl clothes from then on. She did what she was supposed to do in that moment.

Unfortunately, another moment came up. I wasn’t there to witness it. Mom was shopping at Kohl’s without me and saw a sweater that fit my tastes. It was the right color and style, and it must have been the right price. Everything looked good to her except one minor detail: it was a boys’ sweater. Faced with a decision between heeding the request of her child and doing what she felt was best, she chose to buy the sweater. To get me to accept it, she told me it was from the Girls department. I was skeptical, but she assuaged my doubts with insistence on her lie. I believed her.

A few days later, I would be humiliated among my peers when I showed up to school wearing the same sweater as Eddy Mallum. I insisted he was wearing girls’ clothes, in front of classmates who could clearly see which of us was the fool. But I couldn’t. Not at first. I repeated my mother’s lie with confidence and only began to doubt it in the ensuing hours at school, wearing that damn sweater for the rest of a long day. At home, when I asked Mom if it really was a girls’ sweater, she finally admitted her lie. While laughing. She thought this was a funny story. Oopsie! Teehee. My mother, who had always instructed me to tell the truth, had lied to me. She betrayed me. She removed my autonomy by feeding me incorrect information, eliminating my ability to choose for myself. She made me look like a chump. And she laughed about it. 

For many years, I blamed myself for this incident. I should have been doing my own shopping, I reasoned. I was 14, after all. Fourteen-year-olds shop for their own clothes. That’s how you avoid scenarios like this. I just needed to take responsibility. The idea that a parent had betrayed me—that, in fact, there was nothing I could do as a kid to prevent my parent from lying to me, from prioritizing her own whims over my self-determination—was too painful for my adolescent mind to comprehend. Instead, I chose, as I always would and still do, self-blame. Because when you blame yourself, you create the illusion of control. This was my fault, so I can modify my behavior in the future to avoid this.

Welcome to the codependent mindset. Everything is my fault. Everything is controllable. Everything bad that has ever happened to me was the result of my own poor choices. Ergo, nothing bad will happen if I just act right. I must always act right. There is no room for error. If something bad does happen, it’s because I faltered and deserve it.

Thinking this way is how my child self made sense of the behavior of adults who were meant to be infallible. Self-blame protected that illusion by protecting my parents from responsibility. I accepted the messages they told me. My humiliation at school wasn’t a big deal, actually. It was pretty funny if you think about it. My mom was just trying to shop to my tastes. She was trying to help me. Parents help. I was the incorrect one, because I was too sensitive and didn’t appreciate that my mother was actually trying to please me. 

Everything was my fault, whether due to error or a fundamental defect. That was just my truth. It never stopped being my truth.

I can’t be a people pleaser; I’m an asshole

A few weeks ago, my therapist asked if I knew what CoDA was. A flood of information came rushing back to me. Toward the end of my last significant romantic relationship, I had begun a deep dive into codependency. At the time, it felt revelatory. Many patterns discussed in the literature were immediately recognizable to me. I was eager to change and set about doing the work. Alas, the relationship was already taxed beyond repair, and there wasn’t much time to implement learnings before the breakup. Relationships with friends, coworkers and family improved, though, and then codependency faded into the background of my thoughts. Years went by. I found myself in another troubled relationship but did not recall the all-encompassing pathology called codependency until my therapist mentioned it.

Interestingly, codependency was only brought up after a full year of working together. Given the holistic way it describes my patterns of thought and behavior, I wonder why it took so long to mention. Perhaps she was thinking it and avoiding the direct label to allow for self-discovery? Or perhaps this particular pathology is so sneaky and pervasive that it can be difficult to identify. That is, until I say something like, “Romantic relationships consume me. Whenever I’m in one, that’s all I can think about. I organize my whole life around my relationships.” Which is approximately what I said. But codependency is so much bigger than obsession. 

Being raised in an authoritarian household by parents who lacked emotional maturity and availability, who blamed and shamed and mocked and screamed, who lied and betrayed and demanded perfection, and who took out their tensions with each other on their children, turned me into an anxious mess. I tried to be a good kid. I was a good kid. I excelled in school and participated in many extracurriculars. I took AP classes and made the honor roll. I worked a slew of part-time jobs. I had an active and dynamic social life. I was creative and funny and polite and helpful around the house. And my parents reminded me often of my messy room (“lazy”), berated me for being 3-5 minutes late for curfew (because they chose to wait up, which meant I was “inconsiderate” and “never think of anyone else”), teased me about eating habits, and always wondered “what happened?” when an A- showed up on the report card among a sea of As.

More insidiously, they blamed me for the conflict between them. Usually, this took the form of a conflict between Dad and me, followed by a fight between Mom and Dad about the conflict. Details of the original offense varied but often had to do with “sass,” laziness, insubordination, ingratitude, and/or bad attitude. Once, we had a big fight because I used the word “swum,” and Dad thought I was making fun of him by insisting it was a real word. He was livid, especially when I offered to get the dictionary. My father’s ego was fragile. So was my mother’s. She would argue with Dad about how he handled me and then debrief the conversation with me, not bothering to consider the impact of repeating Dad’s negative opinions back to me. “I always stick up for you with your father,” she would often cry, seeking validation for the good parenting she felt she was doing. When angry, she would scream things like, “You disrupt the mood of this entire house,” placing blame on a teenage kid for her and my father’s inability to regulate their own emotions in response to adolescent mood swings.

What I internalized from my upbringing is that I am wrong. Deficient. A problem. Unsolvable. I have carried that belief into adulthood, morphing it into an obsession with mitigating the impact of my existence on others. That is, I am in a constant state of trying to make myself acceptable. A common phrase for this “people pleasing.”

People pleasing is an idea I’ve rejected in the past because I saw myself as wildly independent and often contrarian. Whenever considering the notion, I would recall numerous recent arguments or other instances of pissing someone off. “Nope, not a people pleaser,” I would conclude. “Just an asshole.” But it turns out the two are not mutually exclusive. You can be both! In fact, both are symptoms of codependency. 

Codependency is difficult to define, but it is essentially a system of thoughts and behaviors that attempt to externalize matters of the self. Because I was treated not as an individual but as an extension of my parents—because I was invalidated, blamed, and shamed—my brain has trained itself to ignore its own signals in favor of external ones, which it views as more trustworthy than its own. What this creates is a stormy interior that is at the constant mercy of my environment and those in it. If someone else is in a bad mood, I internalize it. If anything at all is wrong, I internalize it. I feel guilty or anxious or ashamed.

Safety in these circumstances is impossible. One cannot feel safe when their sense of security depends on everyone and everything around them being okay at all times. But brains like mine don’t understand that. They pursue safety by appeasing, controlling, or abandoning others. Strategies vary by person and by incident. One day, I may attempt to create safety by giving into my partner’s every whim and buying her gifts to “earn” or “deserve” her love. Another day, I might withdraw into a fortress of anger or solitude as a way to keep “control” of a situation. Or I might laugh at an offensive comment someone has made directly to my face, in an effort to be liked. Or I might make a hurtful comment to reject someone before they reject me. The list of maladaptive patterns is long, and many are harmful to others.

Learning how to exist

Recovering from codependency involves both accountability and self-compassion. One must look directly at their behavior and acknowledge it as a problem in order to heal, but you also have to be careful not to perpetuate the harmful cycles of self-blame and constant self-criticism. It’s a mind-fuck, honestly. I am attempting to reprogram my entire brain.

Because my needs were never regarded as a child, it is difficult for me to identify them, much less express them. And then allowing them to be met? Horrifying. My brain just wants to stuff everything down and ignore it until it goes away (because it incorrectly believes needs can go away), but anything stuffed down comes out eventually, often in toxic ways. So in order to solve the problematic behavioral patterns, I must first identify and express my needs and allow them to be met. That means I have to acknowledge and care for a self that I am well trained not to see. I have to allow myself to take up space.

A few days ago, my partner offered me the living room TV to watch a movie I wanted to see. She wasn’t particularly interested in the movie but wanted to hang out, so she was sitting on the sofa beside me, playing on her phone while I watched the film. My codependent mind struggled with this. It did not feel that I had a right to take up the entire living room TV with a movie that only I wanted to watch, even in my own home. My mind also perceived her phone-playing as boredom, which it believed to be a problem that was my responsibility to solve. Sitting there, I had to coach myself to tolerate the scene and accept that there was no actual problem, that I had a right to take up space, and that it was not my job to solve my partner’s boredom if she even was bored (she wasn’t). I had to keep forcing my attention away from problems it was inventing and back to the movie. This was hard.

At 40 years old, it is embarrassing to be so thwarted in the emotional areas of my life, especially when I have (codependently!) prided myself on succeeding in so many others. I have always viewed myself as capable because I am. Wildly so. But I have spent my whole life obsessing over relationships. 

I am trying to imagine a world where I free myself from the constant negative feedback loop of codependency—a world in which my actions and thoughts make me proud, in which I am finally able to show up in the authentic and caring ways I strive for, unburdened by echoes of childhood shame. What could I create with those free hours? What could I share if I release my inhibitions? How full and loving could my relationships be if I learn to embrace intimacy without fear?

Imagining this world is challenging, especially when the outside world declines to acknowledge your existence much of the time. When your gender is binary, you might not notice how often you’re asked to choose between male and female—on forms, in public restrooms, while shopping, etc.—without an option for people like me. Even CoDA’s website, where I have gone for help and resources regarding codependency, opens, “We are men and women who…” Are nonbinary people allowed? I know yes, but I have to make that assumption, to insert myself into places where I am not explicitly welcomed. 

Claiming a nonbinary identity, out loud and without apology, is itself a step in the direction of healing. I avoided it for many years, sensing who I was (and even saying it from time to time) but being unwilling to seek acknowledgement from others. The idea of asking people to use they/them pronouns mortified me, and I felt petrified that my nonbinary ex might think I was “copying” them—or that others might think the same. Truly, I repressed a major facet of my identity to keep other people comfortable and to avoid taking up too much space.

Over Thanksgiving, I visited home in Minnesota for the first time since coming out as nonbinary (to select family members). I asked for they/them pronouns, which was new. “I’m leaning toward they but won’t be offended by she or anything,” had been my previous line. Classic minimization. But I noticed that the “she”s had started to hurt, that something in me recoiled at every suggestion or implication that I was a woman, so I decided to be brave and trust my brother and sister-in-law with the they/them request. They were happy to oblige. Still, each time they stumbled a little, corrected themselves, or tried to explain the concept of “nonbinary” to my young nieces, I felt this intense urge to wave away their efforts, to tell them not to worry about it, that it was no big deal, it didn’t matter. Every fiber of my being wanted to minimize and dismiss my needs, but I forced myself to tolerate the discomfort of taking up space. When I did, I found care. And it was really beautiful.

Postscript

One of the hallmarks of codependency is weak boundaries, which includes “sharing privacies with strangers,” according to Codependency for Dummies. I considered those words before sharing this post. Am I just seeking another way to externalize a matter of self? I might be. There could come a time when seeing these words makes me cringe, when I find this exposition unseemly. But right now, I find discussion helpful. Sharing my experiences opens the door for others to share their own, and I hope that if you’ve read this far, you’ve gotten some value out of my words and/or would be willing to talk with me about your own experiences. My door is open these days. Along with my wounds. Along with my heart.

Anyway, I figure there’s enough internet for me to take up a little space in it. So here I am, warts and all.