Broken Metaphors

The hardest part of looking at old photos of myself is recognizing how disordered the people around me were. I was consistently told how I was too plain, too fat, too pale, too awkward, too short, but I don’t see that in the photos. I have heard many people talk about how difficult it is to see photos of themselves and remember all the mean things they said or believed about themselves at the time. That comes up for me as well. However, the piece I cannot process is how others could see me as I were and still say those things.

I wonder what made adults fixate on the fat on my body. Why would an adult care that much about the belly fat of a child? Being on the receiving end of that treatment previously terrified me; now, it repulses me. How could adults have so drastically misinterpreted their responsibilities? Why would an adult say to a child something that he or she would be mortally offended by if subjected to? Why were adults complicit in humiliating me?

It has taken me quite some time to acknowledge that I was a victim of bullying and of broader emotional abuse. It can be hard to acknowledge this because it reveals that bullying and emotional abuse was present in environments where so many people have denied it.

A victim is somehow expected to simultaneously see from her own frame of reference and from bird’s eye view of her own suffering. It’s an impossible task.

I think emotional abuse is like being trapped in a cube, seeing the edges and corners meet. The abuse isn’t the box itself but rather being told that box is a sphere.

I should work more on that metaphor. I have the time, but not the patience. I’m going to go ahead and publish and give myself the opportunity to revisit this topic later.