#paul i’m sorry i wasn’t familiar with your game but i’m obsessed with you now

[one-1-eye]

um hello everyone should watch the newest episode of smartypants so that you can all hear what i just had to hear about the spworm

[perminas-archive]

tl;dr

Mom,

So this is going to be a super long, super emotional one. Brace yourself! I love you so much, unconditionally.

I have inattentive type ADD. There is no way you could have known that. Almost all the research on kids with ADD/ADHD when I was growing up was geared towards prepubescent boys with ADHD.

Girls with inattentive type ADD don't usually present symptoms until after puberty, and they aren't hyperactive.

Girls with inattentive type ADD who are highly intelligent and interested in school and who are competitive, even today, go unnoticed because for a long time, because schoolbook intelligence and a competitive instinct can mask symptoms.

Girls with inattentive type ADD are super interested in conforming to what a girl should be, because all girls grow up with that kind of damage. The research on girls with inattentive type ADD began to be published in 2008-2009, by which time I was already in college.

It may seem weird to think that I have ADD because I have so many obsessive interests. You've heard me play the same song 12 times in a row (at a generous minimum), obsessively fiddling with the volume. I can play the Sims or World of Warcraft for 12 hours straight. I can finish a book in a day.

But ADD comes with the ability to hyperfocus, and if you're interested in school, you can hyperfocus on it. You can knock out a 10-page research paper in a few hours. Which is what I did, all the way through high school and college, while bringing a novel to classes I didn't like. Because I was just a genius, right? It made sense that someone so highly intelligent would work that way, Nutty Professor style. Hyperfocus also sometimes means you get so obsessed with a video game or a TV show that you call in sick to work because you can't stop playing or watching - you really can't stop. That happens too. I can't explain why I can't stop, but I need you to believe that I CAN'T. I CAN'T. It's too deep.

For highly intelligent inattentive type ADD girls, apparently the only place it really shows up young is (a) inability to follow pattern-based social rules and (b) failure in areas where there is a lack of interest but not ability.

I remember Dad saying "You're not bad at math. You just don't like it and you're not trying." I didn't believe him at the time, but now I do, because I can take a differential in calculus as long as I have a funny teacher.

Girls with inattentive type ADD show signs mostly after puberty, beginning  at 11-12. These signs may not be things you think of as ADD - failure in class, inability to focus on school, resistance to learning, anger-related behavioral problems at home. Instead it often looks more like inability to finish chores, problems with grooming, problems with keeping one's room clean, problems with maintaining friendships, problems with relationships and intimacy, problems with bringing home forms from school that aren't crushed into your pocket, covered in crumbs, five days late - a total inability to focus on things that don't interest you. Basic kid stuff, but weirdly stretched through adolescence. Sound familiar? Sound super familiar? The kind of thing that makes you feel like a failure as a mother?

(Sorry. That's my only intentional jab. That one haunts me. I know you know it does and you didn't mean it. But it stuck around, and it will for the rest of my life.)

Inattentive type ADD, particularly in intelligent girls, also comes with increased sensitivity to rejection and criticism, possibly because children with ADD know they're different from other kids but can't prove or articulate it. When they hear things like "You're smarter than this," "I don't know what you were thinking," and "How could you be so careless?" they don't think "My behavior was wrong." They think "There is something wrong with me. Aren't I smarter than this? What was I thinking? Why was I so careless? I don't understand, and everyone is talking to me like this is a decision I made to be careless and stupid and disrespectful, but I'm still not completely sure what it was that I thought wrong that turned into an action. It seems more like I felt and thought wrong from the get-go. There must be something deeply wrong with me." And they can't explain it, because even though they know what they're experiencing with learning in school and at home is different from other kids, they don't really know why. They think it's something wrong with them at a level too deep to be corrected. It has to be masked, particularly with girls, because a problem like that that you can't fix is a reason not to love you.

When I was growing up, you and Dad had a major focus on lectures as opposed to physical punishment, which was great. The lectures tended to focus on guilt as a mechanism to correct behavior. THIS PROBABLY WOULD HAVE WORKED WITH NORMAL KIDS! But it doesn't with a kid who inherently feels that she is wrong and her actions are wrong, full stop. Guilt becomes associated to the person, not the action. Guilt turns into shame.

This is a list of traits of adult women who were subject to "shame-based parenting," aka you, or regular parenting that focused on personal responsibility, aka me:

1. Adults shamed as children are afraid of vulnerability and fear exposure of self.

2. Adults shamed as children may suffer extreme shyness, embarrassment and feelings of being inferior to others. They don't believe they make mistakes. Instead they believe they are mistakes.

3. Adults shamed as children fear intimacy and tend to avoid real commitment in relationships. These adults frequently express the feeling that one foot is out of the door, prepared to run.

4. Adults shamed as children may appear either grandiose and self-centered or seem selfless.

5. Adults shamed as children feel that, “No matter what I do, it won't make a difference; I am and always will be worthless and unlovable.”

6. Adults shamed as children frequently feel defensive when even minor negative feedback is given. They suffer feelings of severe humiliation if forced to look at mistakes or imperfections.

7. Adults shamed as children frequently blame others before they can be blamed.

8. Adults shamed as children may suffer from debilitating guilt. These individuals apologize constantly. They assume responsibility for the behavior of those around them.

9. Adults shamed as children feel like outsiders. They feel a pervasive sense of loneliness throughout their lives, even when surrounded with those who love and care.

10. Adults shamed as children project their beliefs about themselves onto others. They engage in mind-reading that is not in their favor, consistently feeling judged by others.

11. Adults shamed as children often feel angry and judgmental towards the qualities in others that they feel ashamed of in themselves. This can lead to shaming others.

12. Adults shamed as children often feel ugly, flawed and imperfect. These feelings regarding self may lead to focus on clothing and makeup in an attempt to hide flaws in personal appearance and self.

13. Adults shamed as children often feel controlled from the outside as well as from within. Normal spontaneous expression is blocked.

14. Adults shamed as children feel they must do things perfectly or not at all. This internalized belief frequently leads to performance anxiety and procrastination.

15. Adults shamed as children experience depression.

16. Adults shamed as children lie to themselves and others.

17. Adults shamed as children block their feelings of shame through compulsive behaviors like workaholism, eating disorders, shopping, substance-abuse, list-making or gambling.

18. Adults shamed as children often have caseloads rather than friendships.

19. Adults shamed as children often involve themselves in compulsive processing of past interactions and events and intellectualization as a defense against pain.

20. Adults shamed as children are stuck in dependency or counter-dependency.

21. Adults shamed as children have little sense of emotional boundaries. They feel constantly violated by others. They frequently build false boundaries through walls, rage, pleasing or isolation.

Every single item on this list is true of me. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I was having a truly religious moment of clarity. Every single thing. Reading back over it now, I wonder if you aren't having the same feelings about yourself and your own horrifying mother, who was actually engaging in some truly disgusting shame-based parenting. No one should ever call a kid Dummy. You're brilliant, and I'm sure you were as a kid. I love talking to you. I recommend books and podcasts to you, NEVER Dad, because you're smart enough and aware enough to get them, and not an asshole.

Like, I get that she was your mom and you must have loved her. But from every story you've ever told me about her, I hate her for your sake. She was awful to you. You deserved so much better. Thank God for Paul. He's the only person I've ever seen in your life who truly tries to validate you other than me, and my validation is of VERY LATE ORIGIN. You are valid. You're so smart, and so good.

When I was about 11 or 12, I had an epiphany that shaped the rest of my life. It was a false epiphany, for the record. I thought that you didn't actually see me when you were trying to fix me. I convinced myself that you had imagined a better daughter, one with potential and who was capable of change. I knew that person wasn't me. Every time you talked to me about the things that were wrong, I knew for a fact I couldn't fix it, no matter how simple it was. I knew that no matter how hard I tried to force it, I couldn't really change the person I was. I had already tried. I'd tried and tried and I wasn't getting better.

I imagined that I was two people: Charlotte, the real me, the mean, ugly, bitchy, hateful person who fucked up constantly and resented everyone and talked back; and Charlotte Prime, the imaginary daughter who fucked up but had potential, who could be more if she chose, who was loved by her parents, who was capable of change and would grow up right and beautiful. Charlotte Prime seemed like a stranger, but she was also the beloved one.

I convinced myself that you only saw Charlotte Prime. You looked at me and saw the potential. You looked at me and thought how much better and happier I could be if I cut away the bad stuff, the inability to look after myself physically, the meanness, the moods. You didn't know that I, the real Charlotte, even existed. You loved a completely separate, imaginary person as your daughter. You looked at me and loved Charlotte Prime, not me. I couldn't ever let you know I wasn't her. I didn't know if you'd still love me if you figured out I wasn't her and she didn't exist.

I knew (thought) I couldn't change and couldn't cut away the bad stuff. I was killing myself day in and day out to be the perfect dinner guest, to be pretty, to be soft-spoken and charming, to be cute at all times. And it wasn't working. I was intelligent and charming, but I was still brash, dirty, ugly, disrespectful, and according to you and Dad extremely prone to challenge you with sarcasm (which I don't actually remember doing, mostly I assume because I didn't realize I was doing it). But I thought I could probably fake enough change to get by. I'm a decent liar. I could force the ugly parts of me you wanted to cut away small enough that you wouldn't see them, that you'd think I'd fixed them. I could look like Charlotte Prime if nobody looked long enough. I would just have to let the bad parts out in small ways when nobody was looking - eating all the chocolate chips in the kitchen and blaming it on Dad, buying junk food from the vending machines at school with change from the couch and cars, being mean to my friends, hiding in my room all the time so you couldn't see me.

When I was 16, on Mother's Day at Hooters, we had some kind of tiff I don't remember and I was trying to explain myself, and you were (to me, at the time, smugly) justifying your position. And I thought: "Just roll over. Just let her have it. It's not worth it and you'll be out in two years."

That thought carried through the rest of my life. Just let her have it. Just let her be right. Not because she's stupid and it's easier to tell her she's right; but because she's fiercely intelligent, and she'll figure out your lie about Charlotte Prime if you don't let her be right, because you need this lie to survive.

I really, really didn't think you'd love me if you ever figured out I was a monster. If I really was that person who couldn't wash her hair or clean her room. That was wrong and untrue. I know now that you'd love me even if I sent you a text full of pictures of people I'd serial-killed.

But I still knew (thought) that something was wrong with me fundamentally. That I had to demonstrate goodness that was not my own to be worthy of love, to pretend to be the person you loved at all.

I went to Dad's confirmation in the church in April of some year, and I was really sick but felt I had to come anyway. I thought I had to, as a condition of parental love. You didn't put that on me. I put it on myself. I was very sick.

At the confirmation, I got so sick that I couldn't stop coughing and went into the sacristy or the guest lounge or something to avoid further disruption. You followed me, and were so honestly concerned by my health that I ended up confessing that I had never felt good enough for you, and showing up at the confirmation was an attempt at being good enough.

You were sympathetic for a bit and tried to comfort me, but eventually screamed "DON'T YOU PUT THAT SHIT ON ME" re: my feelings of inadequacy and fled the room. And I was, of course, miserable. I couldn't stop crying. After a while I came back out, still crying, dreading you'd see my emotion as a manipulation. I understand your feelings too, I think. You've always thought of me as smarter and better than yourself. To hear that I felt inferior must have been severely jarring and a significant reverse of what you thought was going on. My emotions and behavior might have looked like manipulation, because your own mother manipulated you that way.

But you're my mother. I love you. Maybe I didn't explain it correctly - I was in a monster mood last time. I felt wrong, and I was trying to confess the lie about Charlotte Prime without fully articulating it. You running out on me hurt me deeply. I haven't been able to fully trust you since then. I actually don't know if I can again. I thought it was the end. I thought you figured it out, that I wasn't ever going to turn into the person you loved, Charlotte Prime with all her potential. You were stuck with your ugly, vicious daughter. And you didn't even like her, much less love her.

I could never trust you again. Not because you're untrustworthy - but because you had figured it out. It was as if you were my mother, but I wasn't your daughter.

You've heard me talk about my depression and anxiety as "chemical" mostly because yoga and fruit doesn't fix it. It's something deep in me that can't be corrected by a simple behavioral change. It's intense, easily triggered, and mostly uncontrollable. But I wasn't born with it - maybe with a predisposition to it, but not with it in my brain. Inattentive type ADD and the neuroses that accompany highly intelligent girls throughout their lives develops into depression and anxiety on an extremely regular basis. A lot of the research into girls with inattentive type ADD came after treating adult women with anxiety and depression who responded better to antidepressants combined with ADD medication that gave them the ability to focus. Difficulty focusing is also a depressive trait.

Learning to hate yourself young changes your brain forever. Staying hating yourself when you've grown up changes the way you think, changes the balance of chemicals in your brain. It's the opposite of what happens when someone believes so intensely in faith healing they shrink their tumors. I made myself sick, unconsciously.

I'm still sick. I know what I did, but I can't fix it yet. I can't even completely stop the patterns of thinking that make me sicker. When you and Dad would lecture me, I took from those lectures that feeling horrible was a part of correcting the problem, maybe the most important part - something was wrong with me, but feeling horrible would sink into my bones and fix it over time. I started yelling at myself in my head in your voice whenever I made mistakes, because I thought feeling horrible enough about it would deter me from it in the future. That's still a primary method of self-correction for me. It's only in the last year or two that I recognized I didn't need to do that. Feeling wretched wasn't a part of fixing the problem. It just made me feel (horrible and) helpless, which actually prevented me from fixing the problem.

That's what I mean when I say I hear your voice in my head every day. I hear myself yelling in your voice, because when I was growing up I learned that hearing yelling and feeling horrible was a fundamental part of correcting the bad behavior I couldn't control that made me wrong, bad, different from other kids, that I had to hide or else you wouldn't love me, because you'd figure it out. I had to take over from you so you'd think I was changing. I had to be the person doing the yelling, and it had to sound like you, so I could be scared enough and controlled enough in your presence to fake Charlotte Prime.

I still think that way. At work, I also feel like there's me, Charlotte, who makes tons of mistakes, gossips, spends an hour bullshitting with the admins instead of working, comes in late, forgets about projects, has to come in weekends to make up time. And then there's Charlotte Prime, who's well-spoken, intelligent, who the partners love, who is capable of editing out the "careless" (ADD) errors in her work and eventually fulfilling her potential as a perfect paralegal. They hired Charlotte Prime. I feel like I'm running a scam all the time. No matter how many times they tell me they love me and I can't ever quit, I feel like they're talking to Charlotte Prime. If they knew it was me, Charlotte, they were talking to, they wouldn't bother. Prime has all the potential. Charlotte has all the attitude and mistakes.

I do love my new meds. I was previously on Zoloft, an SSRI, which I hated, because it did nothing for me. Then I was on Wellbutrin, a mood stabilizer and antidepressant, that half worked. Now I'm on Pristiq, which is on the label used to treat both depression and ADD/ADHD. I've actually noticed my focus and concentration improving. It's miraculous. It's not perfect, and I think I want to talk to my shrink about a supplement that is pure ADD medication, but it's such an improvement, because it's actually treating the base cause, not the symptom. Being able to read a simple 10-page estate-planning document all the way through without getting distracted because I didn't care was a bizarre and amazing experience. I felt like I was ascending - like I could become Prime. Prime wasn't a stranger anymore. She was me, medicated. Maybe I wasn't tricking everyone. Maybe I really could become her, but the way I was trying to get there had to be rethought.

I still pretty much think I'm tricking everyone. But it's getting easier to believe that people might honestly love the real me, the fuckup, and to integrate my good behavior self with my bad behavior self, especially as I get older and realize that everyone else is a fuckup too. They might not have ADD to contend with, but by god they've got something. People are all so weird and such idiots and I love them all so much. I love working in an office and living in apartment buildings and being in the city because everyone around you is held artificially close, and you get to see them fucking up and being weird.  

These days, I'm focusing on recognizing when I'm yelling at myself in my head and saying "You don't need to do that. That isn't fixing the problem, it's just making you panic. You'll be more effective at fixing the problem if you stop yelling at yourself." Because even as I'm getting better at recognizing my worth, I still primarily feel like fixing the problem in my behavior is more important than my happiness, but I'm getting closer. I really like Charlie, my new therapist. I don't know if he likes me, but I know he doesn't dislike me the way Julie did. And I think it's better if a therapist doesn't absolutely love you. My first two therapists thought I was the bee's knees, and when it came time to terminate, something weird happened that I think is best encapsulated by this quote from an episode of This American Life:

Terry Gross: In your chapter about your therapist, you have a great description of yourself when describing your thoughts after telling the therapist that you are going to stop seeing him. And I’d like you to read that for us.

David Rakoff: Yes. This is when he— I’m not talking about terminating. I seem to be avoiding the topic. And finally he stops me one day. I’m ranting about, I think, human rights in China or something like that. And he finally says, look, we’ve got to talk about you terminating. This is a big thing.

"Turning things around, I asked him what his feelings were about our ending things. ‘I’m incredibly angry,’ he responded fondly. ‘How dare you. You should at least have to come and have coffee with me once a week.’ I asked if he felt this way about most of his patients. ‘Not really,’ he responded.

Sigh. Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless hair trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness— a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of the kitchen chair— then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on ‘adorable,’ even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one— well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.”

I'm getting better at that. I care if Charlie likes me, because I care if anyone likes me, but I don't care if Charlie likes me at the expense of the truth. I don't lie to him. I don't focus on being charming. I focus on getting better.

I think I'm getting better. I think it's going to take a long fucking time, which is frustrating because I want results NOW. But I'm getting better. I'm never going to be Prime, but I can integrate the two mes. I can be good enough. I am good enough. Everyone makes mistakes, and mine aren't a symbol of my wrongness. They're a symptom.

HMB has really been game-changing for me. I've never worked in an office where I was considered smart and valuable enough to make up for my constant stream of mistakes, or at least where I recognized that people felt that way about me. I still feel like I'm running a scam and people can't possibly see all the mistakes or I'd be fired, but I've fucked up, visibly, hugely, and not been shamed for it - I just fix the error and demonstrate that I'm trying to improve, and I'm forgiven. And I'm finally starting to see other people of my age and my ability making similar mistakes. Some of my mistakes are the ADD or other stuff at work, but a ton of them are about being human. Growing up, hating my mistakes, I convinced myself that other people didn't make them at all, which in retrospect is completely insane. Of course everyone makes mistakes. But when I can see Izabela transposing numbers in our billing, it's like heroin. She did it too! Type-A Izabela occasionally misreads numbers, so maybe it's not a function of my wrongness that I do too. Maybe it's just something that happens.

I'm getting better. I'm getting better. I can be better. This isn't forever. Honestly, if you've ever worried about me being suicidal, know this: I've always been permanently optimistic about precisely one thing, which is that no matter how miserable I am now, my life may someday get better. I can't kill myself because I don't know the future and I don't want to miss out. And I AM getting better. It's happening. Sometimes I think about suicide in an offhand, what-if, "A Christmas Story" way, but it's never been a real idea. I've never truly considered it. And I'm glad, because I can get better. I'm never fully going to be able to morph into Charlotte Prime, but that's also OK. Everyone has some kind of damage, and I can manage my own. I can actually get it smaller through different methodology. I can change the way it affects me, change the way I think. I already have - being able to tell myself yelling internally isn't helpful was a game-changer too. I see a future where I'm OK. I know you love me, Charlotte. I know, somewhere deep down, that Charlotte with all her fuckups is the person my coworkers and friends see. Charlotte Prime is my own monster in the closet. I love people the most when I can see their dark spots. When I found your diary in high school and realized you had been an alcoholic, I loved you more, because you were fucking up. I thought: oh my God, she's like me. She's a human, not a demigod. We're the same on some level. She has a Prime, too. Why can't she tell that I love my own human mother more than Mom Prime? Why does she have to pretend all the time?

You know why.

I love you so much. Thank you for being my mom. You did an amazing job. The way I thought about myself wasn't your fault. It was something you couldn't have known, because my every hour was dedicated to concealing it and nursing it internally and there was no guidebook. I'm so glad I went to therapy as an adult and could figure it out. I don't know who I would be without it. I'm glad you went to therapy, divorced Dad, married Paul. You're leveling up too.

I love you.