A writer with trauma

  I don't know why writing and sadness go together like peanut butter and jelly. They just do.  The biggest works of literature are about dark stuff like sexual abuse (Toni Morrison in 'Bluest eye'), the loss of a parent (Ocean Vuong in 'Time is a mother'), the loss of a lover or a fantasy (Haruki Murakami in 'Desire'), addiction and becoming a broken shell of a man as a result of it (Douglas Stuart in 'Shuggie Bain') and so on. Depression does not discriminate anyone and many famous writers we grew to love and care for have struggled with it. Unfortunately, few of them have lost their lives to this illness. Depression in the literary world Sylvia Plath The day you died I went into the dirt,  Into the lightless hibernaculum  Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard  Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.  Electra on Azalea Path by Sylvia Plath This is the beginning of "Electra on Azalea Path" a poem written by Sylvi...

  I don't like my mother. She doesn't like me. She doesn't know me.  She sees herself as a child in me and I am a redhead, freckled and pale. She's a brunette with a tanned complexion.  But she is me. She's my image turned inwards. Believing she could get a second chance at love by making me love  her as a parent, as a friend, she acts humble and pleasing to me. Despite her lack of awareness and her complete astonishment about why I am not yet turning into a perfect version of  who she wants me to be, I still think she is important. She is important because she served the role of giving me life and making my skin thick. And that is enough for me to be able to write about our experiences together without 'bruising' too easily. I believe that the most important person in anyone's life is their mother. If their mother was absent or  too hurtful to be considered a nurturer, they will affect that person's life to a high degree. Therefore, even though ...

Photo by Elizaveta Dushech I recently realized the fact that narcissistic mothers don't see people as they are but as they want them to be.   Now, this sounds normal. We all do that. We all try to change people we are in a relationship with because we cannot accept them for who they are.  However, narcissists go beyond the habit of wanting to change someone in a relationship. They believe that the person they love/care about is someone else entirely. This is a phenomenon called 'splitting' and I learned about it from a support group I attend.  Splitting is a coping mechanism in which the person sees another person as either 'good' or 'bad', idealised or devalued. This process is done so that the personality-disordered individual can cope better with overwhelming emotions.  Therefore, if a narcissistic mother sees their child as bad, then they will easily conclude that the child needs punishment. The narcissistic mother then won't have to cater to the chi...

  Photo by Noelle Otto Suicide ideation is quite common. Or so I've heard. Living with complex PTSD can make life an incredibly confusing experience. You cannot be in relationships because you are bound to repeat the traumas of your past. But you are also yearning to be in relationships, hoping that this new person is not going to hurt you. (but they do because of a thing called repetition compulsion) What is there to do when you want something really badly but you know you can't have it? Or if you do manage to get it, it causes you incredible pain and suffering. Exactly, you are thinking of not doing this anymore, of playing this game. This game called life (thanks, Florence Scovel Shinn). Why? If something you're doing is hurting you (in this case, life), wouldn't you (or anybody else) want to stop doing what you're doing and just end it? That is exactly what living with complex PTSD feels like. You are overwhelmed on a daily friggin basis with emotional triggers...

  Those of you who have a narcissistic father know what's that like.  He will find any opportunity to put you down and minimize your accomplishments. He'll tell you what you should do with your life and show how unimportant you are by ignoring you, not calling you (my father only called me twice in my entire life), picking on the music you like, the food you eat, and the friends you have. You get my point. Having a narcissistic father sets you up for a life of insecurity and feeling like you're not good enough. But I wonder if the greatest Czech writers of all time felt the same way. I wonder if Franz Kafka also felt like no matter how great he was as a person and as a writer, he'd never be good enough, at least not for his father. Read this letter to have a glimpse of what it felt like for Franz to grow up with such a critical and cold father. It makes you think that his writing was great because he needed to overcome his narcissistic father's abuse and prove to hi...