TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE

I read this post on Tumblr, and it spoke to my lived experience in a loud and familiar voice. I posted it in comments on my Facebook yesterday, but I think it’s worth promoting to Main for other survivors who may take some comfort from it the way I did.

“Living in long term abusive situation, the abusers will often require you to ‘act normal’, as if everything is fine and good, even if you don’t feel okay. They present it to you as necessary, polite, ‘don’t be rude to xyz’ or will straight-up belittle and humiliate you until acting ‘normal’ will be the only safe option for you. It creates the illusion that everyone is secretly falling apart inside and suffering silently only to be polite.

“Acting normal in every situation can become a compulsion, something you do automatically to protect yourself against possible or imagined backlash; you live as if you’re unphased by anything, because showing pain feels like showing weakness, and being hurt while you’re weak is worse. You additionally might feel that your feelings are too much, nobody would want to deal with them, you’re oversensitive, overdramatic, over-emotional disaster of a human and you keep it all in to save yourself rejection and embarassment.”

I said:

“My father did all the abusing, and my mother did all the gaslighting, so I would act okay around not just him, but everyone.

“To the day I ended contact with them, after trying so fucking hard to heal with them, he denied ever doing anything to hurt me, and she gaslighted me about it.

“I was so good at acting okay, most of my biological family doesn’t believe me about his cruelty and abuse.”

I was telling Anne yesterday afternoon that my childhood was defined by a father who clearly didn’t love me, didn’t even like me, and a mother who somehow convinced herself that he wasn’t hurting me. Like, after raising two kids together, I had this realization one day that nothing happened in our house that we both didn’t know about. If one of the kids was upset about something, we both knew about it and we talked about it, together, so we could be the best parents we could be.

There’s no way my mother didn’t know that the man who was my father was cruel to me. There’s no way she didn’t know he was so mean to me. He humiliated me, he teased me, he picked on me. He put me down, he mocked me, he minimized everything I cared about. He did it in front of the whole family, endlessly. There’s no way she didn’t know he clearly and obviously and demonstrably loved my brother and sister in a way he did not love me. I mean, look at pictures of me. Pictures where I was putting on my best face for the whole world! The sadness and pain in my eyes is painfully obvious. Some of you are mothers. I know that every single one of you would recognize that pain and sadness if you saw it in your children. I know that every single one of you would do everything in your power to help your child.

There’s no way she didn’t know, unless she deliberately chose to ignore everything I was going through, for whatever reason. Honestly, that’s worse, I think.

I’ve talked to my sister about it, and it’s like she grew up in a different family than I did. She says she never felt unloved, or like she had to be good enough for their affection and approval. She felt like she was enough, just because she existed. She never felt like our parents didn’t love her or accept her exactly as she was. Watching my parents worship our brother, it was obvious that he was more than enough for them.

But I was a thing. When I was seven, Mom made me a thing that she could use to chase fame and fortune in Hollywood, and that man who should have been a father to me … I guess he resented that thing.

He wasn’t physically abusive toward me until I was a teenager. I mean, they both spanked me and my siblings all the time in the 70s and early 80s. I understand now that we consider that physical abuse, but in the 70s I understand that corporal punishment was more common than it is now? I don’t know. I think using the threat of physical violence and pain to make your kids behave a certain way is monstrous, but I also know it was a different time and … well, my parents were kind of monstrous. I just didn’t have anything to compare my experience to at the time.

I wonder if she convinced herself that, because he wasn’t hitting me or leaving marks on me, that he wasn’t abusive. And I wonder if, having made that choice, the emotional abuse and endless cruelty was that much easier to ignore.

I’ll never know, because all the times I tried to talk to her about it, she just gaslighted me. As far as I know, with the exception of my sister, my birth family sincerely believes I am the villain in their story. And that really, really hurts.

As I said in my post on Tumblr, I got so good at pretending everything was okay, just so I could survive, I fooled everyone in our family, in our neighborhood, and at work. To this day, people I trusted don’t believe me, because I was such a good actor.

It hurts so much to know that people I love don’t believe me, or believe that I’m anything other than a survivor. It hurts, and the lingering vestiges of those childhood survival skills occasionally assert themselves, making an argument to me that I should just reject everything I know to be true, and accept their version of reality, just so I can have the family my brother and sister have.

If I’m being honest, the thing that hurts the most is knowing that my parents had unconditional love to give, because I saw them give it freely to my siblings. The man who was my father made a choice to treat me like shit, and my mother made a choice to ignore or justify it.

My sister told me she has these memories of going on family vacations without me, and that she always missed me being there. I remembered them taking a few trips when I was in my late teens, and how I didn’t want to go with them, because the way our parents and our brother made me feel was just so awful.

I am having a little bit of a flashback right now to one of the many times my brother and father gleefully ganged up on me, teasing me, humiliating me, mocking me. Just relentlessly bullying me. And when I punched back, it was always, “WOAH why are you so sensitive? Learn to take a joke!” and etc.

This has gotten much longer than I intended, and a big part of me feels like I should just delete it all. That part of me is always scared and vulnerable and anxious about everything. But when I posted this yesterday, the ensuing comments helped me feel so NOT ALONE in knowing that all of these things I endured, all the gaslighting and all the pain and trauma were REAL because those things didn’t happen just to me. It hurts to know other people experienced these things, but it also helps me know that I’m not alone, I didn’t make it all up, and none of it was my fault. I hope it helps them, too.

If you see yourself in any of my experiences, I want you to know that I see you, right back. I believe you. We didn’t deserve any of it, and I am so sorry.

I spent much of last week doing some work to move something from being an Idea to being A Thing. I’m still not sure that it’s going to be the Thing I thought it was going to be, because it kind of wants to be this whole other Thing and … you know what? It doesn’t matter. This doesn’t make any sense outside of my head, anyway.

The point is, I spent a lot of time reading my own blog last week, and I was so grateful to Past Wil for writing and publishing those things, here, when he didn’t even think for a moment that Future Wil would want to see them again. I also noticed enormous gaps where I didn’t publish anything, which made me a little sad for whatever Past Wil was going through then.

Today, I got one of those Facebook Memories that I was very surprised to discover I didn’t xpost to my blog. So I’m copying it here, today, for Future Wil, and also for Current Anyone Who Is Interested.

This is from October 2, 2019:

When I was at a con a couple weeks ago, I met a lovely woman who shared her scrapbook from the 80s with me. It’s kind of a time capsule of me from about 13 to 17, filled with pictures and clippings from all the teen magazines my mother made me be part of, even though it was *way* out of my comfort zone to be in these pictures, or to talk to people I didn’t know about my personal stuff.

Based on the mock turtleneck, the larger photo is probably from about 1988, when I was 15 or maybe 16. You can see that this was during a hot minute when I was trying to lean in on my cowlick, and just make it some big dumb stand up thing that I tried to convince myself didn’t look as dumb as it did.
The inset photo is from when we filmed the music video for Stand By Me. This was taken *very* early in the cycle of publicity for the movie. I’m pretty sure it predates even the first teen magazine thing I had to do. Man, I remember how conflicted I felt on that day. On the one hand, I was so excited to be part of something that was going to be on MTV (kids, you gotta know that in those days, for teenagers, being on MTV was the coolest thing, ever). But I was also terrified, because I had (and have) no rhythm, did not (and do not) like to dance, and just felt like an alien in my own body.

River and his family were incredibly musical. He could play guitar and sing, and they were all so comfortable on that set, I wished I could have just settled into it like they did.

During a break, we all ended up in a dressing room on the stage with Ben E. King, and River and he just started jamming together. River picked up a guitar — remember, he was only 15 or 16, and Ben E. King was a legend — and just started strumming. Ben E. King started singing, and before we knew it, everyone in the room was singing with him. Someone pulled a harmonica out and started playing it. Someone else began to drum on the back of a chair, and River’s mom danced that dance we always see people doing at Grateful Dead shows.

I remember feeling so thrilled to be in that room, and also feeling so sad and anxious that I couldn’t join in with them. And that’s really sad to me, now. I couldn’t vocalize it at the time, and I probably wasn’t aware of it then, but I had been so relentlessly bullied by the man who was my father, I had no confidence, terrible self esteem, and I lived in constant fear of being humiliated.

I wonder how that day would have been for me if I’d had the confidence to just dance and sing and join in, without the always-on fear that someone would tease me or make me feel small for not being the best at it. At the very least, that picture wouldn’t make me feel sad, like I need to hug that kid and mentor him the way the man who is his father should have.

Some day, I will see pictures of young me, and I won’t feel sad. I don’t know how I’m going to get there, but it’ll happen. Some day.

Here’s the video. I’m super awkward, but I still got to be on MTV, which was pretty cool.

TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE.

I saw this image a few days ago and WOW it hit me so hard. This is how my shitty, manipulative, narcissist parents talked to me for my entire childhood, whenever I told her I didn’t want to go on auditions, or he made me cry with his relentless bullying: you’re always twisting things, you’re so dramatic, stop feeling sorry for yourself, don’t be so sensitive. The piece of shit who was my father loved to frustrate me until I began to cry. Then he’d holler “Okay, cut!” like I was on the set, before he unloaded mocking laughter at me. He was such a fucking bully to me, and I never deserved it.

If you didn’t live with gaslighting (you are so lucky. I hope you appreciate how lucky you are), it may be tough to understand how crazy this sort of thing made me feel, and why, at 49 years old, I can still feel in my heart and my soul every single time they did this to me, like I’m a helpless child all over again.
It’s like they made a choice, at some point in my childhood, that I would not get the unconditional love they gave my brother and sister. Nothing I did was good enough for the man who was my father, and the only thing my mother cared about was how many auditions I booked. What did I care about? What did I like? How did I feel about … anything? It just didn’t matter, and it was probably stupid.

I didn’t understand it, and it hurt so much. And whenever I tried to talk to them about it (no child should have to figure out how to express to their parents that they feel unloved), the gaslighting would come out: you’re always twisting things, you’re so dramatic, stop feeling sorry for yourself, don’t be so sensitive.

I feel like it started around third or fourth grade, around the time I started working a lot in commercials and then movies (again: not my choice. It was never my choice). I wonder if he resented the time and attention my mother gave me? I wonder if she enjoyed making him … I don’t know, jealous of his own kid? Everything was a passive aggressive power struggle with them, so maybe. I do know that I never saw him treat another person with the cruelty and contempt he showed for me. It wasn’t until Stand By Me, though, that the man who was my father began physically abusing me, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me while he made this enraged growling sound I’ll never be able to unhear. When Star Trek happened, it got even worse. That was when he started screaming at me that I was a “dumb little fuck” in front of my friends. I was painfully aware of how much my dad didn’t like me, because he made no effort to hide it. I mean, anyone with a pulse could have seen it. And nobody stepped in to protect me. My mother just pretended none of it happened, going so far as to make me apologize to him after he jabbed me in the chest while he screamed at me about some fucking thing I didn’t even do, and I just exploded in grief and fear and yelled back at him.

After literally years — I’m talking decades — of trying to talk with them, trying to meet them somewhere in the middle of “that never happened” and “this absolutely happened and this is how it made me feel”, I made the incredibly difficult choice to end contact with my abusers a few years ago.

It sucks, and it hurts, all the time. But having no parents is better than having my parents. And that also sucks.

Over forty years after I became aware of it, it still hurts like it all just happened. I know how it feels to have a huge black hole in your heart where a parent’s love ought to be. I know what it’s like to have nobody to call when something cool happens, or when something awful happens and you need mom and dad to make it better. (I am so grateful for my Star Trek family. Without them, I very likely would have ended up a statistic.)

But I also know that I never did anything wrong. I know that it’s not my fault. I didn’t deserve it. I was ALWAYS enough. He hates me because he hates himself. I have to remind myself about that more often than anyone should have to, but I know what’s real, and I know that I’m not twisting things, being dramatic, feeling sorry for myself, or being too sensitive.
If you recognize any of this gaslighting from your own life, I want you to know that I see you. I believe you. I’m so sorry. I know how it feels. I know how it makes us feel crazy. I know how it makes us question our own lived experience, how it makes us doubt what we know to be true, because it happened to us.

I am here to tell you that you are enough. That WE are enough. It’s not us. It was never us. It was always them.

A lot of you asked where you could get the Acting Ensign pride pin I wore for the most recent episode of Ready Room, and I’m psyched to let you know that they’re available now over at Stands! Every pin sale benefits the It Gets Better Project, an organization dedicated to uplifting, empowering, and connecting LGBTQ+ youth. Get yours here: shopstands.com