hiding

WTF? I am about to turn 40 years old and I am still obsessing over things that went down twenty plus years ago. I have three beautiful kids, a wonderful and loyal husband, no financial worries, and a tremendous burden of a past that has scarred me so badly that I all I can think of is how ruined I am.

I feel like I don't belong here. I don't feel like a legitimate person. I have lost control of my mind. My mind makes me believe that I am a useless, ruined person who wasn't meant to make it this far.

I spent years hiding parts of myself from my father. I spent years hiding my home life from everyone else. I was always pretending to be someone and something I wasn't.

After I finally stood up to my father by sending him a birthday card with a nasty message in it and he told me never to set foot in his house again, my mother talked me into coming back home and staying for the summer. This was 1992, the summer between junior and senior years in college when I was 20 years old.

I checked out a book from the library about interpersonal communication. One of the early chapters was about closeness, and how you can't really consider yourself close to someone if you are not open and honest with them. Somehow this became a revelation to me, and I was only a few pages into the book. (I don't think I ever read the rest.) I suddenly realized that I had hidden everything from my college friends - that I lived in a small run down house in a crappy town (everyone thought that since my parents were doctors, I must have a fancy house), that I was a social misfit for never having been to dances or prom or my school graduation party, that my family was so weird that we couldn't talk about anything around my father, that we were all afraid of him, that my father was a weirdo who hung out in his underwear all day, that we all lowered our voices and run and hid when he came home, that we couldn't mention any friends or my mom's family around him, and so on. I also suddenly consciously realized that I had missed out on many normal teenage experiences and felt like a misfit for that, since I was sure I was the only person who never got to do those things and had such a freaky family.

I always felt strange about hiding anything since I was a child. Thirty years ago, I used to see commercials for hair dyes for women to cover up grey and felt it a little dishonest to present yourself as grey-free if you actually had grey. I used to see commercials for a diet pill called Ayds and felt that it was kind of cheating to use it - weight loss should be 100% your own effort.

I also thought makeup was cheating. Even as a child, I thought that falsely beautifying your face and presenting it to the world was a little deceptive. That said, I started sneaking on makeup when I was in 7th grade and wiping it off before getting home from school. I was embarrassed that my mom wouldn't let me wear nail polish or makeup in middle school.

As a teenager, I developed pretty bad acne and had pizza face. I was also a zit picker, which is worse on dark skin than on lighter. Melanin collects in the scars and creates dark spots which take forever to fade. I had to wear makeup just to look presentable in high school and college. I also have very 'weak' eyes (for lack of a better word - I mean dull eyes with no eyelashes or eyebrows), so I would wear a ton of eye makeup and be very afraid for anyone to see me without it.

I had a big psychological hangup about this. I used to obsess on the makeup issue, and would see that other girls had pretty faces with makeup. I hated that I had to hide my face, but I didn't have the guts to go without makeup. I was afraid I'd get a Phantom of the Opera reaction. I wondered what people would think of me without the makeup. (Actually, one time when I was in high school, a very tactless Indian friend of my mother's saw me without makeup and asked me "What happened to your face?" And once, when I was 22 and living in Chicago, I got my hair highlighted at an Asian salon and when the lady was done with my freakishly unnatural blonde highlights, told me, "Look very good, Must wear makeup, though.") It took an inordinate amount of thinking and debating and conflict to come to the decision to stop wearing it, and I was on the defensive waiting for rude comments for a long time after I stopped.

All that about hair and makeup and diet pills because I hate hiding things, especially things that I shouldn't have to hide. And that book about communications with its innocuous analysis of closeness of a relationship, suddenly made me realize that none of my college friends knew very little about what really made me ME. I could never bring any of them home to my dumpy house with my weird father. I felt like the only person in the world who had never been to a high school dance, or who had never had a 'normal' teenage experience. (Now, thanks to the Internet, I know that there are many others, especially from ethnic homes.) I felt that none of the people I liked and whom I considered to be friends were not truly friends because they would never be able to see me in my 'native habitat' surrounded by my peeps. If they did, they would not have accepted me.

Then, when I was reading a local newspaper, I realized that there was so much more of the big wide world that I hadn't seen having grown up so sheltered in Roswell. I felt very smalltownish never having been to a professional basketball game. (I think the NBA finals were going on at that time.) I felt smalltownish for never having been to a concert until I was in college. (I still feel weird about this, truth be told.) I just felt like a complete smalltown loser for the inexperience and the sheltering.

I had also had it with hiding things from my father. I decided that I couldn't do it anymore. I was going to speak freely on the phone in front of him, not caring what he heard. (As long as it wasn't about boys.)

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