Stuck In My Head

Do you ever wake up with a song stuck in your head?

Something I noticed as of late is that when I wake up with a song in my head I seemingly need to process whatever feeling the song provokes in me. For a while I thought it was something more simple for me as in here is a song my brain latched onto but it is also a song I chose to listen to recently so that’s why it was on my mind.

However, many times I wake up with a song on my mind that I haven’t heard for days or weeks or months. These times have been more rare I suppose and that is why I hadn’t noticed it for myself. Sometimes I wake up with the same song stuck in my head for weeks. I never thought I would ever make anything memorable ever until my friend told me one day that she had one of my songs stuck in her head. It makes me wonder what makes some things linger in my mind while others get brushed away into the depths of our brain.

The idea that my friend remembered something I created made me feel seen, loved, valued and memorable. I grew up feeling very much the opposite. I’ve had trouble with thinking of doing any episodes of my podcast these past few weeks not only because people haven’t really been able to come by (from my perspective) but also the few who did come by didn’t seem engaged in the conversion (again this might not be reality but merely my perspective). It has left me feeling unseen, unwanted and forgotten and the desire to have these needs met (which I struggle to even call them needs) makes me turn against myself.

I broke down in the middle of MonMing this week. I have decided to take a break of undetermined length unless I somehow feel safe by this Monday the 15th. It’s Saturday as I write this. The deepest sting I gave myself last week was thinking about the person with whom I most long to connect on a deeper level. It’s something that has been difficult for me to navigate the more I engage with these feelings while having someone actually there to process everything (my therapist and close friends). I feel trite in saying this but somehow the tumultuous issues I have with myself and my affection for others comes down to “daddy issues” and it makes me feel beyond disgruntled.

The fact that society has a cliché term for something so many people struggle through makes me upset in a number of ways. The reality is all genders have varying degrees of “daddy issues” just as all genders have varying degrees of wonderful loving fathers who don’t leave a painful mark on your psyche. The thing that makes me upset is that it’s weaponized towards women. If a woman had a weak relationship with her father than she is assaulted with ableism and it’s as if she is extra damaged goods. So all that to say I had no idea how to breach this topic on the podcast but it is still on my heart to bring it to light in some way somewhere. So here I am.

For the last two years of therapy it has felt like a constant healing over what my father did as well as what my brother did but let’s be honest it has been a lot of everything in the mix. I have allowed a lot of things into my life because I was taught that I did not matter. My dreams don’t matter. My wishes don’t matter. My needs don’t matter. I could go on of course but hopefully we all have a grasp on what I am trying to express.

The healing process did not start with therapy but it certainly has made it a lot faster and easier to navigate. It gives me more room to be introspective without judgment even on my own time and my own terms. It gives me a chance to see my reality and ground myself in feeling safe to tread these murky waters.

Nonetheless as I started feeling more like myself I came to see that there is a huge part of me that I have left deep in the shadows. A part of me that is dripping with shame and fear and all sorts of negative feelings. Very little things used to poke at that part of me and leave me confused for way too long. I still feel like it’s foggy so much that I cannot speak on it easily. It all feels lost and muddy and confused in my mind.

I’m a tomboy and as I wade through therapy I have a nagging feeling that I don’t know if that was truly my nature or learned behavior. One might wonder why it matters. Why does it matter? Growing up I always felt othered by my father. I have very vivid memories of him arguing with my mother in the middle of a department store when it came time to buy clothes for me. It comes to mind every time I need something of that sort.

My brother’s choices were never questioned, the prices weren’t scrutinized under a microscope. For a while I assumed it was a money thing especially years later hearing about the pink tax. I assumed he wanted to force me to wear hand me downs. Mom refused knowing that the shape of my body would be very uncomfortable in boy’s clothes (my mom is a seamstress and she knew my curves well yes I was curvy since birth move along), but she also wanted me to have the freedom to choose what I like. She always wanted that for me which was also why I didn’t really wear skirts or dresses. I always hated them for whatever reason I don’t feel ok in them.

The more I thought about this while I decided to treat myself with a pair of shorts that I thought looked nice and would look nice on me, while I also had taken my therapist’s advice to “put myself out there” the more I started hitting a weird wall. I have always felt confident in my skin even now while I am “overweight” I don’t usually feel “ugly” or “unattractive” I honestly never think about it in those terms except the times that my demisexual brain has latched onto a friend.

Now this is the part that has been (pardon my language) a mind fuck for sometime now. This is the part that somehow finally clicked and it honestly has me pissed as fuck. It took a toxic “relationship” (that’s a whole other story that I go into detail in the podcast and the episode will be up eventually) for me to even put two and two together.

Trigger Warning for the rest of this post – sexualization, incest and child abuse.

My father started sexualizing me ever since I was a little girl. Most people hear this term and misunderstand but the truth is I got my period when I was 9 years old and things changed. Since that time my father started treating me even worse than ever and he started treating me as though I am less than my brother. What I had blocked out of my mind until recently was that the shopping trip I remember so vividly was when my mother told my father that I needed bras. That was the first time I can think back and remember there being a big huff and puff because of how my body would be treated. My mom decided to buy materials to make bras for me herself instead of having to fight for my needs to be met by my father. I still remember those times when I get dressed.

I’ve never had a boyfriend I can’t really objectively tell you why besides the fact that few men have approached me in a romantic way. The few men who have “come at me” reminded me of the men that would stare at me when I “looked like” a woman while I was still 10-12 years old. I know some people can’t understand that feeling of being looked at like a piece of meat, an object, something to be used and discarded for someone else’s pleasure. I know that some men might hear this and think that just because you think a girl is cute or pretty that we would assume you are sexualizing us that’s not the case at all. I have no way to explain except I felt I was in danger. I have encountered this less and less as more of my interactions are online, as I more and more depart from the “ideal beauty standards” of popular culture, as I rarely am around strange men. I say all this to give some context to everything.

I won’t tell the story again, not here anyway, but there was a toxic man who I once called a friend in my life whose treatment of me made me see a pattern of something I deal with and I have been trying to understand it since then. I was only able to touch on discussing this pattern in therapy very recently (like a week ago when everything else in my life was calm for a moment). I noticed that the only time I started even caring about my physical self image was tied to this man. At first I thought it was because he was the only person I even felt wanted me in a physically intimate way. The details are besides the point since it’s history but now that time has passed and I am in a place where I have grown romantic feelings for friend the pattern felt confirmed. So there’s the context.

In my therapy we have talked about how in our culture female sexuality is seen a way to control women and take their power. I forget why we breached this topic but a day that changed the way I viewed my father had been on my mind almost constantly. It was probably what most would call intrusive thoughts. The more I wanted to feel sexy as I feel more like myself, the more I felt empowered and emboldened to share what I have to offer to the world, the more I felt my heart and soul blooming the more I kept thinking of that moment. The last time I saw my father in person 6 years ago he came onto me. I have never been able to say it so candidly because I felt I had to quantify the interaction, I felt like I had to prove it to myself, I felt like I had to prove it to everyone else if I ever felt safe enough to talk about it. I never felt safe around my father but until that moment I never felt he would ever cross that line.

It wasn’t anything dramatic and I only say that to not worry my readers. It was the way he tried to hug me, but it was enough for me to feel my father’s gaze was the same as the men that made me fear for my sexual safety. The trouble was no one seemed to believe me when it happened. My mom almost didn’t but it was more like shock than disbelief. I know I would blame myself if I had children and the father of those children were to make a pass at one of them. At any rate this is the first time I feel strong enough to talk about it outside of a few conversations here and there and without all the ridiculous details to make it feel like I would be believed. So when I brought it up to my therapist we talked about how it might have been something I gleaned over throughout the years to keep myself feeling safe but the contrast of how my brother was treated vs how I was treated started to make more sense to me.

I will never know the truth. I might never be able to hone in on memories to have peace over it. Suddenly though a lot of things started to make sense. I’ve always been modest and felt like a prude. Since my brother started indoctrinating me with Christian ideas when I was only 13 or so I couldn’t tell for a long time if it was some outside influence or a value I carry for myself for my own reasons. That being said I remember moments like in 8th grade when my father shamed me for dressing up for a school dance and making me feel like I was trying to have sex with someone just because of it. It made me think of all the moments I feel disgusted with myself for even having those feelings for someone I care about. I guess that’s where I am in this moment. It feels like too much to be anywhere right now. It might be because all these connections are still fresh and it hurts a lot. I am scared. I want to hide. The shame and fear consumes me when I feel I have fallen in love.

Beyond those feelings I want to break through and reach for the light. Thank you for reading, as always wishing you peace and love.

Some articles I found interesting while writing this:

• https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/power-in-sexuality-problem/
• https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/women-sexuality_b_5013099
• https://medium.com/sensual-enchantment/female-sexuality-is-so-potent-it-had-to-be-stifled-and-contained-e1b6e8809339