Hey all you guys and gals, and happy Mexican Independence Day! Which for white people basically means all you can drink margaritas and breakfast tacos all day long, maybe a Mariachi band to gaze at whilst chowing down. In any case, hope it's great!
Mine, on the other hand, involved working all day at a Mexican restaurant so you can imagine how busy it was. It also didn't start out on the greatest note, when I kind of flipped out after an incident made me feel a little crappy after I woke up this morning. The short story is that ever since childhood, I've struggled with the horrible feeling that I get when older men, or just men in general, snap at me, or get exasperated with me and act annoyed, causing me to feel a little like, well, running away from my own insecure feelings of stupidity and being less than worthy of a more patient response.
But rather than just run away, I also get angry. I feel angry for two reasons: because I know that the history of why I feel this way has nothing to do with that person, but I also get angry because I know that it's not necessarily going to change. Being sensitive to those things has a lot to do with who I am now. Do I apologize for that? As any person wouldn't, I don't really feel great about being told "how I need to be," whether it's less sensitive or more tough. To me it kind of sends the same message: this thing really bothers you, and you've expressed it many times in a lot of different ways, but YOU need to respond a certain way so that I don't have to change how I communicate with you. Lately I've been overreacting when confronted with these feelings, because I feel very defensive of myself. All my life older men have made me feel awful about myself, calling me stupid and acting like I wasn't capable of the simplest tasks. There have been multiple occasions where I've dated someone who was both emotionally and physically abusive. Sometimes even I feel as though I'm not capable of anything. I guess that I've internalized all of these negative thoughts and feelings so much that I tend to lash out at the next man who I feel responds with a less than "nice" response. Which generally confuses them to no end, understandably. The fault is also in my hands. I just need to find a healthy balance, because I really love the men in my life, but I really don't feel like I'm being listened to!
Here's a little background on the situation: when I was 10, my dad wasn't really around and I ended up being forced to spend a lot of time with my stepfather, who, though I was only 10/11 at the time, punished me like a tiny child and talked to me as though I were a very stupid adult; everything that I did was "wrong" and came complete with a laundry list of why my response was totally illogical and how I needed to change how I looked at literally everything. It was rather traumatizing at that point in my life, and has caused me to regress a little when I get spoken down to. I ended up respecting him in certain ways because he was very intelligent, despite being a devout Catholic and a serious misogynist (neither of which is very intelligent, but he knew a TON about traveling and food and the world, and that was cool to me).
That's another aspect that is hard to distinguish from current situations that I experience: because these men were/are very intelligent, or to me they seem to be so, I literally extrapolate from that that I must be unintelligent. This causes me a lot of inner turmoil, because I hate when I act unfairly out of defense, but I really do not want to be confronted with negative, unproductive ways of communicating with me... I just shut down inside. I have repeatedly tried to explain myself to no avail to a lot of men in my life, and a lot of them have expressed only sympathy, maybe because they differentiate between me as being a sensitive woman and them as being a man who will (and does) react the way he wants to.
What I want, more than anything, seems to be empathy. I want someone to literally put themselves in my position and to try to understand that really nobody wants to be snapped at or spoken down to in a condescending manner. A LOT of women that I've brought this up to have expressed similar feelings that I can only imagine come from years of the same treatment that I seem to have received. It's quite discouraging to note that a lot of them meet with the same resistance and feel that they can't talk to their loved ones about it. I haven't bothered recently either, but I've also been told that my reactions are unnecessary. In no case is name-calling or handling the conversation in an unproductive way as I did encouraged, but we are all human at the end of the day, or night. If we can't ask our lovers to return the empathy that we express, that is when we truly become too sensitive and even weak.
I don't really remember the last time that I was perfectly happy or content, or not too tired or hungry or sore, but I always try to answer people with patience and understanding. I may be tired every single morning and have a long work day ahead of me, but I try to express love in the hopes that it will be returned. I want someone to hear me when I have a problem, just as I try to do for them. Instead all they seem to hear is "please go out of your way to argue with me about this new inconvenience that I've presented you with." I'm not an inconvenience, and neither is adjusting your perspective on a situation that, for whatever reason, KEEPS OCCURRING, whether you want it to or not. If you love someone, it will hurt you that they are hurting.
Bottom line: A lot of women, not all but a lot, struggle with these issues from years of emotional abuse, with people who didn't take the time to patiently explain to them that they were intelligent, or worth it; that what they are feeling or what they have to say is VALID. You've spent a blip of time feeling annoyed or inconvenienced by their sensitivity, but they've spent their whole lives feeling bad about themselves! We have literally had to try to convince ourselves that we aren't stupid or ugly. It is hard! Take the time to be patient with your women, your sisters, your mothers, your lovers, your aunts and cousins, and we will respond favorably. I promise. I am NOT saying that this is true for ONLY women at all, so please don't think that! Men have valid feelings and are oftentimes sensitive and have been made to feel unworthy their whole lives as well. I have deep empathy for them and I will try to lift them up with a kind word. I am simply speaking from the collective experience and perception of many women out there.
Thank you and have a wonderful evening contemplating your own self-worth. I hope you find peace when you discover that you are great, if you haven't already! Don't let your struggles with self-confidence, self-worth, and loneliness get you down like I sometimes do. But if you do, I hope you find empathy and love.
I should also add that it upsets me to NO END when I see women berating or freaking out at their men! Seriously, you don't deserve friends, let alone to get laid with that negative attitude. We're all in this together!
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