What to write when everything is outside of my comfort zone?

First of all thanks (a bunch! :P) to @eaglespirit for nominating me for the #nocomfortzone torture... I mean, challenge.

Really, what's to fear here? Just me, the computer and this great big throbbing pit of shame staring back at me.

For me, the thought of sharing anything outside my comfort zone makes me feel a bit ill. Am I carrying a lot of shame or something?

Yes.

I grew up in a rough neighbourhood – Anfield in Liverpool – you may have heard of Liverpool Football Club (soccer). See? I'm avoiding the shame already by digressing into football. And I can't stand football. Sorry... I'll get back to it but it starts with my mother.

My mother had also grown up in Anfield. She hated it. She observed the fate of other women around her. They would raise kids, cook proper meals when their husbands returned from work (or pub or betting shop if they were unemployed), go food shopping every day, gossip with neighbours and that's about it. Some would go the pub at the weekend or play a game of bingo.

My mother decided, very early on, that this was not her destiny. She wanted 'better'. She worked hard and became a teacher but we stayed in the same house in Anfield for all my childhood.

Source
This is where my shame comes in. At the time (1970s), we lived on a council estate. There were no other professionals in the area. Just my mum. And ours – even though it was a small council house – was The Teacher's House.

This was agony for me. Kids I'd known all my life started to treat me differently, would accuse me of being posh. Me! Me who grew up around them, played knock-door-dash, same school, kicked around the same streets.

I started to notice a feeling of otherness, loneliness even. I used to blend in, relax, have fun. But now I was different, and my peers were pointing this out to me. I remember yearning for that sense of belonging again. To just be one of the normal kids. I had a couple of very close friends that stayed loyal but the majority of the group started to view me with suspicion, as though I were some sort of impostor that would carry secrets back to the enemy.

To make matters worse, my mum decided she hated her Liverpool accent (Scouse). She said it made us sound common as muck. She was now mixing with people who spoke properly. In those days teachers spoke with a polished middle-class accent.

So, she organised some elocution lessons. She wanted us all to go but they were expensive. As she was a teacher, she decided to take the lessons herself and then 'help' us when she returned. I campaigned to keep my accent but she wouldn't listen. I told her the other kids would laugh at me if I spoke funny. Her response was to look at me as though I were some kind of traitor. She'd say, They're ignorant savages! Don't worry what they think! Pah!

Don't worry about it! It was the biggest most painful agony in my life at the time!

I resisted this all the way but it planted a seed. I am an ignorant savage and common as muck. Whenever I'd speak she would correct me. If we were going to any sort of public event (not including visits with our wonderful riff-raff family, of course) she would prepare me with instructions to speak with proper phone voice, don't say that, do this, no definitely don't do that. It was paralysing.

She gave me War and Peace to read when I was nine years old (a teacher friend's daughter had read it by the age of eleven, apparently). I picked that dictionary up so many times during the first page I eventually just gave up and pretended I was engrossed in the story.

I learned, early on, that she would stop criticising when I played along with her vision of how a child of hers should speak and behave. A marionette. That's when I believe a psychological fracture appeared. There was the me that mum wanted and the other me – you know, the disgusting embarrassing savage version.

This manifested itself in various ways. I excelled at school, got great grades, learned how to play piano and did other things that none of my peer group did. I rarely told friends of any 'achievements' for fear it'd remind them of how alien I was.

Then there was the disgusting me. The me I needed to keep secret from mum. This was the savage me that had fun: she swore, smashed windows in *bombdie houses, smoked stolen cigarettes and kidnapped boxes of doomed kittens or pups from outside the RSPCA (animal treatment centre). But occasionally, there'd be a slip; disgusting me would say something 'posh' or make reference to something outside the world of my group, drawing immediate attention to the pretender in their midst.

I wanted both mes to exist as one but this was just not possible. Which ever camp I was in – home or with friends – there was always something defective about me. I was always performing a character. For my mum, I was this, for my friends, something else. And both versions of me were substandard.

Shame was my companion. It drove me to succeed at goals that weren't mine – There's no money in The Arts! I'd always loved art, craft, writing and being creative but I convinced myself she was right. So, I eventually got a proper career, house, lifestyle. But even then I felt like an impostor, a shaved monkey in a suit. It was always there, the fear that disgusting me would leak out somehow and everyone would know I was shit.

I tried to reconcile these two parts of myself for many years.

After becoming ill, I had no energy or motivation to keep up the facade. And it was almost impossible to maintain both versions of me. One of the mes had to die. So, they fought to the death.

Mum took the news of my early retirement badly. What would she tell her friends! It was like there had been a death in the family.

So, even though I'm now doing exactly what I've always wanted to do, I carry the shame of not existing for real. Both these mes were denied a full existence. I've always lived between the gaps. Regardless of what you see, the full picture is never revealed.

My mum isn't so bad though. She acted this way because of her own shame.

*bombdie houses were houses that had been bombed during the war, years earlier, and left in a state of disrepair.

I nominate @amymya (sorry Amy) to do her #nocomfortzone story

SMARTSTEEM

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