So after I put the RIP sign on my dormant Facebook page and getting the contact from my sister asking me to let her know I’m ok, I was still undecided as to what I should do. I blocked her on my phone but soon learnt that blocked people can still leave voicemail messages on an Android device. Which she did. She told me it would be handy if I just let her know that I was alive. A slightly sarcastic tone which is normal for her.
That night I sent her an email saying that I was fine, that I had AvPD and found it difficult. I said that I never said I didn’t want any contact – just the opposite. I lied and said I had an ex boyfriend emailing me and I put the RIP sign up in case he decided to find me online. I couldn’t admit my total madness that I put it up to see if anyone would contact me.
I also told her that I loved her and Dad and that I always would. I was crying and crying as I wrote that email to her.
The next day I got a reply. She said thank God and if she hadn’t heard from me by today, she was going to call the police. She said she hoped I was getting help for my AvPD and told me a bit about what the family had been up to. She said if I felt up to it to stay in touch.
It was so weird. Immediately I just felt more….grounded. Here was a link to my past and my childhood. My sister knows things that I know. The games we used to play, the camping out at night in the garden while mother was off for the night with her lesbian lover (I was 13 and my sister was six, dig dig).
Who else knows that my stepdad (my sister’s dad) slept with my mother’s sister, that he also married my uncle’s girlfriend, that my mum had a relationship with her sister’s ex boyfriend, that my aunt had a relationship with a guy I was seeing (I was 15, he was 28), and that my uncle crossed boundaries when I was 15 and he was in his early fourties?
We kept it in the family!
I felt happy and relieved by our historical connection – for several hours.
And then I noticed that she hadn’t told me that she loved me. She hadn’t insisted that I stay in touch with her. There was not the slightest hint at a family intervention.
Just the drama of calling the cops, and if I were dead, rifling through my stuff and making decisions on my behalf.
When Mother died 16 years ago, I went round to her house while my sister and brother sorted through her things. I felt so out of place, so alone, so awkward, I only stayed for two hours.
When I got home I was a mess and called a therapist. An hour later I was sat in her surgery trying to stop the suicidal thoughts of not being good enough, of feeling abandoned.
They won’t get it. In their minds, AvPD is probably just me being a little introverted – like I’m the shy one at the office party who just needs a glass of wine to loosen up.
If only!
But it’s maybe better they think that. I don’t want them all to know just how bad I am; the fact that I struggle to string a coherent sentence together. The fact that I’m just so needy. Unless they are draping their arms around me and whispering constant reassurances, I start to feel that familiar, awful rejection creeping in that renders me incapable of functioning.
So I think I’ve decided not to reply. That way, I cannot feel rejected. I will just silently disappear again.
I came across the following quote recently, and it’s something I want to look into, learn and drum into my brain, because for me it’s the cause of all my problems:
You must develop the ability to be disliked in order to free yourself from the prison of other people’s opinions.
I sometimes wonder if others with AvPD and rejection issues would feel the same way about what I’ve written on this page, or if I’m just an extreme and unusual case in how I react to rejection.