Content Warning: parental abuse

I wish I'd kept a journal when I was younger. I've carried around my inner narration since I was a child, and while I can remember a lot of the important thoughts I know I don't remember them all, which is to say nothing of those less prominent musings that make up what becomes our psyche.

The closest thing I have is some of my old drawings and the comics I made in high school on binder paper about my chaotic slugs. They give me some glimpses into how I work and my poor understanding of humor, but mostly they were made to get away from my own thoughts.

So yesterday I had an honest to god panic attack for the first time in a year. It's been warm recently, I've been going sleeveless to show off my arms, but the last couple days have approached freezing and my body has felt like it's sinking. Last night, I had a brief anxious thought that was easily dismissed but instead it latched on and refused to let go. After I received empirical evidence it wasn't true, it persisted and searched desperately for another irrational idea to come at me like a knife in their teeth swimming through the darkness in my gut.

It eventually relented but I had to work hard to finish a couple minor favors for some friends, trying my best to stay sane during it. Even a weed gummy didn't help, in fact I think it made it considerably worse. The anxiety in my gut just sank it's razor teeth into me and refused to let go. Sometime fairly late it began to settle, like a raging fire dying to a smolder: relieved of the worst but unmistakably still burning.

I was reasonably certain it wasn't real though. At one point, I wasn't sure if an anxiety was based in reality so I ran it by my dear friend Anna who confirmed it sounded irrational before the universe proved it to me. I kept my cool and didn't do anything stupid or insane.

Still, today I am shaking uncontrollably while having cold flashes even in my warm office. Though I suppose it isn't that warm. I had a very similar episode the first weekend of May last year. I thought it was from the anniversary of my Dad's passing, as I generally do have some depression and anxiety episodes during that time, though it was a week early. But it did happen on a cold day that came after a period of warmth. If it gets much worse I might have to just put in PTO and head home.

I'm glad I kept a record of it. I could compare and contrast and figure out a few things about myself. So while I was going back over my memories to sort out this latest episode, I stumbled over some old journal posts I left on my Tumblr years ago. I wrote a bunch right when my Dad passed, and quite a bit leading up to that, but apparently stopped soon after.

I found I wrote a lot on my Tumblr. So I went back to some old posts from around 2015 and discovered some upsetting entries.

You may have gathered that I consider my parents toxic. I love them very much, and that love has been leveraged by them to ignore a lot of their shortcomings, but I haven't ever been able to completely ignore their character flaws, which has always been the focus of the conflicts between us.

That time period was an era where I was struggling at college. My burnout left me scorched, trying to keep myself at full power, but feeling like I was constantly spiraling. I was going through constant mental whiplash and I was very emotionally unstable without any close friends to help ease the burden of being alive. I'd reach out to folks from California or Arizona now and again, but nobody could quite understand what I was going through, least of all me.

But the thing in these journal entries that sent me reeling was remembering how abusive my folks were to me at this time. I had blocked it out, but reclaiming this painful memory puts some others into context.

In February of 2019, I started my serious career IT job, and could finally enjoy a degree of success. I went to visit my parents, and during the weekend they became cruel and bitter to me, with my Mom picking a fight. My folks felt I lorded my success over them, but I feel very confident in saying that I didn't do that, even a little, that I approached my post-collegiate success with humility, especially after all the horrors that came with not being able to become a navy officer. I thought they'd be proud of me, for doing what they couldn't, for taking all their lessons and making a good life for myself. That's what they always told me they wanted for me.

My Mom was jealous of my girlfriend at the time, who was pursuing her doctorate, and they treated me like I was ashamed of them. She kept screaming that I couldn't replace her. My Dad softly encouraged her, but then during the argument he collapsed. They disowned me that night, and wouldn't talk to me for months. I was so very angry at them, and heartbroken at the same time. I could finally afford all the silly DnD books and Lego sets I wanted, but I couldn't enjoy any of it. I felt so abandoned and adrift.

And then my folks called me because my Dad had lung cancer. And suddenly I dropped all my anger and they did the same. The game was called off.

That's what it was to them, y'see. My Dad warned me when I was growing up in the 2000s that people will play mindgames with you constantly, and gave me a (horrifically outdated) book on mindgames in an effort to educate me on the subject. I found that while people did play games, nobody played them more than my parents, who of course denied it and would become terribly insecure when called out. They opted to encourage a great degree of cognitive dissonance in me in regards to them and it worked.

At the tail end of 2014, I found a book called Toxic Parents by Susan Forward. I read through it and every single page contained example after example that fit my own parents. It posited that at the heart of a toxic parent is an adult who is still a child who has placed the burden of parenting on their own children. I recognized immediately that that matched the dynamic I had been in with my parents since my childhood.

My Dad faced a lot of challenges in his life, but especially so after I was born. An earthquake destroyed our home in 1989 and it took him over a decade to be able to buy another, and then an economic downturn ruined that almost immediately after. In his desperate and unending job search, he fell into a lot of despair. Looking back on it, it's obvious, though at the time he was just my fearless amazing Dad.

One night when I was 16 or so he tells me that it's so scary and awful to be an adult. How it's his job to tell us that everything will be okay, but he asked me "who's going to tell me that everything will be okay?" I told him "everything will be okay" and he became very upset and ended the conversation.

My Mom on the other hand asked me to be her emotional sponge when I was around five years old, and we had argued constantly since I became a teenager- my emotional maturity had rapidly outpaced her and I didn't even have that much of it. She stopped hitting me so much once I was bigger than her and she couldn't easily knock me down.

Around the new year at the end of 2014, my Mom saw some of my pictures on Facebook and saw I had a lot of female friends. This made her tremendously insecure and she spent a few nights screaming at me, demanding I cease any and all relations with "young girls" and "whores" and that I "return to the family" at once. I didn't have a car so I just had to grit and bear it like I had my entire life.

As they dropped me off, I told my Mom I loved her and she said "I don't think you do" and she just wanted me to drop all my ambitions and come home to prove to her I loved her. She told me, yelling in the street, "prove to me you love me."

I blocked it all out. A day later I went on a service trip to Washington DC and had a lot of other things to think about. But I do remember now how angry I was at my Mom. What my journal entries reminded me of is how much my Dad enabled the situation, not just my Mom's behavior, but my own hurt in all this.

I tried to talk to him about how bad I felt being away at college, how bad the winter got me down, how it felt like my whole life I'd been fighting problems, the biggest of which was Mom. And he just told me that when I was a kid the school thought I had brain problems and wanted me on medication and were going to put me in the stupid kid classes but he made sure they didn't. He seemed to be subtly encouraging me to drop out of college. He made me feel like I was actually stupid and that I deserved all this mistreatment because he had been protecting me from myself my whole life.

My Dad was a manipulative person, and I'm fairly certain he might have warranted a narcissism diagnosis. He was tremendously insecure and had a chip on his shoulder about the world not acknowledging his abilities which he felt put him above the average man. I didn't realize any of this while he was alive. He was always just my amazing Dad who encouraged me and protected me.

When he endorsed my Mom's abuse in 2019, I couldn't understand why. He didn't always stand up for me when my Mom became abusive, but I thought she was clearly having an episode and being irrational and he just let it ride and said she was right. People I told this story to said he sounded like he was envious of me and my accomplishments, but I didn't think it was possible. He would never treat me that way, I did everything I did to please him, it's what he wanted, isn't it?

It turns out he did the same thing to my brother in the 90s when he got his first tastes of success. And if my Dad hadn't dropped over dead we probably would have repeated the same song and dance.

I look back over it all now and I see that what happened in 2019 wasn't some freak occurrence. It was the continuation of a pattern of abuse and the lack of self reflection that my Dad always encouraged in me but didn't seem to practice with himself.

I didn't recognize the connections between these moments. In many ways, 2019 existed on its own, it was the start of my new life out of college and making it on my own with my partner, even if I felt like my Dad's dying soured it right out the gate.

I've been realizing recently that the hardest days of my life weren't in the pits of my childhood dodging violence from literally every corner, or my early 20s trying to figure out how to live my life after another hard reset, but it was when I went to college and had to build every kind of support a person could need, because I didn't really have any for myself or really understood why I needed them. And it turned out nobody was going to help me. Except my therapist eventually. And my dear closest friends who I have no idea how I lucked into having them in my life.

I look at the boundaries I've established with my Mom now and I marvel at the work that had to be put in for it. I get along with my Mom much better these days, even in spite of her occasional maladjusted personality. I see how much work I've done to build the safety I have. Someone dear to me called me a "superhero" a little while back. She might be right.

I still very much love my Mom and Dad. I'd pay about any price to be asked for him back. But I see so many reasons that it's good that there is no price I can pay.

I was playing a peculiar game with myself a little while ago in my head. Sometimes I imagine a series of parallel timelines with alternate Jacobs who succeeded at their attempts at greatness, but then I ask myself how it might be that I am the best of them. I picture them saying things like "how did you become so stable without the military" or "how did you get Mom to be so calm" or "how are you able to make friends so easily" and of course "how the fuck did you stop drinking?" Can you think of the reasons you might be the best version of yourself?

Today that truth is so loud to me, that I am the best of all possible Cobs at this juncture, that my investments in myself are paying off and creating a person I can stand to be. I look back at myself ten years ago and I can't believe that kid survived. How the hell did they get through that- I couldn't keep reading because of how horrid that world they lived in seemed to be. I can't believe how strong that kid had to be; I actually cannot fathom it.

I've been having this episode for almost a day now. I've been able to do my job, to live functionally, and even be a good friend. I haven't screamed or broken down or tried to hurt myself. I'm just here in this moment coping without even having to try very hard. This will pass sooner or later, my body can't keep up cortisol production forever. This week I'll run my DnD game, then on Saturday I'll have brunch with Caitlin and then go to goth night to see some familiar faces. I'll take my Mom around town and she'll continue blissfully unaware of the wounds she helped give me that I'll probably have to carry forever.

But I think I'm superheroic enough to carry it.