I'm forty in three months and very conscious of all the negative self-talk I still do. And I'm worried that if I don't address this habit soon, it will start to define me (if it hasn't already).
That may sound melodramatic, but it's meant sincerely. The fug of depression frequently slows me down and affects my sense of self-worth. I work on this with therapy and meditation, but the recent fallout from a difficult familial relationship that I had little control over knocked me sideways while filling me with enough projected responsibility to feel like I'm rebuilding from scratch. Add my dad's death to this - along with the financial implications of my mum's unyielding approach - and it's like I'm running on empty.
I can't help but compare what my parents were doing at my age. When I was born, my mum and dad were 35 and 34 respectively and had been married for nearly thirteen years so they had time on their side to have a baby (though they were still finding their feet). And yet at nearly 40, I'm still struggling to lay the roots for a family, both emotionally and financially, while my mother actively works against me.
Whether my wife and I have children is a difficult question, with time pressing, and my low income and mental health issues adding to the worry. The cost of buying my mum out of my dad's house so we can live there puts us in substantial debt, which makes having kids more anxiety-provoking, which is galling when my mum's the one actively adding to this impact without helping. She seems unable to consider our comparative needs, or grasp that forcing me to lie to my dad about her affairs throughout my childhood was unacceptable and that she only compounded it by secretly remarrying the year before he died and expecting me to lie about that too. I told her at the time it wasn't fair to not give him closure when she'd actively moved on, and that it was ethically unsound to let him sign off a will that left half of everything to her in ignorance of her changed marital status, though both fell on deaf ears. She willfully deceived him and yet I'm the one paying for it, both literally and figuratively, while she behaves like she's the victim.
It's frustrating getting caught in this feedback loop when I want to move on. But I recognise it's a natural response to dealing with a narcissist's distorted expectations and lack of accountability. They use toxic logic, but at least I understand that now and have tactics to help cope with it.
Perhaps the biggest lesson therapy's taught me is that recognising what you can and can't control is the key to recovery. The difficult childhood I had to navigate was not of my making; it was just the place I ended up. And everything I was put through I had to process while hitting the ground running; coping with things a child shouldn't have to do in total secrecy. And yet I still responded with love and acceptance, which was never enough. But that wasn't my fault. There wasn't something I lacked that made me unlovable and unimportant, which was the only way the brain of a child in my position could process it. And I've paid for that early faulty programming in some form ever since. But the time has come to wipe the whiteboard clean and start again, as life begins at forty after all.