On Being The Scapegoat

Back in October, I was talking to my best friend from college - via text, because pandemic.  I was describing to her what I had thought could be an anxiety attack.  I'd noticed a car started parking directly in front of our mailbox - which seemed like something that was probably against city ordinances.  At the very least, it made things very difficult for our mail carrier.  And I'd noticed that the car had only appeared there the day after I had put out our Biden-Harris sign.  It never moved.  

Almost immediately after making that connection, my heart had started racing, I felt shaky, I imagined increasingly dire and improbable escalations:  If someone had done this, would they spray paint "SOCIALIST BABY KILLERS" on our garage?  Would some cul-de-sac teenager beat up my son?  That night I woke up gasping, crying, and sweating from a nightmare where Paul and I had been dragged out of our house, tied to a tree, and our house set on fire with our children inside. 

The end of our text chain was a pact that we would both call therapists, for the first time in our lives, and make appointments - her to work through what she calls "Temple PTSD" and her inability to ask for help which causes overwhelm - me for what is clearly my latent and exponentially worsening social anxiety.  We had to make our appointments by November 1.  If we didn't, we would donate $100 to the Trump Campaign.  Perhaps the only way to get us to follow-through - it was a very effective.

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My New Year's resolution last year was to lose 20 pounds.  Pretty much the most cliché resolution imaginable.  "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for [that] meddling [Coronavirus]."  

This year, I want, no, I need to, shed some emotional weight instead.  Or maybe the metaphor is more to heal a wound or find my confidence or some-such like that.  First step was making those calls to therapists in October.  Haven't actually had an appointment yet - turns out that 2020 has done a number on the mental health of the general populace and a certain amount of triage is in place.  I'm on a waiting list, which is understandable, as my request is more on the order of relationship/thought coaching and less on the suicidal ideation side of things.  Get those folks help first.  

Basically, though, my ultimate goal this year is to work through, with intention, how to be ok even when branded the Family Scapegoat™.  Amazingly(!) achieving said dubious distinction with both my own and my in-laws' families.  Perhaps it all is in my head.  That I'm imagining this scarlet letter - just like I imagined (here's the kicker) that the car was parked in front of our Biden sign on purpose (it wasn't).  

After over ten years of trying to examine the whole situation as objectively as possible, however, I'm fairly confident it's not imagined.  It's been a surreal and toxic experience to go through excruciating political, personal, spiritual (all the -als) transitions the last decade+, all alone, doing all that mental and emotional work by myself, feeling the full brunt of and taking responsibility for any extended familial and social fallout put squarely on only my shoulders.  That's hard enough.  But then, after surviving that (or trying to still survive it when I get sucker-punched by aftershocks that never end and always surprise me)...absorbing all that for myself...already broken and bleeding and not understanding why I've been the target of so much pointless emotional violence, curled up in a corner just trying to find a place where I can breathe a bit...  

I then have the privilege of, as I said, being the Family Scapegoat™.  Where if anyone else shows any inkling of a shift similar to my own, or any shift away from the status quo at all, (I suppose because I was the first to move? Dark side of being the oldest.), I get to take quite a bit of the "blame".  I become, as it were, the cause of it all.  Guilt by proximity.  A couple well-placed kicks to the ribs for being the one who "started it" - doesn't matter if I never had a single conversation with that person about their own decisions.  Doesn't matter if I did have conversations with that person to tell them I would support them and be happy for them if their choices were always different than my own.  Doesn't really matter at all what I do or don't do in reality - it never really does for a scapegoat - there just needs to be a convenient single someone to label as "suspect/contaminant".

It's easier that way, you see.  It's so much harder to give everyone fully-fledged autonomy.

I'm not naive enough to believe that this year I'll be able to change my status as Family Scapegoat™.  It may shock you to know that I actually don't think that I can control the decisions of other humans with their own fully-fledged autonomy.  But, I hope - I really hope - that I can learn how to live with it more gracefully, or at least more protectively.  Some kind of kevlar-lined fur-trimmed parka for my heart and soul?  The metaphor has run away from me now.  Something where the cold shoulders don't make me shiver uncontrollably anymore.  Where any disappointment aimed at me can't slice and fester.  What I don't think I'll ever be able to do, though, is to stop caring.