Find MORE through LESS

On the painful journey to finding your identity as a replacement child.

I am a replacement child.

I was born to fill a void my sister left in the hearts of my parents & my family. Maybe not intentionally, not with the outspoken wish of my parents to become one. But I did so anyways – as I had no other choice to survive the grief, the pain, the confusion, the cold distance & excrutiating silence I was born into. My sister died at the age of 22 months in October 1987. Her name was Adrienn. I was born in June 1988. My name is Adrienn. This is my first attempt to find words for what I never felt strong enough to talk about.

In the 35 years I have lived so far, I often said: I have lived for at least 3. Unconsiously, this was a deliberating thought for me in my younger years, describing the intensity and depth of my life experiences, the pace I was rushing through my days, years: I accomplished, learned, tried, lost, built up more in these 35 years, than most of the people I know. It always felt exhausting, haunted, but I couldn’t help but doing so: running forward, ticking boxes, delivering, performing. Being an exceptional student, athlete, I studied, I worked high-profile jobs, climbed ladders, got married, became a mother, got divorced, lost my home, built up a new one, bought a house, planted trees, ran, drunk, smoked, shopped, read, hurt, cried, numbed myself in any imaginable way. I tried to be an outstanding person, a mother, a wife, an ex-wife, a partner, an ex-partner, a co-worker, a leader, a friend. All at the same time. I tried and I did so, because at the pace of this fast-track lane, I didn’t feel (at least I tried not to feel), what’s inside: NOTHING. A whole, emptiness, numbness, aheavy grey mess, that was slowly eating me up. I do not know who I am. How I am, what makes me me, where are my traits, my limitations, my beliefs, my self.? I might really have lived for three: for my mother, who repressed all her feelings her whole life; for my sister who couldn’t live, but my parents desperately wanted her to „come back“ and be as she was before; and for „me“ – but not out of me. Rather in ralation to others, as a reflection of what was needed of me to keep my parents and later any system around me „alive“, running, balanced and harmonious.

I sat at my therapist’s couch yesterday, two weeks into being at home after an emotional & physical breakdown, in a long-denied burnout. I was asked this very simple question, which I have already tried to find answers for over time, but the humble (and spoken) voice of another person made it hit harder then ever: who are you actually? What do you want?

I sat at my therapist’s couch yesterday, and the tears started running down my face, quite and peaceful. It was warm, I was calm and aware. And as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that I am being the most honest and benevolent version of me saying: I DO NOT KNOW.

I know much about who / what I am not. I was and never became the person I should have became to make the pain of my m other go away. I was never like the daugther she lost. I always knew, that I am deeply disappointing and overwhelming her. Because I was and still not am like *she* was. We never talked. She never said a word about here, we never grieved, we never tried to work ourselves through the loss, the confusion, the pain, the emptiness. Being an immensly sensible person, I just felt that I should try to be everything / anything she needed to be okay. My becoming was learning how to scan, to feel, to assess what my fellow human needed at the moment to survive. That IS what I know of myself, that is what I can do at any given time in my life. That is the „core“ I can feel, the part of me I could draw boundaries around. To keep me safe and create healthy relationsships in all fields of my life. Is that a core one could work with? Whatever else I felt, learned about myself, was not seen, was not welcomed or cherished. I heard the word „too“ more often than anything else growing up: too intense, too sensitive, too demanding, too stubborn, too idealistic, too irrational, too closed-up. I truly belive today, that my parents did not want to hurt me. They just couldn’t do any better, they could not feel their pain, they could not work with their feelings, they could not get over what happened. They did the best they could with the sight and ressources they had. Could they have tried something else, could they have change things, take over responsibilty, and work their way through the unimaginable pain? They could have – but they did not. That is just as real as it gets: I do not feel the anger anymore, the urge the fight reality, to change the unchangeable, to blame them / someone for what happened. I am not hateful, angry and full of blame anymore. Those years have passed, and I survived them fortunately, though I did not want to. Life had a plan for me – and today I am thankful for holding on.

I could list a thousand labels I have become in an attempt to feel myself, to hurt myself, to find relief: I was and am addicted (in different phases of my life to alcohol, to smoking, seductive sexual behaviour, shopping), was for a decade suffering from severe eating disorders and obsessive excersizing, almost twenty years now living with depression, severe anxiety, broken attachment abilities, overachieving, embodying the impostor syndrome… I am the queen of self-sabotaging behaviour, starting but not sticking to anything that could bring me joy and fulfillment. The list could go on and on. I know a lot about what I am not, and can not be. But I do not yet have an idea, what makes me me, how to be me. What source to turn to for orientation, what voice inside to trust, what intuitions to follow. I at least have two of those voices inside me – constantly batteling to steer my actions. By these two, I do not mean my child-self, my inner critic, or my „resposibly grown-up identity“. It really does feel like, if I always wanted at least 2 different things at the same time. As there were two horses pulling the carriage in the opposite directions. For each and every voice for one decision, there is an equivalent of it for the other one. A never-ending, constant battle in my mind & heart, not allowing me to just choose and be with one decision at a time.

I can’t let myself be. I never felt entiteled to my feelings, to my beliefs, to my thoughts, to my red-flags; to my life actually. I have a deep understanding for people suffering from suicidal thoughts. For a long time, I would have admitted: I have them too, time to time. But if I look deeper and try to grasp it more accurate: I have had these thoughts constantly. Not like I wanted to end my life or to die. More like the thoughts that I shouldn’t even be here in the first place, I should not exist, there is no space for me in this life however hard I try. Anytime some small setback occured in life, my very first thoughts were always the same: that existential certainty of not belonging here, not havint the right and the place to be (alive). I did not have to attempt ending my life: it was haunting enough, that I never actually felt the I should be existing in the first place. The world as I got to know it in my early days was an endlessly daunting, cold, sad, distant place. My mother was deeply grieving, isolated and frozen in pain, my father was absent: they could not feel or express lightness, happyness, or joy over my existence, over my arrival. They thought if they do not talk about it, do not express it, it won’t be seen, felt, present. Well, it was – as we all know better today. No newborn baby would ever had any other chance to survive and secure themselves their caregivers affection & attention, but to believe that the grey sorrow around them is something they are responsible for and thus it is on them to try very hard to make up for it. “ I made my caregivers suffer, it’s on me, that they’re in pain – I must be the reason, I must be wrong. It is a very dark place one must work herself up from.

It is the first time in my life, that allowing and expressing these thoughts & feelings do not scare me. They do not make me freeze, unable to breathe through or to start running away from them through any form of numbing. Whatever (and how many) experiences helped me to get to the point where I can sit with them, acknowledge them and hold them – I am deeply grateful for. Because no matter how hard we try to outrun our deepest wounds and life-crippling beliefs, they will not loose their power over us, until we can learn to face them. And accept them for what they are: our reality, our past, our becoming. They might be paralyzingly painful, but even that pain is (just) a part of us, not us in our whole experience. Nothing can be processed and integrated in ourselves, which is not seen first as it truly is. Pain, dispair, struggle, any form of trauma: the inevitable first step towards healing is the honest and open-minded inquiry. Every memory and every experience in our existence is just what it is. Seeing them for what they were, what they are, how they affected our ways is the only way to start reframing them and letting go of the spell they tend to hold over us otherwise.

I do not know who I am, what I want, what I truly like, how my fearless self would wish to live, how I would be without the many layers of adapting strategies, the people-pleasing, the mind-reading, the surpessing, the overcompensating, the achivemnts, the being-a-nice-girl attitude, the smiling. I have a freaking smile to offer to literally anyone in the world – at any time needed. The smile I never truly had for myself, and the one I wouldn’t whish to give awy so easily anymore. I feel so drained and tired of the core beliefs, that I always, under any circumstance must be kind, nice, well-behaved, pleasant, giving, caring, balancing and striving for harmony.

And that all is OK. I am now at peace with standing where I stand, with not knowing more, with holding space for what is: I am alive, I survived all the years of self-loathing, unbearable guilt, shame and extrinsic „guidance“. And I am ready to find my roots inside through whatever ways I can.

My sister lived. She lived shortly, but she had her space. I still live, and even if I didn’t believe I am allowed to have mine, I still have the chance to find & create it. So I will. ❤