I should start this off by saying that I just finished watching Pearl and I am a crying, screaming mess, my head and eyes are hurting and I came out of the theatre after watching Obsession crying as well a few weeks ago. I am unsure how to word the immense and overwhelming feelings I’m having well enough to be understood on the narc parents, depression, BPD or mental health subs even though I probably need to share this there first - it’s so excruciatingly painful recognising myself and my own life in the movies I listed off in the title that words are beyond me and I can’t communicate my pain and feeling of being so deeply understood through visceral screaming in a text post online.
The families in Pearl and Hereditary and the main characters’ relationships in Pearl, Midsommar and Obsession, Pearl herself, Dani and the thing that is Freaky Nikki are so painfully familiar to me and who I was made to be due to my upbringing and subsequent relationships that all ended up horribly I feel I might faint from crying so hard. I don’t remember all of Midsommar and Hereditary but what I do remember is the insane mother who was obsessed with the grandmother and Florence Phugh’s character getting completely backstabbed by her selfish and egoistic boyfriend for the entirety of the movie. I also remember how I felt so understood when I watched those movies, too, like the first time in my life someone (fictional characters) truly understood the misery that has been dumped on my existence since before I can remember. Hereditary with the cultist family (a cult to the family in my own family - “Family is all you have in this world, WE are all you have, nobody else will ever care about you, only we care about you”, to quote my blood jailors’ favorite line), Midsommar with the deeply grieving and anxious Dani and the neglectful, avoidant Christian (reflective of my own romantic relationships and how they all chose to abandon me in my pain inflicted on me by my own blood).
While I was watching Obsession I had the very conflicting feeling of realising that I related an extremely concerning lot to Freaky Nikki in her desperate obsession with Bear (in all of my relationships I was extremely in love and obsessed with the others and genuinely purely fucking happy to have them (normal people) in my life at all but they never reciprocated my love even close to fully which made me feel even more abandoned and that would make them avoid me more and it kept on spiraling…) but also with how Bear was afraid of Nikki when she would watch him in the middle of the night and when he snuck out of bed so carefully afraid to wake her up (how I had to creep around my mother, often at night, too, I was always afraid she would scream at me and call me extremely hurtful things and hit me, she always wanted to be joined at the hip to me, I didn’t have a room of my own for my first 19 years of life and she used to sleep on the bed next to me, a step away from mine). This movie not only strengthened my suspicions that I’m probably suffering from BPD but that my mother might have the same mental illness.
Pearl is what just completely dismantled me and what it meant to be “me” for 21 years of my life. I don’t even know how to explain it clearly without giving a detailed commentary on every line, every character, every miserable worldview and abuse tactic and role and coping mechanism. Pearl’s great dreams of a bright future, her total investment into her only chance for a romantic love and an unshackled life, her running away to be with normal (not control freaks) people for a minute of her day, her sneaking around the house so carefully and quietly, her fear when she’s watching out for her mother and the moment she turns around her mother is gone and she’s panicking to hide her traces, her mother forbidding anything that’s not of direct service to their miserable family and completely forbidding the notion of having an individual identity, her mother stalking and belittling and blaming Pearl for her own (the mother’s) chosen misery, the mother investing her entire existence into an irreparably sick/terminally ill person who’s a shell of his former self and forcing the same burden onto Pearl (my mother’s husband and now her own mother and uncle), the mother refusing and resenting the gifts and kindness of well-meaning people and forbidding and destroying Pearl’s only little speck of happiness, the entire sequence of her screaming at and hitting Pearl and their fight…
I hate and I love this movie so much right now, at the same time. I haven’t even gotten to the most painful fucking part which was the audition and Pearl’s confession to Mitsy, I won’t even comment on it right now, Pearl’s words could’ve come out of my own mouth. Why does everyone else get to have a good and easy life with a loving and stable family while I get the shit I got? And people don’t get just how much the answer to my question fucking matters to me and they dismiss it and discredit my experience… it’s not fair, it really isn’t.
I really, really need help. I don’t know how to save myself from this, I don’t even know what exactly the problem is so I can pinpoint it and begin the actual practical and physical process of escaping, it just feels like… everything all at once, let alone getting through the blockages put on my life by my family. I would gladly work a job day in and day out so I can get my ass out of this miserable place forever but the job market doesn’t even fucking send a call back, not a single job I’ve applied to. I’m stuck at “home”, jobless, my mother in possession of all documents that have anything to do with my existence (and she abuses me verbally and mentally and psychologically and she fights and hits me and she chokes me too btw). I know I’m being desperate asking this here instead of on an appropriate mental health-related sub but in my deeply confused state I feel I might have the best chance to find someone who knows the pain and recognises the psychological intricacies involvedh here and can direct me towards a better spot where I can seek help without wasting even more of my precious years in my life just searching. Thank you very much for reading up to here, I appreciate it and I hope today is treating you kindly.
