an email I sent by accident

I just had an insight while high. Yes, high, at 5:17 in the afternoon, what can I say? Artist's life. Anyway, I have mommy issues. And don't get me wrong, but I was so focused on the daddy issues that I never noticed the biggest issue of all is with my mother. Shock. Fine, I suspected I had them, but I thought they only touched a few corners of my life, like:

• never being completely at peace with my body
• or always feeling guilty somehow

But there was always an enormous problem right under my nose: every woman I get involved with makes a fool of me.

Yes, all of them.

I will always be extremely understanding, I will always believe that when they hurt me they don't mean it, I always find excuses for the things that wound me, I try to play the grown-up, I fake a smile, I try to convince myself it doesn't affect me. That it shouldn't affect me. That they don't mean harm, that they, in truth, have suffered and still suffer so much, that they never learned to handle their feelings, that they are human. They can make mistakes. Me? Bloody Mother Teresa, forever believing I'll fix them. Not that I think they need to change who they are — I love the individuality of every one of them. What I want is to cure each one's pain. I try to be exactly what they need me to be, even when that isn't me. I try to fit into their lives without paying much attention to what I actually want, just to have some kind of affection. Exactly how I always behaved with my mother.

Freud must be laughing. It really is a bit comic that a psychology student took this long to see the obvious. The size of my ego never stops surprising me, no matter how evolved I think I am.

And when I say all of them, I mean all of them: from teachers, to bosses, to friends, to the ones who only ever left.

I spent my whole life trying to understand why I never had any luck with women. All of them, all of them, without exception, left. And you know who else left? Yes, my mother. Not literally, she's alive, but she was the first to leave me. Did I read the room? I don't think so — this was always one long storm.

She walked out when I was 16. And that was that. I got no say in it. And life goes on. Or does it?

Of course it hurt, she gave me a flimsy excuse and left me. And guess who else did that to me? Yes, the ones I dated (and a few bosses).

I always treat women like goddesses. I do everything I can think of to make them feel like the only woman in the world. As if they were the sun, and I the moon. One of my friends told me one day that I'm too nice.

“being women doesn't automatically make them good people”

It's true. Maybe I fell for the cultural tale that women are naturally more enlightened than men, that we are calmer, more empathetic, more understanding — I fell for the tale of the domesticated woman, me of all people, who always criticised that tale. These speeches about women only ever show up in two situations:

• when a man wants forgiveness, so he talks about how good women are, and how men err, that erring is man's nature, and that it is woman's nature to forgive and understand that error, that a woman's nature is to care.
• when they want to judge a woman who refuses to fit what this society's patriarchal standard calls natural for a woman; there will always be praise for the ones who accept being domesticated.

I always criticised that tale, and still I fell for it. I always thought men would hurt me, because that is their nature, and the record shows that nature is real.

I always thought women would take care of me, the same way I would take care of them, the same way I take care of my mother, even when she still hurts me sometimes. Because a woman's nature is to care — but the record shows that isn't true.

my great-grandmother
hurt my grandmother,
who hurt my mother,
who hurt me,
and somehow, I hurt every one of them back.

And then I hurt myself again, when I projected all that weight, without even seeing it, onto every other woman I've been involved with. Not only the wish to be cared for — that much is human. But staying close to someone who isn't treating me the way I believe I deserve to be treated. Being disrespected. Mistreated. And sometimes by building unreal expectations for that kind of relationship, whatever it was: student, employee, friend, lover.

Not that every woman in the world is a monster and I'm some poor thing. I love all of them. I'm proud of who they are, even when they aren't perfect. It's just that they aren't perfect, and that is human, a fact proven over and over through history, whether you're a man or a woman, or neither.

Taking almost 27 years to realise my mommy issues run deeper than I thought isn't really that shocking. We often ignore the truth right in front of us, we build an alternative reality, a fantasy, and swear to God it's real. That is human too — I know it well, since I'm human, and I can be wrong.

Gabriela Oyara