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THE ANTIDOTE
By Kate Armstrong
When I was a young girl, the message was very clear: it was my responsibility to keep myself safe. Do this. Don’t do that. Then I was told, if I was lucky, I’d never be in the wrong place at the wrong time and nothing bad would happen to me.
This proved to be a lie early on.
In my memoir, The Stone Frigate: The Royal Military College’s First Female Cadet Speaks Out, I share personal experiences endured both within my family system and within the military system. The parallels are uncanny. Later in life, after leaving the military and before I started writing, I faced similar struggles in my outwardly successful corporate career that compelled me to tell my story about being one of the first female cadets at RMC. My circumstances, however, were not unique or special. I felt like a capable woman aspiring toward achievement, as defined in our Canadian culture, who was continually set up to fail and was told she could blame herself for her failures.
I knew that I was not alone. For decades, my close women friends—Partner in a Law Firm, Investment Banker, Composer, ER Doctor—had been sharing their stories with me and affirmed that: “Women had the appearance of equality, the concept was enshrined in law, but the vast majority of us in the trenches were having a radically different experience: a horrible, deeper expression of struggle based solely on our sex, one part heartbreaking, one part crazy making, and one part infuriating.” (The Stone Frigate, p. 297)
When I first heard the expression gaslighting, I was shocked to discover that the very definition of the term was exactly what I had experienced: “Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/11-warning-signs-gaslighting)
Warfare uses tactics to gain advantage and win. I saw clearly that gaslighting was the tactical tool used to turn my self-esteem into a weapon against myself and to make me doubt my reality. For decades, I could not understand my continual struggle to feel accepted, supported, and recognized for my many gifts and talents. The greatest illusion I had inherited was that it was my own fault. I carried the burden of others’ manipulative behaviours and was left feeling helpless and hopeless.
The solution for my inner angst came to me through the simple act of picking up a drink after work. Day after day, I sought a few hours of peaceful amnesia. Eventually, my solution turned on me too. My self-loathing grew. My anger toward my situation grew. My drinking changed. My attitude changed. I drank the poison, hoped that I would die, and they would feel sorry.
Still, nothing changed around me. Then came the realization that, recognized and seized, transformed the course of my life forever: it was me who needed to care. It was my attitude toward myself that needed to be recovered. I was spending my life in a vicious cycle of medicating pain, grief, and shock by harming myself and hating myself for it.
It turned out that the great antidote to my pain was to stop drinking the poison and to become willing to face the reality of my situation with clear-headed thinking. Once I found the courage to accept the temporary discomfort of life without self-medicating, by ceasing to hurt myself, feel what I needed to feel, and heal it, I saw that I had been trying to achieve the impossible. I had trusted people, in my family and in my career, thinking they knew me better than I knew myself and wanted the best for me. I had found these people charming, kind, decent. I had ignored the small voice in me that said, “Something doesn’t feel right.” When I saw the truth of what had been happening and that on the other side of the crazy making there existed a world of empowerment and limitless potential, I made the commitment to get to know, love, trust, and be myself.
Over and over, I’ve had to recommit and return to that place of self-love. I’ve made mistakes and slipped back into old patterns, but each time, it became easier and quicker to get back on track. I saw the rewards: healthier relationships, a more fulfilling career, enhanced creativity, clearer decisions, and being comfortable living in my own skin.
Today, I stand confident and free. I love and approve of me. My life gets better every day. I’ve learned to distinguish between what is true about me and what is not. It took time and practice to grow my steadfast desire to make staying true to myself a way of life. But the time it took was worth it.
Kate Armstrong is the author of The Stone Frigate: The Royal Military College’s First Female Cadet Speaks Out (Dundurn, 2019) and was a finalist for the 2020 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Non-Fiction Prize. Before fulfilling her dream to become a writer, she served thirteen years as a military officer and later worked in the corporate world as an electricity trader. Kate is an alumna of several non-fiction residency programs at Banff Centre for the Arts and Sage Hill Writing. She lives in the mountains near Nelson, B.C., with her husband, Rick, and their three black Labs.