Crazy Grandmother 1

My grandmother today: When I was growing up we didn’t have a TV. People now don’t know how life was back then.

Same grandmother, same day talking about 1940: They didn’t have newspapers then.

🤨

COVID-19

I feel that people will reflect on how isolated, lonely, disconnected, and anxious the COVID-19 pandemic made them feel.  And I will say, For me, nothing changed during the pandemic.  All my life I already felt this isolated, lonely, disconnected, and anxious.  At least one positive was the social acceptability of covering my face with a mask.

TIL…

Today I learned that ‘entitled’ means reminding a person less than tactfully that they agreed to an obligation they have not fulfilled within a timely manner.

I was told that she, “didn’t owe me anything”. Except that I asked for something, she agreed to it, and then she pretended like that never happened.

“Don’t be a dishonest person and agree to things you have no intention on holding yourself accountable to. Don’t attempt to shame me for asking for what I need when you had the freedom to say yes OR no.”

Or I should have said, “I have learned my lesson that you can’t be trusted to mean or keep your word.”

That basically translates to “I don’t trust you.”

All because in October it seemed totally reasonable she could get me a pair of gloves for Christmas BEFORE Christmas.

Bittersweet future with every milestone

I wonder how long I am going to pine for someone who didn’t really exist except in my imagination.  How long am I going to miss a person that doesn’t miss me?

It seems like every milestone brings up this grief and sense of loss.  I took my child to school for the first time.  It went well and there’s no reason to be sad.

Except I am missing someone now.  But not a biological relative who has passed on or lives somewhere we can’t easily reach.  Instead I miss someone who would rather imagine my life than keep in touch to learn the reality.

Of course, it’s my own fault this person isn’t in my life.  It’s my own fault my heart aches so terribly right now.  That is what happens when people date people who not that into them.  The people who don’t care are fine and don’t even have to “move on” so much as just quit.  Even forgetting is easy for them.

I don’t even have a perfectly sound explanation for why I care so much.  I do know this person is more comforting to me than my parents or anyone else I dated.  I felt safe then in a deep sense when he held me in a period were little felt alright.  Perhaps he was the person I was most attached to in my life.  Probably because I met him at an incredibly wounded and vulnerable time in my life and he didn’t regularly criticize me in a judgemental tone as I proceeded to fail at life.

But he didn’t “get” me either.  He didn’t adore me or even prefer me to other pretty women.  He just put up with me because of his own insecurities after his compassion got him in over his head.

I don’t know even how there could be a mutually positive conversation between us now or in the future.  Unless I lie and keep to myself that I miss him and wanted to talk with him.  Certainly impossible if I show any jealousy.

There’s a void and when I miss him, it represents that void.  He somewhat filled up that void, but it wasn’t quite enough and it didn’t last.  Even when I was with him, I felt desperate and depressed daily.  I wanted someone who knew me to deeply love me.  He barely knew me and he didn’t care much for me the better acquainted we became.  He couldn’t give me a steady kind of love but apparently he came the closest experiences I have ever had.

It’s oddly painful to feel grief where before I met him there would have only been dull emptiness.

Perhaps missing him shows a really ugly side of me.

Mother

You criticized me first, btw. So yes, you did raise me to treat you this way if you had considered your behavior as molding mine.  You did raise me to be ungrateful by complaining, negative by criticizing, insulting by insulting, angry by hurting, depressed by neglecting.  You think you loved me but you aren’t capable of love or taking responsibility for the hurt you intentionally or unintentionally caused.

You blame me for trying to change our dysfunctional dynamic but I think I need to accept you are a toxic person incapable of change and you’ll only continue to unapologetically hurt us as long as I let myself be near you.

Struggle and meaning

“The joy I discovered in the families of children who were different ran against widespread social expectations, so I felt I needed an abundance of interview subjects to reflect multiple views of various conditions and to support an irrefutable thesis: that profound meaning comes in the struggle to find it.”

http://andrewsolomon.com/articles/my-stories-become-someone-elses-adapting-a-book-to-film/

What I found to read when I felt there was no hope in the future and for my family: the idea that life doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful or that struggle is an ugly flaw. Hope for children of hard lives to still live meaningful, enjoyable lives.

Blinding Hatred, Suicide and Death Wishes

I have hated particular people so much I have wished they were dead. I have hated all people in general so much that I wished humankind was wiped out. Ironically, I will most likely just barely miss that apocalypse.

All this hate is probably because my mom would scream at me that I deserved to go to Hell.

I don’t believe in Hell beyond the very real pain of unhappy living and others’ experience of unhappiness in an afterlife I would not witness seems too remote for wish fulfillment purposes.

Instead, hoping their agency and ability to interfere in my life ends completely is much more rational in the regard that it really is about actual benefits, like control.

So, I hate my son’s paternal grandmother and want her story to be over and retold by someone as unsympathetic to her as I am because she certainly is unsympathetic, self-sabotaging, and possibly delusional in her perspective of me (except for the fact I am blogging about wishing her dead so clearly I can’t be an angel, except perhaps of death–eh, that’s not a funny joke).

I’ve wished my mother dead periodically because of her relentless, unrestrained judgment about my life that put me on the defensive from birth and caused low self-esteem and depression my entire life. Children who aren’t accepted struggle to feel loved. And I have suicidal ideation, self-harm, and interpersonal drama for what is now two-thirds of my life. I honestly can’t remember what not wanting to cease to live feels like. So, thanks for never telling me you believed in me or even good job and always pointing out my flaws or even just what you percieved as flaws in me, laughing at or ignoring my pain, and letting me feel completely isolated and desperate to feel connection. Who needs enemies when family seems like practically the same thing.

I’ve wanted horrible people who didn’t care about me to die despite the fact that I could have decided that I deserved better and cut them out of my life for MY benefit and just let the seething hatred go by reclaiming my autonomy and allow only positive into my life.

I probably believe I deserve to experience life as Hell for having opinions or standards others’ don’t so I can try to earn my way to affection and connection because clearly I never escaped my psychological issues from my childhood. I try to get people who treat me in painful ways to stop rather than protect myself by ending the relationship because self-awareness came later.

The ability to severe ties with people who become toxic to you is limited by the perception of lacking agency, worth, and opportunities. And it makes sense to think that way if that is simply carrying over from my childhood where I depended on my parents and the best I could hope for was to try to convince them to love me. A child who doesn’t believe in herself nor rejects disrespect or hostility directed at her doesn’t suddenly change her beliefs at 18 because now she’s an adult.

So instead, after repeatedly being beaten or just worn down, I would hate someone enough to wish they would die.

And particularly now, I hate some horribly selfish man who for 4 years has gone from subtly abusing me to full out verbal and psychological assault. My life, without fear of reprisals and future interactions, would be better. If he was out of my life and I didn’t have to see him again, I would have a significant source of stress out of my life.

Sure, I would still have stress and maybe stress related to his absence but I wouldn’t need to employ defensive strategies to protect myself from an abuser. I could start to work to feel safe and secure in myself.

I wouldn’t have more opportunities to make mistakes by letting him manipulate or coerce me into letting him control me and dictate the conditions of my life. He wouldn’t have more opportunities to remind me that I should hate myself for letting him hurt me or because he hates me. Instead, I could work on reminding myself I am okay enough to try to live. Without the constant reminder that a person deeply embedded in my life doesn’t accept or love me and the constant criticisms to change aren’t my own.

It’s hard to love yourself when you let people who don’t become too close to you.

Presently, I really hate him every time I remember all the pain he’s caused me with no remorse, all the wrongs he never set out to right, and all the chances I gave him since the first time we met which should have been the last if I was braver, smarter, and healthier.

I don’t think I would have seen him a second time if I had healthy self-esteem. Or definitely not after the third meeting. Disrespect is really internalized if you let someone do that to you from the beginning and a person willing to do that to a stranger is never going to be respectful.

So, 4 years later I hate him as much as I hate myself and it’s absolutely certain my life is better without him in it as anyone else I know has told me. But because I am suicidal, when this man told me he had suicidal thoughts 4 years ago, I had so much empathy and therefore sympathy for him.

However, when he told me the same words 2 months ago, I felt annoyed at first, then sad and worried for him, but finally just dumb and angry. I felt annoyed because this is the man that told me that he didn’t care if I live or die, that he doesn’t want to know if I feel suicidal because he doesn’t want to help, it’s just unpleasant to hear about, and that he values other people more than me, especially to help him. Then he calls me saying he is suicidal in the middle of the night, despite the late hour from the PST and EST time difference and despite having self-reported more helpful friends to call, and despite his apathy regarding my existence entirely. But I am supposed to tell him I want him to keep living. I’m supposed to tell someone that doesn’t care about me that his life is so important to me despite it being fairly obvious to everyone else that he causes immense pain in my life with no remorse and increasing more likely purposefully. After all, it must feel good to be in control of another human and then insult and degrade a person or demand praise from them entirely at one’s own whim.

Thankfully I was asleep and his calls weren’t coming through because I didn’t have the opportunity to blurt out, “But I hate you and your selfish, hypocritical ways.” Later though, imagining how much pain he might be experiencing because of how painful suicidal thoughts are for me, I really felt sorry for him and wanted to try to help.

But then after a few days of misplaced empathy and when he’s behavior returned to normal, I remembered why I hate him. And remembered that I have seen him suicidal at the most convenient times to manipulate a situation with me, his family, and apparently again just then with me.

But I always thought, I don’t want to say, “Go ahead, kill yourself” because it’s truly awful to hear from anyone, much less from someone you hope will somehow help AND what if he really is suicidal?

I mean, deep down I know he’s just acting because he doesn’t understand how hard it is to kill yourself and he hasn’t considered methodology, and his reasoning for not killing himself is only his parents but logically he is the biggest cause of stress, pain and disappointment in their lives. Of course they would never want him to end his life, but imagining their tearful reactions to hearing the news compared to the past decade of disappointment and monetary losses they’ve already suffered by him and most likely will continue to suffer because honestly, he says shit like, “I don’t care about my dad’s feelings,” “My parents will pay for it,” and he bullies his mother and reduces her to tears. So, again, there’s questionable math involved if he’s solely basing his continued life on the impact it has on his parents.

All that questionable data regarding his reported experience with suicidal ideation combined with hindsight of 4 years of manipulative abuse makes suicide seem like the ultimate threat to use against his parents and a sure-fire way to use my own experience and empathy to control me.

But, I still hesitate to say, “You should kill yourself.” After all, isn’t there some possibility he does actually feel suicidal at times?

I have in the past, during moments of crazy, exasperated frustration when dealing with him, blurted out I really do wish he was dead. And maybe if he was suicidal there’d be no semantic distinction between my wish and should. However, as of yet, clearly he hasn’t taken it as such and lives on and continues to attempt to torment me.

And I continue to suffer blinding, destructive hatred and struggle to free myself from him, other people, and my internalized wounds that create it.

After all, even I know wishing other people dead is coming from a place of dysfunction or lack of wellness. Including a lack of sleep. Sleep is super important. It’s harder to love life and people in a sleep-deprived headache and pessimism.

Trust

Broken. Maybe it’s a lie here and another lie there. Catching two different stories about the same event. And slowly, no matter how many excuses I make or how much I want to believe and trust someone, it’s gone. There is nothing left. Every story needs confirmation, but is the evidence provided even definite proof? Could it be faked? Digitally altered? Showing something that only appears to be what I am looking for? How much of the story is a lie? All or just part or just the tiniest but most crucial detail? It’s maddening to have to test everything because there’s been enough demonstration that anything can be lied about. There are no boundaries that aren’t crossed by deceit.

Really, the only sane choice is to cut ties with this person. Make sure there’s no access, leverage, anything left that I would not let everyone else see. Nothing with which to attack or blackmail me. Because if the lying is so obvious and brazen, could there be anything this person wouldn’t do?

The web of lies only can grow, entangling me further into betrayal, danger, and most of all hurt. When trust is gone, affection will follow.

The stranger in front of you

The guy in front of me at the drive-thru paid for my fast food meal and passed along a little note about the idea coming from some radio station (Star 93.3)

And apparently I’m supposed to be grateful and inspired. But I live in Trump/Republican country (upwards of 75% of voters vote Republican), so it’s safe to assume there’s a significant chance that if this Christian stranger votes, he or she votes for slashing public welfare programs and endorses views like “people need to take responsibility”.

I CAN pay for my poisonous garbage food. As Andy Samberg sings in “Threw It on the Ground”: ““Man, what’d I look like? A charity case?”
I took it and threw it on the ground
I don’t need your hand-outs
I’m an adult
Please, you can’t buy me hotdog man”

So, in summary, I feel like have been used by some self-righteous jackass Christian who feels better about themselves by making me a charity case. I’m not buying into that religious nonsense about helping out other people who have enough money to afford cars by buying $10 worth of food. There are so many people who need so many different kinds of help, but you’d have to have a relationship and listen to actually help them with what they need. That’s the kind of help people do appreciate.

You know, this shit doesn’t happen in California. No weirdo has bought my food for me at In-N-Out.

I still ate it, because I am not wasteful. But really just because I didn’t remember “Threw It on the Ground” until halfway through my meal.