Month: April 2003

[Entry: it includes drugs, rape, family and all your usual suspects.]
Today I declare myself an orphan.
Really. I’m not kidding.
It started when my brother called me the other night and told me that he had received the bills from his hospital stays and so far the debt is mounting in the thousands. He’s getting a big break (75-100%) depending on the vendor but the numbers are staggering for not having insurance and seems overwhelming at first but the hospitals and the doctors are willing to work with him on payment.
He calls and he’s freaking out about how he is going to kill himself, declare bankruptcy or whatever to get out of this situation that he was in and I went ballistic. First off, suicide is not a matter to even joke about — hello, look at our family history. Secondly, he also knows if he files for bankruptcy, he is going to fuck ME over (We have our names on a platinum card I am paying off). I am tired of this defeatist attitude between him and my mother and Paul. Really. Absolutely fucking tired of it.
It goes back even father when I went to stay with my mom in early March. We sat at Tom Manis’ restaurant and ate greasy food when I gave her the absolute REASONS why she has treated me the way she has throughout my life. It’s so fucking textbook, it’s disgusting. I mean for fuck sake she has had me in therapy since I was NINE! Yes. Nine. Years. Old. What can a nine year old do that is so terrible to warrant therapy. ANd she sat there, picking at her food and she agreed. She agreed to what I had said. DIdn’t apologize or make excuses but just agreed I told Shelly the conversation almost verbatim when I got home and she asked me how i felt.
I didn’t’ feel the catharsis I thought I should have had. I didn’t. It was like when I called Dr. Asshole an “arrogant jerk” to his face, I didn’t feel all smug like “AHAH! I was right. Phew now i feel better”. I wanted to feel something and all I really felt was even more sad, more confused and more frustrated.
I’ve been in a lot of bad situations in my life. I’ve dropped out of high school, not once but TWICE. I’ve tried to commit suicide when I was 17. I’ve almost been gang raped. I have been date raped. I’ve been beaten up by boyfriends and had my life threatened. I’ve lived with no so nice people and I’ve moved cross country not once but TWICE (three times if you count the recent jaunt back to MI). And through it all, every single time, I had HOPE. I had hope that something better was going to come along and I had hope that somewhere out there things were going to be different. I always found. a. way. to. remove. myself. from. these. situations. They sometimes may not have been the best way or the easiest way, but I did it. Somehow I found a solution and it may have taken me awhile but i did it. I did not let the situation get the best of me even if i felt like it was.
I put myself back in high school where the teasing was awful. And when I found out i was still a credit short to graduate with the class below me, I got my GED. I went to college and then found work with computers and worked my way up the ladder starting with the entry level stuff and moved up to the positions at UUnet. When I got sick of Michigan, I went to San Francisco. When things went belly up in San Fran, I came to DC. And when I knew i was about to commit murder, I came back to MI. I kept trying to take classes at universities and now i’m a full time student competing with people a decade younger than myself. I’m not doing too shabby of it either. Not as wonderful as it could be but not too shabby.
But I always found a way.
Paul wanted a mother just as my brother wants a mother as my mother wants one as well. They all want to be
taken care of and would prefer to have me or someone do things for them than do things for themselves. My mother! SHe says so she is so proud of me! But it’s bragging rights because she can tell them that her daughter was making $50k a year and was under 30 (which is damn good)! She tells people about how I’m back in college and starting all over again and doing things that women of her generation were never really able to do. But she does not really /care/. In fact the only time she calls me is when she needs money and everything i tell her is punctuated with an ‘mhm’. Do you know how fucking irritating that is?
My brother is angry at me because he says he wants ‘help’ when what he really wants is for me to do the work for him, which I’m refusing. I go to his smelly apartment in which it smells like sweaty asscheeks to listen to him talk on the phone to one of his fifty whores while he tries to order me around, which i refuse to do what he asks. He told me and later Shelly the reason why is such an ass to me NOW is due to the fact that he was bullied a lot by all of the local kids and my friends when were growing up. I’m not kidding, he really believes this. I said, Jeff, you have no idea what it was like for me in high school. I was tortured just as much as you were. He said “what do you mean?” and I recounted the story how the swim team had trapped me in their cabin on my freshman ‘camping’ trip and attempted to pull a train and i had gotten out by nearly beating the shit out of some of the guys and trapping myself in the bathroom and friends pulled me through the window. I was so easy to pick on in high school, it was disgusting.
He said “I didn’t’ know that.” I said “Just don’t assume.” And he promised me he would lay off and he never really did.
He says “Who helped you move in Virginia. WHo helped you pack. Who did blah blah blah”. I say “What about your fifty thousand friends? Who took you to the emergency room and stayed with you and carted you around and PAID your meds and doctor visits” and he keeps going on about how i never help him? Hahahah. I hung up on him and he calls back “lisa i’m so sorry.” and then launches from another angel trying to convince me why i should do his work for him. Why i should call the insurance companies and why i should do XYZ. I refuse.
I am so done.
This is not a family spat. Oh no, it is much larger than that. I’ve already resigned to myself that there are very few people in this world who actually care about what happens to me, and none of them are blood related. I’ve worked past all of this years ago, and now this is just the final cut.
Lisa