Family Issues – A Most Unreliable Narrator

Ladies and Gentlemen: My Brother

Dear Internet,
Because when it rains, it pours. Obviously.
My brother and I have had a tumultuous relationship stretching back to our teen years, but we’ve more or less made it work within the last few years with us living in the same city. When TheSoonToBeExHusband and I split, I started tapping those veins of people I’ve helped in the past financially to get some monetary relief as I was not bringing in a reliable income due to my writing sabbatical.
By this I mean, my brother.
I have a lot of open credit but after finally getting my credit in a really good place within the last few years AND not having currently having reliable income to pay it off every month, I was loathed to depend on credit to get me through the next six or so months.
So I asked him for a loan of $3K with a promise to return it back doubled when my divorce settled.
This was in late August.
He agreed to “whatever he could afford” and we were to meet up that weekend. Plans changed and near weekly, I’ve sent him a variation of the following text: “I’m leaving in X weeks. Please come by and pick up your generator and if you can, the money you can lend.”
For weeks he either ignored the text OR responded I needed to make shit right with our mother. I wish her the best of luck and wish her a long and happy life, but I have no intention of making up with her. This is why I grabbed a screenshot with the October 3 date in addition to today’s exchange, as proof of his lack of response.
In his late teens and early ’20s, he “borrowed” thousands from me to pay off his then credit card and medical debt (close to $15K). Later, I also loaned him money to help with the deposit of his house. In 2005/06 when he needed money AGAIN because I was so weary of lending to him without making a dent in the past debt, I have a letter signed by him that was witnessed by a third-party with his intent to pay all of it back with interest.
After a few half-hearted payments he stopped, despite years of promises he would pay it all back. I didn’t even want all of it back or even half, just SOMETHING to show good faith.
Shortly after that, he started the training on becoming an electrician.
He now makes nearly $100K a year. He has a near or slightly over 800 credit score (he brags about it, how I know these things).
He has recently purchased a 2014 or 15 truck, cost was about $55K. Last year he bought and paid off (or nearly paid off) a $10K boat.
He also spends thousands on the restoration of cars and other big ticket hobbies.
So I would have thought that me asking for $3K (or anything really), given my own earning power (I made $62K a year while at my old MPOW. I’m now applying for jobs in my new area like mad that are all in the same range) and my credit history is top notch and how much I’ve loaned HIM over the course of his life AND WITH INTENT TO PAY BACK DOUBLE — would have been some kind of, “Hey. Lisa isn’t going to fuck me out of this.”
I was apparently wrong. But I’m not surprised.
Below is the text conversation from today. His last pot shot to me (not in the below exchange) was, “so get on twitter and report to the masses how bad a person I am.”
You asked and I delivered, dear brother. Don’t say I don’t keep my promises.
(Click for the full image. It reads left to right, top to bottom.)

x0x0,
Lisa
P.S. After this exchange, I went through and unfriended his dormant FB account (he activates and deactivates depending if he’s looking to hook up with someone or not), people I’m related to by blood, and any of his and our mutual friends. Some of them were feeding him information because he knew things that were only published on FB when his account was dormant at the time.

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2013

Precious or costly things

Dear Internet,
I often feel like a spectator to my own train wreck of a life.
After years in the making, my mother and I broke up on Sunday. I spent much of the afternoon and night writing about it, only to find that I could not wrap my brain, and apparently my fingers, around the whole episode. Thousands of words were written and thousands were tossed aside.¹ Instead of the world lifting from my shoulders, I felt the guilt that often hides in the shadows and was now dancing around my peripheral heart with glee. My heart itself felt like it was tightening so hard that I could not breathe.
The cumulation of our break-up, for me, was the realization she may have lied to me about something very big. After getting over the initial shock of, “Why in thee fuck have I not thought of this sooner?”, I felt my entire world crumble and I was instantly emotionally drained
Her potential lie has two consequences:

If what she told me was indeed a lie, then she not only poisoned me with her hatred against my father, but she ruined my relationship with him; whom I’ll never get a chance to make-up with since he’s been dead 12 years.
If what she told me was not a lie, then why did she never protect me, ever, from that danger?

What started down this road of holy fuckery was putting the connections together after her birthday lunch earlier in the day. She and I were buffered by TheHusband and my brother, ensuring that we barely spoke a word throughout the entire strained meal. After, I spent the better part of the afternoon obsessing over how thin our links had become to the other in the last year; with TheHusband wondering loudly, and quite rightly, why I had not broken the connection long ago. I steadfastly believed, until the very second I did not, I could not be that girl. I could not, no matter how horrid our relationship was, give up on her as a daughter. I did not want to be filled with regret after she was dead for missed chances and opportunities for maternal connection. I was barely on speaking terms with my father when he died and it has haunted me for over a decade on everything I may have potentially lost with him and I did not want to go through with that with her.
I’ve never known a time when she said anything even remotely kind about him. As I got older, I started piercing together some of the mistruths she had told in relation to him and of course to me, and rationalized it was all due to, at various times of her life, depression, being bi-polar, or general bitchiness about her divorce from him. But whatever reason she may have had for what she said, in this particular instance, could only come from pure evil and I could not rationale away what she did any other way.
When that connection was made, that I knew she had lied to me in the past and that this one event that shaped much of my teenage years and beyond could also potentially be a lie, the bond between us was finally broken.
Just so we’re clear, there was a long period of time in my ’20s when she and I did not speak. However, since the death of my father in 2000, I have tried desperately in vein to work things out with her. And in the years since then, anytime I’ve tried to tell her or even just to discuss my thoughts and feelings about our relationship (good or bad), it usually boils down to she either telling me if she hurt my feelings, she didn’t mean it and she’s sorry or that I’m insanely jealous of my brother (because it is always about him) or she claims she never said whatever it is I’m supposing telling her she said. There is no real discussion, catharsis, emotional break throughs or fuck, even understanding.
In the very near future, I will be removing myself from her legal documents and transferring that over to my brother. I will be canceling and/or removing her from any accounts or services she may use through me.
While I know I may be revisiting this again and again in the future to work out feelings, she no longer exists in my world.
TTFN,
Lisa

1. The baby was not quite thrown out with the bathwater just yet. I have been using, daily, Day One for all of my personal journaling needs. Since I have it on all my devices and machines, it syncs seamlessly with iTunes and Dropbox. The tossed aside content was added as Sunday’s journal entry and will probably remain there until I feel braver discussing it publicly.

Conversations About Mother (part i)

My brother and I are not on cordial enough speaking terms to the effect that we do not meet up, speak/text or are even Facebook BFFs. Our only connection is in regards to our mother, and even then contact is either brief moments filled with monosyllabic conversations or heated arguments that result in a lot of shameless threats thrown from both sides.
TheHusband, who finds my brother to be a gigantic asshole and refuses to allow him to step foot into our home until my brother apologizes for several unsavory things he’s said to me, did agree that any kind of “family” gathering should be done in a neutral location to keep the drama to low murmur. This is done to appease mother who continually harps and makes noises on “Why can’t you all just be civil to one another?” whenever my brother and I begin to bicker. Mother, however, seemingly and innocently forgets that much of my brother’s and I intolerance of each other has been started by her in some way and additionally while complaining about our sibling behavior, chooses to ignore the fact that she’s not spoken to half of her own brethren (she is the eldest of seven) in nearly five years for various infractions only known to her (and of which she can never explain when asked). Regardless of historical nods, my frustration levels skyrocket whenever a tentative olive branch is swung out to greet him, my brother will consistently denounce any kind of gathering, neutral or otherwise and effectively cock blocks any kind of civility I attempt to share when planning “family time,” regardless of how desperate my mother is to have it.
Therefore to save my sanity and have less dealings with my brother, family celebrations are now split in half for mother, who spends half her time with me and the remaining with my brother.
It is no surprise for this past Mother’s Day, I told mother that she should make plans with my brother first and then we would do our plans around those plans with my brother were made concrete. A day or two later, she tells me that she and my brother were having a mid-day meal at the retirement villa and that after, she’d like to come to our place to hang out while TheHusband and I gardened, followed by meal and game playing (Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit). Because it was her day, I also told her to pick the meal which to her meant giving me the breakdown of a four course (but very simple) meal, which TheHusband and I shopped and prepped for the day before. As mother no longer drives due to neuropathy in her feet caused by diabetes, additional timing is taken into consideration when scheduling events with her. I made it very clear to her that due to my work schedule the following day, it would need to be an early night and that since dinner would take about 1.5 to 2 hours from prep time to table, we would like to eat in the later afternoon with her tucked up back home at a fairly reasonable hour. She agreed.
With surface history of the dealings with my brother mentioned, I was not surprised upon receiving a call from my mother an hour before I was to pick her telling me that my brother could not make it to the mid-day meal (of course) and that instead, he was picking her up in the mid-afternoon to go to a party that was being held in his honor (his birthday was last week). With no thought to our feelings, plans, or prep for the meal she informs me that she’s going to this party. I asked her to call me if she was going to be arriving later then 5pm so we could plan accordingly. She in fact didn’t call until 6pm and was terribly surprised to find out that no, I was not picking her up and no, we were not having dinner as planned and in short, no, we’re not celebrating Mother’s Day with her. I made mention to dropping off some items of hers at her house the following day and hung up.
The following day, I kept to my promise and dropped some goods off at her apartment that I had ordered for mother from Amazon. Mother looked emotionally beaten and was clearly visibly upset. While I sat ramrod straight in a chair, pissed at how rude she behaved the day before, she proceeds to tell me with fat tears running down her cheeks that my brother spent the most of their time together the day before berating her for her behavior. Why was she not fast enough with her cane? Why is she so slow? Why is she not doing a million things at once like she used to do? My brother then apparently bragged that the people who were throwing him the party considered him as a second son (their own son died in a car accident in October 2010 and he and my brother were quite close) and that he wanted to be adopted by them. My brother is 32. On Mother’s Day, my brother used his time with her to talk about her failings, her missed actions and how horrible she was as a mother and did absolutely nothing else.
I struggled with two things that day: One how best to approach mother diplomatically in regards to her own fairly atrocious behavior and secondly, to not get caught up in the mother/brother drama that has pervaded me for nearly my entire life. I succeeded in the first but failed in the second.
This is a gloss over the day to day workings of my immediate family, which accounts for the partial disjointedness of the writing when attempting to explain in the shortest amount of time possible a second in a dysfunction that has been ongoing for decades. Much like that day when I sat ramrod straight in the chair, upset and angry for her behavior towards me, I could feel the undertow pull of her laying down the guilt no matter how much I fought against it. The unspoken listing of her wants and needs, rejecting the possibility that she’s ever done anything wrong is strong. How dare I criticize her when clearly my brother offended her the most with his behavior? Obviously, she should not want to live if we both think she’s the most horrible mother in the world!
I realised then I had two options: Instead of writing short stories where the mother is always violently killed, I would end up murdering my own OR I could start writing publicly about my family to get the tale out into the open. At the very least, it will keep me out of prison. At the very most, it will serve to help articulate years of feeling inadequacy for being born and save me thousands in future therapists bills.

half a world away

I’m in love with one of my classes, Advanced Composition, because the professor is NOT a hard ass. This is not to say the professor is not difficult, she is, but she also gives us a lot of freedom for the subjects we write on and they can be personal, which rocks. There is something about dry academia that turns me off and since she’s pretty liberal about what topics we can write on, it’s great for me in terms of writing growth.
An assignment given to us recently was in response to an essay we read by Adrienne Rich called “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” and our response to that in terms of how we have grown much in the same way that Rich has.
For my topic, I picked my mothers attempted suicide, which you know is always a big hit at parties. The essay will be a discourse on societal views and the ‘hush hush’ topic when I mention — which is always matter-of-factly and people cringe! Cringe I tell you because it’s a ‘secret’, don’t air your dirty laundry in public, blah blah blah.
Writing about it tonight is a catharsis, because it seems appropriate after being on the phone with one of my aunts for nearly two hours and I had this strong urge to call my mother and tell her I love her. When I got her on the phone, she was in a hurry to get me off because she was going to go play poker with her cronies.
My how the world has changed in a little over two years.

lisa of nazareth

I like the idea of Satan being gay, sensitive, and living with his lover Chris on the west side of hell. It makes me giggle and it seems plausible for some reason.
It’s Easter Sunday and I did learn one thing (other than my aunt Jackie is a cheapskate, she asked for (and received) a doggie bag at a buffet!):
That the restlessness that I feel will not be resolved until I have resolved the conflict of spirituality within me.
I realised this,of course, while watching “Jesus of Nazareth” that was showing all over tv today. But it made sense, more sense than anything else I’ve come up with recently.
When I drove from SF -> Dc, i kept seeing these blasted signs that said “I never reconsider your existence. – God.”

little orphan lisa

[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

family stories

My brother has been after me for a few months now to write the family tale.
Tonight, my mom suggested it as well after I sat there fondling the new universal remote I had purchased for her and grinding my teeth in anger. And i was daydreaming about sending a copy, hardcover of course, of the book, fictionalized of course, with a personal note to the cocksuckers:
Fuck. You.
x0x0x

didn’t happen

My aunt waylaid me on the phone, offered to join us for lunch. Proceeded to nearly scream at me (at lunch) about how i had ZERO idea on what was going on in the past (over 30 years ago) but yet she was ‘letting’ go of the past and didn’t want to deal with the family as it were in the current state.
yah. hypocrite is one word that screams at me.
i’ve been grinding my teeth i’ve been so pissed. they can blow me. the whole fucking lot of them.
i passed my number/info to my cousin Kevin’s fiance Jackie who met up with us with my aunt. Whether or not they call is all up to them.
Off to play animal crossing.

Hey Cuz

I’m doing 90MPH on I-69 (yes a legit highway) when I punch in my aunt Debbie’s phone number (digging it out from my pda no less. I am an AMAZING driver).
me: Is Debbie there please?
male voice: No, she’s out. Can I take a message?
me: Yes, (I smile), this is her niece Lisa.
male voice: oooo WOW HI!
I haven’t spoken to my cousins in six years, since my grandfather died. I’m the third oldest cousin and my two oldest are ones that I don’t really care about (i got torutred by them a lot when I was younger) and but the ones below me, they are my babies. My cousin Kevin, Kris and Jon (26, 21, 18). That above was my cousin Jon. I haven’t seen him since he was 12 and he’s now 18 and going to college. His girlfriend is a freshman at Aquinas (small fucking world — my other cousin Paul goes to GVSU, another GR local uni) and he’s been to campus a tonne of times — which is funny because we so missed each other. Kevin was my best friend growing up and we used to go tromping through the trees and what not, playing video games etc and went drinking together in Sarnia when my grandfather died. Now we are all grown up.
My family is, to be blunt, immature, childish, and full of idiots. There are seven children, my mother being the eldest of the lot, and there is nine grand kids and two great-grand kids. The big parties of the easter/christmas getting together? Gone. The 40 people hanging out playing euchre and laughing around after dinner table? Gone. All the family hoo-haws and doo-dads, from cards and presents to informal gatherings in the summer bbqing and playing horseshoes? Oh, all fucking gone.
I don’t know when the world went to hell, probably when I was 13 or so, though to be far the big family shindigs lasted a few more years but once my mom moved us from Port Huron to Grand Rapids, and she started getting depressed all i know is that the family fell apart.
Jon said he had not known the deal with all the sisters but i told him i was tired of how his own mom didn’t tell him a: i was coming into town, b: that we hadn’t spoken and c: that all the sisters are being stupid bitches with their fueding. Grow the fuck up, life is too fucking short for this insane arguing.
Tomorrow I’m going out with my cousins that I haven’t seen in six years.
I’ll let you know, of course, how it goes.

about a girl

i was crying this morning while i was making coffee.
Considering that i had scratched and punched Paul on Saturday, that is somewhat of an improvement.
let me backtrack:
For the last few weeks, mentally, something had not been going right inside my head. I started coming home from work, eating dinner and almost promptly going to bed. Stuff like school, writing, NaNoWriMo, my journal, etc all went out the window. I felt like I was being dragged down into this cesspit of despair but nothing externally had changed. Paul and i were still, well Paul and I, my mother still hadn’t gotten her SSI yet and I was still supporting her and everything else gosh darn remained the same.
But then stupid little incidents started setting me off. Customers who were dumber than a box of rocks (nothing new, however, I seemed to be taking a new path on how to deal with them which wasn’t good), people on mailing lists I would blow up on and use this foul language that bothered even me. The woman who ran me off the side of the road on Saturday, every little slight against me sent me into this fury that pissed me off so much I was shaking physically. I was/am spinning out of control and I do not know how to stop it.
On Saturday, I was sitting at my computer all nonchalant like when Paul asked me to fix the printer. He was prepping the list for us to go shopping for Thanksgiving dinner and I just blew up at him. My movement was so fluid, that I had no time to think or to react. I got up, and started punching and scratching Paul. I threatened to stab him with something. All the while he is looking at me like “What the fuck are you doing?” I started screaming at him about why couldn’t he fix the printer himself and i tried to force open said printer when he started yelling at me I was doing it all wrong. Once I got the printer opened, I took the color cartridge out of its place and shook it all over him, leaving drops of blue and red ink on his white T-shirt. I just did not give a flying fuck. At some point, I went and laid down, to help calm down, and that did not seem to help either. All I kept thinking about was sliding a knife down my arm vertically and just fucking ending it all. Fuck you, fuck the world, fuck my mother and my family, fuck work and most especially fuck Paul.
But I didn’t grab a knife, I just laid down and slept for a few hours hoping that the monsters would go away.
They of course, did not.
Sunday morning, I woke up after a few hours of sleep and went to the massage therapist. All the work my chiropractor had done on me for the last year had gone to hell in a handbasket as all the pain i started suffering came rushing back within the last month or so. I can’t sleep, I’m angsty and i feel like stabbing someone. really. Charisma (yes, really, that is her name) started working on me and i felt myself tense up and eventually relax. By the time I had left her an hour later, my body was like rubber. However, later on that day, I was back to being pent up, angsty, angry Lisa. Nothing was working. Not massage, not going to the chiropractor, not drugs, not relaxing, nothing. zip. nada.
I’ve never thought of myself as a cutter and have prided myself on being ‘too smart’ to follow through with cutting myself or attempting suicide, but, I’m telling you, the idea felt warm and safe in my head Saturday and this morning, the fact that all this frustration and anger came welling to the top, I’m this close to wanting to hurt myself. I’m literally hanging on by a thread.
in over a year of being with my therapist, not once can i honestly say that i wanted to hurt myself until recently. Oh, i had bouts when on new drugs that the idea seemed to be golden, but, i rationally knew it was the drugs not how i felt consciously. My family, genetically, seems to dispel drugs like there is no tomorrow. My mother had been on various anti-whatevers for the last year and she would get to the point where she would be okay, she would be almost maniac but not quiet and then BOOM, she would fall. With me, it is almost the same. Prozac, paxil, Effexor, zolotf, now Serzone all seem to have the same effects one me — fine for awhile, then the drug does not work anymore. I’m tired of feeling out of control and like my life is spinning 180 degrees. I fought so fucking hard to not be where I was five years ago only to find that it seems worthless. I feel worthless and I feel like my life is not worth it.
My eyes are welling up with tears again, like they have been for the last few weeks or so. Everything, everything is setting me off. I feel so fucking helpless, because i AM seeing a therapist, i AM taking anti-whatever drugs, i AM going to a chiropractor, i AM seeing a massage therapist. NOTHING IS WORKING. I’m so fucking pissed because I’m doing all the ‘right’ things, and yet i feel I’m back where i started over a year ago. That fuels my anger even more and i want to hurt myself or someone around me.
I just got done making breakfast as I decided it was in the best interest that I not go in today. I’m lucky, in that, half my department is fucking loony toons and that they know my history that I can call in ‘sick’ and tell them really why i was ‘sick’.
I sat there chopping up onions and green peppers thinking I can make this omelette (which, I of course burn) and the thought of slicing my skin is still there. I watch the omelette burn and I have this special omelette pan in which when I flipped it over, a plastic part of the pan starts burning stinking up my kitchen. I toss the whole mess into a regular frying pan and end up making scrambled eggs with potatoes, onions, and green peppers.
My life could be described just like that: it’s a mess so i transfer it over to something else. I’m tired, oh so tired of fighting to stay alive. I keep myself in check all these years, busting my ass to do the right things, and to make up for all the things i feel I’ve done to slight people and myself and I can not catch up. I just can’t do it anymore.
For a long time, I wanted to be crazy, like really crazy , mental hospital crazy, but my mom’s experience this summer showed that what i saw in movies and what was real were wildly different things. I still want to be crazy, I feel worthless enough because I cannot accomplish anything feasible. Everything feels like this huge burden that I cannot even begin to touch.
You’re a child, and you are told from day one that you are special and worthwhile and bright and gifted. You are told you can do anything you want, that the world is your oyster and you cannot fail at anything.
Then the chemistry changes and at the age of nine you are seeing a therapist because “you’ve been a bad girl,” and your mother keeps yelling at you how everything is your fault, and you are grounded not for days or weeks but for months and years. You run and escape into books and feel paranoid. You feel like everyone is out to get you and you can’t understand why at the age of 9,10,11 why you don’t have friends like other people have friends. You’ve spent so much of your young life being grounded that you miss out on birthday parties and events with other kids. You don’t have friends. The people who say there are your friends only use you because you are stupid enough or naive enough to think they like you. But they don’t, not really. Kids are cruel creatures.
So you grow up, your family moves, and you start a new school where no one knows you. You think that you can be anything you want to be, but your attempts at making friends is feeble and you spend most of your lunch periods reading or writing, always alone. Your 13. Your body changes and you suddenly develop breasts and lose some of the baby fat, and suddenly guys want to date you. You still feel like this insecure be-speckled person you were when you were nine and 10. Fat, worthless, pointless. You don’t know what changed but now people want to be your friend, but they are they wrong type of friends. They are the ‘bad kids’, but you don’t care because someone finally pays attention to you and you feel happy because now you have ‘friends’, and that’s all you wanted. Everything becomes this big blur as you enter high school and everyone leaves you alone because they either don’t know you or assume you are a transferring senior when really you’re just a 5’10 150lb freshman. You still think you were so fat. Then you go on the special school trip where your class of AP students travel to Kentucky. You get lured into and locked into a cabin with the swim team where they get this bright idea to gang rape you. You fight and claw and run screaming into the bathroom and a friend saves you. But no one is told. Not the parents, not the guardians, no one. You sit through the going away party glaring at the boys who had tried to harm you and they act nothing is going on. Back to school, everything changes and suddenly rumors are spreading and the same boys who grabbed you are leering at you and making comments. Kids are so cruel, they didn’t mean it.
You start getting older, 14, 15 and things remain the same. You now feel like two people instead of one. One who doesn’t give a fuck and the one who does. She (me/i/her) still hangs out with the ‘bad kids’ and the other half goes and starts studying for the LSAT. The two worlds cannot reconcile themselves and the fighting at home becomes worse and your mother keeps taking you to separate therapists where you confess just what an awful child you are. You start a new habit of breaking things. You get angry and start breaking anything made of china or glass. Your friends get used to it and you laugh it off and your mother gets angry for breaking all the dish ware in the house. You had as a child taken a point of where you used to sew your fingers together with needle and thread, through the upper layers of your skin. You would sew and sew and then rip it out gingerly and start over again. You used to pull huge clumps of hair out. At 16,17 and 18, nothing has changed. You lose your virginity to someone you don’t love only to have him dump you four days later for a whore. You sleep with whoever and you don’t care, thinking your this badass who can deal with it and you know they are jerks and won’t call you again. You spend a lot of time hiding under your desk when on the phone, as if the wrath of your family is just that bad, but your family consists of a younger brother and a mother and how can it be so bad?
Anyone who was seriously into you, and I mean seriously into you, leaves because they can’t deal with the mania and the depression that follows. Sometimes you forget to eat and when you do eat, you gain weight. Except now you are cycling, between the mania and the depression. You move again and again with your mother and move to Toronto when your 18, only to find that the lessons you had learned as a child are still with you. You come back having only made a few friends, didn’t leave the house and nothing changed for you. It was still the same.
Then it cycles faster.
And as you get older, you notice that the so-called ‘adults’ you are supposed to be, still have the same tenacity as the children you knew. No one is interested in being ‘real’ or friends with you, they would rather lie, cheat and steal. Instead of hair pulling or sewing, you cry and don’t leave your room for days. Friends call and want to go out, and you have panic attacks thinking about leaving the house. Then a few days later everything is ‘fine’ and you pretend nothing happens.
Your world has become disjointed and you tell yourself you’ll pull out of this bullshit and move on. But you can’t reconcile the differences between reality and fantasy. Reality is much too fucking painful to deal with. Either that or your sense of reality is too fucking painful. You don’t see happiness or warmth in anything, it’s all gray and dark and dismal.
Memories keep shooting up to the forefront and you still cry. You cry when your mother left you with cast up to your thigh on the Christmas you were 22 and your 16 year old brother was with you to help you use the port-a-potty because you could not walk the 50′ to the bathroom. Your brother helps you up the stairs and you really bathe for the first time in a week and your next door neighbors come over on Christmas day and help you hobble over to their house for dinner. THEN the police show up at your door because your father is worried you were being mistreated (22, no phone in the house, no food and your mother and her husband are gone for the holidays). The following Christmas your mother gives you a bottle of washer fluid for your car, and you sit there crying. Your brother and you start a tradition where you go to blockbuster and grab burger king for dinner. You hate Christmas and all the fake cheer that is associated with it.
Now you are 29. Next year you’ll be 30. All through the years you’ve kept a pretty good handle on the monsters. You’ve kept them at bay and worked to not let them interfere with your life on day to day basis, but you know that is a lie of sorts. If you really kept them at bay, you would not be suffering this pseudo-breakdown you are today. You feel embarrassed and guilty for bringing it up, and the non-stop headaches you have lately does not dissipate with bringing all this information forward.
Part of you, a good chunk of you, has given up. It’s easier to automate your life and work on that than to work on what’s really bothering you, but even you don’t know what’s bothering you anymore. Everything seems so trivial and of a lesser extent than when you make it real. But if there were true, there would be no fucking reason why you would be fucking crying at Harry Potter or any other movie that shows some sort of goodness to the heart.
The other part of you, albeit seemingly feeling small and unimportant is hanging on for dear life. Sheer will is keeping you together as your body is trained to handle certain things, but, sheer will is losing out fairly quickly. Rationally you know that you won’t necessarily do anything to harm yourself, but that is fast running low against the monster that wants to hurt you.
The irony of the saying “god only gives you what you can handle” which has been drilled in your head since your Catholic school days is fast losing its hilarity.
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I’ve got a 3:30pm appointment today with my shrink.
x0x0x
lisa