Today is the last day to join, so if you want in on it, be sure to read over the rules and PM Shakespearicles!alphabet soup · 6:55pm Jun 5th, 2016
Another general "dear diary" type post. Page break to spare the feeds of those uninterested. Mostly ruminations on life, family, and the healing nature of writing. Also, some project updates here and there. And potentially video game talk. I like video games.
My mind is a soup. A hot, frothy soup of alphabet letters. They swirl in steaming liquid, forming strings of ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. Some are floating at the edge of the bowl of my mind. The others are clumped together, noodles touching, all connected though they could be understood independently. Life is like that. Just a big hot mess. Sometimes it tastes good. Sometimes it has too much sodium.
Sorry, that image was getting away from me.
ANYWAY.
Today started out simple. Last night, I had dinner with old friends. Some I hadn't seen in years. Husbando was there with me. SmallCaliber stayed home because this restaurant was not the sort of place he could hop out of his seat and run around in (as he is often doing.) It was nice. Really, really nice. A positive experience to heap next to the dubious ones, which sit alongside the ones that were most certainly horrible. I'm rusty in the social department. I've never been particularly skilled with interacting with people, but I'd hate to say I'm so awkward as to be unable to carry a conversation. I just... feel anxious about it. Interactions with others always felt perilous, even with friends. Even online. I find myself fretting and feeling apprehensive and sometimes out standoffish because that feels safer. I can't hurt others and they can't hurt me.
That was an option I always took advantage of with people outside of my family.
You see, my family came to this country to escape the madness of Manuel Noreiga, a military dictator of Panama and a megalomaniac who incited the wrath of the US government. They got out of the country just before the Americans invaded. Coming to this country, they couldn't speak English. They barely had money. Life was not easy for them. They tell me stories of how they slept on the patio floor of some kind Christians who gave them shelter. How my father worked at a chicken ranch, and a tire factory, and really, just whatever jobs he could get. My mother worked at a canning factory and a nursing home. Multiple jobs between both parents was a norm for several years. As an infant and toddler, I was raised by my brothers. Two teenage boys who were overwhelmed by the culture shock and who dealt with it in various ways. One via shady shenanigans to make himself feel safe. The other through hoarding and collecting stuff to make up for all the possessions he'd been forced to give up.
These were my caretakers. Children. During formative years I was literally raised by children. Traumatized children. Then later? I was figuratively raised by traumatized children. You see, my parents weren't much better. My whole family had varying degrees of PTSD, and none of them had really great coping skills to deal with it.
This was stuff I didn't stop and think about for years. It's only been in the recent months, with professional help, that I've been able to look back, scratch my head, and go, "Oh! So THAT'S where all this baggage comes from."
I take advantage of avoiding social interactions, even with people I like, because for years I felt obligated to keep interacting with my screwed up family. The worst to deal with is my narcissistic mother. For a long time, I never really thought of her that way. For years, it was just, "My mom is frustrating, but that's normal, right? Mom's are supposed to emotionally blackmail you. Why else would movies and books crack jokes about that kind of thing? It's common!"
Common =/= okay.
It's hard to make someone understand who has never had to deal with it, or at least witnessed a lot of someone else dealing with it. After all, everyone's parents drive them a little crazy. No one's perfectly emotionally balanced. Baggage comes in all colors, sizes, and shapes. A user on this site was kind enough to point me to this subreddit of people who were raised by narcissists. That's really the best thing I can offer up aside from my own testimony. Having to deal with someone so self-absorbed all your life--and not just that--looking to them to guide you and teach you is emotionally exhausting.
I was frequently forced as a child to take on the role being a parent. When shit hit the fan, I knew I was expected to pick up the pieces with my little hands. To take responsibility for things I had no business taking responsibility for. To this day it still happens. I find myself glaring at my mother's bedroom door, frustrated beyond words because I know she's expecting me to go in there and take care of her. "Yes mother, your life is hard. I'm sorry you're feeling down. Would you like some tea? What's on your mind? Let me know if you need anything." Which, in any other setting, wouldn't be horrible. A child caring for their parent is a good thing. But the role reversal is real. My mother can easily take care of herself. She just refuses to, because that would mean I stop paying attention to her. Making her the center of my world. A place that really should be reserved for my son and husband.
And it's irritating, because I put in a lot of work to keep her life running. I keep the house clean, I cook dinner, and I pick up the slack wherever I find it. Groceries? I got it. Rent due? I'll take it to the management office. Something broken? Lemme fix it.
I felt the appreciation for these efforts when I had to take half of the dinner I cooked days ago whilst still sick, and dump it in the garbage disposal. I really felt it when I slaved over fixing the washing machine, taking the entire thing apart to pull out the sock that was clogging the drainage cycle, only to be flatly asked whether I had the water temperature set to hot when testing to see if it worked again (because y'know, the heat bill is really what's important in that moment.) And I especially felt it when I organized the shed outside, climbing over mountains of boxes and junk to figure out what can be better organized or discarded entirely, and was told that the stuff laid out in the courtyard and the pathway was a nuisance.
The annoying thing is that I still find myself actively resisting the urge to swoop in and be "mom" to my mom. She's a grown-ass woman. It's not my fault if she isolates herself. It's not my fault if she fails to take care of herself in the ways that she is fully capable of. It's not my fault that I have no interest in even trying to be nice anymore because it's constantly thrown back in my face. See where a lot of my social anxiety comes from? I've learned that trying to care for others, and to interact with others, and simply being around others is a fucking emotional mindfield. I know now that's how my brain works. Seeing where this comes from helps me to say, "All right. That's bullshit. Time to break the cycle. It doesn't have to be this way." But reprogramming your mind after years of operating in a certain way takes time. My favorite mantra at the moment is: It's not my job to parent my parent. It stops me from taking my mom's bait. I try to refocus on kiddo. Y'know, my actual child. I try to refocus on myself. I'm allowed to be happy. That's the other thing I tell myself.
I've found that freeing my mind and heart up in this way has led to a small boost in confidence. My relationship with my husband has improved. (We have ups and downs like any couple. We're definitely 'up' at the moment.) Even my relationship with my son, though I always want to do better, be better for him, I feel has progressed positively. He used to be attached to my mother because of the force of her personality. As a narcissist, she naturally felt the need to be my son's "favorite." She used to tell me I was being ridiculous when my son used to call her "mama," saying backhanded things in front of her and others like, "Oh there she goes again. She's being silly."
Now I don't feel the need for apologizing for myself, my husband, and my son behaving as, y'know, a family. My mother acts like she's been exiled, but really, she's done it to herself. My husband did everything he could to be on good terms with her. She encouraged all those traits in my son that now drive her insane for some reason. And me? I practically bent over backwards trying to make her comfortable. To make her feel included. To make her feel welcome.
The bottom line is: if you keep rejecting people, chances are, they're going to stop reaching out to you.
This is stuff that I've worked out in my stories. I've mentioned before that What They Expect to Give was my way of sorting out the challenge of having a narcissistic parent. Of separating what love is and isn't. But looking back, I've realized that my writing has revealed far more than I ever could have meant to. Writing can be therapeutic. It's true that a writer's work may not always (if ever) be a literal translation of their lives, but look closely and I'm sure a person's work will reveal something about themselves. Either how they think, how they feel, or what they've gone through.
I took a look at my writing recently and realized that childish, narcissistic parents has been a recurrent presence in my work. I was thinking that my FlutterDash was my only direct artistic representation of this ongoing struggle in my life, but nope! It's always been there. In almost every story I've written. It's kind of humbling. Like there's something bigger than me at work, and it's just holding this big mosaic of my creative expression up to my face and going: "It's always been there. This pain. Even before you could put it into words. Even then, you were trying to deal with it."
When I do blogs like these, I feel self-conscious. I fret about bothering others. But then I remember that this is my blog, and I can put in those handy-dandy page breaks for those uninterested. I think to myself: but I'm airing my dirty laundry! And I think: well, you hold enough back that there's still plenty kept in the ol' skeletal closet...and honestly, aside from your therapist, who can you talk to? Your 2-year-old son? Your husband, who works all the time? Your family, who ARE the problem? Your friends, who you hardly speak to anymore, save for that once-a-year get together? The various sympathetic ears online whom you have already perhaps exhausted with your self-absorbed forays into whatever?
SO...I blog. I blog and I feel better, and that's almost with the complete and total absence of views or comments. I never did intend for this space to become my confessional diary. I wanted it to feel interesting and sorta professional. But let's be honest... Professional? On FimFiction? I mean, not to hate on the people who manage successful Patreons through this site, but geez, come on guys, let's not kid ourselves. It's a fan site about pastel ponies.
With this stuff on my mind, I barely have room for the election on Tuesday. California primaries are rising up like a tidal wave, shadowing over my life. My phone has been blowing up from campaign volunteers asking me to support their candidates. The mailbox, both physically and digitally, has been bloated with political mail. The news can't seem to stop talking about the politics.
Meanwhile my ballot continues to gather dust.
I mean, it's a little hard to concentrate on that when I'm just trying to get through my days without going nuts. A few times, in various correspondences with other FimFic users, I'd reveal the stuff I do at home. The responses have ranged from envy to admiration to even an uneasy kind of bemusement. I just sort of laugh and shake my head. You see, if I didn't do all of these domestic chores, and writing, and parent stuff, I'd go nuts. I'd stare at the wall, drooling on yet another messily drawn coloring book page. It's really the only thing keeping me from feeling bitter all the time about the lack of help I get at home. From the knowledge that, once I return to work after kiddo goes to pre-school, I'll still likely be the one doing all of this stuff. When I think about all of these things, my affection for characters like Applejack make more sense. It's another reason I tend to write "motherly" characters too, I guess. Those childish parents in my stories need someone to keep the world from falling apart, after all.
I can hear puttering outside. Slippers as my mother goes back and forth in the house. Likely she's brooding over the fact that I haven't tried to baby her yet. I kind of hope she leaves on an errand. If not, I'll take SmallCaliber and leave. I can cook up a reason. I don't need permission to leave my fucking house.
Which sort of brings me to a small (if jarring) writing update: No. The next chapter for What They Expect to Give is not done. The start of the month is challenging due to bills and screwed up emotions. Coming off of my cold didn't help. It'd be nice to bang something out last minute. If I can do it and feel relatively good about the chapter, you'll see an update late today. If not, I'm afraid it'll have to be next week. This week, I mostly devoted time toward getting on the same page with Editor Man about where the story was going. Original plot outline is irrelevant now. Changed enough things that it required a pow-wow about what the story was trying to achieve in the long run. He got back to me. We're good. That gives me more certainty about the story as a whole, but it came a bit late, partially because he was also very busy this week too. BUT! Progress and things have been made.
Nothing for Her Collar, Her Love still. Sorry about that.
Still want to do reviews for my First Impression series. I have two more Star Wars crossovers I wanted to do. They aren't technically next in my queue, but I thought it'd be cool to group those together anyway (even if May has come and gone.)
But with my mind being so all over the place, I really would hate to try and critique someone's work and fail to give their writing the attention it deserves. I'm kind of so all over the place that stories and video games have been affecting me more than usual. Like last night, when I was playing Fallout 4, there was this little side quest (that didn't even warrant a misc. classification) around Fallon's Department store. When you go in that area, you can catch a distress signal of this woman trapped in a jewelry safe. You know she's dead. The signal was from when the bombs first dropped. But I fought to find her anyway. I mean. Yeah. You know it's going to lead to good loot, but I was really doing it for HER. I just had trouble finding the jewelry department.
I spent an hour combing the building, listening to her desperate message over and over. Finally, I found her, and of course, she was dead. Just a skeleton in front of a HAM radio. I felt like shit while I looted the safe, which was rife with good stuff, but I had no joy in getting it all. The woman was in there for four days with no food and water. She knew something bad had happened outside. She was calling out desperately for help... And it didn't come until 200 years later. I suppose I was kind of hoping she'd be a ghoul, like Billy, the kid you can find in the fridge. But no. Game logic permits this woman to sit alone and unaided for so long. Not even raiders have come to claim the treasures of her grave. It's implausible (surely SOMEONE would have gotten there before my character) but the way it played out for me just made me really depressed. I had to sit quietly for a while and think about something happier than such a lonely death. I know Fallout to be dark in nature, but even its grim moments fail to affect me like that. Usually I just chortle at the black humor amidst it all and keep shooting super mutants.
And at the risk of being really melodramatic, I kind of feel sometimes like my blog posts are like unheeded SOS signals from a safe in the domestic department. But the broadcasts still feel good. It still makes me feel better to think that I'm being heard, if only by machines.
I'll end this long blog with this Yeah Yeah Yeahs song that always manages to lift my spirits when I'm feeling low, or uncertain, or just generally unenthusiastic about anything.
Wow. That was quite a read. I don't often have the time or the occasion or the motivation to read self reflections, but it's this kind of writing that always speaks to me. It doesn't put on pretenses; it isn't showy; it's simply reflection.
It's also this kind of thing that speaks to me, yet I have no proper words to offer in response. I'm glad sharing these insights is cathartic for you. You likely already recognize that these things are worth writing, even if they only seem worthwhile for yourself.
I truly can't say much on this. Since I'm not a person of much experience, I find it all very insightful and interesting but lack the questions people would consider indicative of having paid attention. You're a trooper. I can say that without reservation.
I guess I find it refreshing to read about others' struggles so that I may put own in perspective. You're very good at articulating your feelings, which is probably why I stuck around to read.
4000524
Thank you. And it's fine for people to just read. Sometimes, I do that too if I feel I can't say anything of worth.
I also like to think that if someone going through a similar situation reads it and feels less alone, then that is good. I used to lurk blog posts like these and feel grateful for them, even if I didn't comment.
4000540
A toast to the lurkers, then!
There were some Fallouty things I just could not find funny even in the black humor sense. They'd done too well a job. Some of the houses and stuff with an actual toybox with actual toys inside, things like that.
I'd say ouch, but I'd half be afraid of diminishing what you've won out of that. We haven't been friends long, but you're a hell of a person, Nine, so here's to you and here's to the triumphs, may their shadows deepen and darken over the bumps (and mountains) in the road.
4000621
there certainly were moments that felt too real, in some ways. stuff like what you mentioned, I usually hustled past as quickly as possible.
4000831
thanks. sorry I haven't been able to do some of the things I said I'd do for you yet. it's hard to assemble coherent thoughts.
4001178 Pbbbbt. Life first. :P If I realized just how fucked up things were, I wouldn't ask. Put my stuff on back of the back burner, behind the door marked "beware of the leopard." Be well.