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Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
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1:44 pm
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I think this is from a few months later than this letter; like, early 2000.
This isn't addressed to anyone in particular. It looks like it was crumpled up thoroughly and then straightened back out. I think it may have been written in response to an accusation from Aeryn that I never tell them how I feel and so how are they supposed to know and then I get mad at them!, or something.
how i feel:
like I'm being pushed to the crazy edge place. like I don't have what I need to take care of myself or those I love. (I didn't!) like what I need (say, money) is being dragged away from me and no matter how far I run there's always a little bit more and a lot less fuel to run it on. (well yeah; i was spending without keeping track of my money and i had no sense of how to deal with any of it. And I had a regular paycheck!) like everything is sharp big glass jagged edges and I can't grab on to anything. like there's very little security and most of my time + energy is spent doing and giving and helping other people. (yes, it's called codependency! and the glass part is called being triggered!) depressed and shaky and numb. (told you it was called being triggered.) and I'm working till 6 am (what?!?) and not sleeping well/enough and so there's no quiet time to be alone with myself inside reading or hanging with my friends. Even though there is time, it's not enough. I spend it all preparing for the next burst of shit.
And I feel angry (felt angry) because I couldn't talk to you about problems I wanted to talk to you about and then you were mad at me for not being able to deal with criticism. And because I'm having a hard time watching Connor this week, two days, and you guys were talking to me like that was How I Am With Him. And you just kept saying mad dead sounding things at me. (I love how I am projecting my own feelings onto them, here. Like, I didn't even know that it was okay for them to sound mad, because it was triggering (and I think I am talking to some emotionally abusive people here including Aeron) and therefore... same logic the Myriad used later on. And that the things they said were "dead sounding"! I love the weird metaphors of projection. I also love how clear it is to me now that I was not willing to hear any criticism of me at all because I was so threatened.) and because I feel like if I tell you how I feel or what's going on in my life you will say something about how I'm ALWAYS like this I'm ALWAYS stressed out and be all tired of it, and I know it's "always" like this because this is just what it felt like when I was trying to do a month's worth of work in a week, and do all my finals that week, and produce an entire senior project, and everything had to get not-quite-done and I kept having to beg people for more time or to lend me more money and I kept having to run faster and faster like something out of Alice in Fucking WONDERLAND, and it's ALL HAPPENING AGAIN.
(That is SO INSANE. Ok first of all: ritual abuse shout-out, because I mentioned how much the other letter reeked of ritual abuse and Alice in Wonderland is connected to a lot of RA shit - especially for Aeron - and I didn't know any of that then! And yet, there it is showing up all huge here.
And then: It doesn't matter if I "felt like" they would say whatever. That's not a feeling, first of all, that's an assumption. And it doesn't matter because if I have a problem with it, I can address that if and when they actually say it. I mean, I didn't have a healthy way to address it then, but that's irrelevant. I super-love how I totally acknowledge that it's always like this after ranting about how they are going to say it's always like this. Also, it is such an addict/abuse survivor thing to do, to have the same messy painful patterns repeating and see it as "happening again", like an external force. Like thinking that we can jinx stuff or that we just have to hope things get better. Like we have no agency and things just happen at random. The severing of cause and effect that comes from abuse. it's AWESOME.)
and I'm tryingstop</u> it. (Dude: how? By wishing it would stop? You can't stop it if you don't have any boundaries or recovery!) And it's partly the testosterone too because I don't have any outlets to help my body deal with this confusing stuff and it's scary to talk to people who don't know I'm trans/itioning and be afraid of what they'll say and what to tell them, especially since I can't just say that I'm living as a man or whatever. (Because I wasn't. Translation: Aeryn in particular was starting the pattern of "I'm going to tell you what you are feeling and why", which is always offsides. First it was, often and repeatedly, that we were angry or stressed out or whatever because of testosterone, and then it was that we were grumpy or cranky in the mornings, and so on. I was trying to talk about transitioning as a stressor, making the first steps toward acknowledging my own side of the street ("you're sort of right about this, in this way") but doing it with a lot of fear and in an attempt to mollify an abuser who was actually saying something completely different. Like "if I tell you the way that that COULD be a valid argument, will you stop accusing me of being angry all the time because of hormones?" Of course not.) It's all too hard to explain and then sometimes that makes me feel like I don't even understand it and aaaaaaaaaaa.
And I don't like the way I'm living right now and I'm trying to change it but so much is going on and all I need is help. And it was so wonderful when you helped me last night and you made all the stress go away and I was happy and me again. (AAA! Other people do not control your feelings! Other people do not control your feelings!! DO NOT ASCRIBE THAT POWER TO THEM! Hint: anyone you ascribe that power to is almost certainly an abusive prick in your life. Or you wouldn't experience them as being able to make tempestuous vast changes in your emotional landscape.) And then nothing like that happened just the opposite happened tonight and it was terrible and I was sad. ~the end.~
(Again, no boundaries. This is my life before recovery: I couldn't identify what I was feeling, so of course I couldn't identify what was not okay with me, I certainly didn't think I was worthy of setting boundaries or that it could ever be safe, so I did the same thing I used to do with my parents: write them a letter about something I was scared to ask them and hope for the best. With my parents it was more like "I lost my lunch money"; as an adult it was like "I feel bad because of something you said and I am going to say so at the end of four handwritten pages and then stop short of setting any sort of boundary or taking care of my own emotions privately." Isn't it awesome how different things are now? I can't imagine writing someone a letter because I was scared to talk to them. And I even did that (but at least by way of setting boundaries) when I was working at Mills.) I am inclined to say that any situation where you feel like you need to write someone a letter to set boundaries is a situation you shouldn't be in. But I don't know, maybe there are situations where the other person is working on their shit and you're just super-triggered.
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| Saturday, December 8th, 2007
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3:17 pm - Golden Oldies
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I have five years! 5 years in CODA... and 8 days! Not to mention 9 months sobriety in DA! In honor of that here is an awesome glimpse into What I Used To Be Like. From a conversation between people in here, on a ripped-out piece of notebook paper, from (I am guessing) very late 2001 (when we were still dating the meaniad and specifically Matt, the subject of this conversation):
Adam: i hATE This Relationship
hate i hate it hate it
i hate that he thinks he can say shit like that
it isn't okay to say he's cutting because of us i HATE that
Me: but what if that's how he feels?
doesn't he need to express that?
Adam: no! fuck that! it's HIS CHOICE to cut! we're not forcing him to cut! if he wants to say he cuts cause he feels bad cause whatever I said, that's FINE, he can cut all he fucking wants but WHY is he saying it like THAT?
Me: i don't know, because he's too crazy to be all super-communication-skills right now?
Adam: he still (something scribbled out) no Aeryn brought us in there. he didn't plan to cut in front of us.
FUCK HIM ANYWAY
mister "i'm going to goad you into breaking up with me" the little wuss why doesn't he fucking do it himself i hate him doing that
Me: weren't we going to try to give him nothing but boyfriends this visit?
Abi: i'm mad because he wants to give our solstice to his mommy
the only good thing it is for is for being just us people and also his mommy is scary
Adam, ignoring that: Yes we were it just made me so MAD
Me: And this makes it okay how?
Adam: bite me
Me: bite yourself penis-by. if you come NEAR the surface before we leave i will castrate you with your own anger do you understand me?
Adam: fine. enfuckingjoy.
OMGS. can you imagine? can you imagine me now totally shutting down other people in here and being that mean and rude? or anyone? can you imagine me dating someone who uses their own self-injury as a passive-aggressive weapon? i remember times when they stormed off and locked themselves in the bathroom to cut and then when no one came to bang on the door and plead with them to stop they announced that if we all didn't care then they would just kill themselves. and more. i mean, there are so many MORE things I could say about that. it is funny to see that this could have been december of 2001. at first I thought 2000 and i was like, holy shit. how can this have been so long ago? how can i still be this pissed off about stuff that happened that long ago? that is the MISTS OF TIME.
i even hit their journal for a minute and i don't know if it is funny or if it just pisses me off but the stuff they post now could seriously just as well be from 2000. i mean, places are different, the names of people who are mainly out or who they have relationships with are different, but so what? that is seriously the only thing. the best part is when they say stuff like that their friends "feel so distant" or whatever. like, what they mean is that THEY feel... whatever... but they have always put it in that vague, distant way that puts it on the other person. I think I am moving much closer to letting go of these people who never change, are so unwilling to work on their shit and see reality and change, who are so mired in borderline personality disorder. Like the more I can see myself and what I have changed, the more I can see how inconsequential they now are to me, instead of seeing the vivid pain of being around them.
Okay, I just stopped to put a half-baked Arizmendi pizza in the oven. And it was too small for our oven (!!! i didn't know our oven was that small) so I had to cut it in half. and I made an inappropriately scary comment to Brian about how if he didn't get out of the way i would cut him in half, and then I apologized to him and Annie. And then I was all, "But you know what I'm NOT doing! Locking myself in the bathroom to cut and threatening to kill myself if no one cares!" And without missing a beat, Annie said, "Why would you take the pizza into the bathroom?"
I laughed so hard that I had to bend over. Seriously.
but yeah. Adam was so right on, here. And what happened was that both they and Aeryn (now Aeron, a visibly creepy guy type in their Flickr photos... named after a fucking CHAIR) were and probably still are deeply convinced that it is Not Okay to Be Angry. Aeron most of all. It wasn't okay for anyone to be able to tell that you were angry. The Myriad in particular were of the opinion that if we sounded angry or looked angry or they "knew" we were angry, it was abusive. And especially so if we "wouldn't admit" that we were angry, which was a great mindfuck - they were both very into telling us how we felt, over and over, no matter whether we felt that way or not. And if we were angry it wasn't actually safe to admit it because first of all, they had all made it very clear that that meant we were horrible abusive people and automatically in the wrong, or at the very very least that it would trigger them hugely and that would be all our faults, and second of all, if it didn't trigger them enough to stop everything and we actually tried to talk about something we had a problem with, they would insist that Aeron be involved as a very biased mediator. And so we learned that it wasn't okay to be angry and that Adam, who was often angry with them, should shut up and go away because he wasn't their boyfriend anyway and he was wrong wrong wrong because they were perfect and everything was just fine.
I just love this conversation because it covers it all. Of course he doesn't need to "express" how he "feeeeels" by cutting himself and blaming us. And: that's NOT A FEELING. That's a thought. You aren't required to share every thought you have. Being responsible in a relationship, whatever kind, means paying attention to your thoughts and actions and working on your boundaries and dealing with what comes up for you in appropriate ways. Like, if you're upset about something someone says, you don't go cut yourself (and, often, make a huge mess of the bathroom, leave it for someone else to clean up, and/or go get checked in to the hospital and then make a huge fuss about how horrible it is in there. and i'm not saying it's not.) And if you need to express something, you know, paint a fucking picture. also: not in your own blood.
so yeah. I was soooo codependent. It's automatically okay that he cut himself and then blamed us, because that's what he did! whatever he does is inherently right! i'll get right on the rationalization and justifications so that I can figure out why it was inherently right! I'll ignore your actual arguments and answer your rhetorical questions with guilt-tripping! if someone else is in a bad place, they automatically get to say and do whatever they want! And then if you make the point that they're passive-aggressively trying to break up with us, I'll ignore it completely and attack your right to even be here at all! And if you raise other important points about things that are happening in our relationship, I'll ignore you entirely! And then I'll shower you with verbal abuse (penis-boy? where the hell did that even come from?) and threaten you into submission!
I couldn't believe it when I found this. It's such a great document of pre-recovery codependent thought. Also, the cat peed on it at some point, which was an awesome statement.
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| Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
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11:56 am - I passionately love my new phone
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I got the Samsung Blackjack!
i know I said the Sync. but then I found out that it wasn't as good. Like, the call quality wasn't as good and i think the camera wasn't either or something. The blackjack was twice as expensive but I bought it with my birthday money so it didn't totally matter. And the call quality is the biggest deal to me because i hugely hate people not understanding what i say on the phone (or anywhere) and the whole point of getting a new phone is to have something that I can love using and actually want to make program calls and other calls with.
Annie and I got a family plan together. And I just got a Firefly on ebay for Connor and added that line to the plan too. Course I still have to figure out how it works and program numbers into it and everything before I can send it to him. It only has like five buttons. It's still going to cost a trillion dollars for both lines and the service for them and internet on my phone and whatever, but I figured out how to afford it with my spending plan and it is so worth it. Here is what my new phone does!
1. It can take videos.
2. It can make video calls if someone else has a phone that does that and I get the add-on to the plan that lets me do it and I figure out how.
3. It can send video messages (if someone else has a phone that can handle them)
4. It can send picture messages
5. It can send text messages (I seem to be as cursed with messages as with faxes tho. They somehow never go through. I need to investigate this further.)
6. It can record voice notes!
7. It checks my gmail for me! And it ignores all my filters so instead of the same boring emails I already looked at, I get to see all of the emails from online meetings that normally i filter straight to folders, so it's like i have a 12-step meeting on my phone!
8. It has a qwerty keyboard that i can actually use to do stuff!
9. It has a good camera! That can be adjusted for different lighting! And zooms!
10. It can BEAM pictures I take and videos I take to my computer!
11. It can surf teh intarwebs but not super-well.
12. I can TETHER it to my computer and have internet wherever I go! I talked to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kola, in the Netherlands, on my computer, from the highway in the middle of nowhere in Illinois! It was so much fun!
13. It has REALLY good speakerphone. Like, people don't know when I have them on speakerphone. I mean sometimes they do, but it is a far cry from "Do you have me on speakerphone take me off I hate it you sound so far away!" And it is nice and loud as if they were in the same room as me!
14. It's a real phone!
Yaayy!
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