sisterhoodbrij-blog

[sisterhoodbrij-blog]

Inaugural post of this blog. The pic above is me with Hunt, my beloved (recently and unfortunately deceased) mental health companion animal (if a companion dog is good enough for Carrie Fisher, who also had bipolar disorder, it’s good enough for me). Yes, I named him after James.

Heads-up: long post, swears and Battlestar Galactica-themed profanity, divorce, family drama, discussion of bipolar disorder, specifically psychosis and suicidal ideation

I started this Tumblr, because it was pointed out to me that authenticity is talking about the shit times too. How can I help the next generation of social entrepreneurs if I don’t talk about the stuff that I’m struggling with? I’ll paint an unnaturally rosy picture of entrepreneurship, which is very inauthentic (and I really wish those perky business advice people would talk about the struggles instead of ).

So here comes some authenticity about dealing with family and life drama while trying to start a movement.

I’ve been running Motorsport Sisterhood since August 2015. (The website anniversary is September 15th, 2015, so that’s where we officially count from - we count birthdays, not conception days.) For the most part, it’s felt like yelling into the void. I yelled into the void for a full frakking year before people (other than my friends, who I’m pretty sure got sick of forced adds to groups and tags in FB and Twitter posts with requests to RT) started to respond to me.

My own frakking mother didn’t even like my Facebook page for over a year, until I complained that she didn’t support my organisation. Then she started doing that thing where she commented on posts, criticising them without reading them. On a post about suicide - that was really brave of me to write, because it was so personal, and I angled it very much towards ‘seek professional help’ - she commented, ‘Uh, I would’ve thought going to see a psychologist would be a good idea!’ This from the woman who spent the best part of a decade pretending my symptoms were either a personality flaw for her to manipulate, shame, and gas-light out of me, or a demon that needed to be exorcised. (She did try an exorcism once when I got grumpy because my grandmother told me not to sit on the same side of the car as my mother as I would ‘break the suspension’. Incidentally, two fat women won’t break the suspension. Packing the car full of people and stuff and driving it on a long road-trip on a bumpy road breaks the suspension. I learned this lesson in that car in real life. Prior to the evil bitch’s claims that my then-120kg self would break the suspension. But point aside, my mother’s attempt at an exorcism caused a psychotic break in which I heard a voice in the room that spoke words of comfort to me, and gave me tips for self-care. Best auditory hallucination ever! If I had been religious at the time, I would probably have written it down as a word from the Lord. I mean, how many other people have a psychotic-break head-voice that gives good self-care advice?) I can’t win with her.

Then in March this year, she started slowly and painfully divorcing my dad, and (due to circumstances she claims were beyond her control) made me responsible for sorting through her belongings (she’s a hoarder and they’ve been married 40 years, so a lot of junk has accumulated), sending her the things she wants (the entire scarf collection must be shipped, but the wedding dress and lingerie [which is way more kinky than I ever wanted to contemplate in the context of my parents...I’m off red pleather suspenders for life after realising my dad was into that!] must be 'got rid of’), and finding appropriate homes for the vast majority of her belongings. And in my birthday phonecall from her, she had the gall to say, ‘Now you understand why I was so beady with you for not helping when we moved from [previous address] to [current address]!’ (It. Was. Her. Stuff. I packed and moved my own stuff, in addition to helping a bit with hers out of the goodness of my heart. Her stuff, her problem, right?) So around all the day-job and Sisterhood things, I’ve been silently disassembling my family home.

I feel like an awful feminist for taking my dad’s side in the divorce. I know that women almost always end up worse off financially, but I can’t bring myself to care enough to call her in over the bad economic decisions she’s making. I know that a lot of women are in abusive relationships and struggle to leave, but I don’t buy her story that Dad was an angry, abusive wife-beater their entire marriage. (Show me the bruises! I have way more scarring memories of her yelling for no reason - for example, when my deputy headmaster snitched on me for wanting to kill myself as a teenager, she yelled for two hours straight [literally spitting mad] about how I could keep secrets and humiliate her by telling Rod Montague [the deputy head in question] instead of her [I skipped manual labour {ditch digging around the school grounds; standard punishment for calling the French teacher an ill-informed bitch when she corrected my grammar when I wasn’t even wrong according to the textbook} to kill myself, and didn’t end up killing myself because she got home from the shop early, and then I had to give Rod Montague a reason for not taking my punishment] and air our family’s dirty laundry in public - than I do of him. He has the occasional eruption of irrational, angry yelling, but most people reach breaking point sometimes.) I’m 100% on Team Dad because she’s so frakking bonkers and self-centred and crazy-making, but feel like I should side with her because she was also born with a vagina and is being disadvantaged by society’s views on said vagina, in addition to her own shitty life choices.

So, if you know someone as crazy-making as my mother, here’s some advice from what I’m learning at the moment.

- Distance is good. Find a way to get some space. Thankfully, mine moved countries of her own accord, and gifted me with the space to see how toxic she was.

- Limit communication to safe topics. Do. Not. Engage. Recognise and dodge the crazy. If they get angry with you, deflect onto a safe topic. Keep deflecting. Don’t let them near your soft underbelly. Have a wing-buddy where possible.

- Lean into your community. As in, pick up the frakking telephone and call a human being you like and trust. No vaguebooking and hoping someone notices your pain. Choose specific people who are good listeners, and are possibly willing and able to wing-buddy for you when you’re around the crazy factory. Call them, and talk, preferably in person and not at the crazy-maker’s house.

- Get a therapist/coach/professional help of some description. They can put names to the things the crazy-maker does that make you feel bad. Having words to google is so frakking helpful! They can also reassure you that you are unlikely to have contracted pathological narcissism.

- Take care of yourself. Exercise. Read books you love. Eat nutritious food. Keep your body and living space clean(ish). Complete the sentence, ‘I show love to [person you love] by...’ then do the things to yourself.

If you have any advice to add, add it in the reblogs!