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theamberfang · 5 years ago

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Journal 235: Success and Future

Completion

I have quite a few things to catch up on since I missed out on discussing certain things last night, but I’ll start off with how I successfully finished writing about my playthrough of Mae’s fourth day home in Night of the Woods. Even after thinking about how I’d continue and the way I’d structure the post while mowing the lawn and taking a shower, I didn’t end up blowing it out of proportion in my head. When it came time to write, I didn’t feel like I had expectations that were overwhelmingly impossible to meet. Admittedly, after writing the preface and pasting over the content from yesterday’s journal, I did hit a bit of a speedbump, but some tea helped to get me through (and a second cup to make sure I finished later.)

This little project has actually been turning out a bit differently than I expected: the initial conceit was to have a sort of reaction/review/analysis thing. True, there’s some elements of that, but a lot of what I’m doing is simply recording what I had played in the game. Well, “simply” isn’t fair to myself: I’m also reinterpreting and retelling the events of the game. In a way, what I’ve been doing might be decent practice for story-writing. Of course, I’m quite brief with everything because I’ve already played through it and I expect anyone stumbling into this project already has as well: going into extraordinary detail feels like a waste of time at the moment. Still, I wonder if I can carry this voice I’m developing into a NitW fanfiction or something—I’ll just have to see how I feel by the end of this project.

Otherwise, I do feel like I’m throwing a good amount of personal reactions to stuff as well as some analysis of themes and whatnot. Even if I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing, I’m having enough fun with it. At least one person followed me for it, so at least one other person thinks it’s interesting as well. (Well, it was day three they followed for, but whatever)

Obsession

Which does lead to a growing concern I’ve had: despite turning off the dashboard notifications for them, I keep opening up my blog information to look at recent activity anyway. I don’t want to be so concerned about these internet points; it only serves to make me anxious about the quality of my writing, hoping to impress people so that the numbers go up. All that would do is fuel my perfectionism, which would prevent me from writing any more.

I do think turning off the dash notifications is a good start, but I think I need a more committed effort to combatting this obsession. One extra step I did today was setting the activity tracker back to a 24-hour period, down from a 30-day period. As nice as the graph was to look at, I could feel myself wanting to chase the peak I had achieved a couple of weeks ago. Seeing those highs from so long ago was not helping.

Another idea I’ve had is to somehow restrict how often I’m allowed to click on that activity information tab. I can try either a discreet number of allowed checks, or to have defined time periods where I’m allowed to check it, and times where I restrict myself. A sort of mix could be to specifically schedule times to check the tab. However I do it, the plan would then be to increase my own restrictions until I’m simply not checking it anymore. Based on the way I’ve handled my hunger—from 0800-2000 I’m allowed to eat, and other times I fast—I think I’ll prefer the restricted periods of time; I’ll figure out when exactly those are when I set my schedule/tasks for tomorrow.

Parents

Speaking of problems, I guess I should follow up with my frustrations from yesterday. I’ll admit that I wasn’t wholly fair to my father, since the moment I brought up happened [relatively] shortly after I came out. Indeed, I’m aware that parents can need some time to “grieve” the child that they feel like they’ve lost, and it can be difficult to adjust to a new name because of how it dredges up that pain: the problem is, my father has never moved on past it, and I guess the way I’ve failed to correct him over the years has basically given him tacit approval to keep deadnaming me.

Still, I accurately described how that past exchange went from my own end, and I think I can be forgiven for not wanting to repeat that event. I’m also still frustrated with how my father, evidently, hasn’t done any research into how to deal with a child that has either mental illness or has come out as transgender. I simply provided the explanation above to be fair to my father, but that doesn’t absolve him, and I have not forgiven him for his nonsense.

Today, my mom also asked me about last night; she tried to, charitably, explain that my father was only trying to give me helpful advice—as if impoliteness is the reason I’ve been isolating myself for many of the past years and the reason I’ve been unemployed since dropping out. The truth of the matter is that my father wants me to be polite to him. My read on the situation is that he doesn’t feel like I’m giving him his due respect, as he is the head of the household, the breadwinner keeping the family fed and sheltered. As much as I do appreciate him for providing my basic human needs, it would be right to say that I don’t respect him: just look above to see why. As far as I’m concerned, he’s always behaved narcissistically and self-righteously: he’s never wrong and he never apologizes. I’m genuinely unsure if he takes care of my mom and me out of familial love or out of social obligation and how he would look bad if he didn’t.

I didn’t say that to my mother though, staying silent and expressing my displeasure at the very idea that his idea would have been helpful. She went on to tell me: “don’t let it get to you.” In other words, as she’s literally said to me before: “it’s all in your head.” These platitudes are not helpful when dealing with mental illness. As I’ve seen expressed on my dashboard before, saying “it’s just in your head” is like telling someone with a broken leg “the pain is just in your leg.” If I could stop things from getting to me, I wouldn’t be mentally ill: I’d have to be mentally healthy to do what she is asking of me. She’s asking a person with a broken leg to “walk it off.”

Again, to be fair to her, she grew up in the Philippines decades ago. The concept of mental illness there, especially from her time, was really bad. In her words, people with mental illness were only considered “crazy,” so it makes sense that she doesn’t really know how to handle my issues. She’s also quite computer-illiterate, so unlike my father, I can’t really expect her to do research on these subjects.

It has occurred to me that I might be able to talk to my mom about it, though. It also occurred to me earlier when she was trying to explain my father’s “advice,” but I wasn’t emotionally prepared at that moment. I do generally think she would be receptive if I spoke to her about things: that the conversation wouldn’t blow up into an argument, and that I could even have a conversation on the topic with her multiple times. I haven’t felt confident enough for this sort of endeavor a long time, but I think I’ve reached a point where I can at least try to talk to mom about things that I need to talk about.

My father is a different story though. He’s likely to take anything I have to say as an accusation against him: that I’m blaming him for how I turned out. You see, perhaps the most fundamental problem I see in him is that he’s very individualistic. Unlike my mom, he was born in the United States as a second-generation immigrant. Based on how fervently his father, my grandfather, pushed him into the military, I imagine my grandfather had the patriotic zeal of a religious convert, and it passed down to my father as an intense adherence to “rugged American individualism.” He’s not likely to see how his behavior was only one—if a significant one—factor to the development of my mental illness. I also doubt he believes that I could have possibly been transgender all along, and that I’ve instead made this “choice”—further, he may even think that the lack of apparent effort I’ve put into transitioning shows that I’ve rescinded my “choice.”

Basically, any attempt to talk to my father about my issues is a minefield. Literally every talk I’ve tried to have with him about these things ended up being a shouting match where he just walks off. He never changes his behavior afterwards either. It’s the same thing when he argues with my mom: she tells him off for things, sometimes it explodes into an argument, but at most he’ll only stop the behavior temporarily, because it upsets her. It never sticks because he never thinks that he’s done anything wrong.

It’s why my plan for dealing with him is to write a letter to him. It’s the only option I can think of that will let me feel like I’ve told him what I need to: trying to speak to him is too likely to blow up before I say what I need to. Admittedly, the written word can also end up inciting him enough that he can’t read the whole thing, but at that point, it would have ceased to be my problem. If I write such a letter and either doesn’t read it or decides he doesn’t need to change any of his behavior in response to it, I could still then be confident that I tried my absolute best and can then be free to actively ignore him.

Theme

Moving on from the heavy stuff, I missed out on discussing what I’ve done with my blog’s theme thus far. Evidently, one can mess with a theme’s colors to give a blog light-text on dark. If I had to guess how I came to my previous theme then, it’s simply that the default for that theme was light on dark. There is one tiny problem with this arrangement for this theme though: the color of the “tags” dropdown box doesn’t have any options, so now it’s left as white on white basically. At the moment, I don’t actually care very much about people being able to easily navigate my blog through tags, so it’s not a big deal, but I might be able to search through the html code to do something about it in the future. If I really have to, I can always try other themes... or I could just do black text on white and just deal with that.

I’ve also fiddled around with my blog’s description, since the space for it is so much larger with this theme. I briefly included a sentence in there with my age and transgender identity, but I ended up removing it. It feels weird to me to so prominently display that information; not that I’m ashamed of it or anything. I think what it is... is that I prefer, for now, to have the description focus on the content and purpose of this blog. If I were to include something about my gender identity, I’d rather rewrite the whole thing: lumping it in with my mental illnesses as something I frequently write about doesn’t seem right��being trans isn’t a mental illness.

Even with those concerns, I do think it’s a general improvement. Though, one thing I still haven’t done yet is reblog a long chain of reblogs: that was one of the main reasons I wanted to stop using my old theme. Everything got squeezed into a really narrow space, and the OP in such a chain was often unreadable.

I feel like I had more topics to discuss, but I got myself into another rant about my parents tonight. It was something I needed to get off my chest though, so better out than in I suppose.

Tomorrow’s Tasks

Avoid checking blog activity; 0900-1200

Dance for exercise; 1000

Extended Outlook; 1100

KA: US History; 1400

Habit-free time; 1600

Journal; 2000

#daily journal #personal #mental health #self care #meta

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