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selfmadesuperhero · 4 years ago

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i’m very much not okay

and i’ll probably take very long for me to explain why

i don’t know how to write this. i don’t know where to even start. i’m here because i just don’t have anywhere else to go. i can’t afford therapy. i no longer have any close friends other than Mabu (gf).

it’s getting pretty bad inside my head

i know most people’s lives are hell this year and i’m not special. i know that. to me, this year is feeling like the last nail in my coffin because 2019 had already chewed me up and spit me out.

i kept my last job for eight years. after my first year there, another developer came in, and we became friends. we worked side by side less than 4 feet apart for six years. our hours were flexible but we always agreed upon our schedule just so work would be more bearable, because we both hated it and often had to team up against our boss’ downright abuse. it was a very small company (at its biggest we were only 7 employees). we were also going to graduate at the same time from the same school (different majors), so we had a bit of a pact to leave our shitty boss once we’d graduated and start developing our own, way less shitty games.

at the start of 2019, he got an excellent job offer. i was thrilled for him and told him to of course get out of that hellhole we hated so much, we were only there because the pay was decent and the hours were flexible so we could get our degree, you know? it stung, but i was happy for him. on the last day i gave him a ride home (which is also something i did almost daily), he surprised me by hugging me and telling me i was like a brother to him and our plans weren’t going to change.

i believed him, and went back to work. he was soon replaced, obviously, by a junior developer because that’s how capitalism works. but suddenly, i no longer had someone to take a stand with me against my boss - there was no one left that i knew, everyone had resigned or been fired and i was the oldest employee. you’d think that’d earn me something, after eight years being dedicated to the same company, right?

(shortly after, my grandma passed, after years and years of agonizing in a wheelchair. we lived together)

fuck that

the first months were fine. i was being the senior developer and teaching the junior constantly, so my boss stayed out of my way. but see, this is where he started to get ansty. the more the junior stopped being a junior and was actually useful for something, the more that piece of gigantic ass just started thinking only about our salaries. i started in that company in 2012 making little more than 3 bucks/hour (remember i live in a third world country, but it was still specialized work), but by 2019, my salary was pretty much double of what the junior was making, and every penny extra i got during those years was a CONQUEST. i also worked six hours while he worked eight, so.

my boss basically started treating me even more like shit. he wasn’t nice to be around before, but he was bearable in small amounts. suddenly it was obvious to everyone that he was really fixating on me and my performance, and to me it was obvious he just wanted me to walk away too so he could replace me with TWO junior developers instead of just one measly charlie.

then, the nationals elections began. oh boy.

this probably wouldn’t read as news to anyone, but i’m a huge leftie, obviously. if you’re at all interested in politics, read about what socialist policies have done for uruguay during the past 15 years and how they turned us into AT LEAST a developing country, but i digress.

the people that sat in my office even shared my political views or whatever, but my boss is actually part of the conservative party and started actively campaigning. every time something involving politics happened, he made a point to come barging in the office and telling me and specifically me about it like i was personally running against his party. i actually recorded him once to have proof of him at least screaming at me, so i could check if i was crazy for thinking he had something against me. he frequently called me communist and just mocked my views. if you’re wondering, yes, this is illegal, but nothing happened.

then, two big things happened at once: we lost the election, and my recently adopted puppy was diagnosed with distemper. yes, it happened on the same that and it’s a day i’ll never forget.

my girlfriend and i had talked about getting a puppy once we moved in together. we’d named him like two years before it actually happened. we moved in together on may 2019 and on september i found the most precious boy for adoption on facebook and i was innocently all like “oh i’ve had to put rescue dogs for adoption before, let’s give back!”.

on october 27th, he had a seizure and the vet told us it was likely we’d have to put him down because only 20% of dogs survived, and it was even less for puppies.

when i went to work, i had to put up with my boss laughing and mocking me for winning the election “against me”. i guess i missed my running for anything?

this post is already too long for me to get into details about my dog’s disease. for months, every day we looked after him constantly. i read everything there was to BE READ about distemper online, spent thousands of pesos on medicine and treatments just in case he had a chance. good news is he did! this is the only positive note in this post.

it still wasn’t easy. he made us cry at least three times a day. we really thought he was dying, and we’d made the mistake of naming him 2 years before he was even born. we’d taken PERFECT care of him while he was unvaccinated, but the vet told us it was most likely he was already infected before he came home to us. i’d never seen such a small puppy so sick. he hallucinated constantly. if you don’t know, distemper is a neuro/digestive/skin/bone/HELL disease that’s really nasty. he’d have seizures almost daily and poop and pee himself. he stopped being able to control his body other than his two front legs, which he didn’t even have full control of. when he stopped being able to walk, he started crying constantly, it really tore the heart out of my chest

we called another vet, a dog physical therapist, so she’d tell us how we could help him. she told us to make him stand as long as possible, so every time he had a meal, i’d bend down with him and hold his hips - so he’d be able to stand, and slowly gain back some muscle mobility. every day we massaged his legs and flexed his joints, even his tiny toes, so he’d avoid atrophy. and we did it!! as i’m writing this, he’s one year old now, he’s no longer sick even if he’ll carry with him plenty of lifelong sequels, and he walks and runs and barks like the best of them ♥ i wasn’t going to plug anything but if you wanna see his progress, it’s on instagram @hamiltonthefighter

okay, i guess i ended up talking at length about his disease in the end, sorry. his walking again had a price to pay for me: my own back. for two or three months i was bent over this dog, you know? i still can’t get out of bed without help sometimes lol around december it got really bad but i just kept popping pills because joy oh joy, i was doing my thesis and i didn’t really have time or money for anything else. my job was basically paying for our rent, my university classes including the thesis course which was ridiculously expensive, and our dog had given me credit card debt out of desperation (we even had to buy those rubber things used for yoga to place on our floors so he’d have something to use his nails against instead of constantly slipping on the floor, we tried every medication that might help, we gave him CBD oils, all kinds of vitamins, constant vet visits where during the first two weeks he got like three different shots every day, etc)

i’m rambling, and i’m sorry, but i don’t really think anyone will read this. i started this post crying my eyes out and writing about my dog at least has been calming, because even if he’s a drooling mess now, he’s still the same he ever was and i love him very much and he’s sleeping soundly next to me and he’s finally close to fine.

remember the friend i talked about like half an hour ago? the one that worked with me for six years? nothing changed between us during the first months. for my thesis, i was going to develop a videogame with Mabu, but we were allowed to have external coding help because it was about GameDev, not the actual coding. i knew how to code, obviously, but Nico (the friend, guess we’ll give him a name) was also part of our project so he was gonna help us code so i had more time to focus on art and 3D modelling. the idea was kill two birds with one stone, make something we all liked, mabu and I were going to graduate with it and then we’d keep working on it during 2020 as we’d always always talked about.

by december, even if nico and i still talked regularly, i could tell he had just moved on with his life. he’d said he’d help us, but he was doing his own thesis, so i told him not to worry at that time, our final due date was in february. he asked us to forgive him during december and promised us he’d come back in january to DEVOTE himself to the project. i started coding the project besides working on the art and i was thankfully able to meet all the deadlines, so it was really fine, of course i understood where he was coming from.

then, on january 7th, Mabu’s grandma passed away. she was scheduled for a heart surgery that supposedly only had 1% risk, and she passed on the table because of a doctor’s mistake. the surgery was here in the capital, but Mabu’s family lives five hours away. she comes from a very big, very loving family, and her grandma (being the mother of five children) was very much the center of it. i also loved her. she’d replaced my grandma the second she passed and every time i saw her she hugged me like i was a lost grandson.

when my girlfriend called me during her surgery, i immediately left work because i just knew she would be crying if things were okay. this was a nightmare come alive for a family of 20+ people, and most of them were 5 hours away from their own house. my mother in law was (and still is) devastated by the lost of her mother because she was the one to encourage the surgery and she still thinks she killed her. i drove my her, my girlfriend, her sister and her sister’s boyfriend on my mother’s in law van for five hours while they all cried or slept and i had to really, really pinch myself because i was EXHAUSTED but what else could i do?

logically i missed work the next day. LOGICALLY. i had the service to attend and i was 5 hours away from the office and i didn’t even have my own car with me. i told my boss to discount the day, since i wasn’t entitled to the mourning day by law because it wasn’t my grandma. he didn’t even reply - he almost never talked to me by this point unless it was to berate me for something. i went back to work the day after the service.

now, remember we were doing our thesis and it was due in february? it really wasn’t great timing for anyone to die, but i was trusting Nico’s promise that he’d have more free time and he’d make up for not helping us code sooner. i told him the news about Mabu’s grandma, and then basically had to tell him to say something to her for her loss because he was supposed to be her friend, what the fuck, why aren’t you at least sending her a text.

let’s just say, january wasn’t a great month for Mabu and myself. two weeks after the passing, we still hadn’t had news from Nico. Mabu didn’t even have time to properly mourn because we had to turn our thesis in like, little over a month. i wrote to nico just downright ASKING if he was gonna be able to help us or WHAT, to which he said to me...

he’d never promised anything because he was really busy with his own stuff and he didn’t want to bring it up sooner because he knew Mabu was mourning and things were hard for us at the moment?

like that’s great pal, thanks for telling me at the last POSSIBLE second you were just dropping out altogether, what the actual fuck? it still baffles me that someone can be so thick headed, but he kept saying he had made no promises and both Mabu and I knew that was a lie and i honestly just couldn’t deal with someone so selfish he couldn’t at least give a heads up sooner

the icing on the cake during the beginning of this year is someone i haven’t even mentined: MY PIECE OF SHIT BROTHER. talking about him may deserve another post, because this is already so long and convoluted and i haven’t even talked about his involvement in my misery during 2019-2020. i’ll try to make the story short if anyone’s still reading this far:

a lot of years ago, our maternal grandmother moved to uruguay from russia and bought a tiny shitty house here next to my mother’s. my mother still hasn’t talked to me since 2013 because i’m trans, but that’s neither here nor there. i tried to keep in touch with my brother (we don’t share dads so he was no relation with my side of the family), and around 2017 i finally succeeded in making friends with him. or so i thought, clearly.

that grandmother passed... sometime. i don’t really know because they cut me off. she didn’t speak to me either, she was literally a crazy old nasty woman and i didn’t even care when i heard she’d died, to be honest. she was such a nasty woman, she’d put her tiny shitty house to my and my brother’s name just to keep her own daughter out of the inheritance when she bought it.

that also meant i was inheriting something for the first time ever, even if it was shitty. BUT my brother had his own fake grandma (the woman who looked after him his whole life instead of our mother) who was very old and frail and asked me if he could house her there. i said yes because again, i didn’t give a shit about the inheritance or the house or anything regarding my mother’s side of the family (other than him obviously), so for years this woman occupied the house. my brother basically took all existing furniture and appliances because he was moving in with a girlfriend and i even loaded up my shitty car with his stuff. all i wanted to inherit was the couch set, which had come all the way from russia and everyone had promised me since i was a wee lad, but he started whining about his fake-grandma not having a living room set and nowhere to sit and i didn’t even live by myself yet so i let them have the fucking couches, too.

oh boy this is already too long but now i’m too lazy to make a separate post

anyway, sometime during 2019, the woman moved out to an old folks home because she could no longer take care of herself. i immediately asked about the couch set with hope in my heart that it could finally be mine, but my brother told me our mother didn’t want me to have it.

he wanted to rent the house to make a profit, which sounded good to me because of that dog related credit card debt i talked about. and here’s where you might think i’m not that there in the head, but all my life i didn’t want anything to do with that house until my mother was in the ground - not out of hate but because i thought it was a shitty thing her own mother had done to her, and the inheritance should have been hers. she doesn’t have a degree or a stable job because she’s a russian translator so hey, whatever, they needed it more than i did. but then my brother starting getting ideas about improving the house so we’d make more money, and how we should do it together, and... i think i might have mentioned already why i didn’t exactly have time to redo a house? i was doing my thesis? about to graduate? my boss was constantly on my case? my dog was about to die?

i helped as much as i could at first, but then december came, and then january, and my brother just kept nagging me about the house like i was purposefuly sitting on my ass doing nothing, because oh every day it’s not rented it’s money lost. no amount of explaining how stretched thin i was seemed to suffice, not even when mabu’s grandma died and nico left us hanging with the thesis and i had less than a month left to code the whole project by myself while ALSO taking care of the art.

by the end of january, i was so stressed, i called a doctor after a panic attack. he gave me a weeks rest because of my back, because i wasn’t even able to get up without help at that time. it wasn’t much of a rest because i still used that time to sit at the computer and code 15 hours a day at LEAST, but hey.

it was the first time in 8 years i’d taken medical leave of ANY kind. i didn’t even get medical leave when i got my chest surgery. it happened on a friday and i was back to work the next monday. i’d never skipped more than 2 days of work at best when i had a bad case of the flu or something, but that was it.

when i went back to work, my boss immediatelly called me to his office. he started berating me about my performance again, bringing graphs comparing the amount of lines of code i’d written next to my coworkers. i didn’t mention this, but the graphic designer had also quit during 2019, so i was also covering that workload and no, that didn’t exactly translate to lines of code. i also had to spend HOURS every day tutoring the junior because he was too much of a cheap shit (didn’t use those words) to hire an experienced developer. i’d even WORKED AS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER FOR MEDIA CONTENT FOR HIS POLITICAL CAREER, EVEN IF IT WAS AGAINST MY BELIEFS AND NOT AT ALL RELATED TO MY JOB. he denied everything. EVERYTHING. he stuck to the narrative that i was just lazy and the proof was i’d just taken AN ENTIRE WEEK because “my back just hurt a little” and i had the audacity to skip work for someone else’s grandmother dying

i’m not exaggerating, i swear to anyone who might be reading this. that day was brutal and i’m still not over it half a year later, i don’t care if that makes me sound like a wuss. i worked eight years of my life in this fucking place.

this argument lasted for hours, but i kept my head down because i couldn’t afford to lose the job, specially not then. i even apologized for any loss in performance and tried to explain my point of view and what i was going through (which i’d already done to another superior weeks ago anyway). but just when i thought i’d MAYBE be able to keep my head above water, he told me he was denying my the request i’d made to take two weeks of holiday days before the thesis final due date.

i had already explained everything to him. everything, even nico dropping the team and my having to do everything by myself. i broke down and i told him he was forcing me to leave my job, i’d just have been certified by a doctor and i was asking for leave for SCHOOL (all things that are protected by law here), but he just kept repeating i could either walk away from my job or show up during those two weeks. he just wanted me gone, but he couldn’t fire me right away without having to pay me THOUSANDS because of my seniority (by law). he knew what he was doing to me and he didn’t care about it. he didn’t even let me TOUCH MY COMPUTER, he told me he wasn’t the one pushing me away, that i was doing this to myself, and he’d ask for a lawyer to check my computer for any “inconsistencies in my activity”, even. i really have a hard time just thinking about that day and how utterly humilliating it was. i lost a lot of personal files, because i sat at that desk for eight years and of course i had personal files because sometimes i stayed after hours before going to class.

imagine for a second a sixty year old man, rich as shit, political candidate, standing in front of a computer, disconnecting the mouse and keyboard so i couldn’t touch it, yelling at me i was doing this to myself and i was losing my job because i had the audacity to ask for two weeks leave to finish my fucking school thesis.

and yeah, i lawyered up. i didn’t have actual money to AFFORD a lawyer, but mabu’s cousin’s girlfriend was a lawyer and lived one block away and i immediatelly told her everything there was to tell. she brought me to the firm she worked in and they guaranteed me i had a pretty strong case and i was at least gonna be able to walk away with something.

that put things in hold for a while because the “trial” or whatever wasn’t gonna be held until after the thesis, so i tried to forget about it. my boss even owed me my untaken paid vacation days, which i told the lawyers because i was pretty sure he’d just forgot, but i wanted to know if it made a better case against him. they agreed, and i left it at that.

but you know who was still making my life miserable even when february began and i had less than three weeks to finish our project right? MY SWEET BABY BRO. he was constantly nagging me about having to do all the work himself, like I’D ASKED ANYTHING FROM THAT HOUSE TO BEGIN WITH. but see, the nastier he started getting, the more apparent his lies began to appear. he got nasty to the level where ON THE DAY I WAS TURNING THE PROJECT IN he kept calling me demanding MONEY for stuff he’d paid for the house without checking in with me. i was honestly baffled by his level of selfishness, i was already sleeping three hours a day tops and he expected me to what, paint walls? he was FIERCELY against having to wait for my project to be done even if it was two weeks away and he was asking and asking for money when i’d just told him i’d lost my job without a penny to show for it. nice guy, really.

suddenly, the following lies became clear:

my mother didn’t care if i took the couch set, he told me that because he was moving again and he was planning on taking the couches himself. (he ended up doing just so, too). he lied to me with the thing that hurts me most in the world: my mother hating me. he had even made a joke about it, because my mother had bought a new couch not long ago, and he didn’t “get” why she “didn’t want me to have anything”

years ago he’d told me he had refinanced a tax debt the house had, and i gave him money for it. now that the house was about to be put up for rent, he pretended that had never happened and suddenly started talking about how we needed to take care of that

he wasn’t planning on splitting the rent three ways between him, our mother and i. he was gonna keep two thirds, and i later even found out my own mother had given him the idea.

then poor mabu confessed to me once, two years ago, she’d wore a skirt one time visiting my brother and his then girlfriend, and he had told her nasty stuff to her year upon saying goodbye and she had never said anything because didn’t want to hurt our sibling relationship

talk about final nail huh?

i confronted him and he denied everything, obviously, he instantly played the victim card, how dare i think that way about him, how dare i break his dreams of reuniting the family again. he said things to me i’ll also never forget like, apparently, it shows that i’m a shit person because i have no friends and no one wants me around, unlike him that has so many. he told me i thought the world owed me when i was shit and i believed anything anyone told me before believing him. no one told me any of his lies, i caught them all by myself, but whatever. he cursed me and told me he never wanted anything to do with me because i was rotten and i only cared about money and i was so so selfish. this must have been around march and i still don’t know anything from him, or care.

what do i have to do for that side of the family to leave me alone, i wonder? all i ever wanted to do was be his friend

the “trial” against my boss came and suddenly every lawyer that worked at that firm was taking a fucking holiday except for the one that was supposedly leading my case - except suddenly, i didn’t have much of a case at all. i walked away with less than 2 thousand dollars and that was WITH the vacation days i hadn’t taken. the agreement was the lawyers were gonna keep 25% of however much i made but THAT vacation money wasn’t supposed to count because it didn’t come out of the “trial” thing, you know?

well, it did. the lawyer screwed me over too. but hey, at least he’d gotten me unemployment for a couple of months (you only apply for unemployment if you’re fired, not if you walk away from a job, and my having been fired or not was what was being contested), i still tried to be optimistic, i had a few months to figure things out while i looked for another job, and at least i was able to finish paying for school with that money.

yeah, this was late february, beginning of march. joke’s on me for being optimistic at all

my own brother plotting with my own mother against me has done a number for my mental health. i already had baggage aplenty, like every trans dude or girl whose parents would rather see them dead than be a dyke/fag (my mother’s own words, ladies and gents)

my boss of eight years kicking me to the curve at the worst moment in my life in the most humilliating of ways while blaming me for it has left me feeling so worthless to people in general. i’m getting better with time, i think, but i’m still all not there. i have a really hard time thinking my work is worth anything at all.

i keep thinking my brother was right, and i’m a shitty friend, and i don’t deserve anyone around. my only real friend at the moment is my girlfriend, which makes it really hard to have any arguments because i start feeling like my life is ending because she’s pretty much all i have left and she’s the most important thing in the world to me because i wouldn’t have survived all this shit i’m writing without her by my side. i would walk to hell and back for her. but nico also left me behind without a second thought, after telling me i was like a brother to him, no matter how many times i invited him to hang out or anything to keep in touch. i’ve been a shitty friend to a lot of people, but not him, and he still didn’t care about me at all, so i just stopped trying.

but now social distancing has got me all fucked up. i can’t trust people. i can’t go outside. everything is scary to me, i have at least two or three panic attacks per WEEK and they get nastier and longer every time. i know i need help, but i can’t even afford rent, let alone therapy. Uruguay has the worst unemployment rates since 2006 now thanks to our baby-Trump right now. i look for jobs daily even if the notion of having a job even SIMILAR to the one i had before gives me the shakes. programming isn’t as hard as some people may think, but the workplaces are usually VERY toxic because you’re valued by the amount of lines of code you write, and i’m so so tired. i’m still looking because I NEED. TO. PAY. RENT. but not because it’s something i want in life, at all. i’d much rather be poor and just do freelance work instead, but i’m failing.

i thank the people that have helped me or commissioned me these past few months from the bottom of my heart. i’m sorry i’m not more active, i’m sorry i’m still rusty and can’t draw faster, i’m sorry i sometimes spend half a day crying my eyes out because i just don’t know how to move forward. i have a week left, i still haven’t made enough for rent, let alone the bills or food. mabu used to get plenty of art commissions on etsy, but she hasn’t sold anything since march either and she’s younger than me so our financial struggles have an even deeper impact on her

i’m just so, so tired. i’m lucky to have mabu, and that is about it. i honestly don’t think i could have survived this year without her. for months the future has looked like a black screen to me. i can’t even trust the vegetable market in front of my fucking house because some piece of shit spread the rumor that i’m trans and now i can’t even open the door to my front house without getting stares sometimes, it’s ridiculous. i wish i could trust more than one person in the world so that everything wasn’t on her shoulders.

i’m not okay. we’re not okay.

that’s about it. i’m sorry i can’t end this on a more positive note. at least we graduated with an excellent score. not that we had a graduation, obviously. thanks corona.

thank you for reading if you read this far ♥

#this is literally 5k+ words of how my life went to shit :)#trying to write down feelings like i used to do seven years ago when i was transitioning because i have no other outlets #sorry new followers #(sorry old followers)

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dearfuturehusbandblog · 4 years ago

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Welcome To The World, LittleBean: A Life Update

Dear Future Husband,

My sister had the baby! And it made me depressed.

I kind of receded from the world for a couple of weeks and stopped talking to people I enjoy talking to, and stopped doing things I enjoy doing, and kind of stayed in my room unless it was absolutely necessary to leave.

Why, might you ask, would I have done such a thing as a response to such a happy event?

Well, for some of the reasons I've written about previously. The emotional weight of the sadness that comes along with seeing a younger sibling live through something you yourself desire but feel you'll never have, is probably the biggest.

But another reason I've been really down is because of my mother.

Dear old MotherLivelyHeart has problems.

I think I've mentioned this previously, but if/when I marry, I will most definitely be marrying INTO a family and as "out" of my own as I possibly can.

MotherLivelyHeart suffers from anxiety and depression. Shocker, I know.

In fact, my inner voice is comprised mainly of her criticism and negativity. Shocker, I know.

Dear old MotherLivelyHeart has never really wanted to be a mother, as far as I can tell. Shocker? ...I dunno.

When I was growing up, my mother used to always say "I only had children for the grandkids" and everyone would laugh. But HAHA! it wasn't a joke. I figured out pretty early on that she was kind of serious with that statement.

But nothing in my life confirmed that until she was on the phone with her machutanim on the day LittleBean was born and repeated that sentiment to them.

So, all my life, she's struggled with being the parent she never wanted to be in order for us to have offspring that she could love and adore and spoil and then send home to their parents without having to parent herself.

THIS is the "home" I came from.

THIS is the parenting I received.

It's absolutely no wonder I'm so screwed up.

My mother has been overbearing my entire life. And a lot of it comes from her own insecurities and anxieties and lack of the world living up to her expectations. Which is kind of understandable.

The problem comes when those expectations come at the cost of other peoples' comfort and safety.

LilSis had a c-section. The baby wasn't exactly breached, but was flipped at a weird angle and stuck. The baby was also a meconium baby, so while it was already over a week past the due date, LilSis thought she still had time. But as it turned out there wasn't any time because when she went for what she thought was a routine check up, they induced her and after two days of labor and nothing happening, they did the c-section.

Now, LilSis made it clear earlier this year that she didn't want anyone at the hospital with her aside from her doula and husband. No visitors, family included. The rest of us seemed to accept this, but MotherLivelyHeart just kind of smirked and went, "yeah, ok, we'll see about that."

And I get that LilSis is her baby.

I get that it's not easy to see your child suffer.

I get that she's been waiting her whole life to be a grandmother.

I get that she's had expectations about what it would be like to meet her grandchildren, especially her first grandchild.

I. GET. IT.

But when LilSis facetimed and showed us the baby and B"H the baby looked fine but LilSis was clearly too pale and weak and dizzy and needed to get off the phone, but again repeated that she didn't want anyone coming to the hospital, dear old MotherLivelyHeart's response was that she wanted to "surprise" them at the hospital.

"I don't need to ask permission."

"I'm not a 'visitor', I'm her MOTHER."

"I don't need permission to see my own daughter."

"I know what she needs, I'll just drop it off, give her a hug and leave."

"I don't need to see her, I just want to see the baby."

UHM, NOOOOOOOOO.

Your daughter is almost 30.

She's been married for over half a decade.

She has a right to her space and her boundaries for her little nuclear family and YOU ARE CROSSING THEM by even THINKING that would be acceptable.

And the next day, my mother called LilSis and asked her about something she wanted to bring with her. LilSis made it clear that she didn't want anyone to come. When my mother didn't seem to get this, my brother in law texted her a kind "now isn't a good time" message and my mother felt "ganged up on".

She went into a tailspin.

"They don't like me."

"What did I ever do to them that they hate me so much?"

"I've been dissed and dismissed."

"They've cut me out of their lives."

And sooooooo many other thoughts along those lines.

There isn't even enough space here to describe all the insane things she did as a response to this "rejection" she was experiencing.

She was 100000000000% projecting her own thoughts, expectations, and experiences with her own c-section onto LilSis and the whole situation was absurd.

Then LittleBean ended up back in the hospital because of some complications and LilSis and her husband still wanted space.

Now, what MotherLivelyHeart doesn't know, because I will never tell her, is that I saw LittleBean before she did.

Because I'm actually supportive and respectful of boundaries, when they got home LilSis and her husband allowed me to come by and drop stuff off, and run some errands for them (while they were still keeping overbearing MotherLivelyHeart at arms length). So I met LittleBean like 3 or 4 times. And the babes is absolutely precious. <3

LilSis and her husband finally let MotherLivelyHeart over this past week to meet LittleBean and help out and it's like a switch was flipped. Suddenly everything for MotherLivelyHeart is sunshine and rainbows and I legit can't handle the mood swings.

But I digress....

One night last week I drove around and cried and screamed for an hour.

It absolutely sucks when you have no one to talk to.

Which brings me to the next part of my life update:

I finally spoke to a therapist.

So, I thought I was ghosted by the therapist I wanted to speak to. It took a few days, but he finally responded there was an issue with his online scheduler and he needed me to reschedule.

Fine, whatever.

I rescheduled for two weeks from that date (which had already been rescheduled from two weeks prior). So, now it's been a month and a half.

Fine, whatever.

Well, my meeting with him ended up being earlier this week. As it turns out, this therapist I wanted to speak to isn't taking on new clients at the moment, so he was acting more as triage for his practice and had a 15 minute zoom call with me before picking a therapist from his practice he thought I'd connect with.

So the next night I had an hour and a half zoom call with her and she's absolutely lovely and has experience working with children and adults who have experienced similar situations to the one I'm in.

For $120 I had my thought processes and experiences validated.

But that's pretty much it.

She told me I sound pretty level headed and understand what's healthy and what's not healthy in my life and in my past (which is one of the problems with being an overthinker, overanalyzer, and having done extensive research to try and figure out WTF is wrong with me), and she told me there are some exercises to try and reduce stress because it's clear that I'm overstressed and have been since I was a child, and even possibly since birth.

But these are all things I knew already. These are all things I've validated for myself. Yes, it's nice to hear a specialist say the same things, but for $120!?

I literally had to use unemployment money to pay for that. Unemployment that I'm going to have to end pretty soon.

How on EARTH am I supposed to be able to afford continued therapy when it costs so bloody much!?

It's absolutely awful that the people who need therapy the most are the ones who can't afford it.

And I found an organization that claims to help anyone who asks without needing an explanation, so I messaged them a brief "my life is a mess and I need to talk to a therapist. I found someone I think I can connect with, but it costs $120." and they sent me $10.

They said they help anyone who asks without an explanation.

I gave a valid explanation with a specific amount requested.

And they sent me $10.

It just so often feels like I'm banging my head against a wall.

Like I'm a joke to Hashem.

This random organization was like a beacon in the dark. A sign from Hashem that if I reach out for help, I can receive it.

He put this organization into my path and awareness just at the time that I needed it.

All so that He could mock me.

OF COURSE the therapy practice I chose doesn't take insurance.

Not that it would help, because my OBAMAdoesntCARE has been PENDING SINCE OCTOBER.

So OF COURSE I have to pay out of pocket.

And OF COURSE it costs so damn much.

And OF COURSE when I reach out for help I get laughed at.

What did they think I was supposed to do with the $10?

That's literally 1/12 of what I needed.

Even the Torah has us give more than that in maaser.

I legitimately don't understand.

Where do I have to go and what do I have to do to get a sugar daddy to pay for this so I can get my goddamn life in order!?

I'm literally drowning out here and God is throwing me half-deflated pool floaties.

On the bright side, I keep making amazing non-Jewish internet friends.

Do you know how much that sucks?

That I'm literally getting more support from non-Jewish internet friends that live halfway across the world than I am from my own community?

And it sucks even more to know that Hashem put those people into my path too!!

He literally keeps giving me things that He knows will make me feel worse because they make me feel better but also disconnected from the Jewish community, and not giving me things that would make me feel better and closer to Him and the Jewish community.

What am I supposed to do with that knowledge!?

I've often wondered if maybe I just wasn't meant to be Jewish. Like maybe there was some mistake and my mother isn't really Jewish and therefore I'm not Jewish and this is Hashem's way of telling me that I just need to separate myself from the Jewish world and go seek a secular life because that's truly who I'm supposed to be.

Except that my parents were married by a really chashuv community rav who did his research and would not have married my parents if there'd been even one safek as to her Jewishness.

And so, I'm stuck.

I'm stuck feeling constantly disconnected from the community that's supposed to be my rock and support. By the God who's supposed to be merciful and kind.

It's exhausting.

Are you out there? Do you feel the same? Are you a BT or ger or someone else who has lived both lives and can explain to me why yiddishkeit is better?

I have too much Jewish guilt to walk away from any of this, but I have too much mental stress to keep striving to be a part of it.

It's utterly exhausting to be stuck in the middle.

I hope you're doing better than I am.

-LivelyHeart

#jumblr #frumblr #orthodox #shidduch #dating #jewishdating #jewish dating #jewish #frum #shadchan #shadchanim #shidduchim

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ahiddenpath · 4 years ago

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hey hidden. I hope this question isn't weird but your job is very cool to me, so I was wondering: what exactly did you need for education to get into it, and what's it like for you?

Are- Are you- Are you asking me to nerd out?

THE NERDING WILL COMMENCE BELOW THE CUT!

EDIT: Trigger warning for discussion of cancer treatments/research.

SO I am a molecular biologist. I am currently researching immunotherapies for a biotech company.

One thing I should emphasize is that this stuff takes an enormous team working together for years. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m, like... Personally producing cancer medicines. I’m part of a team of about 400 people, working together with 20 ish years of data produced by our company and the companies we partner with. And my boss tells me what I’m going to work on! I design the experiment, run the experiment, and consider the data from there, but I’m not the “mastermind” for anything. It’s usually the upper level career scientists with pHDs doing that.

Another disclaimer is that, sadly, we as humans aren’t at the “defeat cancer forever” stage. Like, it’s not... near. The best defense continues to be frequent screening so it can be caught and treated early (which is bad news in the states, where people can’t afford the screening because we don’t have universal health care, or they can afford it but don’t go because they have three part time jobs, none of which give benefits- But I digress).

Oh! And one more thing I want to tell all future science dorks, something I was super lucky to learn at age 19: follow the money.

When I was 19, I was culturing and chemically processing algae, then assessing the data. My company at the time wanted to create biodiesel from algae, and my whole world was rocked when they told me: WE ALREADY CAN MAKE VIABLE FUEL FROM ALGAE. The problem is that it costs about $4.50 per gallon, so it can’t compete with normal diesel (at the time, this was like 12 years ago).

So what they wanted was algae that had the correct chemical profile for use in biodiesel, that could also be grown at tropical temperatures. Why? Because the algae was to be grown in sugar cane processing centers, where it’s tropical, and most of the production costs came from cooling the incubators and instruments that would grow the algae. So they needed algae that could make diesel, but also grow in hot weather, which apparently isn’t common.

ALWAYS FOLLOW THE MONEY! It’s often not even about “can we do it,” but “can we do it at x cost, considering conditions hundreds of miles away.” Crazy!

Ah, but you asked how to get into biotech! It’s not that hard, thankfully! I have a BS in biology. I made sure to get good grades and all of that, and if you’re serious about biotech, you want to take classes in things like immunology, virology, any science class that can return to human health and biotech. I will say that, while I’ve always naturally excelled at biology, I had to take more chemistry than bio! Plus, you need math and physics...

But here’s my best advice for biotech-interested young people:

-If you’re looking at universities while in high school, PLEASE check out what AP classes will get you out of undergrad labs. The WORST PART about being a science kid is the labs. For example, every bio and chem class has a lab. The class itself usually consists of three 50 minute lectures (150 min/week), and you get 3 credits. The lab is 170 min per week, and you only get 1 credit. If you don’t place out of some classes with labs attached with AP credit, YOUR ASS WILL BE SITTING IN LABS FOR AT LEAST 340 MINUTES A WEEK! AND YOU ONLY GET 2 CREDITS FOR THAT!!!! It’s utter bullshit.

So, if you’re in high school and really serious about pursuing a science degree, check out which AP scores get you out of labs at your favorite universities, and really commit to getting 5s in those.

I was able to place out of 3 labs this way, and it played an enormous role in maintaining my sanity.

-Everyone in biotech knows EVERYONE in biotech. It’s absolutely astounding. But it’s a small field, centered around a few hot spots, and lots of these people have been at it for 40+ years.

Here are some of the hot spots in America (you might have to live in one of these areas to find biotech jobs, so be sure you’re down for that).

Anyway, like I said, I worked as an undergrad at a biotech. I was so fortunate, because they paid me, I was already doing actual-factual research, and I got to know people. And when I graduated, people went, “Oh you worked for Bob? Let me give him a call.” And then they did. And then Bob said, “Oh yeah, she’s a hard worker, hire her.”

SO you need to make connections ASAP, and strive to show people your hard-working, curious, problem-solving, good-attitude-having self. Sadly, there’s an element of luck there, for sure. But you need to be ready to try to work in professional labs in college, which means juggling your difficult courses and school labs with work. Hooray!

...Did I say this wasn’t hard? I’m full of shit, aren’t I. Looking back, all I can see is how lucky I was, and how I “only” needed a 4 year degree, but... It really takes a lot to get here.

As for what it’s like...

I love it, it’s great, but like any job, it... Well, it’s rough.

Here’s what I think you need to thrive in biotech, assuming you’re not put off by the stuff I’ve already covered:

-Organization, time management, and focus. Honestly, being a lab researcher isn’t about being smart, it’s about juggling a lot of things simultaneously. Lots of folks describe the job as “hurry up and wait,” because you rush to mix the experimental ingredients together so they can incubate for two hours before you do the next step. And while that’s incubating, you do x, which has a few 15 minute incubations. In those 15 minutes, you generate graphs with yesterday’s data, make records for you lab notebook, order items for next week’s experiment, print labels, or... Any number of things. There are ALWAYS tons of balls in the air, so organization and time management are 90% of the job.

And you need to focus, because most of the time it looks like you’re adding a single droplet of water to other droplets of water. Almost everything you work with is a clear liquid, so you can’t go spacing out and forgetting what you’ve already added to the mix.

A typical day is to arrive at work, sit down for a while to plan out how to best use the incubation times to do other things, head into the lab, hope for incubation periods for toilet/water/food breaks, and scramble to get data processing in there somewhere. Deadlines are usually tight, because it’s always a race to patent a medicine before one of the other 5,000 companies trying to do it can. We all work from the shared published scientific knowledge, so there’s no... Developing something in secret.

I’d say my job is challenging, but rewarding, especially as we come closer to generating medicines for what we call “patients with unmet needs.” Remember how I said “follow the money?” Sadly, often, um... Okay I’m gonna do a really quick and loose explanation. People have different versions of the same genes, right? And sometimes, there are “cancer” genes- this is a really sloppy explanation, sorry. So medicines get created for the most common mutated cancer gene first. So say 70% of cancer patients have this mutated gene, 20% have that mutated gene, and 10% have a third mutated gene. Guess who gets medicine made for them first?

If you guessed the largest group, you’re right! The trouble is that big companies will then move on to the largest group for another cancer/gene group, leaving people with more rare genetic issues without treatment options beyond chemo, which many elderly or immunocompromised patients simply can’t tolerate.

My company specifically aims to help these people with no help in sight. On the one hand, follow the money- we are doing it because we will have a market, and we can’t compete with big companies yet. On the other, we are helping people who have no options. I’m so grateful to use my gifts (organization, planning, focus, problem solving, and natural curiosity) to play a small, small role in hopefully helping people. It means something to me.

On the other hand, it can be a grind, no lie. And any high-pressure job will have colleagues who are also under pressure, and might lash out or try to throw other people under the bus when problems arise. A certain level of emotional maturity and strength is required, and frankly, I needed therapy to get there.

Also, if you’re a female-presenting human, some people will give you shit in biotech. Luckily, I’ve only ever had one coworker be blatantly sexist and ask me (multiple times) if I was sure I belonged here. Unfortunately, you’re more likely to see more discrete sexism, like folks asking you to organize parties for pregnant or engaged coworkers because “you seem like you’d be good at it,” ie “you’re female and I am throwing social tasks at you so I can focus on my science, which you also have to do.” I’ve had a lot of coworkers try so hard to corner me into doing emotional work for them. But... Honestly, most of this is just existing as a woman, and isn’t specific to biotech.

So yeah! You’re gonna have to work hard, but if you have an interest in science, great organization skills, and want to play a little role in helping people who are suffering in a way that doesn’t involve direct social interaction with the hurting people... It’s great!

Sorry for the absolute wall of text, I hope this helps! I’m always happy to talk about this, so please ask away if you’d like. Thanks for the ask!

#Anonymous #ask hidden #career stuff #biotech

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hmajorgirl · 5 years ago

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so here I am for old times sake. it’s been 5 years and a lot has changed. but i’m kinda still the same. maybe my inner monologue doesn’t sound as self-assured as it did when I was 15. maybe i don’t romanticise the shit out of every 2 second eye contact i make with cute strangers. maybe i don’t grammar well anymore because i think it’s a cute look. Oh wow. so much of the world has changed. facial recognition, instagram shops, the pandemic... so many new songs i play on repeat until i’m sick of them. i’m a lot less motivated than i was before, and i’m ashamed to admit that. i have smile lines. i feel more and more defeated everyday (actually, we’re trying to work on this). but yh the sad emo vibes never quite dissipated like i dreamed they would, i felt so betrayed by the order of things and the way of the world that i lost a lot of hope. gave up on myself (a bit... a lot sometimes). but other times, it’s gucci. i feel like i’m definitely more cringe than cheesy now. not sure if that’s a good thing, pretty sure it’s not.

hmm. what hasn’t changed? still unfortunately in love with love, but i can mostly see the difference between real life and the cute shit that happens in my head. i’m learning to have faith, to trust. to start living life and exist in the same dimension as other people because even though it sucks, it’s better than existing alone in your head. i realised that studying will only get you a quarter of the way to things and unfortunately stopped that shit. it wasn’t a good idea because i didn’t pick anything else up. i’m still writing songs. still singing them badly. BUT my singing has improved marginally:) i still love my parents, family is all good (touch wood). still a bit too impressionable but we’re working on building a stronger willpower and independence. still love taylor swift. still want to run away to the creative industry. still want to runaway sometimes (in general). I still write! sometimes. wow, i guess some things really just don’t change.

The good? Hmm my eyes have been opened to the multi-dimensions of wealth and inequality and cultural differences that exist in the world. I am thankful for that and didn’t know that money could buy so much. but simultaneously feel disheartened that the discrepancy is so large between people at birth. inequity is real and idk how i feel about that because i really believed in the natural justice system. and then I was so caught up in these feelings of betrayal and injustice that i forgot that i am lucky enough to have the opportunity to change things. I forgot about it for 5 years and now it feels like it’s too late. i know it’s not.

that was a digression.

the good. okay. hmm discovered korean dramas and the mastery that is cinema and how it evokes emotions through stories and idk that’s just a piece of my soul coming together. i work out occasionally. sadly i stopped dance but i’m vowing to sign up for classes once i have the money. i got a spotify membership and spend my days making playlists for myself and it’s one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I really hate how my inner core is so soft and romantic, it’s not fit for the capitalist society that we’re living under. i have friends, i like them, they like me. there is a guy, maybe. there were a few guys actually. i’m not sure how long this one is going to be around for GAHHH omg imagine if i re-read this in five years time and i’m laughing at myself because he screwed me over so bad idk. i have bad self-esteem issues. i am kinda joking, kinda not. okay, i like him but let’s move onto another topic. i’m trying my best to adult and be honest with my feelings and approach things with feigned maturity to mask my pre-teen thoughts. let’s leave it at that:)

i remember that taylor said that the lucky one was the hardest song to write for the red album. because it was solely about her and her life. no guys (apart from the second verse but okay that’s not central to the song). it’s the same for me. i don’t want to talk about the direction of my professional life because it scares me more than messing my life up romantically. for now, i’m beginning to see the role of passion and interest in work and it’s importance. I’m trying my best to walk towards that direction because i know that ultimately i want a career that I would love to work overtime for. but i’m still trying to balance the scales between what i want and the confinements of reality. i need to make money. sometimes it feels like an either or kind of situation and i don’t know what to do. but maybe this is just standard 20 year old thoughts. okay but we have 2 months left of uni so i’m going back to studying. i hope that when i look back on this i would have a 2:1 bachelors (but let’s be honest we want a first)

some final thoughts for 25 year old me because why not make your tumblr a time-capsule? dodie-style.

what are you listening to right now? I’m listening to 21 by gracie. Are you seeing anyone? Honestly, I don’t see you in a steady relationship because i feel like your self-esteem will get in the way of things - either that or you get your shit together and focus on your career too much. I hope it’s the latter. I hope family is all well and healthy. call them. right now, if you’re not living with them. DEAR GOD PLS don’t still be living with them. OH GOD DO YOU HAVE YOUR OWN FLAT/HOUSE?? where are you by the way? london? what are you doing right now career-wise? how’s it going? is it what you want to do? does it fit in with your life plan? please tell me you have a life plan by now. i hope i’m proud of you. i hope you’re working hard. how are you? really? are you rich enough to afford therapy and weekly spin/pilates sessions? what’s up with your social circle? are you still writing? ARE THERE DRONES EVERYwhere? How’s chloe? Elizabeth? Jason? Update me, what happened with the guy - i want to hear a story. do you cook now? did you manage to turn your personality type from a 2/9 enneagram to a 3? bitch we gonna work on this. do you still write songs? can you sing? you don’t have kids right lmao pls no god help us. what’s your yearly salary post-tax? did you start dancing again? did you start to learn piano again? what happened with the pandemic? how long were you quarantined for? do you still make spotify playlists haha? what tv series are you currently binging? do you hate me? please tell me your still blogging ur life on ur private instagram. how many followers do you have now? who are you having conversations right now with on facebook? what are your colleagues like? are you less people orientated now that you’ve realised that they cannot provide you with the love that you are depriving yourself of from yourself? DO YOU READ? are you the perfect health-freak, ig-girl, smart business woman, go-getter in her white suit at the glass media company that you dreamed about being at those dark spin sessions? GOD IMAGINE. I hope you are but i don’t have faith right now. pls tell me you don’t teach (or you teach and ur salary is insane in a good way). are you a journalist? you didn’t go into consulting right? did you study again after uni? are you the screenwriter that you’ve dreamed about? did your poetry account blow up and now you’re a full time poet? I still kinda hope you work at a nice glass office (brand consulting, advertising, media, journalism) and wear cute coords suits to work. and i hope you’re writing on the side because it’s who you are. I hope you’re reading lots and I hope you’re super smart and switched on. I hope you’re memory has improved a lot. I hope you’re in love, I hope he loves you back and I hope you know that too. I hope you have a great and healthy relationship with your parents and see your extended family and grandparents often. I hope everyone is healthy and I hope you took your parents to duck and waffle like you wanted (don’t do it when you’re poor though). I hope you’re taking care of your health and eating well. I hope you’re still dreaming in a realistic way. I hope you have great mentors and a supportive friend group. I hope you’re living your best life. re-read the defining decade. but i hope you don’t reminisce to much anymore and don’t write too many songs because you’re 25, time to break out the novel shit. I hope you’ve travelled alot. I hope you spend a few more summers in china falling in love with life and yourself again. how is your chinese? are you still a romantic? tell me, have you changed, if at all? do you read the news? are you less cynical about yourself and more realistic or less optimistc about the world? I hope you are. contingencies are important.

are you excited for the future? I hope you are. if not, please change, you have time, all you need is faith and diligence. hope you’re holding up well. Me? at 20? I’m excited about what my 25 year old self is going to be like, like i was excited to see what my gcse results were going to be like. I hope the results are the same. work hard. i love you. hope you love yourself more. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. have faith. :) i can’t do much for you, but i hope i did a lot to get to where you are right now. hoping is useless, i’m going to work now.

take care x

#hmajorgirl

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sativaaaaaaa · 5 years ago

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Just Us Two || Sarah Paulson

Part One 🔽

15: "I'm so so sorry."

16: "This is all your fault!"

|Reader's name is Gina and the baby's name is Ava. Time skip : 2 years later||

Gina

These past two years have been eventful to say the least. I found out that my daughter ended up having non verbal Autism. To any other parent that would be heartbreaking or something hard to deal with but I've managed to balance her and my job. Well... the job I did have. I've had too many scares with Ava's asthma so I ultimately had to quit to take care of her full time.

It gets a little hard.. Dealing with her on my own. I mean, I have family and friends and they do the best they can but when the sun sets and its just me and her in the apartment, things just aren't the same.

Since I don't have a job I can't afford Ava's therapy sessions so today was her last session for a while, just until I got some more money. She was making great progress though; we found out that music was a really helpful tool in having her interact and it was helping her make sounds and let loose. So in honor of her progress we decided to go get ice cream.

Everything was going smoothly until we ran into someone...

Zarlengo's Italian Ice and Ice Cream

"What do you want princess? Do you want strawberry or fruit punch?" As I was asking Ava what she wanted I held up one finger for strawberry and two fingers or fruit punch. Since she doesn't speak I've found ways and tricks to use when she has to decide between two things.

She looked at me for a while before holding up two fingers. I smiled and her before placing a small kiss on her nose as we moved up in the line. Once I made it to the front of the line I began to place my order.

"Hi can I have one scoop of fruit punch Italian ice and one small Arctic Cooler with strawberry Italian ice?" I shifted Ava on my hip while grabbing a $10 bill out of my pocket.

The cashier rang us up and handed me my change before we stepped to the side. There was some music playing lightly which made Ava kick her feet in excitement. Another smile appeared on my face as I began to dance with her in my arms while playfully nudging her nose with mine.

She let out a laugh before placing her hands on my cheeks and kissing my forehead.

"Thank you Avacado. Mommy loves her avocado's kisses!" I softly cooed at her.

The bell at the door rung catching my attention. I glanced over my shoulder just curious to see who it was but was immediately shocked when I saw Sarah walk in with her new girlfriend, Holland Taylor.

I quickly whipped around and thankfully my number was called. I walked up to the counter and I grabbed Ava and I's Italian ice before retreating to the back of the parlor so Sarah wouldn't notice me.

Seeing her made a bunch of old feelings, good and bad, bubble to the surface. Ava was the only thing keeping me grounded at the moment so I just decided to enjoy my time with her instead of worrying about who was around me.

Soon we were done and I grabbed some baby wipes out of my purse and cleaned Ava before collecting our trash and standing up.

"Come on Avacado, its time to go home." I picked her up and placed a kiss on her cheek but as I started walking to the door Sarah looked over at me briefly making eye contact with me.

I cursed in my head seeing her walk over towards me. I wanted to bolt out of the door but I stood there with Ava in my arms as she got closer.

"Gina? Oh my goodness. Um, how are you?" She stammered over her words seeming a little nervous and a little shocked.

"I'm as good as I can be. How are you?" My voice lacked emotion and my stare was blank. I was trying really hard to keep my cool but memories of her leaving and me going through labor by myself kept flashing in my head making me upset. But I concealer my feelings for the sake of Ava; I didn't want to frighten her and make her have a behavioral episode.

"Umm I've been. I've been okay I supposed. Who's this little cutie?" Oh.. So she wanted to act dumb.

"This is Ava, my daughter. She's 2." I gently tickled Ava's side to get her attention. She squealed and tried to grab my hand which eased my anger some - but not all the way.

"Well hi Ava." Sarah gave her a little wave and Ava gave her the same before laying her head on my shoulder. Sarah looked confused for a second before glancing at me for an explanation on why Ava didn't speak.

"She had non verbal Autism. Today was her last day of therapy for a while." I muttered trying to keep my cool. Talking about her struggles always made me upset. Not at her but at the fact that everyone basically left me at the first sight of trouble; Sarah included.

"Oh my goodness. I'm so so sorry. Why was this her last therapy session? Shouldn't she been in therapy until she speaks or something?" Sarah rambled on in a low voice trying not to cause a scene or draw attention to us.

"I can't afford it. So we'll keep doing what we can at home until I come up on some money to pay for her sessions." I shifted on my feet realizing that my anger was slowly growing by the second. It almost bursted to the top because she touched me... She grabbed my arm and tried to soothe me. Like really?

I stepped back from her as soon as her fingers grazed my arms. My eyes held fire but I kept my voice calm as I looked her dead in the eye.

"Don't. Touch. Me."

"Gina don't be like that. I can explain everything." She bargained with me. She reached out to touch me again but I moved away before she could.

"There is no explanation in this world that could vindicate what you left me to endure by myself. You just left without a warning, blocked me on everything possible without a second thought. Your careless and selfish decision made our friends feel like that had to choose and guess who got chosen. Certainly wasn't me obviously because if it was I wouldn't be saving everything I could possibly get my hands in to provide for the child that you wanted and left me with and now I can barely provide for her because the person who vowed to have my back through thick and thin decided to leave me when life got a little too heavy hitting for her liking. There is nothing you can say or do to ever get me to forgive you. This is all your fault."

Hot tears were streaming down my face but my voice never wavered in volume or emotion. Her face read nothing but pure guilt. She had nothing else to say. She just stared down at her shoes leaving nothing but silence between us.

I scoffed and wiped my face with my free hand turning around and walking away from her and out of the parlor. I tried to hold my emotions in as Ava and I walked home but the tears just kept flowing but I wiped them every time they fell.

I had to be strong; for myself and for Ava. I was all we had. No one else had our backs. It was just us two......

___________________________

word count : 1314

|| Sorry if us this is a little trash. I just got off of work and decided to write this since I had a bit of energy left. But I digress. Avacado is Ava and avocado put together 𝒐𝒃𝒗𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒍𝒚, Zarlengo's is a real ice cream and Italian ice place where Im from so yeahhh. And an Arctic Cooler is half vanilla ice cream half flavored Italian Ice. Its really good guys 😭 But that is all for now. |

#sarah paulson x reader #sarah paulson #ahs #angst #heartache #children

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dearholly · 4 years ago

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Dear Me,

I know why you’re here and I’m not mad. I’m not disappointed. Read this and then go rest. And please be gentle on yourself.

We met at Macy's and immediately hit it off. I think it was a dark sense of humor and a fluency in sarcasm that first bonded us. She was amused and seemingly rapt by everything I had to say. When I eventually left Macy's for a work-at-home job listening to sales calls, I brought her with me. And because he was unemployed, her ex-boyfriend/roommate came with us as well.

They had dated in high school but had long since broken up although hey were still living together in her parent's house after his parents moved to Hawaii without him. I got to know him more when we started at our new positions. As a telecommuting job, here were a lot of opportunities for us to bond over instant messenger. He had a raw, vulnerable quality that drew me to him and I enjoyed how open and free I could be with him. He didn't seem to mind the darker parts of my humor and we bonded over a love of cars and photography.

The first tear in the fabric of everything is, I think, when I admitted to to my husband that I thought I had feelings for Her. He sexualized this confession and internalized it as permission for himself to be attracted to her, which in short turn he started to act on. In some ways, I knew that would happen but but I was terrified of my feelings. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, just that I wanted something else. Something more than what I had. On some level, I believe that I wanted her. But I let my fear and submissiveness get the better of me and chose to put my needs aside for what my husband wanted, which at the time seemed more manageable for me than having to deal with my own inner turmoil.

Throughout their entire flirtation in the beginning, she never came to me to tell me what was going on, or to question it. To this day, I don't even know if she asked my husband whether or not I knew. It might be the years that have since passed shading my opinions in this matter, but I don't believe she ever did ask him. I eventually did come to her to tell her what was going on, but I don't believe that I ever really trusted her again after that, despite our friendship continuing for another five years.

Years later, when I would say all of this out loud to a therapist, I would realize what a hard time I have accepting and advocating for my own feelings. Looking back now, I can tell you I was deeply hurt and extremely angry.

Which is probably what lead me to sleep with Him, her ex-boyfriend slash roommate, on the same night she first slept with my husband. And I did not afford her the same foreknowledge that I had.

But it wasn't all vindication. He and I had been getting very close. We worked together on a wedding I shot in Malibu. I'll never forget when we had some free time in between getting shots and we drove down to the beachier part of the beach to look for some locations to shoot the couple later. It was raining and the beach was empty, so he told me to take the car onto the sand, assuring me that it'd be fine. He was something of an expert on cars, after all. The front tires almost immediately sunk into the sand and we got stuck. As panic mounted in both of us, a friendly gentleman in a Nissan Xterra came by and offered assistance. With some pushing and revving, the car was unstuck. After our Samaritan drove off, He turned to me to apologize and wrapped his arms around me. There's something about being hugged by a person who is much taller than you. In that moment, I fell in love with him. His easy free affection was all it took.

And she had no clue about any of it because I did not do the courtesy of cluing her in. This is what is so dangerous about people who are not even aware of the emotions they're having.

Also, I knew that she would cock block. So the night that she came to my house to fuck my husband, I set up a little date with her ex boyfriend. I took him to a local bar, and explained what was happening with Her and my husband. And then I told him, "But I am here with you." Couldn't keep our hands off each other after that.

I didn't tell her until after the fact and I am positive that there was never a moment after that that she fully trusted me either. We cursed ourselves from the very beginning. And then made things truly awkward by attempting to have a four-way.

They say ignorance is bliss, but denial is true euphoria. And that is where we lived for the next 6 years. We changed our state abbreviation from CA to WA, but we lived in the same place, ignoring red flag after red flag. The chemistry was just bad. But we plundered ahead, all four of us. And when three of us lost our telecommuting jobs, it was Him that found us work again.

I hated the idea from the very beginning (red flag) but said nothing. I resented that he got her a job at the same place he'd gotten me a job and that she'd be starting the day after me, leaving me no time at all to have this one thing for myself. I knew even then that working and living with her would turn out to be a problem. And it did; when something bad happened at work, there was no escape from it at home. When something bad happened at home, there was no escape from it at work. Even though we were on opposite ends of the house, there was just no escaping it. When she was upset, there was a toxic cloud that hung over the whole house. It seeped into everything and was unescapable. It left no room for anyone else to take up any emotional space.

After a while, I stopped getting a period. But because I was living on Denial St, I ignored it for over a year. My doctors wholly admitted that they have no idea how this could have happened at such an early point in my life, but all of them speculated stress, both physical and mental. Prior to losing my period, I had lost a great deal of weight in a small time by over-exercising and under-eating. I was starving myself and then working myself to the point of exhaustion, and if this were the cause of my early menopause, I would not be surprised to find that out.

However, there was no space in my home to have any feelings about this. Because I was of a mind to never have children anyway, it was easy for most people to minimize how deeply it was affecting me, and ignore the active signs that it was doing so. And I never talked about. The feelings were too confusing, too mixed up, to talk about. I didn't understand them myself and there was no room to figure them out there.

A couple months after I got my menopause diagnosis, I started having regular panic attacks. She is the one who suggested I speak to a therapist. She's the one who recommended my first one, actually. And I am still glad that she did. My life really started to turn around at that point. I started in May of that year and by the end of the summer, I had finalized my divorce and moved into my own apartment. And later that year, I started anti depressants.

It is my belief that all of the improvements and growth in my life are what lead she and I to have our initial falling out that next Spring. Through therapy, and medication, and meditation, and all the other ways in which I was working on improving myself, I did eventually grow strong. And so did my boundaries. I started saying "No." more and "Sorry" less. And I stopped accepting unnecessary bullshit that was launched in my direction.

Especially when it is in a shared space in which professionalism is mandatory. After a five month hiatus from the office in which she recovered from an exploding kidney, I invited her to help me train a batch of new hires. During which, at some point, I explained something to one of them which was news to her. She started raising her voice in frustration, demanding to know why she was never told anything, and in general being extremely negative. To be clear, this type of behavior was just something she did. And it always bothered me - something that should be of little to no consequence to her personally, blown up in decibels and f-bombs. Like her brother dating someone she didn't approve of. Or her roommate's cousin marrying someone she didn't approve of. Or her cousin dating someone she didn't approve of. Or her aunts doing or saying something she didn't approve of. I often thought about buying her a robe and gavel for how judgmental and salty she could be to the people she supposedly loved. But I digress....

I am a deeply private person. So in that moment in our office, I was completely mortified. Here are these strangers I am trying to set a good example for, and here she comes with her Debbie Downer bullshit. I shut the conversation down as fast as I could by leaving it immediately. But later I sent a text explaining why that was over the line and why I was upset. A day later, I received some half assed apology about how she felt she was being left behind at work, and that somehow justified the disrespect. Like it was acceptable behavior because she was in pain.

I didn't respond. For one, because I was knee deep (literally) in dog fur, trying to shave my Maltese mutt. And for another, I thought that what needed to be said had been said. Her response didn't change mine. And so the next day, I went to her apartment as I did every Monday to do my laundry. As I was putting the laundry into the washing machine, I heard her bedroom door open. Before I could even look up from my dirty jeans and towels, I hear "Oh... Hi." and I turn just in time to see a flash of red hair whipping behind a slamming door.

At that point, I start to have a panic attack, assuming the slammed door was for me and my face. But I breathe through it and decide its best left aone. She's still upset and I don't have the bandwidth to find out why. I'm done volunteering for whatever that is. At work, I try to be cordial. With Him, I try to maintain boundaries and I tell him nothing that happens between she and I.

A few days go by. One night, I go pick him up and we have dinner at a diner down the street from his place. He's visibly upset, and he's using that soft whispery tone that usually precedes a fucking nightmare. Over my country fried chicken, I ask him what's wrong. He asks why I am ignoring her. I tell him I am not. And that after having a door slammed at me, I'm giving whatever she is dealing with a wide berth. He convinces me to reach out to her to try and resolve the issue.

So I try to do that. But I'm annoyed and I say entirely the wrong thing, from the very start. I tell her "Stop telling people I'm ignoring you." Rather than "I am not ignoring you, Friend. Rather trying to give you space to deal with whatever it is you're dealing with because I don't understand it"... which eventually I do say, but it's too late. My tone is too incendiary. I'm too angry now. And I no longer feel as if this is anything worth saving anymore. She feels the same way. So she tells me we can no longer be friends. I'm hurt that she said that, but more disappointed that she said it first, and I accept that this is the way things will be. I block her on every social media platform we have in common.

Things are instantly strained between He and I. I ask him repeatedly not to get involved because I will be the one accused of it. But he can't help himself from being upset because she's upset. They have no boundaries at all between them. I tell him I need a break from him. He accuses me of "dropping him" the same way I "dropped Her" And so we break up.

For about 2 months. And then one night, I happen to get a late bus out of Seattle and sit across from him. He was coming from work. And I was coming from a bar. Were it not for the tequila, I probably would never have moved next to him. We made very little conversation all the way to our bus stop. I don't remember what I said. Probably just that I missed him and that I wish things had been different. We started talking again after that. And things were better, for a time. Between he and I, anyways.

What happened then between she and I is what sealed our friendship to the annals of history forever...

One night, while late in bed, I get an email notification from tumblr telling me I had a new follower. And its Her. Through several name/address changes, on the one platform I did not think to block her from, there she was following me. Looking down on that message as it glowed up at me from under the covers, witnessing the little smirk in her user avatar, I started to shake. The blog I thought I had made for myself, similar to this one, where I had the space to ruminate and collect thoughts, had been violated and invaded. Like every other aspect of my life, by her.

I did not react well to this discovery. At first, I made several passive aggressive posts directed at her and then deleted each one. And then I went directly to her, asking her to stop as I didn't think it was appropriate for her to be following me. Her response was to laugh at me, and mock something I had said in one of the passive aggressive and deleted posts I made. I'm not ashamed to admit that my reaction was explosive. I hurled every shitty thing I could think of to say inside one sentence and then deleted the entire messaging system we were using to communicate (which at the time was Slack). Later, when I apologized for my terrible reaction, she doubled down on the insults and called me a hypocrite for expecting that there be boundaries between myself and the person who said they never wanted to speak to me again. And so a final decision was made that this was not worth saving. So I blew it up over two lengthy emails.

I don't even remember what I said. And I don't want to. I suspect my brain is protecting me like a heat shield protects a satellite that is being hurled back to earth. I do remember what she said, which is that I proved her therapists right and that I had always been a bad person. I remember this because my therapist had lead me to the same conclusion about herself. Funny how even in our friendship death, we still have things in common.

A day or two after she followed me on tumblr, I updated the configuration of my blog that said no one could access via the app that wasn’t one of my followers, essentially ensuring that whoever was going to visit my site was going to do so in broad daylight. And then I installed a counter that tracked IP addresses of visitors who came to my blog. For months, she continued to check on it. It was like she couldn’t help it. She was clearly sick. So to test the lengths to which she would go to find it, I changed the name once again and sent Him a link to a post. Lo and behold one week later, there is the entry from his phone visiting. And then a few days later another, closely followed by Her IP again. Tumblr would be the first of many spaces that she colonized and evicted me from. It's not a coincidence that I struggled to find a voice after that or that I have not been able to write with anything approaching ease in the last few years.

I didn't see her or talk to her for months. She had stopped coming into the office. I stopped hearing sirens in my head when I saw her name, so I unblocked her on social media. After all, we still share friends and having gotten what I wanted all along (space), my anger had evaporated.

But according to my boss, she still used the fact that we no longer got along as an excuse to work from home. As if I had been the one shouting at her in the office, as if I had caused a hostile work place. It's no small coincidence, in my mind, that I was let go by our boss very shortly after she returned to the office regularly. I can't prove it, but I believe she contributed to it. And unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last time she actively set out to hurt me.

When I lost my job, I lost my insurance and therefore, access to my therapist. And I had to start rationing my anti-depressants. I fell into the deepest darkest depression of my life. And it did not help that this was all in the dead of winter, when the sun barely came out long enough for me to see it and run outside. Through the rest of December and January, I submitted dozens of applications and copies of my resume. Finally, at the end of January when I had had to start cutting each of my Lexapro's in half to get by, I got a call for an interview for a company in New York. They hired me almost immediately, and before I knew it I was being sent to New York to be trained. It was right around the same time that I found out the remaining members of the team I had hired at my previous job, Her and several others had been let go unexpectedly. I'd love to say that there was no part of me that received any amount of pleasure upon hearing that, but I'd be lying. I definitely gloated. It felt good to know that things were going wrong for them, for her, when things had just started to go right for me after they messed them up so poorly. In all of my self righteousness I opined to a mutual friend about how bleak Her household must be because I believed it probably was. It sucks to lose one's job and I would know all about that. That mutual friend, knowing that I had a relationship with Him at this time, mistook my opinion as though I had heard it was bleak in the household directly from Him. So the next time our mutual friend spoke with Her, our mutual friend voiced some concerns about the state of how things were going for the two of them. Her spoke to Him later, demanding to know why He is telling me in particular that things in their house are not fine. Which leads him to send a group chat message...

It's 7AM EST early February and I'm in the Best Western of Troy, New York reading my text messages. He has sent one to our entire friend group, demanding that if any of us are speaking about him to stop it immediately; leave him out of all conversation - She is upset that there has been any talk at all. I tell him that request is impossible as we're all friends who care about each other and I refuse to be isolated in any way from any of them. Meanwhile, sirens are going off in my head. I hear my mother's voice, warning me about domestic abusers who isolate their victims from their friends to perpetuate their abuse. I silence it. After all, I still live on the corner of Denial St and The-Dick- Is-Big Ave.

Eventually, a one-on-one conversation is started between He and I. He insinuates that it is the group chat itself that is the issue, because she is not allowed to be in it. I tell him I think it's valid that she is not in it as I am, and I want her to remain firmly out of my space. Which is a mutual feeling between the two of us, or so I thought. And anyway, I tell him, it's her that has me blocked on every social media platform we had in common.

It's at this point he calls me a liar. And it's at this point the story should have ended but I still have a severe lack of love for myself, no therapeutic support, am low on my anti depressants, and completely isolated in New York for the next two weeks.

He tells me he has her search for me on Facebook and Instagram and she finds nothing, which proves that it is I that have her blocked therefore I it is me doing the lying. Which, anyone who knows anything about social media will tell you, this is expected behavior if you have someone blocked. But he hardly ever engages with social media, let alone take the time to understand it, so this is lost on him.

I'm immediately triggered. I have to leave the office where I'm being trained for my new job and walk back to my hotel to catch my breath before I vomit up the coffee and cake that our sales manager brought as a welcome gift. The words "At this point, yeah I do think you're lying." keep swimming back up to me from a little grey bubble. I call him and scream into his voicemail. "...I do think you're lying to me," ... My hands practically vibrating, I take a screen recording of all of my blocked lists and send it to him. "...you're lying to me..." I black out for a moment, thoughts of my mothers fists raining down on me as I'm being called a liar in the backseat of her car. I sob into my hotel pillow. I feel broken.

But it’s the middle of the day, I’ve had this job for all of two days and I cannot be having a massive freak out this early on. I take one of my precious remaining Ativan and try to breathe. Eventually, I calm myself. In a sick twist, I end up apologizing to him for screaming and overreacting. I open myself up further and explain to him why being called a liar is a trigger for me. This was a pattern with us; The only way he ever had compassion for me when we argued (and sometimes when we weren't) was when I spelled out exactly what I was going through. I thought if I was honest about my feelings with him, he would treat me with more dignity. But as a matter of fact, it turned out when I was crying on his shoulder, he felt as if I was manipulating him. He told me that once when I called him, sad because someone I had a crush on had started dating someone else. I was never sure what I was supposedly manipulating him to do. Spend time with me? Show concern for me? But despite that, I take a huge risk, expose my jugular to him again and beg for him to understand where I am coming from.

He apologizes. He comes over and we have a quiet talk. For a very short time, things go back to whatever normal is to us. We're communicating a little more and I think we're being more honest. But things aren't the same. We're still very vulnerable. I never knew if he sensed that or not. I'd like to believe that if he did, his behavior would have been different. But his behavior remained rough, and careless.

A little over a month after I returned from New York, he had invited me to his house while she was away. The entire experience was unnerving. For one, the apartment felt cold and dark. It was not very inviting. For another, He was relegated to sleeping on a roll up mat on the floor while She had a bed and a closing door with a closet and a window. This really bothered me. I thought there would be more of a separation, or a at least a clear division of space. A boundary. I look desperately for boundaries, but there were none. Her makeup vanity was directly behind his work desk and above the space he used to sleep in. And there was no trace of me there at all. But of course there wouldn't be. She wouldn't allow it. And he never cared enough about me to change that in any sense. So I started to really see for the first time that our relationship was just sex for him. I couldn't see clearly that we even had a friendship anymore and this really bothered me.

I wanted to talk to him about it, and I asked him if we could. I'm not even sure what I wanted to say, but I just needed reassurance that he was still friends with me. That he still liked me. That he was, even though he was far away, still somewhat in my corner. I was feeling anxious, I was low on my medicine, with no therapist, working 12 hour days and still broke from being unemployed for months. I just wanted to talk and have him reassure me that at the very least, he was there for me and would be there for me. He agreed to that and we scheduled a time to talk, because at that point he was extremely busy with work and trying to balance everything, as was I. The afternoon we had worked out to talk comes and goes, and I don't hear from him. I message him and I express annoyance because we had plans, but he tells me that he had an outing with Her, and it went long. And then he expresses annoyance at me for being annoyed at him. He goes on the defensive. I completely unravel over a string of messages, which of course are poorly timed and one right after the other, which I know he hates. He engages his favorite tactic which is to leave the conversation entirely, tell me he's not speaking to me for a while, and then come back at his whim. He does this over a few days. He responds to each of my texts individually, escalating in each response until he's screaming at me in all caps and has worked himself back into the rage which makes him walk away.

I'm at the point where I'm looking at this pile of garbage relationship which has twice in the past two months shoved me into two of the worst, most ill-timed panic attacks I've ever had - and finally I hear my therapist's voice ring back to me as clear as a bell: He will never leave her, and he will never choose you. Everything that my denial had been holding at bay like a sweet little naïve raincloud crashed down all at once around me with the force of a tornado. It was the way there was never any compassion or kindness shown to me at the worst time of my life. It was the way he called me a liar and a manipulator when I was trying to include him in my deepest most personal feelings and experiences. It was the way he never noticed that I was blowing up my life with alcohol or that I was deeply depressed. It was the way he lied over and over again, telling me that he cared about me and then turning around to demonstrate why that wasn't actually true. It was the way I had to bend over backwards to accommodate his feelings, while there was never any room for mine.

And so, as anticlimactically as it began, our relationship finally ended. I don't even remember what the final blow was, or what I said in response. No doubt something shaky and angry and ugly. But I have never regretted it. For as ugly as I know it probably was, I do not regret it. My life, my health both mental and physical, has improved exponentially since that day in late April.

But if there is a hopeful epilogue to the story, it would pick up six months later when I had settled into my new place in the city, to be closer to work. I started to feel those pangs again. Those little flighty feathery feelings that can be so strong they echo across decades with such intensity that you can almost physically feel their presence inside your skin where they hibernate. It was the same feeling that made me sit down next to him on the bus all that time ago. I missed him. In spite of everything that happened, everything I learned, and went through, I did. But it wasn't until I started to feel as though I missed Her too that I knew I had to get back into therapy. A queer friend of mine who had been struggling through their own relationship issues, suggested a co-op place in Seattle they'd been using which was geared specifically to women and those who identify as such. Signing up with them was probably the best decision I'd end up making in my 30's. The therapist I was paired with was understanding, validating, and I never sensed once that she was bored with anything I had to say. She equipped me with the best tools to deal with my feelings, she taught that it's okay to love and protect myself through setting and maintaining healthy boundaries. And the best part about her is that she herself maintained extremely healthy boundaries. I never knew more about her than I needed to know. Yet I felt like I connected with her on a very deep level. And through talking to her, working with her, I was able to fully understand and appreciate what I had just been through, and how to exercise compassion for myself when I would find myself in situations where I would start reliving all of that trauma. Because of her, I found myself again. Or maybe I found myself for the first time. She helped me understand the feelings I'd been having for years but hadn't had the space or emotional support to explore. She helped me put a name to a feeling I’d had since childhood but never knew there was a word for. Not long after I started working with her, I came out as non-binary. Through our work, I found a deep well of love for myself that allows me to firmly (but with patience and love) define and protect my boundaries, and still have enough energy left over show interest, compassion and love for others in their journeys. And I stopped trying to avoid feeling like shit through drinking. Literally, everything became better a result of my therapist's influence on me.

But try as I might, there are some days in the year where my mind wanders back to the grey north where I tried to make a home. When I can almost hear the drizzle of rain in Occidental Park as I cried my eyes out there over something He said. In my mind's eye, I turn away, but the neighborhood is haunted with these types of traumas for me. Nowhere is safe, my mind panics, and I get turned around in the horrid memories; screaming at each other on 1st Avenue outside E Smith, sobbing so hard on 2nd that a stranger asked me if I was okay, countless arguments in the park that followed us to the bus stop and back to our home. Eventually, my mind grows desperate for answers, and it carries me back in time... all the way back to 2010 at Macy's when it began, and the loop starts again.

Which brings me to today. I've lost count of how many times we've been down this road. But I know grief is hard. And so is recovery. One of the ways in which I see to my recovery now is to write more. I don't usually publish what I write because it's just for me and I still have a lot of residual anxiety about posting anything personal online. Another reason is that my writing is so fluid that publishing it seems too final. Like... what if I change my mind about that way I've structured a sentence? What if I think of a better way to phrase that feeling? What if I change my mind entirely about the thing that I've written about? ...Why use a period if I could use a comma?

But I'm publishing this note anyway. For you, future Holly. Because you need this to be over. And because whenever we get into this rut, the only thing we seem to be able to do to stop ourselves from missing them and reminiscing about the good times is to walk ourselves through the trauma that they ended up causing. Which is effective in getting the sad feelings to stop, but you know is burning you alive on the inside. And so I'm writing this note to tell you (future me) that we don't have to do that anymore. You can set these thoughts and feelings down in language and writing, and be done. You can publish them, and move on. You can walk away. Put a period on the end of the sentence and close the book.

But if you ever feel as though you need to mutilate yourself mentally by trying to list it all out again, so that you can poke it and dissect it and review it in triplicate... I will be here. Waiting to remind you that nothing you have ever done disqualifies you from being afforded compassion and kindness. Waiting to remind you that you deserve better friends, better love, than those that would afford you only scraps. Waiting to remind you that your anger is valid, along with your hurt and your sadness. And also waiting to remind you that this is temporary. These feelings are temporary. Give yourself the space today to feel what you are feeling. Let yourself be sad. Let yourself be angry. And tomorrow when you wake up, let it all go.

I love you. -H

#note to self #aubviously #muad-dweeb #fear is the mind killer #holly hearts

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savage-rhi · 5 years ago

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Hey I saw you have depression and PTSD and if you are comfortable and in a good head space what is a tip you can give to someone recently diagnosed with both?

I’m always down for giving tips on these issues. First of all let me say I am sorry to hear another person is going through this, but I am happy you got a proper diagnosis (lord knows I can go off on a tangent about people that assume they have PTSD or use PTSD/”trigger” to say they are offended by something etc. etc. I digress).

The type of therapy I am getting is EMDR ( Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). I’ve been seeing a therapist now for three years. I recommend if you have the means to afford it, ask for someone that specializes in either of those.

Some techniques I learned over the years I can share with you that have worked for me are the following:

1. Grounding: Grounding is a particular type of coping strategy that is designed to "ground" you in, or immediately connect you with the present moment. Grounding is often used as a way of coping with flashbacks or dissociation when you have post-traumatic stress disorder. An example is closing your eyes and visualizing a safe place (can be anything) and trying to call to mind things you can see, touch, hear, feel and smell.

2. Disassociation: If you have PTSD, you may sometimes have felt "disconnected" from yourself. Flashbacks, blanking out, and losing touch with reality can be common symptoms. Additional symptoms called depersonalization (feeling as if the world is not real) and derealization (feeling as if the self is not real) can also be present.

Now you may be wondering, how can this negative be used as a positive, and this is how I personally learned to deal with depressive bouts: I disassociate my brain from “me” or my consciousness. When I see my brain as a separate piece of my body, an organ that is just under the weather and not the true “me” itself, it allows me to focus in the present and not blame myself for any types of emotional episodes I could be having. I see it as “this sack of meat I share head space with and a skeleton is having one of its moments and I’m feeling what “it” feels, but that’s not really “me”

I do not recommend this for just anyone. This is something my therapist and I have been concocting together for a long time that helps me out personally and not other clients, but it is an interesting technique on taking something horrible and channeling it into a tool you can use to break out of cycles of self doubt and the like.

3. Exposure: Part of CBT can involve your therapist exposing you to reminders of the trauma you endured but in a safe environment where you can sort through the emotions on your own time, and be challenged to counter negative thoughts. If you don’t have a therapist, you can still do mental exercises to help ease you into it.

For example, sometimes I will listen to songs that trigger certain memories to flash and I’ll allow myself to feel what is happening without fighting it and when the song is over, I write down everything I am feeling and thinking about. If there’s anything negative I use the other side of the paper to make counter arguments about why I have no reason to feel bad.

In the event it becomes too much for me, I quickly change the song to music that calms me down and go back to grounding. I do this in my room, in a place where I am most comfortable and people will not bother me while I sort through my mental mess. If you have a close friend that doesn’t mind even being outside the door in case you need physical help for grounding, I sometimes do that.

I want to make a disclaimer that I AM NOT A PROFESSIONAL by any means. These are just coping strategies that helped me out personally and may or may not work for you. Its always best to get a professional input if you can before jumping into something. That being said, I hope this helps you at least do more research. I send you my love and I want you to know that you’ll find your way. It may take time, but you will

#depression #ptsd #ooc #i cannot stress how important mental health is #and i hope this helps out people looking into helping themselves #again its always best to get a professional to help #but i completely understand if you don't have access

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americangoulash · 6 years ago

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Sample Lunch

Growing up, one of my favorite things to do with my family was “sample lunch” at Costco, even though I don’t think my family ever had their own Costco membership.

For those of you who are not familiar with Costco, it’s a wholesale warehouse store where you can get a mega-size of anything from storage sheds to a year’s supply of emergency food to actual coffins ( (if the apocalypse prep doesn’t work out for you.) I think the coffins are regular-sized, not mega-sized, but I digress. The deal with Costco is that you have to pay a small annual membership fee in order to access their extraordinary savings/10-pound tubs of butter. I was told that you had to also be a business owner - which is why my family pretended to be our business-owning neighbor. Honestly, I think we were just frugal. It was easier to commit these small crimes back in the ‘80s/’90s. Early digital photo technology was so bad that my mother, Anyu - a perpetually worried, statuesque brunette Transylvanian woman - somehow managed to pass herself off as Humberto Jose González-Villaseñor - a barrel-chested, long-haired Latino man with an infectious grin. If questioned, she’d say that the picture was of my grandma, Nagymama, who had not smiled since 1955. Anyu said that the picture was just really, really old. At 24 pixels-per-inch, either the Costco greeter either couldn’t tell the difference or did not want to risk angering my Nagymama.

I have included a rudimentary illustration to indicate how ridiculous this was:

I’m the little one in the hat dancing because Costco had ice cream samples that day.

I’m not actually sure what the heck we bought at Costco. We were a small family, so I doubt we would have been able to go through five gallons of 100% Pure Vegetable Oil or afford the 10-pound bag of fish sticks. “Vild caught!” Anyu would say, “Just like your fadder and the po-lice, ahahaha.”I’m pretty sure that the number one reason for going to Costco was for Sample Lunch. You see, Costco has vendors come in to do product demonstrations, which usually comes with a free sample. We could have smiled, thanked the vendor, and enjoyed one sample per item per person like normal humans. The thing is, there is no limit on how many samples you can take. So per usual with my family, there was always some kind of scheme.

Here’s how it went - my mother would “distract” the person handing out the samples. Meanwhile, I would pull out my oversized sweatshirt like a sort of parachute so Nagymama could load up sample after sample into my shirt. (Though unrelated to the scheme at hand, it's worth mentioning that she’d always check first to make sure that my undershirt was tucked into my underwear so no torso skin would ever be exposed to refrigerated air, lest I catch a “kidney cold.”)

When my mother was done being distracting, we would combine the samples into a piece of tin foil that Nagymama had been saving since the war and go for a loop around the crate of frozen peas. I’d usually eat a few before they went into the tinfoil and Nagymama would yell at me for eating too fast because the sample was too hot/too cold. Only room-temperature foods were safe. Then, Nagymama would put on her glasses, thinking that she as a 5-foot-tall lady who looked exactly like George Washington in a babushka wasn’t enough of a disguise, and we'd round the sample aisle again. And again.

We did this so often that the vendors started to get to know Nagymama. She even asked if she could bring the perfume sample vendor, Marlene, to my choir recital, even though I have no idea why she hung out in the perfume sample section since Anyu was allergic to perfume. “Vrap them up in a plastic in case we can give them as a gift to somevon,” Nagymama said. As little as we had back then, Anyu and Nagymama were oddly generous about collecting as many things as they could so they could give gifts to other people.

A part of me also thinks that Anyu knew that we could get as many samples as we wanted without all the trickery, but simply welcomed the time to commiserate with another adult human being. Sure, they were paid vendors, trapped behind a booth and forced to be nice to her, but isn’t that also what 90% of therapy is?

Anyu: “Nobody appreciates how hard I vork.” Vendor: “You do work hard. Why not treat yourself to Totinos Pizza Rolls™?” Anyu: “...and I told him, you get out!” Vendor: “The great thing about Totinos Pizza Rolls™ is that your deadbeat husband can take them even when he’s on the go!” Anyu: “...and you know vhat? He doesn’t even pay child support ” Vendor: “The Totinos corporation understands that money is tight sometimes. That's why it is just three dollars for 150 Totinos Pizza Rolls™. And yet, they technically qualify as food!” I poked fun at all of this even at the time, but flash forward 20 years and I am not any better. This is my food diary entry from today:

Bibigo Steamed Vegetable Wonton (½)

Kirkland Orange Juice (2 ounces)

Dark Chocolate Coconut Almond (3 almonds)

Organic Chickpea Puffs (2 & 1/4 puffs)

Haagen Dazs Vanilla Milk Chocolate Almond Ice Cream (like a thumb size?)

An indeterminate number of sausage pieces (each skewered with ½ pretzel stick! This is a good idea. Remember to do this at parties so people don’t waste plastic forks. Add to a different list of things that I’m supposed to remember)

Weird Chicken Salad Thing ( ½ oz)… man that sucked, why did I even get that? I knew it was going to be bad but there wasn’t a line. Now I know why. Who wants to lap tepid chicken salad with low-fat mayo out of a cupcake liner? I should have gone back for another piece of wonton instead, but there was a lady standing there, causing a bottleneck, talking to the vendor about her sciatica and.... OMG! I think other people do the thing my mother did! Remember to write blog about this.

Etc.

At least I actually pay for my membership now, and I never take more than 2 at a time - one for me, one for my husband, who I swear exists (even though he refuses to wear an oversized sweater.) I may or may not do multiple laps.

Enjoyed this essay? Support through Cinevore’s Patreon and you’ll get these essays (and more of my creative projects) early!

Costco samples photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images

#essay #short story #costco

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thetarotalchemist13 · 5 years ago

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In the Shadow of the Moon: A Lesson in Tarot and Shadow Work

Surrender to the Darkness

A vast ocean of mystery, danger, and illusion stretches out and swells over a pier. Above and below, shadows seem to wait and watch. The Moon is the world of the unconscious, and it can be both frightening and disorienting. There is nowhere to anchor and everything feels confusing and deceptive, though slightly seductive and familiar. Even time seems to be disappearing, but there is an urgency for you to move or risk being lost here forever. It’s not too late to turn back, but if you truly want freedom, you will brave the current and surrender to the waves of cosmic intuition. -- The Moon XVIII, The Fountain Tarot, p34.

Let’s start with the Moon! It seems appropriate for a number of reasons. This weekend we are in the shadow of the new/super/black moon in Virgo. This year, 2019, my tarot card is The Moon (also the Hermit which is how the work of the Moon is often administered). I am a moon baby, born on a Moon-day 32 years and six months ago. And the moon, in all of her mysterious glory, rules my birth chart. So, I guess what I am trying to say is….Hi! I’m DaVonne, the Tarot Alchemist, and I will be your host on this blog.

Like the quote from the above entry for the Moon states, and the image of the corresponding card beautifully illustrates, the Moon carries with it some very mysterious and magical qualities. She heavily influences oceans, people, and menstrual cycles. Her phases were worshiped and ritualized by a number of ancient civilizations and people. Witches of past and present scheduled their alchemical work around her movements. Yet most people will past through an entire month and never lift a gaze to her.

I’ve always been intrigued by Mystery. So it should be of no surprise that the Moon card in almost every tarot deck I’ve ever purchased or touched, would indicate whether or not I would actually connect, or work with a deck. There are, of course, other factors, but a poorly designed Moon card could turn me off from a deck.

I digress…

The Moon card in the tarot, as indicated in the excerpt from The Fountain Tarot Guidebook, represents mystery, illusion, psychic abilities, seduction, shadow, and intuition. Working with the Moon, or doing shadow work, as the moon is often times associated with this type of alchemic technique, can cause anxiety, disorientation, confusion, discomfort, and, believe it or not, freedom. Trust me this process, should you accept the invitation and the challenge to work through it is not for the weak. It requires a soul ready for real change and growth.

The advice of the quote above is to surrender, which is the only way to get to the true medicine the Moon affords, the freedom. Fighting against the strong tides the Moon produces, will only make the healing energy of this celestial body, and the work required to move through it, harder to bear. Trust me, I’m floating in it right now. The moon invites you to trust her. To allow her mysterious waves to carry you away to places you may not want to go, or realize are deep within you, to heal the parts of your Self (and some times those of your family and ancestors), you most likely weren’t aware were broken.

Shadow Work: The Alchemy of the Moon Card

Society has taught us to push aside any feelings of fear or discomfort for the illusion that “everything is fine.” Of course, I can’t remember which book I read that contained this example, but I am reminded of the image of a family going through a divorce. The parents are arguing constantly and barely speaking but they will put on a smile to go on a family vacation and tell everyone they're fine. Why then, when an emotionally disturbed teenager tells the world they are fine and then falls into depression and commits suicide, are we surprised to learn that they were truly torn to pieces inside and drowning in their dark emotions? Extreme I know, but imagine if the norm in our society was for that teen’s parents, to actually sit them down and discuss the reality of their situation; the depth of the emotions they are feeling and face the open wound head-on. Then that teenager would probably do the same for their deep, bleeding, emotions and work through them in such a way that would allow them to be released and relieving their torture. This is shadow work. Facing those things inside us which we are the most afraid of and healing their traumatic effects.

Another example of shadow work is journaling about why we are so quick to anger when someone questions our intelligence. Or why we are so easily agitated when things are not going our way, or 100% perfect. Or why we need to insult another person to have fun in a social gathering. All of these things are examples of unconscious expressions of deep shadowy wounds. Some of them may sound familiar as they are very common human expressions. Every person walking around on this planet has a behavior that is expressive of a traumatic event/experience, ancestral/familiar wound or curse, or other similar happenings. This is the work of the energy of the moon card, to help bring awareness to these such wounds (along with other cards in a reading) so that we can confront them head-on and heal them once and for all.

This is not a quick fix or one size fits all type of practice. In some cases, it may take years of therapy or similar healing techniques to even gain an ounce of change, or soul evolution. Patience, balance, persistence, and conscious awareness are the underlying efforts needed to do shadow work.

So all hail the moon in her illustrious glory. Bath in her silvery healing light. For she illuminates for us all the depths of our souls and the stripes that bleed there so they may be healed.

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The technique of tarot I use is focused on working through these types of wounds and facing them head-on. Used as a supplement to professional mental health guidance, tarot can aid in cultivating emotional and traumatic healing, both personal and familial/ancestral. If you are interested in a reading please feel free to DM me for more information.

#thefountaintarot #tarotlesson #soulalchemy #soulwork #shadowwork #tarotreader #soultarot #tarotalchemist

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comehailbob · 6 years ago

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“Sybil” mini review: Disproving Multiple Personality Disorder one irritating step at a time

**SPOILER ALERT. I WILL BE DESCRIBING PLOT POINTS IN THE BOOK, SO PLEASE DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU DON’T WANT ANY SPOILERS**

Lord, where to begin with this.

For a third of the book I waited extremely patiently for there to be anything more than foreshadowing. While i understand anticipation enhances reader engagement, at some point I was feeling compelled to skip ahead just to find out what the hell the writer was hinting towards. It took a uselessly long amount of time to get into the actual phenomenon itself or the lead-up to it, then once it was described it was horribly rushed. Timeline planning aside, there are a few big issues I take with this book, I’ll outline them below.

Sybil is unreasonable and uncooperative to the point of reader exhaustion. If you’ve read the book, many of you will agree. I found it incredibly annoying how often Sybil was giving the same slumpy ‘woe is me’ answers to the psychoanalyst despite having moved her entire life to New York in order to get well. With as much obvious concern as she expressed about fearing that she would never be well, she put up so much resistance that I’m surprised the book concluded at all. The word ‘resistance’ infuriating her, I suppose as another form of denial, but she went for answers and assistance and turned it down until the very end (which i’ll also get in to).

The psychoanalyst was in it for her own personal gain and enjoyment. One of the two biggest issues I take with this book is the blatant disregard for Sybil’s well-being during the DECADE of work the doctor did with her. While maintaining a form of friendship with the ‘selves’ and insisting that she was looking for the best interest of the ‘waking Sybil’ as she refers to her, she seemed to let a lot of things slide until the last possible moment, once a crisis was reached. In the book it’s even described with Sybil’s ‘selves’ causing mayhem-- smashing glass, running off for expensive trips (when she apparently has no money to even afford necessities and has to receive checks from her father), wandering the streets, talking to herself in public, failing out of school, failing to hold a job-- the doctor did nothing until Vicky, the most dominant ‘self’ magically intervened at the last moment by hastily taking over during a suicide attempt and calling the doctor to come to the rescue. The doctor should have had much more concern with allowing Sybil, who was obviously in no state of mind to be living independently. The behavior of this doctor, if real in any way, was a miscarriage of psychiatric assistance.

Everything thing about the ‘selves’, for lack of a better word, is horseshit. Cut and dry groupings of different ‘personalities’ who can apparently manifest themselves by choice as they saunter into the doctor’s office, some of them even interacting with her at the same time, leads me to this conclusion all on it’s own. While this takes a fairly decent amount of suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader, this option is entirely voided at the end of the book when the ‘selves’ can apparently be summoned at-will. This was what took the cake for me, and I spent the rest of the book pissed off over it.

Speaking of the end of the book-- Wouldn’t you believe it? The answer was so simple the entire time! Sybil’s illness could be almost completely cured by hypnosis! I almost gave up at this point. By far the most irritating portion of the entire book, the fact that suddenly, over the course of two years, Sybil was able to be so successfully hypnotized and the ‘selves’ so perfectly called upon and managed that the doctor may as well have said “well shit, should have done this years ago”. There’s almost nothing more to say about that, I can’t believe what a lazy crock of shit the conclusion of her treatment was.

Sybil rejects closeness while simultaneously lamenting about closeness being rejected. Someone is willing to offer her everything she wants but she cowers away after having successfully dated someone for 8 weeks because, once again, that ‘woe is me!’ attitude came busting through, apparently entirely perpetrated by the ‘waking Sybil’. It’s even mentioned that the ‘selves’ were annoyed that Sybil turned him away, even though the context behind her integration was so that the ‘selves’ would help her in moving forward. So apparently instead of a takeover, or any help whatsoever, they become an inner monologue of doubt. Go figure. Then Sybil whines about not wanting to be rejected and wanting to get married an have a family. Bitch if you don’t---

Sybil was clearly suffering from PTSD, schizophrenia, and DID. I get it, multiple personality disorder was the big hit in those days, and DID is the transition of that illness to make it less of a ‘there are multiple people living in me’ to ‘my personality dissociates and manifests in specific ways’. PTSD also wasn’t recognized until 1980 so I’ll give it a pass. However, Sybil should have been treated for schizophrenia, particularly considering that not only her mother, but a paternal relative (aunt i think) had been diagnosed. Hysteria came up briefly, I suppose this was the old-timey precursor to PTSD, but i digress. I feel that this was obvious from the moment Sodium Pentothol was introduced as medicinal therapy to Sybil, and why hypnosis had worked. I understand that the SEVERE trauma caused rifts and breaks in personality for her, but the issue I have is that this doctor humored this behavior by insisting that each dissociation was an entirely different person, whom she had individual relationships with. I’m sure some of this was fabricated, I can’t possibly begin to believe that it was all genuine (that wouldn’t sell books, boooooring). In the 21st century, with the enormous strides we’ve made in mental health, we have the gift of knowledge and hindsight that still was not recognized at the time of Sybil’s case, but it just really irks me that schizophrenia wasn’t even considered.

Bonus: two things about her father that remained completely uncleared. It was obvious that her father was abusive by proxy, purposefully neglectful for his own sake despite seeing his daughter constantly horribly injured and knowing his wife was a violent and unrelenting schizophrenic. That’s beside seeing the way Sybil reacted towards harmless objects, those are some pretty huge red flags. However, the most blatant example of this piece of shit father was him willingly participating in sexual intercourse in front of Sybil for nine years. His spiel to them about “i tried to be a good father” should have been met with, frankly, a fucking drop-kick, but he just went on his merry way, completely avoiding the realization that he’s a piece of shit who let his daughter suffer absolutely horrifying abuse at the hands of her own mother. The other, more minor, thing that was never cleared is that the doctor referenced 3 or 4 times to Sybil’s Oedipus complex towards her father, but it was never actually explained why she felt that way. I didn’t catch it, so if someone else did, please respond.

In conclusion, 2/10 would not recommend unless you want to be angry.

#literature #Sybil #DID #PTSD #schizophrenia #mental health #mental disorder #mental illness #bookworm #book review #multiple personality disorder

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