part 82

I am still so sad. There is nowhere for my mind to go except to be sad. I'm not even that angry anymore.

Drugs and alcohol are no longer options for me; unhealthy food is no longer an option for me; running away is no longer an option for me - I very much recognize that I do have a choice in each of these opportunities to temporarily escape reality, but that is not acceptable to me anymore.

I'm just not willing to hurt myself anymore, or to hurt my own beautiful family.

So I'm left with confronting the pain of how people hurt me.

Its shitty. For realsies.

Over and over I've been realizing that this was what I was so afraid of, why I didn't tell - and how none of them loved me the way I was promised they would if I kept my mouth shut. I put up with all of that horror to try to convince a bunch of assholes to love me. I've spent my whole life trying to convince myself that they are not a bunch of assholes. But they are!

Another big part is accepting who my mom really is - and she is fucked up. Seriously. I had been hanging on to the notion that I had a mom - a real mom - and now I can see how that was never true. I am hesitant to write her off as just plain evil, but I can't get around how insidious and destructive she has been in my life.

What also really sucks is how it all just makes sense now.

It's like, "oh."

I might have already written about all of this, but it just keeps going through my head, over and over and over.

I knew the things that were done to me were not right - even very much beyond the things I blocked out and have re-remembered, what I thought were simple, everyday normal things. I knew logically that so much of it just wasn't right. I tried so hard to get a similar opinion, to get some backup for my own sanity, to have someone else acknowledge that I was being harmed and that it was not okay.

And that feeling of getting shut DOWN - oh my god - when I would get to the point of realizing that it didn't matter what I said and saw that there was a wall set in front me that made me mute. Nothing I said could get beyond that wall. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how real and logical and fucking RATIONAL it was, that wall was there and it was stayed there and I had to learn to accept it as a part of life.

My dad put this wall up, my mom put this wall up, and my sister and brother learned how to put this wall up - and they still do it.

They are so incredibly entrenched with the idea that they are somehow smarter than everyone, more intuitive than everyone, better trained than everyone, that they refuse to consider their own arrogance as a tremendously debilitating aspect that makes them really not able to see much at all, that maybe the wall isn't keeping me silent and shut in, but keeping them shut out of what is real.

Oh my god. Sigh.

I want to hate them. I want to want to hurt them. I want to be ANGRY! My old stand-by, anger, got knocked on its ass and edged out as a way of not feeling hurt, and I miss it. I MISS BEING THAT ANGRY.

When I was in the hospital, someone told me that there is always pain behind anger. I believed whoever it was that told me, but I sure as hell did not want to think about exactly what it meant.

But now that's where I'm at. Thinking about the pain. And rather than wanting to hurt anyone or myself, I just want to be left alone. More than anything at all, I want my mom and my brother and my sister to just leave me alone. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would even want to speak to any of them, for any reason. I just want them to leave me the fuck alone.

So far they are doing a really good job.

So I guess that's good, right? I honestly would have a much harder time with all of this if they continued to try to contact me and tell me once again how supportive they are and how crazy I am. But they aren't.

I have a very difficult time imagining that they are not contacting me out of respect for me and my request that they did not contact me. I would imagine that is the tack they would take, though, if questioned about it.

When I first told my mom about the neighbors, I asked her to tell people - my aunts and uncles, the other neighbors, her husband. But she didn't. She asked me what she could do to help me and I specifically asked her to just let people know what going on so that I didn't have to keep going over and over it to every person I came across.

She didn't tell anyone. Not one single person.

After a week, I called her husband myself and told him about the neighbors. I asked my mom why she hadn't told him and she said she didn't feel it was her place to do that. She's shitting her pants wondering what I am going to remember next - about HER - and she doesn't want anyone at all to know anything about what I've been going through because she is a part of it all.

But she says she didn't tell anyone out of respect for me.

She made up lies about other neighbors, claiming that she couldn't confront them because they were so wrapped up in taking care of their ailing family members and ailing selves. After a few months of hearing that, I saw it as another excuse - a lie - to get me off her back about talking to other neighbors, but in a way that did not make her look bad.

She can take anything that has the smallest grain of truth to it and turn it into a full-blown campaign to destroy anyone or anything that might sully her reputation. I don't even know if it's her reputation among other people - it may very well just be her own view of herself that she's so terrified of actually changing, of becoming real.

But god forbid anyone try to confront her on any of it, because then she pulls the grain of truth out and gets all indignant about anyone questioning her. Actually, that is a lot like how my dad operated.

Its so WEIRD having hindsight undistorted by mind-fucking-colored glasses. Maybe it is so weird because it is real. It's not all of the bullshit that has been spoon fed to me for my entire life - it's actually real.

It's taken a lot for me to get to the point that I can look at something for what it is and be confident enough in my own mind to know that I am capable of seeing what is real - or that "real" even exists.

My mom AND dad - both of them are mind-fucking monsters. And while I can see that my brother and sister are both products of the mind-fucking, I cannot look beyond the fact that they have always been fucking with my mind, too.

I still imagine what they would think about the things I am writing and putting all out there. I imagine that they would highly disapprove of what I am writing right now, and maybe even shake their heads in disbelief. I imagine what arguments I will have to come up with to defend my point of view, to prove that it is logical and not delusional or crazy.

I keep thinking about what I should do to prove to them that I am not like my dad.

I know I am not like my dad, and I really can't handle playing into their hands anymore, obsessing over myself, over how I act, questioning my every breath, every word, to see if it could somehow be viewed as something my dad had done or would do. I've just focused so intensely on trying to convince them of who I'm not that I haven't really had much time for myself to consider who I am.

And I still like who I am, and I still know I am good person, and I still know that I am not maliciously manipulative, and I still know that I am not crazy, and I still know what is real.

I can just live now, and just allow myself to be my own person. I have never been able to do that before - I always felt like I had to view myself through the eyes of my mom and my brother and my sister.

But now, I have my own eyes that I can view myself with, and my mom and my brother and my sister can go to hell - my dad is probably already there. They can have a nice family reunion.

P.S. I am working a lot on my new novel again :)