for the record

Ok, so here I'm going to copy verbatim some text from a book called Stalking the Soul.

I feel like I spend half my life (or at least, half of my life in the last 10 years or so) gathering 'evidence' against my family's belief in silence, in might makes right, in sticks and stones, sink or swim, suffering builds character, etc. etc. Or fill in the blank with your own personal favorite aphorism.

In case I forget about this book later on, here's some text from it that captures almost exactly what I experienced (and continue to experience) from my family.

Why, you may ask, do I feel the need to copy somebody else's writing? Because it's evidence, as I say, that I'm not just making this up or overreacting or just trying to get attention. All of which I've been accused of at various times while trying to make my case, make myself heard, get recognition, acknowledgment, comfort, appreciation, what have you, you name it. (What do I win if I manage to write an post consisting entirely of catch-phrases? Never mind, don't answer that.)

This writing shows that somebody else feels exactly the way I do about it. Which means not only that I'm a) not alone, but b) I'm RIGHT. I'm fucking right. So neener neener, stick than in your pipe and shove it up your ... oh, wait, that's not how it goes. Sorry.

So with all that ado, here's the text (p.96):

Abusive individuals evade a direct question when it is asked. Because they won't talk, one ascribes wisdom and grace to them. One enters a world with little verbal communication and vague unsettling remarks. Everything is suggested but never said outright. A shrug of the shoulders or a sigh will suffice. The victim tries to understand: "What have I done to him? Why is he reproachful?" And because nothing is actually said, anything becomes cause for blame.

Denial, whether of reproach or conflict on the aggresor's part, paralyzes the victim, who cannot defend herself. Abuse is perpetrated by the refusal to acknowledge what is happening [emphasis mine], discuss the situation, or jointly find solutions. [Family: Please make a note of this. This means YOU.]

If the conflict were out in the open, discussion would be possible and a solution might be forged. Within the scope of abusive communication, however, one must above all prevent the other person from thinking, understanding or reacting. An effective way of aggravating the conflict is avoiding dialogue [family? Looking at you again], which silently imputes blame on the other person. The victim is refused the right to be heard. [emphasis mine again. Damn, I could have written this whole thing, not so eloquently or dispassionately, to be sure. But the feelings? Every damn one is right on the money.]

Her version of the facts doesn't interest the abusive individual, who won't listen. [Wow, there sure are a lot of people like this. And even those who pretend to listen often don't care, they just want to seem like they're good people.]

This refusal of dialogue is a way of saying, without directly epressing it in words, that the other person does not interest the aggressor or that she doesn't even exist. [ow :-( ] With anyone else one can ask questions if one doesn't understand, but with abusers discourse is tortuous and unclear and can only lead to mutual alienation [emph. mine].

conditional 'love'

The small intestine is where the body begins the process of sorting good from bad in terms of the absorption of food. The unwanted 'junk' gets sent to other parts (kidney, liver, etc.) to be filtered out and eventually eliminated from the body.

But what happens when this mechanism gets confused? When there's some kind of meddling with the sorting process, interference - where somehow bad gets classified as good, and good as bad? This confusion can happen when the body gets too much junk food and has to try to find tiny crumbs (literally) of goodness out of a pile of bad stuff.

When there is too much 'non food', the body (and the mind - only Westerners split them apart in this unnatural way) becomes sick. (Maybe I should just start calling it the 'being', and skip over such convoluted westernisms such as 'bodymind' and other argh-y English-mangulating crap. Anyway...)

In eastern medicine, there's a psychic/metaphysical component to this as well: It's where our 'gut' instinct for sorting good from bad in our lives also occurs. Bad people, bad vibes, bad situations, etc. There's literally a whole separate set of wiring in the gut that makes it like an entire, separate brain from the one in the head (though of course they're connected, as all things are). In fact some would argue that it's the more powerful of the two 'brains', that it's the one that really runs the show, the back seat driver of the psyche, being the one that's been in existence the longest - the lizard brain.

So I'm sitting here noticing this, and wondering, Why does my gut hurt? What's happening that I need to be paying attention to?

And I realize that it's to do with the fact that unless I'm actively feeding somebody (metaphorically, as in emotionally) I can't feed myself.

Working my way back from that: I was a really smart little kid, with a really, really needy mom (emotionally, that is).

So she had this giant need, a huge vortex kind of like an emotional vacuum cleaner, sucking around at everything nearby trying to get what it needed.

And here I am, this newborn baby, trying to get my needs met.

What I learned was, the only way to get mom to pay attention to me was if I took care of her. Otherwise, I was just this pain-in-the-ass, noisy, smelly thing that made big messes and stressed her out.

So it became my job to become the 'good' baby, to be quiet and peaceful and never disrupt my mom's equilibrium.

I basically disappeared. I was complicit in my own virtual (?) erasure, making my needs invisible so that I could actually survive at all. As soon as I expressed a need of any kind - poopy diaper, hungry crying, needing to be picked up, falling down and needing a boo-boo kissed - there was this angry, scowling, critical face, making it all my fault. All my fault that her life had become this endless round of cleaning and tidying and chasing after some ungrateful two-year-old who couldn't take care of herself. Damn babies, anyway!

So now I carry this pattern along in my adult life: I feel that unless I'm actively helping somebody in my environment, that I have no value whatsoever. So I'm constantly (at a subconscious level) trying to feed other people: Make them laugh, help them solve a problem, make sure that the thing they need is sitting there waiting for them almost like magic, so they don't even realize I've done it for them.

And of course they took it for granted, since I never once demanded any payment or recompense - I was just this silent, perfect, needs-meeting device.

Well, I tell ya WHAT, it fuckin' SUCKS (literally), and I ain't doin' it no more.

****
But the bigger problem is, how to keep this from happening in my daily life? I can often see the pattern in retrospect, after it's too late, it's already happened, I've already set up a pattern of interaction with somebody that establishes me as the 'giver' and them as the 'taker'.

I've become more and more conscious of this over the years, and have become very angry about it at times, becoming angry with the other person for taking advantage of me.

But what is it in me that allows, or insists, that I behave this way?

I contend that it was that early, unconscious (subconscious?) training by my mother to put her needs ahead of my own or else I'd be treated totally like shit. Like I was an evil being, to be reviled and treated with contempt.

And of course my mother wouldn't remember any of this - I never called her on it, not til many, many years later (like, in my 40s) when I finally felt strong enough to stand up to her, unwilling to accept her silent threats of disapproval (and oh how powerful a parent's disapproval can be! Don't tell me it hasn't powered the entire lifetime of most of the people of the planet - the eternal search for the parental 'smile' that one never got as a child. That unconditional acceptance, that most important component of love of all: Mutual respect.)

So now I see how it plays out in current relationships, but sometimes it's exhausting to be so aware, so conscious of every little detail of every interaction. It's like learning to speak a second language - it never flows freely from some unwilled place, but rather constantly requires effort, the struggle to make oneself heard and understood.

What I want to know is, how come so few people ever engage in this process of self-reflection and self-knowledge? Answer has to be: Because they don't have to. Because, for whatever reason, they manage to survive, are able to get enough of what they need from life, without ever having to change a hair on their heads.

How the fuck does everybody else get away with this, but I cannot?

who's got your back?

People ask me over and over again, "So, why did you quit architecture?" I've never really been satisfied with my answers - they always left something missing. I think I may have finally hit on one that seems to capture the truth: Nobody ever had my back.

Over all those years, with all those projects and all those working relationships and connections and interdependencies and you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yourses, only one manager ever had my back. But he wasn't there long, and after that, I never had a similar relationship. They were all looking out for number one, ready to drop me like a hot rock the instant they saw a better option. They were fickle, unreliable, unpredictable, undependable. Huh, reminds me a lot of my parents...

He was the very first one (manager, that is), and even he tried to torpedo me initially, until I stood up to him. I never let his first salvo get past me, though it took everything I had to do it. I've always wondered if he even realized he was testing me, or if it's just an unconscious thing guys do to anybody new. (Just read somewhere, in some random Google search, a line something like, "As soon as he knows you'll accept that first lie, he knows he has you. You're his forevermore." Are men really that simple-minded??????

Never mind - please don't answer that question. I don't really want to know.
***

A woman in a male-dominated world finds there is no safe place to stand - there are piranhas everywhere, every potential ally will turn and gobble you up if it looks to be to his advantage. Women are no better, and in fact are often worse: There's so little support, and so much competition to get even a token spot in this world of good ol' boys, that most women will gladly throw another woman under the bus to climb even a fraction of an inch higher on the ladder.

Argh, this isn't where I really wanted to go with this.

I wanted to link the 'no one having your back' idea with having that same feeling in my family.

And also realizing that you can never climb very high on the ladder of power if the desire for power itself isn't a big motivator.

we learn to relate to others

the same way we learn language: By hearing it over and over and over again from the people we grow up with.

It is learned at such a deep level that it is mostly unconscious.

Many parents try to instill more conscious messages, hence the litany of 'shoulds' many of us can recite from childhood. Some of them have actual words, like the "Suffering builds character" my father was so fond of. Many of them are just feelings, that get triggered every time a similar situation comes along - the feeling of shame when you even hear someone being mocked, for example, bringing back the burning ears and sick-to-the-stomach feeling of wishing the earth would open and swallow you up. Or flinching when you see that same glare of utter contempt on a mother's face that looks just like the one you saw so may times when you were little. They can bring you to your knees with a glance, a scowl, a word. We are so craven, you see, we're all really just little children inside, never having grown up, never having been loved well enough, we seek, crave, long for that acceptance, word of praise, glance of appreciation that we never got. Such simple things, yet so hard to find, as unreachable (or so it sometimes seems) as the moon.
***

My brothers think this shit is lame; that I'm being pathetic, a whiner, a sissy.

The thing is, they got both sides of the coin - the mocking, plus the knowing that eventually, being men, they'd get to be part of the mocker's club themselves.

Me, on the other hand, being the girl, and the oldest, knew all along that I was never going to get to join that elite club. I watched mom be a doormat over and over again, disappearing from rooms at the slightest sign of conflict or unpleasantness. She always managed to be elsewhere when the shit hit. No wonder she has no memory of any of it, and imagines my childhood to have been entirely peaceful and pleasant: She wasn't there.

Let me repeat that, for emphasis: She wasn't there.

Oh yes, her body was there often enough, washing clothes and cooking and cleaning; but mentally? Emotionally? She was totally checked out. She was on some other planet, some safe place between her ears that had no connection whatsoever with my personal reality. In fact, she almost never checked in; never sent messages; never asked me how I was doing. She really just didn't know. Because she wasn't there.

Wow. No matter how many ways I stumble on this little 'gem' of truth (barking shins and stubbing toes each time), I'm still dumbfounded by this realization.

It's as if my mind (and human minds in general, I don't think this is something unique to me) simply cannot process the idea of a mother this disconnected, this dissociated, this uninvolved. It's as if the organism would cease to function. As if a tree discovered that it's own roots were trying to strangle it, or like that Twilight Zone episode where this guy's hand becomes possessed and he tries to strangle himself.

It's just so unnatural, so completely contrary to everything nature evolved us to be, that it just simply does not compute.

I imagine I can come back to this in a few hours or days or weeks and marvel, yet again, at this revelation; it will always seem fresh, because it is so shocking. And potentially devastating.

So how to keep it from repeatedly shutting me down? Well, I think that's what dissociation is for. Taking that which is impossible to deal with (at least, single-handedly, without help from another, understanding soul)

immediately,

on re-reading the previous, I am shocked and appalled by the language at the end. How quickly the parental voices step in to overwrite, edit and negate. I almost deleted it, edited it out; but why? Who am I protecting? If someone sees these words, someone who knows me, will they be shocked? Hurt? Repulsed?

And do I care? Because, if said person were involved enough in my life to have been privy to these feelings in the first place, I might never have had to have the feelings.

Does that make sense? In other words, if there'd ever been someone around who cared enough for me to talk at all about any of this stuff, it would never have accumulated into this giant, mooshed-together mountainous blob of stuff that's too big for anybody to deal with, let alone little old me with my tiny, rusty, bent-handled teaspoon. I do my best, but still.

It's about the layers, baby. First there's a layer of grief; then a layer of anger. Then a layer of sandstone - no, wait, that's shale, the oil-bearing strata. Never mind.

So then after the anger, there's another layer of grief, then a giggle, then something completely different. You see, they're all compressed there together, like growth rings, or maybe it really is like shale, where millions of years worth of layer upon layer upon infinite layer of organic debris is compressed, gradually, by its own weight (and the weight of hundreds of tons of rock on top of that) into this entirely new substance that is no longer the leaves, or any one thing - it's this gloopy, sticky, tarry, undifferentiated mass (for some reason I find myself thinking of that moment in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray is trying to shake some ectoplasm off his fingers and saying, "It slimed me," in a voice of complete and utter disgust).

The weight? My mother. Or, more accurately, her disregard for my feelings. I think it's that that translated into the 'lead' feeling - the sense that she was actually sitting on me, in some way, sitting on my feelings, blocking them by her very disregard. That her disinterest, in and of itself, was this sort of force that dammed the feelings up inside me (erg, just had 'talk to the hand' pop into my head, yuck, massive cultural disrespect meme, blech, yuck, get it off me).

It's this force that I've internalized, this resistance, this - blockage? Disrespect? Trying to find the right word. It's as if I have to pry her loose from me, shove her away, disconnect her, break her hold on my mind/body/psyche/spirit. I keep having the image of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens pop into my head, the parasite bursting out of her body cavity. The metaphor of the eggs being laid inside her body is not lost on me - the parent can lay the 'eggs', sow the seeds of discontent, by how they treat you.

This is crucial, understanding this almost Pavlovian mechanism by which we learn to relate to other humans: It is entirely unconscious, entirely unwilled. It is entirely situational and circumstantial; think of the child raised by wolves who thinks he's a wolf even though his arms a legs clearly differ from his wolf 'brothers and sisters'. The human mind is infinitely adaptable (which, of course, can be both a feature and a bug). The fact that we can adapt means that we often do adapt, even if it's not in our long-term best interests to do so. The organism simply responds to its environment the way it learned to over many millions of years of trial and error. The ultimate survival mechanism.

Next layer

of the onion, that is.

So, peeling away here, in my layer-y fashion, I find guilt underneath the shame.

Guilt that I screwed up, guilt that I did something wrong.

Guilt that it's my fault that people go away, that they leave me behind, helpless and hopeless, terrified, scared witless, frightened beyond any capacity to cope or function.

It's astonishing that I manage to function in the adult world at all sometimes, given how often this mute terror grabs me from behind like the undertoad and sucks me into the watery emotional underworld of panic and despair.

I try so hard to find out what I did wrong, I tie myself in the most amazing Gordian mental and emotional knots trying to retrace my steps and play a sort of reverse, deconstructionist chess game trying to second guess what might have worked if only I had known.

But growing up with what I grew up with, there was never any going back, never any strategy for repair or mending of bridges; never any healing or consolement; only the icy cold of abandonment and neglect, the flat, featureless, frightening grayness of a world with no emotional color.

I remember several times when I was really sick (as a kid) and had been lying in bed for several days and it had been quite a while since anybody had checked on me.

I felt this leadenness overtake my limbs - literally, as if my blood was turning to lead while I was lying there and I couldn't move. "How curious," I thought to myself, fascinated (and terrified) by this further weirdness (the mind can go weird places anyway when you're already sick; this seemed like just another possible deviation that I hadn't yet experienced. Also, when you grow up reading Dr. Seuss and Rudyard Kipling and Alice in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe, it's really no wonder if your mind is more comfortable with the strange than with the so-called 'normal'. Really, I never had a chance at anything remotely resembling 'normal'. I now approach 'normalcy' the way a drag queen approaches her makeup: With a sense of adventure and excitement and a chill of the secret pleasure of having 'gotten away with something' when I manage, somehow, to actually 'pass'.)

Anyway - I'm thinking now, in retrospect, that the leadenness was the literal feeling, in my body, of cutting off, of abandonment. As if my very molecules, or something, were actually changing, somehow, to try to shut out the unwanted feelings that I was unable to cope with alone. (I wonder if that's one of the times I need to go back to somehow, to reconnect with having a whole body, a whole spirit? To remember what it was like before my feelings got split off?)

This leaden state I think was a precursor to true dissociation - I think I felt that first few times as a literally bodily state, where my body, with its horrible and noxious feelings - eewwww - became this wooden, disconnected thing. Not 'me'. Of course I didn't think of it that way at the time - it was more like a sort of disconnected feeling of watching myself disappear, of feeling my body become so immobile, from having lain still waiting forever in hopelessness for someone, anyone, to show up and perform the normal adult caretaker behavior of giving a shit.

But nobody ever showed up, and it became like that game where you hold your breath to see how long you can go without passing out. As I lay there, motionless, I began to lose contact with various bits of my body - as if I were paralyzed, as if my body had literally become lead and lost all feeling, losing even the physical sense (proprioception?) of where one's arms and legs are in space. I was just these disembodied thoughts, floating around nebulously like some science fiction creature. Nobody cared; nobody noticed. I think I may have tried to explain the feeling to my mom, but of course she wasn't interested - she just thought I was trying to 'get attention'. Fuck, yeah, you fucking moron - ATTENTION. Fucking PAY ATTENTION TO ME! That's your fucking JOB as a fucking PARENT, you clueless piece of shit! Stop trying to fucking GUILT me for wanting what EVERY NORMAL CHILD TAKES AS A MATTER OF COURSE, AS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT.

Fuck. Did I say that already? Let me say it again: Fucking fuckity fuck fuck FUCK. Fucking stupid-ass pieces of SHIT. Is it too late to send them back, to exchange them for some real parents? Some parents who actually CARE????

if anger turned inward is depression

then anguish turned inward is shame.

That's my new contention.

I was sitting here (lying here, actually) crying, working through some old stuff, and I felt my face going into that shape you see on small infants who are really howling their guts out. You know the face - little mouth stretched as wide as it can go, eyes scrunched, making as much sound as possible. Howling.

And then I felt my lower lip start to go into that shape that I think of as being beyond the howling phase, when the baby has been left to cry for too long and has begun to enter that stage of despair, of losing hope. Where she has no belief that her caretaker will ever return for her, she's been abandoned, left alone to die. The wolves will eat her. She is terrified, distraught, and so full of fear that she begins to shut down. This is when the exhaustion sets in; in self-defense, her little limbs curl up, all energy leaves her body, and she assumes that curled-inward fetal position so familiar to those witnessing someone in major self-protection mode.

There's nobody there for her; no one she can trust. So she does the only thing she has left to do: Retreats from the world into the safety of sleep, where these fears no longer overwhelm her.

Of course, there's always the lovely nightmares. Do infants have nightmares? I know I started having them around age three, and had them more or less continuously throughout my life until the brief period when I had a consistent partner to curl up with every night, and then, more recently, I've had some nightmare-free stretches as I seem to have released some of the old demons by creating a safe enough time and place in which to face them down and let them go.

But I still have bad patches. Since the panic attacks early last year, I've taken to falling asleep in the wee hours with the lights on, as if waiting til it's almost light out will keep me from falling down the black hole again.

It's worked, more or less - no more panic attacks, yay! But has also wreaked serious havoc with any semblance of a 'normal' sleep schedule. But, hey, I'm doing what I have to do, and it's not hurting anybody, and it sure as heck is helping me, so FUCK that 'normal' shit. Girl's gotta do what she's gotta do.

Long-term solutions

So, if you tell somebody, someone who claims to love you, over and over and OVER again that you're miserable and terrified and suffering and lonely and have no one to turn to, that you've been having panic attacks and are afraid you're going to DIE,

and after all that, after all that intense outpouring of fear and rage and misery, they then proceed to

not call you or check on you in any way shape or form

for the next several MONTHS?

And if they ever do call, there's no, "Hi, how are you?" There's no subtle sussing around for a way to help. There's always resentment, and anger, and irritation that you're so fucking needy and pathetic. That you can't just fucking get your shit together.

And then they're all fucking walking-on-egg-shells, because they don't fucking GET that what you fucking need is fucking HELP and for somebody to SHOW that they fucking GIVE A FUCKING SHIT by actually fucking CALLING you now and then, and not just to pretend that nothing's wrong and that they'll only talk to you if you don't bother them with all that annoying suicide shit that's just a bunch of attention-getting anyway.

No fucking SHIT, you fucking moron. Attention? A person who's lonely and terrified and miserable doesn't need any fucking attention. Naw, we're just being manipulative assholes. We really LOVE being this miserable, it's so much fucking FUN. It's just fucking GREAT. In fact, why don't you fucking TRY it, you piece of shit?
***

So.

You've mentioned suicide to them, because you're afraid you're going to do it.

You don't really WANT to die, but when the pain gets bad enough, when you haven't slept or eaten in days, when you're terrified to leave the house because you can't stand the idea of yet another harsh word or rude action that will send your already full-to-the-brim pain reservoir sloshing all over the place so that you fall, yet again, down the rabbit hole of despair at the cruelty and selfishness of other humans -

FUCK - people worry about a fucking PET TURTLE or some shit more than they worry about actual humans. "Oh, pweese, won't you check on little anklebiter for me? I'm so worried he'll get lonely. I don't want him to be stwessed."

Of course they don't fucking GIVE a rat's ass about YOUR stress or loneliness. No, that's YOUR problem, babe. After all, you've got a car, you can dial a phone - what more do you need? So you have no money. Eh, money's over-rated (says the guy with two houses, four cars, a boat, a living room full of excercise machines, who complains that his friends tease him that he doesn't have a widescreen in his fucking living room. Jesus FUCKING christ.)
***

A friend (obviously no longer a close one) committed suicide about a week ago.

I have to say, I understand (I think) how he was feeling: Alone, lonely, end of his rope, no end in sight, no hope, no future. Getting older, all the bright possibilities that once beckoned from a glorious future never came to pass; the disappointments accumulate, over and over.

You never expected to be a superstar, no; but you thought you'd be loved, cared for; that you'd have a family of your own, or at least someone to curl up with at night.

You thought you'd have a home of your own; a nest, a safe place, where they couldn't throw you out because they'd found someone else who could pay them more money.

You thought you'd be doing something worthwhile with your life, something valuable, something that made you feel appreciated and important and special.

And yet, even when such appreciation came to pass, it was never enough - it never filled that empty place inside, that always hungry place where lack of true parental appreciation for who you WERE should have been.

Instead they were always on about what you DID; they never seemed pleased with you, never happy to see you; just the sight of your bright, shining little face never sent them into raptures of joy.

You became what they call a 'human doing' instead of a human being.

And even that never worked. You could never please them - you'd do the art projects your mom wanted, but you were too good, too quick, too naturally talented. Your amazing early work was met with: Silence.

The fact that you read at the age of three was used as a way to shut you up alone for hours on end, assuming that you were totally self-sufficient and would be just fine. News flash to moronic mother: Shutting a THREE YEAR OLD up alone with a bunch of books is the social equivalent of - I don't fucking know what. But I know that it fucked me up. At the time when I most needed other people, I was continually ALONE. Yes, I know, you had the new baby to deal with. Right, so what was I - fucking dog meat?

Yeah, I know. You weren't really ready to be a mother - ill-equipped and all that. Whatever. How the fuck does that help ME? Answer: It doesn't. Not at all. It's just another pathetic excuse.
***

And here we go round the fucking hamster wheel again: Trying to figure out WHY.

Why ME? Why am I, particularly, so miserable?

In this culture we're held entirely responsible for everything that happens to us, from the circumstances of our birth to the long-term outcomes of said circumstances.

You will fucking NEVER be cut any fucking slack for having been, say, emotionally rejected by your father for committing the heinous crime of being born female.

No one will ever sympathize that you didn't get enough support; after all, you're a girl - you're just supposed to shut up and smile and get married and have babies and stay the fuck out of the way of all the important people, namely, men.

Men don't care because all they want is to fuck you if you're sexy; have you as a status symbol if you're gorgeous enough, or indenture you as a child-bearing machine and household menial if you appear to possess the right mix of - let's see if I can get this right - sugar and spice and everything nice, was that the prescription women got stuck with? While men got to do all the fun stuff - frogs and snails and shit.

No one will ever care.

No one will genuinely be concerned that you're like a flower that, season after season, put forth leaves and branches and a bud or two - but never blossomed.

They'll blame YOU for that - you see, it was your own damn fault. You were just too angry - you wouldn't suck it up and roll over and let them get away with their shit. You fucking CALLED them on it, every fucking time, and they got tired of the woman who wouldn't let them remain little boys with their little boy toys. You wouldn't play 'mama' for them.

Eh, whatever.

FUCK y'all. Fuck ALL y'all.
***

What a fucking INSULT to call suicide a 'long-term solution to a short-term problem'. You can fucking KISS MY ENTIRE ASS, you sanctimonious piece of shit.

Have you ever fucking EXPERIENCED what this person's going through? No, you fucking well haven't. You don't have a fucking CLUE what it's like. Not only that, you don't fucking CARE. You just don't want to be bothered. It's too much trouble. Plus, it makes you think, and you don't LIKE to think. Thinking is hard. It's just too fucking difficult. Thinking is for people who got a bad hand in life, and you, we'll, you're special. There's no way you'd ever 'let' something like that happen to you because you're in total and complete control at all times of everything that happens in your life, and anyway only losers ever complain about their lives. That's victim shit.

Don't give me fucking platitudes about how it will get better. How do you know? It's been getting steadily worse for the last ten years - what the fuck is going to change? Am I going to magically get younger? Win the lottery? Suddenly become beautiful when I never have been before? Suddenly develop a completely different personality that allows me to be blissfully oblivious to the total and complete mindfuck of being a woman in a male-dominated world?

FUCK you.

***

Hearing your father screaming, “Don’t let my son die” is what kept you here. You know, now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you really matter to somebody. I think that those of us who contemplate suicide do so because we’re pretty dang sure that nobody cares.

The sound of the gun will echo for a long time, true - but so will your father’s words. That will pull you through, will give you the strength to deal with the rest of it. Hearing somebody scream that is like somebody throwing you an emotional life preserver - it’s probably what helped you survive. You’re very lucky to have someone like that in your life.

I envy you. I wish someone would care about me that much. I’ve wished for it all my life.