I don’t really even know how today’s argument became an argument.
My mom asked what was in a Walmart bag in the kitchen. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about because I didn’t, and she accused me of having an attitude. I told her I just didn’t know what was in the bag.
At this point she said that if I wanted to know what was in it, then I would know, so it was obvious I just didn’t want to know so I didn’t have to answer her or that I was pretending not to know to upset her. I responded that I didn’t know what was in the bag because I didn’t know what bag it was. She said I should know since it was obviously mine, because anything that comes in the house is automatically mine even though I don’t really get anything for myself these days.
I pointed out that when my stuff comes in that it often gets moved or destroyed so I can’t really keep up with my stuff anymore. So she started in on how I always say dad moves my stuff (he does) and he always says I mess with things, then I say he hates me. I stopped her to point on that that tidbit is something I’ve been told by him myself and through her. She said that was not something he ever said about me and that was just how I interpreted what she’s said and what he’s said. I told her she has explicitly said Dad’s said it to me repeatedly and she said I was making that up as usual.
I made the mistake of saying “Oh God” out of exasperation so I had to explain that I was upset because there was literally nowhere I could be tonight to get away from this. That I had no one I knew I could go to in that moment and felt trapped. And that just made her more upset with me.
That’s when I broke the fuck down and started crying because I am so tired of being accused of lying and being told that things I’ve heard or experienced didn’t happen. I cried for an hour and a half. And what was my mom’s big concern? That I cook dinner since my plans were all canceled for the night.
Eventually she halfway apologized for upsetting me before telling me it was justified because my dad and I annoy her so much. Apparently it’s okay to gaslight someone if you’re annoyed with them.
This past week has been a struggle. No, really it has. There have been several times where I wanted to scream into a pillow or start crying and never stop. It’s been bad enough that I can’t even remember all of the badness.
The worst of it started on Monday morning. (Prior to this, the freezer we keep my ice packs in died.) Mom had a steroid injection in her neck. She’d thought it was funny when they scheduled it that they could either do it on Valentine’s Day or on my birthday (Thursday); and she didn’t understand the concept of: I have plans those days that don’t involve hours of waiting in a car for a shot that never actually gives any lasting relief. But I agreed to Valentine’s Day because I knew it’d be easier that day than on my birthday.
So because of their newest Covid protocols, I sat in the car for three hours. When you have a notoriously bad hip, sitting in the car can be beyond painful. I was stiff and in a lot of pain during my date with Chris, but the date was nice, cute, and fun. We watched YouTube videos afterwards.
An hour before my dad had to leave for an appointment on Tuesday morning, mom fell. I checked on her and asked if I needed to take him. She said she was okay, and she took him to his appointment. When they got back, she was talking about how the next afternoon he needed to go to the pharmacy to get his pneumonia vaccine. I told her that wasn’t possible since I had to work Wednesday. She then said she’d do it on Thursday afternoon. When I reminded her I had plans on Thursday, she told me other people in the house have plans too and she didn’t understand why I had to do whatever it was on Thursday. I told her she could take him early on Thursday, but I wasn’t going to give up that afternoon. She never seemed to recognize why I was so adamant about Thursday.
I had to take her to a lab appointment that afternoon and I had to sit in the car in the parking lot for another hour, which inflamed my hip even more. When we got home, I went to grab my bag and I saw that a painting of mine had been cut in two places. I assumed it was damaged by my dad because he does that with my stuff quite a bit. I showed my mom and she didn’t seem to understand why I would be so upset.
Normally, Tuesday is Writers’ Club night. So I would usually be staying at Chris’s overnight after we all went home. But Tuesday it was canceled. I texted to make sure I could still stay over, since I know sometimes he might not feel like it, and he said of course I could. So I went over and started napping on the bed with him at around 5 pm.
At 5:59, we both woke up to a special ringtone I have set for mom. She might need to go to the ER. Her throat hurt, she couldn’t swallow, her back hurt, she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t see her doctor the next day because he wasn’t going to be in. I drove home and picked her up; I waited while she got ready. Then I drove her to the ER and, at about 7 pm, let her out before I went to park the car in the parking deck. That’s when it happened, and, by it, I mean I wrecked my car.
I hit a concrete pillar/support/column as I was entering the parking space. A doctor witnessed it and tried to prevent my oncoming panic attack. This led to an asthma attack and texts to Ashley, Chris, mom, my aunt, Laura, and Kitty. They helped calm me down.
While in the ER’s visitor waiting area out in the parking deck, there was a guy who was reciting rap lyrics, yelling obscenities & slurs, and said “I’m going to fucking kill you” as a state trooper headed into the ER. The cop grabbed his vest and turned really quickly. I was sure something bad was about to go down. It didn’t. Security moved the guy a few times. Eventually Chris suggested I go wait in my car, so I did.
At about 1:45, mom texted me that she got a room in the ER. This meant I could go wait with her in the hospital, which I did. We were told that the doctor would be in soon. Soon ended up being 5:30. He said she pulled a muscle and just had a sore throat; her throat had already started feeling better by now. He said we’d get discharged soon. Soon ended up being 7 am.
Around 24 hours after I first woke up.
I went home to take a nap before my HAL shift, and got about 4.5 hours sleep in. Luckily, things were fairly dead on Wednesday, so I just sat and watched my friend Sara get married via livestream. Oh, and I answered a new text from mom about how I needed to change my birthday plans. (Not because she was in pain.)
She told me that there would be storms the next day and there was a risk they’d been strong. I had been monitoring the system for days. She wanted us to cancel our plans to go to The Cheesecake Factory. I told her that I would just make sure we got there and back to Chris’s house before the storms arrived. So even though I suck at time management, I worked out a timeline for the next day so that we could do what we’d planned on doing for months. (Mom had been told a while before that this was our plan.)
Because of the importance of the timeline, I was the one who took dad to get his vaccine, not her. And I was able to get to Chris’s house well before I needed to to make sure we could go to The Cheesecake Factory.
Our date was actually one of the best birthdays ever, and not just because I was finally able to try Chicken Parmesan Pizza Style, which I loved. No, it was one of the best because I was with Chris.
He’s so pretty.
At 4:54, mom texted to check if we’d gotten back. We had been back since shortly before 3:30, which was when I had told Chris we needed to be back. She asked if I was staying overnight and I told her I was. She said that was fine.
Two hours later, she let me know that dad was upset by his new glucose monitor. She was describing him as losing control, snapping, and yelling, which he does these things as part of his dementia and his bipolar disorder and his sparkling personality. He can be violent and it’s important to keep him as calm as possible to prevent that violence. His violence is something that mom knows scares the shit out of me because I’m usually the person he targets. So bringing it up was a good way to make me come home. But I sensed that he wasn’t really in that mind frame, so I tried giving ideas to soothe him. She told me nothing could soothe him but she’d leave him alone. Chris asked if she realized how her texts sound. I told him that she says she doesn’t, but that I’ve told her in the past and she claims that isn’t her intention.
I don’t think anything major happened on Friday, but on Saturday night while I was sleeping my Facebook got hacked. I was able to convince Facebook to let me change the password, but my account is currently disabled, pending a review.
From what I’ve gathered, the hackers posted an ad for some kind of good or service that violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. The community standards link leads to this page. If they compared the ads to any other post I’ve made since 2007, they’d notice that none of those goods/services line up with my values.
So, in 28 days, I may officially have a permanently disabled Facebook profile for things I didn’t even do. Fun. Things will get better soon. They have to.
O’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago, Chris’s birthday was Monday, my birthday is in just over two weeks, and mom’s is five days after that. This time of year is always pretty hectic for me in terms of birthdays & other family things.
We used to also have the days and weeks Nana would mourn the losses on the anniversaries of deaths, including Granddaddy’s, which happened 26 years ago this past Monday. I sometimes wonder how she would react to knowing Chris’s birthday was Granddaddy’s death day.
This last weekend was also Chris’s weekend with O. I drove him to pick up O on Friday and I drove them to drop O off on Sunday. It was the first time I was in the vicinity of O’s mom, a woman I have felt intimidated by for a while. But now I don’t, which I’m counting as an achievement.
After dropping O off, we went on a quest to find dinner for his family. We were going to go to Popeyes but there were technical issues and a lack of sides that prevented that, so instead we got food at KFC. Then we watched Charlotte Dobre and Evan & Katelyn videos on YouTube. Eventually mom texted to passive aggressively remind me to come home because she wouldn’t get to see me for the next two nights so she needed to spend time with me.
I spent Monday with Chris. He had to get his hair cut and his beard trimmed. I have previously attempted to trim his mustache before and accidentally gave him half of a Hitler-stache, so I defer to professionals on that. We then hung out at his house for a while until his mom was ready for dinner, which we ate at his favorite Japanese restaurant. We ate, and I tried sushi for the second time and found out I do like it. I also found out that my first sushi was probably bad, as in rotten or on its way to being rotten; this rice was vinegary and the fish was super fishy to the point that I barely finished a couple of rolls. Chris told me that it’s probably a good thing I didn’t finish the sushi that time because it was bad. The food Monday night was good; so good that I overate & ended up vomiting part of it when we got back to his house.
Then we watched The Legend of Vox Machina before going back to YouTube videos while we regretted our life choices. (Mostly, the overeating, but also any movement we made after overeating.) Mom texted at around ten, which caused the night to come to an abrupt end.
Chris was still feeling bad after the food choices today, so, to give him a chance to recover, we didn’t get to go to Writers’ Club together tonight. I’ll admit I cried a bit when I found that out because I’m on my period and I do that a lot on my period, as I mentioned a few posts ago. Apparently it had to do with the extra progesterone that gets released around the time of your period causing borderline personality disorder to go into overdrive.
I found out about the change of plans prior to getting my labs done for my primary care doctor. And I’m sure my lipids and sugar levels will be great after the mukbang that was this weekend.
The first Tiktok I got to post about my labs this morning. The first I started recording this morning about my labs.
Oh, and I found out before the labs that Adore Me decided to claim I sent back another empty box with their Elite subscription, so I was fucking pissed about that. Later in the day, they’d claim they actually received it, but everything was unsanitary so they had to give me an almost $200 penalty for items they actually received. I’ve contacted the BBB and plan to make YouTube & TikTok videos about their scamming tendencies. (Last month, they claimed I sent back an empty box because they say they never received anything from me. The month before, they claimed I sent something back dirty. I’m not sure how I could dirty up something I never touched.)
Oh, and I started figuring out how extensive my disordered eating really is. I’ve been exhibiting signs not just of binge eating disorder but also bulimia, and that’s freaked me out a little. But otherwise things in my life are awesome.
Basically, I had a lot going on and didn’t really have a lot of time for drama llamas on social media, so when I got home and found out a person I considered a friend blocked me on Twitter, I was about ready to laugh. No really. Apparently I may have been blocked for failing to block another friend of mine sometime over the weekend because some of their friends got into it with some of hers.
I don’t know all of what happened nor do I care to, especially since the blocker is being hypocritical as fuck over all of it. A few months ago another person said that if you didn’t like two people they both happen to like, then you are a bad/questionable person. I made a TikTok about how this kind of behavior hurt my feelings. The blocker sent me half a dozen comments invalidating my feelings & gaslighting the fuck out of me. Then she deleted them so as to not look bad. We never spoke of it again, but she’s seemed sus to me since then.
It used to make me uncomfortable how close she was with people who had been even more hurtful toward me. There was one in particular who compared a breakdown in borderline personality disorder to being a little depressed or anxious. That person claimed I was ableist because I disagreed with them and had pointed out that they had excused their friend’s ableist rhetoric. They claimed I hated autistic people and some other bullshit. I have a lot of mutuals with this person, but most don’t make me uncomfortable. The blocker did.
Today I realized her block didn’t matter all that much to me. I had an amazing weekend. I’m hormonal and cry over anything, but being dumped by a person I used to think of as a friend didn’t matter to me. There are other people who I know it would hurt coming from, but not her.
And I know this coming weekend will be amazing too, and I know that not being able to share it with this person doesn’t bother me at all. So I guess I should thank her for the learning experience?
The weekends this year are starting to remind me of the winter of 1996. We’ve had two winter storms so far and we’re only fifteen days in. In 1996, we seemed to have a winter storm every single week in January and a couple into February.
Of course memories of that year are pretty vivid since it was also the winter when so many relatives died and the year when both of my grandfathers died. It’s also the year when my OCD got kicked into high gear. Basically, it wasn’t the best of times for me & my family.
I love snow, except for how it seems to isolate me from my friends and, now, Chris. It gives me no way to get out and deal with my anxiety, which isn’t great. At least when we were on lockdown, I could be in my car and drive around a little. Or I could go up to Lowe Mill and work a little, but I can’t do that even on the clearest day since that studio is no longer being rented by HAL. (I need a safe place to do art.)
I hope the snow won’t keep us stuck inside for long.
I have to get back into the hang of blogging and I know eventually I will. I know I used to disappear for days and weeks and months on end, but I don’t want to be like that anymore. I want to be more reliable.
Christmas was pretty good, though it was a bit scary at one point when we found out that Chris’s son had COVID-19. He was in California at the time, so we were helpless and heartbroken. I may have also been extra bitchy towards people during that time because I was upset. O is fine now, which ended up being the only thing I really wanted this Christmas. (Though if you want to get something for my birthday, I wouldn’t be opposed to that.)
Our dessert table on Christmas
I spent Christmas Day with my mom’s side of the family, and Chris spent it with his mom’s side. We waited until the day before New Years Eve to wrap presents for O, which were unwrapped within an hour of O getting to Chris’s house on New Years Eve. He seemed to enjoy his presents, which I’m so glad. You watch enough Charlotte Dobre videos and you start to worry about how kids will react to presents; though I never really have to worry about with O because he’s a good kid.
Chris and I went to a “party” before Christmas at our friend Elenya’s house. (It’s also Colin’s house, but he wasn’t there that night.) It was really just a Writers’ Club meeting with Christmas themed prompts (by Rhiana) and desserts & hot chocolate. I wrote this, which is only available on my Patreon.
So that’s what happened over my holiday break. And now I’m sitting in my living room listening to rain and sleet as part of the winter storm that’s going on right now. Fun times.
My T. Swift shirt on New Years Eve. Please ignore the toilet in the background.
On the way to celebrate Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house on Thursday, my mom told me that she and my dad had had a conversation recently about me. She told me that she told him that I would be happier and easier to get along with if I was on mood stabilizers. I was horrified.
My first response was, “what?” That was followed by my pointing out that I had tried every mood stabilizer and that I had adverse reactions to a large chunk of them (lithium, antipsychotics, and several anticonvulsants) and a zombie on most of them. My mom told me that I hadn’t. (I have taken all but two FDA-approved and off-label mood stabilizers.)
I’m actually much happier and feel relatively stable off of them. Being happier is why I’m not at home as much. In fact, the goal of my mental health care over the last decade or so has been to increase my ability to leave the house with the hope that one day I could actually live separately from my parents. And my treatment plans have had to accommodate my inability to use mood stabilizers.
When I told him what she’d said, Chris said it sounded like she wanted me to be compliant and stay home all the time. Unfortunately that was what I thought too. I haven’t told him all of the times she has said she wants to be my representative payee or have me placed in a program through Social Security that would eliminate my access to a bank account & remove my ability to run my shop. It would keep me without true resources.
It makes all of her talk through the years about my lack of control & my inability to live without continued assistance of my parents seem all the more sinister. Not to mention how it colors my view on her wanting access to my accident settlement (she wants it in her bank account) and how she wants to raid my cash box for the festivals I’ve sold art & jewelry at. I’m fairly certain she’s been repaid most of the change she thinks I owe her on that. Then again, this is a woman who has threatened to sell or throw out my belongings before, so who knows what she thinks about that money?
It makes me want to make sure I definitely get a studio out of this house so that I can definitely gain independence. It also makes me want to stay out of my house all the time. I don’t feel like she views me as a person.
