Eredien's Journal

Therapy & Mental Health: yesterday, my therapist and I both agreed that I am pretty much done with therapy for right now. I feel happier and way more confident in my life and have mechanisms in place to deal with the bad stuff. It doesn't seem like I was in therapy for more than three years, but it's a different kind of work than I was thinking it was when I went into it, so the time-dilation makes a little bit of sense to me. I am really proud. I still have problems (see below) but I can deal with them in a reasonable manner. I am still taking meds for PCOS and bipolar disorder, which seem to be working really, extraordinarily well.

Home life: my parents are transphobes, my mother explicitly told me that she wants me to settle down with a man or a 'real woman'. Going to have a talk about this with my mother. On other hand, mother does not have cancer again, so that's good.

Creativity: I have gone into my winter creativity phase, which mostly means writing poetry, reading long involved novels, drawing, and sewing (as opposed to my summer phase, which is writing longer works of fiction, reading short stories, gardening, and website design). I am really happy with where I am at in my sewing; it looks more professional every day. Also when I move back to the Boston area I am planning on trying to do my maskmaking/puppeteering internship again.

Fitness/body image: this is slowly progressing. I am going to a weekly meeting that is helping. I have decided that I would rather lose weight and see what that does to my breasts and shape than get top surgery; I don't think I want it anymore and I figure if I do later the procedure will still be there.

Work: I got promoted from intern to part-timer, which means more responsibility and not being paid under the table. Yay for daily structure.

Relationships & Friendships: Long distance relationships with my friends and partners still suck, but I have kind of gotten used to it. I try to see people when I can, which also involves being able to say 'I can't see this person right now' when I can't. My life is much better for the way I now manage relationships that are important to me instead of letting my relationships manage my moods. I had a fantastic minivacation where I got to see A., B., and E. this past weekend and managed to break through some of my remaining psychosexual fears in a big way, which was incredibly rewarding. Things with R and R' are slowly, slowly coming back to a level of friendship I haven't felt from them in years, which is also fantastic. The support of I. through all this has been steadfast not to mention hilarious. I feel really amazed and grateful to have such incredible people in my life.

Food: the biggest change in my life this year has been my deciding two things: I can be veg* at home if I'm not vocal about it--no one will miss me eating cheese or meat if I don't make a big deal out of it--and that I want to start fishing. I went fishing this summer and really found it incredibly relaxing, though I caught close to nothing. I've decided that I will eat what I catch if I can, which is consistent with my overall food philosophy of taking personal responsibility for the things I eat and trying to grow or kill as much of it myself as possible. Next possible food project: keeping rescue chickens?

Moving plans: progressing apace with my bank account (did I mention I'm grateful for my job)? I may move to Boston and commute to Western MA to see B., I may move to Western MA with B. and commute to the semi-Boston area to see A. Still looking for Boston jobs, especially in editing or writing. Really where I live depends on what kind of job I get and what my plans with B. solidify into. We are thinking of getting some kind of cohousing--a shared duplex, or possibly nearby apartments.

Travel: Belgium in 2015 with A. I also actually have a price on my dream trip to Russia/Mongolia/China/Japan and am saving up for that.

Religion/God: I am impressed with the new pope even though I currently consider myself agnostic. I went to Jewish services for the first time last week and really enjoyed all the singing and debate of theology even though I don't believe in the efficacy of prayer as such. Chi work both with and without my partners is going well. Saving up for martial arts again even though my mother considers them unwomanly (another thing to talk with her about).
This entry was originally posted at http://eredien.dreamwidth.org/2405.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I got home from some errands and business-promotion stuff about 4 pm today, having been out for most of the day. My mom was sitting on the sofa, watching Dr. Phil and playing with the cat.

She: "Can you go get some apples?"
Me: "But we have apples here, a whole bag full."
She: "But we need tart apples for the cabbage and apples we are having tonight, and the apples we have are not tart apples."
Me: "Why don't you go? Since I just got home from the grocery store and really don't want to go out again."
She: "Your dad took my car to get to work."
Me: "You can take my car."
She: "I don't want to go out."
Me: "Well, I really don't have time to do this today. If you haven't gone yourself by the time I put my stuff away, I will see if I can go or not."
[20 minutes later]
Me: "Mom, I really don't have time to do this today. Can you go?"
She: "Sure."
[20 minutes later]
Me: "Mom, it's getting kind of late. Is the cabbage thing going to be ready for this evening's meal or should I make my own food?"
She: "Oh, it will be ready; don't worry." She is chopping cabbage and onions, but there are still no tart apples in sight.
Me: "How long does it take to cook in the crockpot?"
She: "Three hours."
[I note at this juncture that she was home literally all day and could have started this at any time, and gone to get the apples anytime between 9 am and 3 pm, but she started it around 5:30 pm without her ingredients.]
Me: "Are you sure it will be ready?"
She: "Sure!"
[45 minutes later]
She: "Oh!"
Me: "What?"
She: "I thought this would be ready around 7 but instead I found out it was not going on 5 pm like I thought, it was going on 6:30."
Me: "...yeah, that's why I asked you if it would be ready on time."
She: "I just lost track of the time."
Me: "Yeah, I did that too, and then I bought a clock for the living room that you can see as you are watching tv."
[Note that there are 3 other clocks in the living room, all of which would work if she either wound them correctly or got them fixed, but this has not been done in about 5 years. So I had to go and get a clock if I wanted to see the time without constantly pulling my cell out of my pocket.]
She: "I just didn't pay attention."
Me: "What are we doing for dinner?"
She: "Dad and I are eating leftovers."
Me: "Ah."

This wouldn't be so infuriating if she didn't routinely miss dinnertime* by several hours on the days when I make dinner at a specific time for her and my dad, and then criticizes my cooking.

* Dinnertime: in eredien's household, this can be any time between 4:45 pm and 11:30 pm EST, inclusive yet uncertain.

If my mother cooked and you do not show up on time, you are complained at for half an hour as you eat at the table.
If you routinely miss it because you forgot it was 9 pm at night and you still hadn't eaten yet, you are my dad.

If you buy--or attempt to make something for yourself, then get chased out of the kitchen during your mother's frantic dinner preparations at 8:30 at night--when you get hungry enough and then you are told you don't eat enough with the family, you are me.

If you get fed on time, you are the cat.

My dad and I got into a fight today because he didn't respect my opinion about something and then later tried to shush me loudly and rudely when I tried talking to him about why I was upset, and my mother has a totally racist 'funny' work forward printed out and sitting on our kitchen table that I am trying to figure out how to confront her about, but those are not the only things that have me thinking, "something's badly wrong here, in this place."

My mom and I just came back from the Muppet movie--I'd been wanting to go, so she took me. It was pretty fun (I am really looking forward to the Studio Ghibli adaptation of the Borrowers, which was like my favorite book in 3rd grade!) until we got to the parking lot after the movie, at which point a panhandler walked up to our car. My mom rolled down the window a crack, and the woman asked, "look, are you nice people?" My mom repeated the question sarcastically--"are we nice people?"--rolled the window up, said, "I guess not," and drove away.

I sat in absolute stunned silence all the way home while my mom made the following comments:
- "See, those other people next to us didn't help her either."
- "There was this guy in front of my office who used the 'I need help' spiel on me and my coworkers without realizing he'd said it before, and when he'd used it before we'd given him help and places to go and he went there for a while and then was back in the same spot using the same old story a month later."

We paused in the parking lot of my parents' home:
- "I want you to know, [Eredien], that if she had really needed help I would have helped her."

I interjected at that point, saying, "how do you know what she needed? You didn't even listen to her."

My mother: "If you really need help you don't go up to people and ask if they're 'nice people.' You go up to people and say, 'I need help.'"

I don't always give to panhandlers. I didn't tonight because I didn't have my wallet on me, and I haven't been giving lately because I'm deep in debt and need to save my money to get out of the spot I'm in. But there's a difference, a big one, between listening for a few moments and going, "sorry, I can't help you today," and meaning it, and saying, "well, I'm not a nice person!" But I wish I had my wallet tonight.

I am baffled, and hurt, and angry, and shocked, and deeply saddened. I am also angry that I'm angry, and baffled that I'm baffled--what the hell else did I expect? Must I truly grow a tougher skin again and pretend like everything that offends or upsets me doesn't matter just so I can live in this place without daily screaming fights?

I am definitely moving back in with my family. Over the weekend of Nov. 18th and 19th, I will be moving from my current place in MA back to NY.

I've personally been struggling, since spring 2010, to banish as paranoia (as I and others characterized it) the feeling that my loved ones and roommates can't really decide if they want to have my physical presence, much less welcome my physical presence, in the spaces they've said they want to share with me--only to have it turn out that my presence was decidedly unwelcome after all, no matter how regrettable that was, and I needed to be the one to fix the awkward situation by leaving.

This is mostly because, as I realized in the summer of 2010 when my parents weren't there for me in the hospital, that my parents' attitude toward living with me (whether as an adult or as a child), that they want me in their presence when they want me, as a kind of command performance, and want me and the reminders of me out of their presence the rest of the time, that makes me so aware and so hurt when others express ambivalence about having me in their lives, physically, sharing space with them.

I realized this, last summer, and realized that the fix was trying to express that I needed the people who lived with me to express non-ambivalence and actively embrace my presence in their space and in their lives, but my partner at the time was unable to do that, even though I believe she may have wanted to, so the uncertainties built up in my mind.

Of course, that contributed to the problem until my worst fears, the ones I was encouraged by others to think of as impossibly paranoid--and, more importantly, had taught myself to believe in (correctly, still, I think), as impossibly paranoid, because after all I believed I was someone worth living a life together with, or else I would not have taken the leap of faith to move and trust even when things looked hard, and change careers and start admitting my deep desire to further my own self through my own creative work as a job--came true. No wonder I was a wreck. No wonder parts of me still are.

I don't think this will be good for me as a whole experience, but it may lead me to confront the issue at the source, which I think will be good for me. I can only hope. And I will hopefully emerge stronger, able to afford things like the carpentry program I want to persue, able to afford my own damn apartment without being screwed over by a succession of passive-aggressive roommates, able to take love and care from people and give it back without being so needy as to rely on their love and care in a way that terrifies them or makes them resentful of my otherwise awesome, even nee4ded, presence in their life.

Why I never returned your email:
If you have tried to contact me via email in the last month or so, I did not get your email, as I am locked out of all my gmail accounts due to a long and complicated story involving unrecoverable files on a laptop, a backup which failed, a phone which lost the program I needed to recover my files, and the fact that the gmail guardians of last resort will never be convinced that I am really the owner of any of my email addresses, since I cannot remember facts like the specific date on which I first activated my gmail account lo these many years ago. I am currently in the process of trying to figure out what to do next in terms of email communications, and in terms of my Google Plus identity.

TL;DR: I do not recommend implementing google 2-step authentication.

How to contact me now:
Texting me on my cellphone is best. Calling is ok too. When I get an email again I will post it here.

Where are you living now?:
I have settled into the new house. It is good. There are trees, and a small river nearby, and also the city is nearby. I have gotten used to Boston again. I am kind of starting to enjoy living here again.

What are your roommates like?:
Roommate E. went goth clubbing with me and some friends this Monday. It was exhausting but really fun. She is awesome. Roommate J. is almost never here, and he is sometimes very confusing in how he relates to people, although he is also nice. We are looking for a roommate to replace J.

What is your job like?:
My contract with Nokia was not renewed--I made a decision to pursue a career I liked better instead. As far as that goes I was very happy indeed though....recently though through nothing that could have been predicted my job description and responsibilities were changed at a very rapid pace, twice in two weeks, and that has recently thrown me off balance. I hope to work there for some time to come, as long as I continue to really enjoy the job and manage it well, and continue to learn my own strengths/weaknesses as an employee.

Are you staying in Boston for the forseeable future?:
Probably, unless I apply elsewhere for grad school and get a scholarship. I have found there is a food sciences program at Harvard Extension school and am considering figuring out if the program there seems as good a fit for me as the one at IU did. I am still really interested in getting my masters' degree, but need to make sure I pick the right program and right choice and have the resources at hand to back me up.

What is happening with your family?:
My sister is still awesome, as is my brother-in-law.

I attempted to reconcile with my family, with the help and assistance of my therapist, in late June. It did not go well. My father absented himself for half the session, and my mother told me that she was offended on behalf of the truly abused when I claimed I was abused. Some things that they told me make more sense now--I understand now why my mother hurts when I pull back from physical contact with her. But I also understand why I pull back from physical contact. I wish I had understood both of those things sooner. But I am glad I understand them now.

It took me a while to figure out what to do with my family relations after that. I visited my hometown in August, and had a good time with the rest of my extended family, and mourned a cousin who died, and finally came to realize and articulate to myself about a half-month ago that the best course for me would be to let my parents go, finally, because of the fact that they use friends, family, and loved ones to critique and hurt me. They also used me to hurt my friends, family and loved ones by constantly querying my timelines, decisions, choices, efforts and timetables until I started distrusting my own daily choices and hard-won self-knowledge and confidence in my own joy and the joy I found in my loved ones, family, and friends. I became so distrustful of most of my own desires that I questioned away my joyful, confident, knowledgeable, brave, self-assured, and kind self every time I was asked to make a decision. Because I was going through the insidious self-undermining cycle of mental self-flagellation caused by my abusive relationship with my parents--at a time when my partner and I already needed me to stronger, kinder, more effective, and clearly decisive on a daily basis--eventually every single daily decision I made on my own or was asked to make on behalf of the relationship became a process of desperately struggling to trust and express my own needs and wants, or rejecting my own needs and wants and expressing them as selfish, foolish, petty, or undeserving of being met.

I couldn't see the self-abuse, and didn't really know what was happening at the time, other than to know that I knew profound joy and love and respect when I allowed myself to follow my own heart's deepest promptings, and profoundly hurt when I did not allow myself to follow them. I decided to follow my own heart's deepest and most joyful promptings even though I was scared to let myself trust myself. Then, I was so proud to find that trusting and expressing my own joys again made myself and others happy. Then, I was profoundly terrified to learn that my decision to trust myself had not made my partner feel as happy as she said she was, but had made her feel scared and manipulated instead. In learning that, I felt had finally done what I had been taught that trusting my own decisions would inevitably do--cause a lot of hurt. I was taught that expressing my own needs was selfish. I was taught that trusting myself to love people and be loved was foolish because the people who loved me would always eventually admit that though they loved and cared for me, they ultimately felt trapped and constrained by my love and joy and presence in their lives but had felt obligated to lie to me about it because they couldn't bear to see me hurt when they told me the truth--that I was being selfish when I dared to express my love for them.

I stopped making decisions for a long while after that, and just accepted the decisions of others--whatever would make them happiest or most convenient, I did. I was hurt. That's what I do when I'm hurt.

Later, I realized that the above was the opposite of what actually happened. I realized that I could trust myself and my own decisions, I realized the interpretation of what would happen if I trusted myself was colored and twisted by my abuse and my hurt. I feel really proud and happy I realized that.

In the time between trusting my first decision, and knowing with the sick logic of the abused that I had hurt people by trusting myself and daring to have the audacity to love someone and be loved back, and realizing that that incorrect interpretation of events was formed by the patterns of self-doubt and questioning-abuse that bringing my joyful relationship to my parents had re-started in my own head, there were a few months where I felt a great self-loathing for my own capacity for love and joy.
There were a few months where I really believed that by allowing myself to trust myself, by being proud of my ability to do so, and by being proud of my ability to love others and be loved, I had been utterly selfish, and bore direct responsibility for the breakup. I felt that if I hadn't ever given in to allowing myself to selfishly love and trust her and trust myself to be with her, she would never have felt constrained by my love, never felt she had to lie to me about her perspective on my choices, never had to feel as if she had to tell me she was happy with me when she wasn't, and never needed me to leave. I hurt a lot.

I said a lot of things about myself that weren't kind that I regret. I said a lot of things about others that weren't kind that I regret. I don't think I could have gotten here today without having gone through that period of hating myself for being able to trust in my choices, hating that I could trust that my partners were telling me the truth, and hating myself for loving myself enough to allow myself to express my needs, which finally showed itself up as the foolishness it was all along.

It is good to trust myself. It is good to express my choices. It is good to love and be loved. What wasn't good was letting my self-confidence get undermined by my parents' insidious questioning of all my choices, such that I myself began questioning those things and hurt myself and the people I loved.

I can't think of a way to have a relationship with my parents that won't ultimately end in their raising objections and tiny undermining critiquing questions about everything I do, am, want to be, or who or what I love. I can't talk with them without talking about those things. They don't have the willpower to resist getting me to question every decision I make, and I believe they don't fully understand what they are doing. I don't have the ability, even after a decade of being on my own and learning--and being taught--to love myself and others better and better, to fully evade the abuse pattern. I don't know if any amount of self-love and self-confidence would ever be enough, because the more I have of it the more they use it as a weapon to convince me I am selfish and ungrateful, and turn me against my own best self. So, I am not talking to them any more.

I should have cut off relations with them fully last summer for my own health, but I had to be sure that I was making a decision that was good for me and not just good for my relationships--if it had been good for my relationships but bad for me it would ultimately have been a bad decision for my relationships as well.

TL;DR: I am cutting off relationships with my parents: the better I get, the more they use it against me and the people I love. They use the love I have for others to critique and hurt me and get me to doubt myself, and they use the love others have for me to critique and hurt others and get them to doubt themselves through my doubt. They have even done it to themselves, with their own love. This is unacceptable. They cannot stop. The better I get, the more ammo I give them. This is unfortunate, but I am not even really sad about it anymore; it's been more than a year coming slowly to this decision, since even mid 2009 I think, at the engagement party my parents threw for us: they didn't care if I or my partner wanted it. They were throwing it for themselves in a very real sense. I started to try and convince myself that they were doing it for me and my partner because I wanted to convince myself of that so badly, and I succeeded. When they did not call her when I was sick the summer of 2010, I tried to convince myself that it was because I had never done a good job of showing my family what I loved about her, because I so badly didn't want to admit that they would never respect me and the choices I made in my life, and I succeeded. From there, a whole host of doubts flowed and paralyzed my every move. No more.

I feel a vast sense of relief and the beginnings of a new life.

How is your health?:
Generally pretty ok, though often I have to go off antidepressants as I do not have enough money to pay for my psych services out of pocket and they do not take the state healthcare plan (no health insurance at job). However, I am still getting antidepressants and going to counseling when I can afford it, and enjoy it. It has been really helpful. I got a new doctor early this spring. I have not yet visited her; when I do for my yearly October visit I plan on introducing myself and asking for new hormone level tests, as well as discussing the fact that my psych medication noticeably interacts with my PMS in somewhat confusing ways. I also plan on asking for an allergy referral and a sleep study, as I have been having problems with my sleep cycle for years now and might finally have the resources to get help for myself.

I am tentatively trying out going vegetarian for health reasons, as I suspect I might have the beginnings of a latex-fruit reactivity problem. I am also putting it off for health reasons, as I know I have a lactose intolerance that makes me ill and uncomfortable for days at a time. I am also putting it off for ethical reasons, as I am really uncomfortable eating the commercially-produced milk, cheese and eggs that appear in so many processed food products now.

What have you been doing?:
Reading, writing, and healing. The fey novel is going to be about abuse, recovery, and its complexities: I cried when I realized that. I have also been hiking and swimming a lot. There is a lake about a mile from my house in one direction. There is a bookstore about a mile in the other direction. Life is, generally, good.

How are your pets?:
Tokai is finally eating on her own again. I am thrilled. She is a mighty huntress! Oolong is herself. She is adorable and fluffy and somewhat dopey. She's also 3 next month.

“Say what you want to say about me,” Palin said, “but I raised a combat vet. You can’t take that away from me.”

I truly don't understand what she's saying here. She raised a son who grew up to make his own decisions about which institutions and ideals to support. That's parenting in a nutshell. Does she want accolades for happening to be the mother of her son, because when her son was able to make his own decisions about which institutions and ideals to support, he decided to support institutions and ideals whose aims his mom happened to agree with?

If he'd decided to support an institution or ideal she did not agree with, would she then reject identical accolades from those who told her that she must be proud to have raised such a courageous, self-aware, self-sacrificing child, because the institution or ideal he decided to support was something she could not support?

Why does it seem like she wants to take credit for a decision her son made because she is his parent? It's not just Palin--my parents do this too, and I think a lot of parents do. If we make decisions that our parents agree with, they say that it's because they raised us right, and if we make decisions our parents disagree with, they not only say that they can't support our decision, but wonder where they went wrong raising us. It's natural for a parent to rejoice at the success of a child and be sad at their child's failures. But the measure of success of a parent as a parent must be composed of more than the parent's perception of what their child's successes or failures are, and the measure of success of a human being who has children must be composed of more than that human's perceived success or failure as a parent.

The meatloaf analogy

In rm's journal, trinker wrote a comment about how surviving abuse makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get.

I wanted to expand on that a little, and wanted to put it in a place where I could talk about how that was rekevant to my own situation right now.

To trinker's comment, I would add to this that it makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get--even if they don't want it, even if they detest it, even if getting it is actively bad for them. And when people are told and believe that they should be grateful for getting things that are bad for them over and over again, they generally end up not being able to articulate what it is that would actually be good for them, because they have never had the opportunity to have something that was good for them, whether they got it for themselves or had other people give it to them.

When you are starving for food, and someone hands you meatloaf, you are going to eat it even if you don't like meatloaf. You are going to eat it even if you are allergic to meatloaf, if you are hungry enough. And if all that the people who cook for you know how to make is meatloaf, you are eventually going to learn to eat and probably cook meatloaf, even if you don't want it. Then, once you've learned to eat it all the time without throwing up, you will start to wonder if you really do like meatloaf--after all, you're eating it all the time.

Then, you learn that other people eat other things--beans, squash, fish, ice cream, sometimes even meatloaf. At first you are surprised--people eat a variety of things? You spend a while adjusting to that idea, and then you go to the kitchen and tell the chef about pumpkins and they say, "but my meatloaf is the very best!" or "sorry, I don't know how to make salad; you'll have to make do with meatloaf!" or "you don't like my meatloaf? Fine! Don't eat tonight, then!" or "but you've been eating my meatloaf your whole life, so you must like it--and look at how healthy you are! " These last two arguments are quite convincing, because you a.) don't want to stave, and b.) you yourself were already wondering if maybe your hatred for meatloaf was irrational--it reinforces that self-doubt that was already there. You never stopped to wonder if you could have become more healthy if you ate soup instead: for one thing, you'd never had the opportunity to try soup because you'd never had it in your kitchen. And for another, you had no reason to think that eating something else would fix the problem, since when other people said they ate other things and were "normally healthy" you assumed that meant that they were constantly sick, since that was "normally healthy" for you and everyone who you knew, since you all ate from the same kitchen.

But then you finally figure out that maybe you should to learn how to cook.

You go to the cook and ask to use the kitchen, but they won't let you make anything other than meatloaf; so you have to go elsewhere to learn to cook.

There are three options from that point.

( Please read below the LJ cut, this is cut only for length and not for importance. )

I have been--am--guilty of this fundamental selfishness, in terms of relationships. I think that is because I believed that the only permissible way to live with and love others in a relationship--and in turn be lived with and be loved by those others--was the already socially sanctioned way of showing those things. Which is just not true.

Which is probably why I spent a lot of time in the past six months deconstructing arguments against gay marriage and following the news about worldwide queer rights and Prop 8--I was using my thoughts about what was actually happening as a tool to try and work through my feelings about the social sanction of marriage. After the first few months, I was even able to articulate to myself that I was using all that reading and writing as a tool to get to something else, a means to an end, but I wasn't quite sure what end I was looking for. (I was so crushed when the prop 8 victory was handed down a day before R. and I broke up, but the reason I was crushed didn't make sense to me--we had never planned on getting married in CA anyway, so why would the timing have such an affect on me and my relationship, personally? Turns out I was crushed because the social sanction aspect so central to the case was something that I had really believed I needed to have a happy, loving relationship, and at the very point that that social sanction was making global news headlines, I no longer had a happy, loving relationship for those sanctions to apply to). It was that reading and writing and thinking that led me to realize that I didn't actually want or need those social sanctions to have a loving relationship, and further led me to realize that my insistence on those sanctions was what led me to ignore my own idea of what I actually wanted, which led me to destroy the loving relationship I actually had going on already. [After some reflection, I don't think that I destroyed the relationship, and I don't think it was the pressure for social sanction that led it to be destroyed. I do however, think that my insistence on the sanction let me to ignore what I wanted.]
This is not to say that other people shouldn't want or need social sanctions, because I think the vast majority of people do, and deserve them. I will continue to fight for gay marriage. I just won't continue to fight for it for me anymore, because it's not what I want.

(The meatloaf analogy, BTW, is both a metaphorical and a literal analogy--I'm vegan and I literally get the "wow, this is so good but it's so weird, I don't think I could eat it every day; are you sure you don't want steak--and you aren't losing any weight, are you?" with every family dinner for which I make and bring my own food. (When I was a preteen and decided to become pescatarian, my parents forbid me from buying and/or cooking my own food at home. I would eat what they cooked and pick out the bits of meat. I survived a year on frozen/canned side-dish vegetables, pasta, and McDonald's caesar salads, before I realized that I could not get enough protein without the tofu that I could not buy or cook, and went back to eating meat for my own long-term health.) The whole point of bringing the food in the first place is to enable me to make the food choices that are right for me, and stay emotionally and physically healthy by doing so), but my mom just complains that eating fish would make me healthier and feels bad that I won't eat her turkey gravy, and my dad won't try anything made of tofu at all, though I think he had three slices of vegan cake).

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with food--I didn't like the food I was being given, but didn't have an opportunity to eat kind of food I wanted much, wasn't allowed to have my own diet when I found out my ideal foods were radically different from those of the people around me, and was told my choices were invalid so began to doubt my own ideas about what I liked and whether my food opinions were just totally invalid.

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with relationships--I didn't have an opportunity to get much attention as a kid, and didn't like what attention I was given. But when I expressed this, I was told that it was not acceptable to ask for or want different kinds of affection, because the kinds of attention I was given were the kinds they could give, and the prevailing socially sanctioned idea my parents and I had of love was "the parents will love to the best of their ability, and since that is all they can do, the child will know and feel loved" -- even though that doesn't really follow. Even when I found out that my ideal forms of getting attention and expressing love and affection were acceptable to ask for from people who weren't my parents, I still didn't have a good understanding of what kinds of attention I did want, or if I wanted attention at all, or if I wanted it how to get it or give my own.

I think this problem, though, has gone a long way toward being solved in the past decade. Some highlights: I learned a lot about what kind of types of affection I actually wanted and about what kinds were no good for me. I learned that it was ok to desire them, and to ask for them. I learned how to say "no" and "yes" when someone gave them to me, and mean it. I learned it was ok to say "I don't know," and wait. I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself beyond "what I desire in my relationships." I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself within my relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires in their relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for themselves beyond "what they desire in their relationships."

All those things are really important.

..and now today my mom just wrote that maybe she realized that she hadn't always communicated love to me very well and hopes that she can express it to me in better other ways in the future.

Who knew, all I needed to do was be a bitch for a week and actually start expressing the anger I felt at them in impolite ways, and I'd get them to say something like that; I am going to try it more often.

August sucks doublehard; I needed to hear that like a month ago and I probably would have been a lot less angry and stressed going into it.

All this stuff coming on top of stuff is really wearing.