06.08.10
Posted in Family, Relationships at 3:08 pm by TheShire
I want to write something about my fucked up intimate/sex life, but I’m sick and grumpy. My nose has decided to clog up and I’m struggling to breath. The electrician still hasn’t come to fix the heater so the house is icy cold. So basically I’m miserable and my brain is really foggy.
Just, it’s this big fucking mess, and it seems I keep getting people in my life that want to play with me, treat me as a joke. It triggers all the crappy stuff from my family and their inability to love me, and all the friendships I failed to get to work, and I feel unlovable, and more than that, someone that is just seen as a joke to everyone, someone to play with so they can sit back and laugh at the stupid girl that thinks she’s worth loving.
How much of this is because I’m miserable from being sick, or how much is how I am reacting to yet another kick in the gut I don’t know.
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04.30.10
Posted in Family, Multiplicity at 4:51 pm by TheShire
I’m going to try reopening the comments option on my journal. But if I get over run with spam again, I’ll be closing it up, fair warning
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04.16.10
Posted in Family, Trauma at 5:47 pm by TheShire
I was talking to my mother the other day, and happened to mention I need new knickers as the ones I have the elastic is gone in them so they slide down. It was a joke, not that it wasn’t true, but I brought it up because I had a scary walk back from the bus where I feared my knickers would end up at my ankles.
So the thing is, today I got a package from her, with… gods help me… knickers in it. Now my first thought was she’d gone down and brought me a few pairs of ugly granny knickers, because really a family of four could live in them they are that big. But then I looked closer and hence why I’m freaking out right now. She sent me her knickers, knickers she’s worn herself. They are laundered and clean, but fuck it, she sent me her used underwear. Who does that? Do normal sane people do that? Because it’s simply freaking me out so much. Triggered to all hell, having sensory flashbacks which I know will eventually turn into visual complete memories. I can smell her, feel her, fuck it all, taste her. Am I overreacting? I don’t fucking know.
Also on the whole kick me in the face thing, she sent a picture of my brother’s kids. They are nice, but its like.. this is the family you don’t get to belong to. Now I know that’s an overreaction on my part but still what I feel.
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01.15.10
Posted in Family, Recovery, Relationships at 10:11 pm by TheShire
Just finished watching Criminal Minds The Uncanny Valley. So damn creepy and I fell in love with Reid all over again. Was brilliant.
So onto life stuff, rather than my fandom love.
It’s been a rough time lately. December/January is never a good time for me. I thought, perhaps now I don’t have contact with my family over that four week period things would get better but it turns out that it’s still just as tragic and difficult. We shut down, felt lost outside of the world. I did feel incredibly isolated. I think a part of this is my so-called romantic life. It sucks, it’s become nothing but a painful game. I spoke to Brian briefly about 3 weeks ago and when I didn’t acknowledge all the pretty words, about me being special and so very important to him I haven’t heard anything back. I just can’t do it anymore, I can’t have someone feed me lines that have no action to back them up. I can’t let myself believe them, even though I do wish they were true, because when they go on without anything following them I feel worthless, not good enough, not worth his time and effort. He’s probably got a lot of issues that make it like this. I try to tell myself that, but I keep coming back to the fact that if I was special enough, good enough, I would then be enough, deserve more than just pretty words.
The same sort of goes for Holly but its different. A friend said she sounds like a 14 year old boy playing at being a lesbian, and yeah sometimes the things she says sounds more like a penthouse magazine letter (not that I’ve ever read such a thing of course), than a real person. But I doubt she’s a teenaged boy, I just don’t know how much of what she tells me is true, and since she refuses to meet me I’ll probably never know. I just, well I talk to her online, and I keep it like I do with all my friends, nothing too personal about my life, being there for them, knowing they will never be there for me in return. I know people tell me I’m closed off, hard to get to know, distant. I don’t really deny that, I know its a lot of damn hard work to actually get to know me and I don’t really know much about friendships. I just, I wish sometimes someone would put the effort in as well, that it wouldn’t always be about them. Of course, I am good at deflecting people when they get too close.
And then, dealing with this alone feeling, this isolated position, I get a stark memory, or at least part of the memory, it didn’t finish, it just ended, probably with a switch, and the person that got out of the bed wasn’t the one that got into it. That’s not exactly unusual. In all things it probably isn’t even close to being the worst thing that ever happened to me, in fact when I look at it from a distance, it seems minor, not a big deal. I struggle even to call it sexual abuse, although the intellectual part of my mind sees it that way. But the thing is it was my brother, it was yet another one of my family that took advantage of that, took that from me. It just makes me so tired, drained and drawn thin. It hurts, its just a little too much tragedy. Someone again said something along the lines of everyone has pain. And yes its true… but there is always this part of me that wants to yell, not like mine. It’s not about denying someone else’s pain, its about… I don’t know, finally owning up to the damage done. I know it sounds arrogant, at least it does to my ears, but I feel that I shouldn’t have survived, I shouldn’t have come out of my childhood with anything close to sanity, and its a damn miracle I’m as in control of my life as I am.
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07.26.08
Posted in Family, Just Stuff at 1:12 pm by TheShire
I managed to put my neck out. Well not sure if its my neck or my very upper spine, but whatever it was, I’ve been in a lot of pain these last few days. For the first couple of days I couldn’t turn my neck or move my shoulders without a lot of pain. It made things rather difficult. It’s gotten better, slowly, but still not better. The worst part is it is the sorest when I am lying down, so sleeping has been a pain, and it seems sleeping on the side I prefer is the worst for it. So I haven’t had much sleep these last few days and wake up even sorer than when I went to bed.
My mother came down this last week. It wasn’t the best visit. Somehow a chat about game shows turned into a, well, not fight, I couldn’t be bothered fighting with her, but her telling me I was wrong and didn’t know what I was talking about. We were talking about game show hosts and who would host Millionaire. She said she wanted Simon Barnett, and I just can’t stand the man, for many reasons. But I mentioned I didn’t like his attitude when he was protesting the no-spanking law. I should have known not to mention that, but well, sometimes I just don’t want to have to censor myself all the time.
I know the spanking law is rather controversial. I also don’t expect everyone to agree with me. But for, probably obvious reasons, I am very pro a law that says it is illegal for parents to hit their children. Basically the law was to remove an old law that said parents were allowed to use “reasonable violence” to discipline their children. So many parents that were abusing their children and could afford a good lawyer were able to get off charges by claiming it was reasonable force. Of course many people were up in arms because they we no longer able to spank their children. It is illegal to smack an adult, if you hit an adult and they want to, you can be arrested for assault. But children never had the same right. I don’t believe in violence as a discipline tool, I don’t believe it does any good and I don’t believe it is the only or the best option. I just don’t.
But my mother made it known I don’t have a right to that opinion. No surprise there, I’ve never had a right to an opinion that differed from her. So as we sat in the cheap yucky café she took me too, and she told me I was not only wrong but stupid. I don’t have kids so what do I know about raising them. Never mind I helped someone raise her two kids for 18 months, and actually have studied child development. And yes I know that’s different than being an actual parent, but it also means I’m not totally clueless. It also seems children are idiots and the only way to get through them is to smack them, and when parents do that, its not only correct but amusing.
Luckily I don’t think I was the type of company my mother wanted me to be because she took me home rather quickly. Oh and about the crappy café. When my parents use to come down we would go to the pub for lunch. The pubs we would go to were well, basic. A few visits ago I told her I would meet her at the café up the hill instead. I much prefer it than going to a pub. It had really good coffee, and proper food. Anyway, for some reason the place has closed down, so I said go into town and we’ll get something there. Around the octagon (sort of the central point of town) there are a lot of very nice cafés. Yes the food is a bit more expensive than getting a sandwich or a sausage roll.
A little history lesson (this is getting long and complicated). For a while Dunedin was pretty much a backward town. In a lot of ways it still is. But if you went out for a meal, it would be steak and chips, there was no ethnic food, no stylish food. Cafes were non-existent. There were places, but you got percolated cona coffee only and food was basic sandwiches, pies, and cheese rolls. Basically we were stuck in the 50’s. This has changed, we now have some really good barristas, and food options.
But my mother came down on a Wednesday. I get my money on a Thursday so I’m lucky to have even a couple of dollars left by Wednesday so because I couldn’t pay my own way I just went where they wanted. I suggested a couple of places, although I wasn’t sure of the food I knew they made good coffee. But my mother wanted to go to this place. I didn’t know why, but I knew it was of the old style. So we get there and they only have cona coffee, which ok, it had caffeine in it, but when I go out for coffee I want good coffee.
The funny thing was even my mother was disappointed in the food, not because it was the old 50’s style of place, but because they didn’t have as many varieties of sandwiches. She said something about how much it had changed from when she used to go there. I asked when that was and she said before they went to Kurow. Ok, that’s about 15 years ago. Umm, of course its changed, its probably changed hands 3 or 4 times since then. It’s something about my mother, she doesn’t see that the world moves on without her. I think its her borderline issues, where she can’t see that there is a whole way of being, people and life that isn’t all about her.
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03.25.08
Posted in Family, Recovery, writing at 7:01 pm by TheShire
So we see Sean tomorrow after about a month without therapy and we’re very nervous about it. Not just that we are worried that our fears are right and he’ll end up saying he doesn’t want to see me anymore, but also having to talk about the stuff we tried to bury (unsuccessfully) these last couple of months. We have class first, and then will have to walk from school down to see him, so it’s going to be quite a nerve wracking day. He’s in new offices, which are in a much better place, but I hate his office, it’s too small and too close to the waiting room. It’s been taking a while to get use to the change; we still don’t handle change that well.
My mother is back from her visit to my brother. She did her usual thing, my brother’s word is god, and I know nothing. It was silly, I mean it was simply over a Dan Brown book. According to my brother Angels and Demons is far better than the DaVinci Code. Now I don’t agree, I enjoyed them both, but to me the Da Vinci Code was the better book. I read it before all the hype, and really enjoyed the themes in it. It wasn’t that my brother’s opinion was different than mine, I’m sure there are people that agree, but rather when I gave mine my mother completely dismissed it since my brother told her something different. At first it really brushed me up the wrong way, I made some slightly sarky comment about it, which she either wasn’t listening to or ignored. Then I just put it aside, I mean this is my mother, she’s always going to be that way. She won’t read the Da Vinci Code because my brother said it wasn’t that good, and well, one never disputes him. It’s something she does all the time, it’s her way of reinforcing my place in the family and I suppose it’s up to me to not allow her to do that.
I know she’s annoyed with me for not asking about her holiday, but since there’s a rule now that we simply don’t want to know anything about my brother, that we’ve effectively removed him from our life, there was really no way to ask without giving her the opening. And well, that would just be asking for trouble. She doesn’t get it, she won’t believe we can stand for ourselves and stay hold of our principles. Which again, isn’t that surprising since for years we’ve always been so scared and backed down from her, given in to try to keep her happy. It’s like the whole rule about never going back to visit her unless we have our own transport. It doesn’t matter how much we tell her that she still expects us to back down. Oh the joys of having a controlling mother. Our thoughts have been tainted a lot lately with family issues, having been brought up by feelings about our father. The thing is of course, can’t think about those issues with him without connecting them with our mother. And I noticed as I write this how much we are avoiding the word “abuse” now that’s not a good sign.
We’ve been thinking a bit about putting our fanfic up on this journal, putting it in separate pages so that friends that might come back to read the journal could read it too, but so terribly nervous about that. We were posting them on livejournal for a while, but have stopped that. Well sort of stopped, been putting it somewhere else where only a couple of people can read it. I love writing, sometimes I think I might even be not a bad writer, but mostly I just fear anyone that reads it will laugh and call it crap. It’s only really fanfic we are writing, especially now we are back to our Doctor Who and Torchwood obsession. We don’t have a beta (editor) which would probably make the writing better, but it’s so hard to even consider someone helping that way. Still, there is this little part of me that wonders what it would be like to share it more publicly, to get feedback and encouragement.
Ok, with all that said and done, I need to go and cook my dinner. Well actually need to go check to see if the pork is burning.
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11.30.06
Posted in Family, Relationships at 2:21 pm by TheShire
I wonder why I do this since I don’t celebrate Christmas or really want anything to do with it. That said I do know why, because I have to sit with the family this year and I don’t want the “poor and therefore inferior” spotlight blazing on me. So I spent the day finding Christmas presents for my family, rather successfully I must say. It wasn’t fun, mostly because I think I am sick, I am hoping it’s just the flu and nothing too major, more about that later.
I did manage to find the DVD I was wanting to get David. I was going to get it for him for his birthday but that was put on hold because he went to his Dad’s funeral. He has a great interest in the American Civil War and months ago we were talking about it and he mentioned how much he would like the Glory DVD and I found it in Whitcoulls. I am so happy about that, I know he will like it and it was something I could afford. Whilst in Whitcoulls I found three storybooks for the two girls and new baby. Buying a book for an infant might be a bit ridiculous but it’s easier for me. Also I always said if I was to buy them presents it would be books and I want to stick with that. Afterwards I was walking along the road and saw this really pretty necklace in a store and went in to see about it for me. But I am not paying $200 for a necklace that’s just unthinkable. However in a store with such expensive things I found a couple of things for my Mum and my brother and sister-in-law. My Mum has photos everywhere, mostly of Dad and the grandkids, so I found a really interesting segmented photo frame, one you can put four different photos in. And for my brother and his wife a small plate, not sure what they will use it for but I thought it was pretty. It’s coloured glass, very stylised, in reds. They were both in my price range, so that’s it, Christmas shopping done.
So that’s the good news, on the headdesking side of things, I have just spent a fortune, money I don’t really have. It isn’t so bad because I won’t be losing my internet. When I signed up they were offering three months free, at the time I thought it was the first three months, but it was 1st, 6th and 12th, and this is the 12th. So I don’t have to worry about paying for it and that makes things a little easier. There was some money I had set aside to take myself out to dinner on my birthday and that with grocery money will pay for the Christmas presents. It means I don’t have to be totally humiliated at Christmas but by doing that I have to lose having time and something special for myself.
David asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I originally told him nothing but after a bit of talking we got to “something pretty”. Now maybe it’s because he’s a guy, but how come that means for me to go out and find something, buy it and he’ll give me the money. Not really putting a lot of effort into it is he? I have no idea what I want, or what to ask for, if we lived in the same city it might be easier I could just drag him around the stores with me. Sigh. .yet another reason I don’t want to get presents.
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11.13.06
Posted in Family, Recovery at 12:13 am by TheShire
My mother rang tonight with “good news”. Good news that has me cringing, that has me frantically grasping for straws that aren’t there. My brother has decided that the whole family is going to be there for Christmas so he, his wife and children will be coming over. They arrive on the 16th of December and will be staying for about a month. This is supposed to make me happy and excited but all I feel is dread. When Dad was alive I said I would never do the Christmas thing if my brother was over, I wouldn’t put any of us through that again. It is not pleasant in so many ways. Not only do we have to deal with our mother’s little attacks and snide jabs, but we also have to deal with my brother. Every time we have ever been with them it has been traumatic and we weren’t going to do it again. Now if things weren’t like they are now I would say, no you have them, I’ll come up some other time. But you see, this is the first Christmas after Dad died, and I feel obliged to be there for my mother. When she was going to be alone, there was no way I would let that happen, but this to my mother wasn’t about a one off. I don’t know how to say to her now, well you have my brother you don’t need me. She won’t accept it, and I really don’t want to cause a fuss. Part of me is still hoping that somehow David will be able to come through with me. But I haven’t had a chance to talk through that with him since he has been away.
I would like to think we have done enough work so that when we get there, and have to deal with our family we could stay strong in our sense of self. I would like to think I can stand my ground, require better treatment, not retreat into old habits, and lose myself again. I would like to believe I can spend some time with them and still retain my power. I am not sure if that will happen though. I am not sure I can spend a day or two with them all and not feel beaten down, adrift. I do not know if the weight of this year that we are still carrying will still be there. I don’t know what to do.
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