Depressed Ramble About Nothing
Feb. 8th, 2003 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeActually, I had a good day. I tried an experiment last night and didn't take my sleeping pills to see if the insomnia had magically resolved itself (I've been sleeping about as well as I used to without the pills, that is to say that I've been waking up about four or five times a night and then going back to sleep a few minutes later), and was disappointed to find out it hadn't.
So back on the pills I go tonight. I'm just afraid I'll grow dependent on them. For some reason I'm really and truly terrified of becoming addicted to any kind of substance, jokes about caffeine aside. I even tend to stop caffeine intake completely every now and then just to make sure I'm not too dependent on it.
I think it's also why I'm so eager to be weaned off the Paxil, even though it seems to be the only thing really keeping me afloat these days.
I spent the afternoon and evening with the Parental Units. My mother is sick, and it sounds to all of us like she's worked herself into such a state of overstressed nerves that she's got the beginnings of gastritis (she has a history for that kind of thing). Naturally she's refusing to do anything about it. My parents are both notorious for ignoring health problems until they have to be rushed to the hospital.
Crap. I just had another epiphany while flashing back to this. *sigh* I guess the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree.
Anyhow, I made dinner for them, because with my mother non-functional my father is basically incapable, or more to the point, unwilling, to take care of himself. Also spent most of the day lying on their sofa watching television.
My mother watched part of the new Buffy episode with me and eventually left after making numerous disparaging comments about how the show used to be good until they started talking a language she couldn't understand and bringing lesbians into the show. Well, not quite in so many words, but she kept making remarks about how she wasn't fond of "the lesbian plotline" as she called it, as though it was something that would eventually get resolved and Willow would go back to liking boys.
I constantly get conflicting signals from my mother about this kind of thing. On one level she seems to think that being homosexual is all right, as evidenced by her heartfelt approval of The Hours in which everyone and their cousin seems to be a lesbian, and on so many others she proves herself to be a complete homophobe. I guess she doesn't mind homosexuality as long as it isn't in her own living-room. *rolls eyes*
I'm feeling incredibly emotionally drained tonight. I guess maybe it was a combination of not getting to sleep until 4am and playing UN Peace Corps with the Parental Units that did it. My mother gets extremely oversensitive when she's tired and/or sick, and she was both today, so I spent most of the day trying to iron out what she perceived to be my father's "faux pas." Any other day she would have just laughed them off, but today she took everything to heart and took everything badly, and I had to do a lot of hand-holding and soothing of ruffled feathers while at the same time keeping my father's feelings from being hurt.
All this without ever an unpleasant word being exchanged all day. Subtext. It's all about the subtext.
In short, I'm feeling very, very tired and once again close to tears for no apparent reason. Nothing major happened, just a bunch of details that wore me down. It's one of those times in which I feel like a total sham, faking my way through life, pretending to hold myself together when all I want to do is fall apart and cry as though my heart were breaking.
I don't do melodrama well, though. I do Angst pretty well, but melodrama just makes me feel self–conscious. I prefer to sit home alone in the dark and suffer, because having people watch me makes me feel like an even bigger fake, and then somehow I'd feel compelled to get up and offer them tea and biscuits or something.
At least I've gotten past the feelings of worthlessness and complete hopelessness. I'm not suicidal, and I'm not about to go and cut just to feel in control, to feel something, to prove to myself I'm not some kind of inhuman monstrosity without feelings or emotions or anything.
Well, mostly gotten past them. Sometimes it's easier thinking of myself as something not human, but that's the post-traumatic stress talking. Who would have thought you could develop that from mere schoolyard bullying? And yet there it is, classic symptoms and all.
I was surprised when that diagnosis came out, but so far no one's refuted that particular diagnosis. Then again, three years of living in constant fear of going to school might do that to you. I'm not sure what it says about me that I never really dreamed of revenge against the bullies at school, never thought about getting rid of them forever the way so many bullied kids seem to nowadays. The farthest I ever got in a fantasy was me actually avoiding getting the crap kicked out of me and maybe landing a good punch.
I did fight back once. I had taken self defense classes with my mother and learned a good move when someone pushed you: grab their arm, use their momentum to throw them to the ground and then twist their arm behind them. Well, it sort of worked: I got one guy on the ground and then another boy kicked me in the head and sent me sprawling. Then they all took turns kicking me while I was on the ground.
After that they made sure to have two of them hold my arms while the others punched me. Always in the stomach and chest, so I wouldn't have "proof" of what they were doing. Not that I'd have told, anyway. I tried that and all it did was get me beaten more. The teachers either didn't know or didn't care or didn't want to deal with it. I think it was the latter.
Of course, when it wasn't the boys, it was the girls. My "best friend" once ripped a fist-sized chunk of hair out of my head during a game of tag when I was "it" and tagged her.
In fifth grade, we had a space problem in the girl's locker room: there wasn't enough room for all of us. So my teacher had the brilliant idea of giving me a locker in the boys' locker room. I don't know how she ever thought that was a good plan.
When I tried to go into the girs' locker room to change for gym one day, the same friend shoved me out the door and into the opposing wall, shouting: "You're not allowed in! You're not a girl!" The other girls crowded around the doorway with her and shoved me away and scratched at me when I tried to get back in.
Of course the boys had a similar reaction, and so I changed for gym class in the hallway, where luckily there wasn't anyone around. After that I'd hide in the janitor's closet to change.
I don't know why I'm going on about this tonight. I don't think I've ever really gone into it in depth in this space ever before, and it's not like it's of any relevance now: my days of being a complete doormat are over. At least, I like to think they are. They lasted well into my very early twenties (until I was 21 or so), but I very consciously tried to overcome all that when I got to university.
My days of verbal abuse and being beaten with hockey sticks in gym class are over.
I should probably go to bed, but I haven't taken my little white pill yet, and even if I take it now it'll take at least another hour to take effect.
Maybe I'll go back to reading Post Captain. I'm having to plod through it very slowly, because apart from the naval scenes, and especially the naval battle scenes, I'm finding the writing almost incomprehensible. Patrick O'Brian's style is weird and elliptic and allusive and really annoying, and I'm finding it hard to really warm to either of the two main characters, and yet it's not so poor a novel that I don't want to finish reading it. The naval battle scenes are worth it, in any case, and are the only times when the sentences and dialogue make any kind of syntactical sense.
Actually, what's really missing in this story are the logical connectors between events. O'Brian jumps from scene to scene as though he were writing a movie-script instead of a novel, and a lot of the time I find myself scratching my head and wondering just how the hell the characters got there in the first place?
I think my soul might be torn. Do you know anyone who can mend it?
So back on the pills I go tonight. I'm just afraid I'll grow dependent on them. For some reason I'm really and truly terrified of becoming addicted to any kind of substance, jokes about caffeine aside. I even tend to stop caffeine intake completely every now and then just to make sure I'm not too dependent on it.
I think it's also why I'm so eager to be weaned off the Paxil, even though it seems to be the only thing really keeping me afloat these days.
I spent the afternoon and evening with the Parental Units. My mother is sick, and it sounds to all of us like she's worked herself into such a state of overstressed nerves that she's got the beginnings of gastritis (she has a history for that kind of thing). Naturally she's refusing to do anything about it. My parents are both notorious for ignoring health problems until they have to be rushed to the hospital.
Crap. I just had another epiphany while flashing back to this. *sigh* I guess the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree.
Anyhow, I made dinner for them, because with my mother non-functional my father is basically incapable, or more to the point, unwilling, to take care of himself. Also spent most of the day lying on their sofa watching television.
My mother watched part of the new Buffy episode with me and eventually left after making numerous disparaging comments about how the show used to be good until they started talking a language she couldn't understand and bringing lesbians into the show. Well, not quite in so many words, but she kept making remarks about how she wasn't fond of "the lesbian plotline" as she called it, as though it was something that would eventually get resolved and Willow would go back to liking boys.
I constantly get conflicting signals from my mother about this kind of thing. On one level she seems to think that being homosexual is all right, as evidenced by her heartfelt approval of The Hours in which everyone and their cousin seems to be a lesbian, and on so many others she proves herself to be a complete homophobe. I guess she doesn't mind homosexuality as long as it isn't in her own living-room. *rolls eyes*
I'm feeling incredibly emotionally drained tonight. I guess maybe it was a combination of not getting to sleep until 4am and playing UN Peace Corps with the Parental Units that did it. My mother gets extremely oversensitive when she's tired and/or sick, and she was both today, so I spent most of the day trying to iron out what she perceived to be my father's "faux pas." Any other day she would have just laughed them off, but today she took everything to heart and took everything badly, and I had to do a lot of hand-holding and soothing of ruffled feathers while at the same time keeping my father's feelings from being hurt.
All this without ever an unpleasant word being exchanged all day. Subtext. It's all about the subtext.
In short, I'm feeling very, very tired and once again close to tears for no apparent reason. Nothing major happened, just a bunch of details that wore me down. It's one of those times in which I feel like a total sham, faking my way through life, pretending to hold myself together when all I want to do is fall apart and cry as though my heart were breaking.
I don't do melodrama well, though. I do Angst pretty well, but melodrama just makes me feel self–conscious. I prefer to sit home alone in the dark and suffer, because having people watch me makes me feel like an even bigger fake, and then somehow I'd feel compelled to get up and offer them tea and biscuits or something.
At least I've gotten past the feelings of worthlessness and complete hopelessness. I'm not suicidal, and I'm not about to go and cut just to feel in control, to feel something, to prove to myself I'm not some kind of inhuman monstrosity without feelings or emotions or anything.
Well, mostly gotten past them. Sometimes it's easier thinking of myself as something not human, but that's the post-traumatic stress talking. Who would have thought you could develop that from mere schoolyard bullying? And yet there it is, classic symptoms and all.
I was surprised when that diagnosis came out, but so far no one's refuted that particular diagnosis. Then again, three years of living in constant fear of going to school might do that to you. I'm not sure what it says about me that I never really dreamed of revenge against the bullies at school, never thought about getting rid of them forever the way so many bullied kids seem to nowadays. The farthest I ever got in a fantasy was me actually avoiding getting the crap kicked out of me and maybe landing a good punch.
I did fight back once. I had taken self defense classes with my mother and learned a good move when someone pushed you: grab their arm, use their momentum to throw them to the ground and then twist their arm behind them. Well, it sort of worked: I got one guy on the ground and then another boy kicked me in the head and sent me sprawling. Then they all took turns kicking me while I was on the ground.
After that they made sure to have two of them hold my arms while the others punched me. Always in the stomach and chest, so I wouldn't have "proof" of what they were doing. Not that I'd have told, anyway. I tried that and all it did was get me beaten more. The teachers either didn't know or didn't care or didn't want to deal with it. I think it was the latter.
Of course, when it wasn't the boys, it was the girls. My "best friend" once ripped a fist-sized chunk of hair out of my head during a game of tag when I was "it" and tagged her.
In fifth grade, we had a space problem in the girl's locker room: there wasn't enough room for all of us. So my teacher had the brilliant idea of giving me a locker in the boys' locker room. I don't know how she ever thought that was a good plan.
When I tried to go into the girs' locker room to change for gym one day, the same friend shoved me out the door and into the opposing wall, shouting: "You're not allowed in! You're not a girl!" The other girls crowded around the doorway with her and shoved me away and scratched at me when I tried to get back in.
Of course the boys had a similar reaction, and so I changed for gym class in the hallway, where luckily there wasn't anyone around. After that I'd hide in the janitor's closet to change.
I don't know why I'm going on about this tonight. I don't think I've ever really gone into it in depth in this space ever before, and it's not like it's of any relevance now: my days of being a complete doormat are over. At least, I like to think they are. They lasted well into my very early twenties (until I was 21 or so), but I very consciously tried to overcome all that when I got to university.
My days of verbal abuse and being beaten with hockey sticks in gym class are over.
I should probably go to bed, but I haven't taken my little white pill yet, and even if I take it now it'll take at least another hour to take effect.
Maybe I'll go back to reading Post Captain. I'm having to plod through it very slowly, because apart from the naval scenes, and especially the naval battle scenes, I'm finding the writing almost incomprehensible. Patrick O'Brian's style is weird and elliptic and allusive and really annoying, and I'm finding it hard to really warm to either of the two main characters, and yet it's not so poor a novel that I don't want to finish reading it. The naval battle scenes are worth it, in any case, and are the only times when the sentences and dialogue make any kind of syntactical sense.
Actually, what's really missing in this story are the logical connectors between events. O'Brian jumps from scene to scene as though he were writing a movie-script instead of a novel, and a lot of the time I find myself scratching my head and wondering just how the hell the characters got there in the first place?
I think my soul might be torn. Do you know anyone who can mend it?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-02-08 09:00 pm (UTC)There's nothing mere about it. I'm so so sorry it happened to you. One of my bitterest regrets is that I didn't always step in at school and stop bullying when I knew it was happening.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-08 09:06 pm (UTC)Ditto.
Understatement of the year: Being bullied sucks. The most physical is got for me was being shoved into a bookcase once and having a girl stab her nails into my arm. (Broke the skin too, but at least the scars are gone now.) Of course, most of mine was the emotional/psychological bullying. And I'm still messed up but I'm slowly getting away from it. Meh.
*Hugs*
Re:
Date: 2003-02-08 10:17 pm (UTC)They enjoy screwing with people's heads, too.
I never could figure out quite what it was that made me their target. Well, me and two or three others.
I'm sorry you had to go through that too. :(
no subject
Date: 2003-02-08 10:38 pm (UTC)Totally.
I never could figure out quite what it was that made me their target. Well, me and two or three others.
I guess it was me because I happened to be the new kid that year. Although the "ring leader" of the girls who went after me was also new that year. Never could figure that out...
I'm sorry you had to go through that too. :(
Meh. I'm fine most of the time. Is only when certain things set me off that I have to bite my lip and try not to cry. Like this past Thursday. :/
*hugs*
Date: 2003-02-08 10:26 pm (UTC)Bullying can't always be stopped, and if it's anyone's responsibility it should be the teachers' and the parents' and probably the school administrators' (although in our case we had one very very elderly headmistress and that was all ^^;).
It's one of my lasting regrets that I never helped out any of my classmates when they were being bullied. All I could feel was a sense of relief that it wasn't me, and it shames me even now to admit it. All my nobler instincts were trodden underfoot when push came to shove. I've had to live a very long time with the knowledge that I am, at heart, a coward, and it's hard.
Re: *hugs*
Date: 2003-02-08 10:34 pm (UTC)Pfft. Try telling that to the school I went to. My mom and I actually went and told them what was happening and they didn't do a single thing, even when they broke into my locker.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-09 05:01 am (UTC)As for the bullying... yeah, your days of being misused are over, but your body doesn't know that. It's trying to protect you as best it can. You're not a sham. You have coping mechanisms, and that's a different thing.