And so it goes

 After four years of grieving mom dying of covid & being in a constant state of chaos being triggered and overstimmed and overwhelmed by everything, after four years of diligence and sacrificing personal experiences, I caught COVID. 

How this came to be is a combination of conditions:

1. My boss insisting I attend a mandatory meeting with 30 people in an enclosed conference room for 4 hours—when I have been avoiding crowds for sustained periods of time and have medical documentation justifying my working remotely 2 days a week.

2. My inability to advocate for myself by pushing back regarding this because of the fact my boss has only perpetuated this dynamic wherein I feel and believe I am a problem, and by pushing back it would have only contributed more to this dynamic. 

3. A half century of both, a fear of failure and people pleasing as a byproduct of my C-PTSD, which was brought on by decades of narcissistic abuse from mom. I was unable to make my mother happy, and by extension, I’ll never make my boss happy. 

It is convenient for me to blame my mom, and have a white hot hate-on for my boss, for this. I lack sufficient conflict resolution skills necessary for me to navigate challenging situations like this. Convenient & a reasonable conclusion; however, I am weary and fucking bored of this trope, blaming mom, and of course suffering because I feel disempowered to advocate for myself.

I caught covid a month after being diagnosed with a DVT in my leg, so I was already distracted and overwhelmed before the situation regarding the mandatory meeting presented itself. 

In the 88 days since my DVT diagnosis and 40 days since testing positive for covid, not once has my boss nor my office manager bothered to ask me how I am doing. In fact, when others are brave enough to inquire, my office manager tone polices me when I dare to respond. 

The ultimate conclusion I have come to is neither my boss nor office manager gives a shit about my health, well being, or comfort—just as mom didn’t give a shit. 

Each day I manage to drag myself to the office, it is as if I were trying to work up an appetite to feast on rotten meat. And unlike all those years of family gatherings I avoided, I cannot avoid work. I need my job and its medical insurance which sadly I need more and more with each passing day. 

I have been unhappy since roughly day 45 of my initial 90 day probationary period, and I’ve attempted to extricate myself from this trap of misery by interviewing for jobs elsewhere, to no avail. 

I have tried to change my perspective to muster the fortitude to keep at it, and I have yet to make my peace with it. So, it is imperative I change my paradigm, and try yet again to find a new job. 

Just as I felt as if I never fit in, in my family, in school, in church, always an outsider looking in—I don’t fit in at my job, and I am tired of being a square peg being judged harshly that I am a fish who is being judged harshly for my inability to climb a tree. 

A Microscopic Shift

As I’ve said before, acceptance & forgiveness are not love languages I was taught growing up, and as a consequence, I struggle with as an adult. 

Recently, I changed one of my hundreds of passwords to involve the word “forgive” in some form or another, so every day, whether I want to or not, I have to type that word, repeatedly, hoping to elicit some benefit from doing so. 

Additionally, 2 weeks ago I broke down and called that co-worker who, for 17 years I thought was a friend, and who retired 3 years ago. I had been giving her nothing but radio silence in all this time—and she has done the same towards me. 

Anyway, I guess I was chasing some kind of dopamine hit by doing so, and she delivered by fawning excessively. Not sure why I did it, as this person showed their true nature by being carelessly cruel to me after I suffered an injury 4 years ago—an injury which still has me hobbled to this day. 

Perhaps I was “bread crumbing” her. I don’t know why else. Maybe I am lonely & craving interaction of any sort. The bar is set pretty damned low if that weee the case, but I guess this is better than calling random strangers just to chit chat. 

Anyway. My customary response as I am walking is to blurt out “Fuck you Nizuc!” (the resort where I suffered my injury), and “Fyck you Brenda!” (the name of the person who was carelessly cruel me. I don’t recall how many weeks it has been (1? 2?) since the password change, but I noticed yesterday when the script automatically started running yesterday, I managed just to blurt our “Fuck you Nizuc!”

Looks like progress to me. 

On Unlived Lives

There’s a quote by Jung that resonates with me: “The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents”

That has put a fine point on the knowledge I have been struggling within myself, that I am not living up to my potential, and looking back on my upbringing is it no wonder I struggle with learned helplessness & its accompanying self worth issues, as neither of my parents were able to extricate themselves completely from the traps their parents created for them. 

At a minimum their lives are great cautionary tales for myself of things or a life I want to avoid—so I try to move forward the best I can. There is no alternative. 

Reviewing Old Blog Posts From 2018-2017

It is wild re-reading old posts, being reminded of a few things (i.e., the solitary apology I ever received from mom), and the instability of my relationships with mom, my sister, and her sister. If things were relatively peaceful between mom and I, then things with my aunt or my sister suffered, and visa versa. 

If mom was fawning over one of us, she was fighting or freezing someone else. And always triangulating. Someone always had to be the villain or scapegoat in her narrative. 

Damaged people DAMAGE PEOPLE. The collateral damage for me is I am left shattered, anxious and avoidant, and hyper vigilant—the last characteristic I am viewing as a super power that serves to protect me, but still it is exhausting constantly bring mindful and assessing risks. 

Mom is the one who physically died, and yet I am left behind feeling as if I were already a ghost and an afterthought. Sometimes I feel as if I were a ghost haunting my own grave that no one visits.

Mom wasted so much time creating & stoking chaos, it didn’t leave much time for love, though there were glimmers of it (or so I thought) along the way that got diluted in the chaos. 

Sadly what little glimmer of familial love or ties that remained in the aftermath of her death, the Trump presidency and the persistence of the COVID pandemic diluted things to the point where I am convinced there isn’t much left at all. 

Cruelty & Weakness

 

“This Is How Things Are Now”

I originally started this blog when mom was alive as a means of documenting and warehousing and compartmentalizing the abuse & absurdity I experienced in my relationship with mom.  

In the aftermath of her passing, I now see that it has evolved into documenting my relationship with myself. 

Before COVID, I thought I had a handle on everything: controlling myself, my thoughts, and by extension my feelings to the point where I was off antidepressants for 11 years. 

Back on medication & back in therapy again, to put myself back together again. Familiar territory. 

I have been re-reading the entries in this blog and reflecting back on the version of myself writing those entries, and so many thoughts come to my mind: the exhaustion & exasperation of constantly being vigilant and protective of me, Maharajah and our life, mindful not to share anything that could be gossiped about or twisted into something else entirely. 

I spent too much time being protective, vigilant, angry, resentful. I see the gaps in blog entries where I was documenting how many days I went without contacting mom, or days when she would call me an outlandish amount of times. 

Exasperation. Exhaustion. Control. Stress. Then her love bombing with a mere glimmer of what appeared to be love, which would dissipate back into the spiral of stress, and nothing ever making her happy, leaving me feeling like a failure—why bother? 

Spending that much time being hyper-vigilant, over stressed, feeling like the villain in the stories mom told herself and others didn’t leave much room for love—and to be honest, it is difficult for me to distinguish actual love versus trauma bonding & Stockholm Syndrome regarding mom. 

I learned too late in life what this is (or was): peptide addiction (the interplay of excess cortisol + dopamine depletion in particular). There I go again, doing what I do best, intellectualizing my trauma. 

Things toward the very end moved too quick, no time for tidy attempts at a sentimental goodbye. The last month of her life was, for all of us, high stress. And in a way, I am chasing my “next hit” of dopamine from a wave of love bombing that will never come. Closure has yet to darken the doorstep of my heart & psyche.

In her 2019 Christmas voicemail to me, in response to gifts she can no longer afford to give us she said, “Well, this is how things are now.” 

Indeed. This is how things are now. At some point I hope to progress from stone cold resignation to actual acceptance. In the meantime, I am trying to allow myself the grace to “just be” and sit with my thoughts and feelings until such time my sadness lessens and my resentments melt away.

On Familiarity