Pam was here on Thursday and I stayed up very late because I wanted to hear all the words she was willing to say to me. I haven’t slept well since. I just… I feel like I’m doing that vibrating with energy thing. I want to separate from my family and be an individual person. Not be a milking machine. Only 2-4 years to go…

I feel like I’m very overly focused on negativity. I want to complain about every one and every thing. Even though I feel pretty happy. It’s like being happy makes me more irritated by the things that aren’t perfect yet.

How very very codependent I am with my friends is bothering me. Many of the people I spend time with are abused or traumatized people. Many of them are not that great at adulting. I let these friends take up a lot of space in my head and then I waste hours and hours and hours being frustrated by the steps these folks won’t take to change their lives.

As if I have room to talk.

BUT THAT DOESN’T STOP ME FROM JUDGING IN MY HEAD. BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING ASSHOLE.

One lady I like a lot. She’s so nice and kind and gentle. So nice and kind and gentle she is letting her kid walk all over her. I’m deeply worried about both of them.

Another lady I like a lot. She’s deep in grief. I worry a lot about how she is balancing what she owes the dead with what she owes the living.

Another lady I like a lot. She’s struggling to cope with her grief over losing a connection she never ever thought she could even want. I worry that she is going to fall into that hole and not ever be willing to try again.

Life is nothing but trying again.

I think I frequently make wrong choices. I think I waste so much time and effort and energy on stupid things I shouldn’t do. I am sitting in a glass house with a big pile of rocks. Does it make it any better that I’m not saying almost anything to these people about what I think they should do?

Dude I know that my opinion ain’t worth nothing. Nobody ought to listen to me.

Except my kids. And that sucks for them. Ha.

I wouldn’t want control over these peoples lives if I could have it. I am not actually wise enough or omnipotent enough to know what they really should do. I don’t have Noah’s hubris that I can think through all the possible repercussions and make the Right Choice. I think I’m going to make the wrong choices over and over and stumble towards a path that is right enough for me.

I see my friends hurting and I want them to hurt less. Sometimes the ways in which they are hurting are ways in which I instantly feel and believe that I know something that might help. I’m mostly wrong. I’m mostly lying to myself. I’m mostly keeping these thoughts in my head and not sharing them because fuck me and my stupid ass advice.

Seriously dude. Fuck me.

But I can’t get my brain to shut off. I don’t want to have these elaborate thoughts about other peoples lives. I don’t want to strategize someone else’s divorce. I don’t want to be constantly weighing and measuring in my head what kinds of services my friends should be getting for their kids.

It’s exhausting.

I hide at home partially because the weight of “keeping an eye on people” wears me the fuck out. What do I do with this keeping an eye on? Mostly nothing. But it feels like what my inner child requires of me so that I won’t turn out to be one more piece of shit who just didn’t notice some egregious problems.

I’m not calling CPS left and right so clearly I think people are doing well enough. But I’m always scared. Who is going to go off the rails? I don’t trust that anyone is so awesome they could never fuck up.

I don’t trust anyone. There’s a piece of me that feels so grateful that CPS came to check on my family. I get my kids evaluated by Teh Authoritays pretty frequently because I want to be checked up on because I’m totally capable of going off the rails and abusing the shit out of my kids. I don’t want to though. So I put tons of checks and balances in place so my babies don’t have to be at the mercy of my kindness. I’m not that kind. What I have instead is an incredibly well developed Super-Ego and the desire to keep my forever family.

I dislike this negativity in my head.

I want to think about the good parts. The parts I admire. The parts I am striving to emulate. There’s not one person I want to give advice to that I don’t try to copy in some way at some times. Generally speaking I think they are all much better people than me. But good people don’t always think strategically about their own benefit. Sometimes they care too much about the feelings of assholes.

I want to teach my friends how to be bigger assholes like me so they won’t get kicked so hard. But it doesn’t work like that. My schtick works for me for complicated reasons that won’t work for other people and I know it. But it still hurts to see my friends be hurt and I’m a selfish piece of shit and I want to hurt less. So I want my friends to get hurt less. But I don’t have much control over this since I’m not the one hurting them to start with.

So I inappropriately think controlling thoughts in their direction. WITH THE POWER OF MY MIND I WILL HELP YOU TO BE A BIGGER ASSHOLE SO THAT YOU GET SHIT ON LESS BECAUSE YOU ARE AN AWESOME PERSON AND PEOPLE WHO PICK ON YOU DESERVE TO HAVE A RASH THAT MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO EVER SIT DOWN AGAIN.

I am at my absolute limit for how much control I can exert over Noah and the kids. The kids are getting old enough that I need to start backing off more seriously. In some ways I already have. So to replace the codependent relationships I want to be having with my mother and my cousin and my aunt… I think too much about my friends.

I’m trying to both curb my codependency and forgive myself for the impulses. I limit how much time I spend with the friends I want to “take care of” on purpose because I get inappropriate. I don’t need to go clean anyone’s damn house. I don’t need to get into another situation where I’m providing respite/therapeutic care to special needs kids to help their parents out. I love and miss the Bonus Kids but my stress levels have gone down so much it isn’t funny. Trying to learn what I needed to learn to help them… that was hard. And I was fighting their mother’s impulses the whole way because helping them would require her changing and she didn’t want to.

I can’t do that any more. I need to stop fighting other people to change. It isn’t my place. It’s wrong of me. And it’s ineffective and I don’t have time for ineffective behavior. It’s hilarious to me how much “being effective” has become a more important metric than “being nice”. Fuck nice.

If someone else wants to sit still with their mental illness and not fix big glaring problems in their life… I have enough shit of my own to fix. fuck.

ugh