Me and the big kids are having a lot of nightmares. Last night for me was about a “Christian Mission” housing orphans and sex workers. The organizers deliberately kept it bare of anything but beds (with no covers for the mattresses) and it was dirty and run down and giant like a maze. There were no corridors. You had to walk through rooms to get to rooms. I was looking for my mother in there and I kept walking through sex workers having to deal with violent clients. The owners were secretly rich. They got government funding to run this shithole and they didn’t see why they should have to share “their” reward.

Eldest Child has been having a lot of nightmares about Paul Hollywood chasing her with bread products. She has brought this up most mornings for weeks. Middle Child has had a continuing dream about all people under 40 being forced to live in one building complex where they are forced to work. (You are let out at 40 because you have no more value.) There is a long list of rules you have to follow and if you break any you are put in jail where you will do everyone else’s laundry by hand.

We are all anxious as fuck.

I am struggling with feeling like I am bad for writing about my feelings. Surely I am only doing so because I want to control people and I am bad. I am trying to force people to act in a certain way; I am being controlling and evil and…

I have a hard time with the way that mental health diagnosis stuff is weaponized. I can’t count how many lay people have told me that I must have Borderline because they don’t like how I am acting. Actually bitch, more than 30 clinicians have come to the conclusion that I definitely don’t so why don’t you go fuck yourself with a rusty spork.

I used to be friends with a woman. When she didn’t like my behavior she would start telling me that I was acting manic and I needed to get that under control. When I politely and calmly asked her to not use diagnosing language for me because she is not someone I am paying to have a medical opinion about me she completely fucking exploded and started screaming at the top of her lungs that she is a terrible person WHO SHOULD JUST DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE. I spent a bunch of time trying to calm her down and assuring her that I don’t think she is a terrible person who does nothing right, I just have a problem with this one behavior. It was really awful. How come I have to become your therapist telling you that you are ok because you did something that wasn’t fucking ok?

I am terrified of forcing people to appease me. So I spend a lot of time appeasing others. I don’t want to be appeased. I would rather move away and stop talking to anyone rather than force them to jump through hoops to appease me.

I am also struggling with a dynamic with my kids that has been going on for years. I have many examples going back a long time. I do this thing where I deliberately focus on the kids for a day each in a week then on a different day I say “We did x person’s thing 3 days ago and y person’s thing 2 days ago and z person’s thing yesterday today I want us to do ______.” Every time my kids start badgering me and/or tantruming about how they want _______. Sometimes it is something they want to do (that won’t be fun for me at all–like supervising them in a play area) but often it is demanding that I supply them with sugar. “I want ice cream” repeated for hours.

It makes me feel really really bad. I pay a lot of attention to you. You get your way a lot. Why don’t I get to say I want to spend 3 hours doing this other thing?

Noah always tells me that I can go do the thing by myself and leave him with the kids so that the kids don’t have a chance to do it to me. Then I find a corner to crawl into and I cry.

Why don’t I just be alone. I go through all this effort for all these people and when I want to do something I think is fun… why don’t I just be alone.

I don’t want all day every day to be my fun stuff. I don’t ask for anything even vaguely approaching that.

One of my buddies really wants me to call her. She has texted me a few times asking me to. But she wants a free therapist (she has never seen a real therapist). She wants advice on parenting and dealing with her parents and dealing with her legal troubles and dealing with the government. She spends about 5 minutes asking me how my kids are doing then she launches into all the stuff she wants help with. She doesn’t know anything about me. I don’t ever get to talk about how I am doing or what is going on for me. She literally knows nothing about me other than I always seem to have answers to her questions. I haven’t called her. I feel guilty. She begged me to please do so soon, definitely before I leave Japan. Something is probably going on for her and she wants me to tell her how to fix it.

I can’t fix my problems. Why do you want me spending my energy on fixing yours?

I am struggling a lot with feeling invalid. If i have both negative and positive feelings about someone clearly I am vacillating between idealizing and tearing someone down. Uhhhh, no? I am having both sets of feelings at the same time? I am not alternating? Oh. Well I have strong negative and positive feelings about people sometimes. THEN YOU HAVE BORDERLINE. Wait, what?

I feel like a lot of people weaponize mental health discussions to invalidate people having feelings as a reaction to legitimate negative treatment. I am pretty sure Sarah felt like she was supporting me as much as I supported her. If I disagree with that assessment it must be because I have Borderline.

I feel like I have to get enraged before I believe it is ok to defend my boundaries, then I am a bad person because I got so angry. But if I try to defend my boundaries in more mild ways I am walked on. I have no acceptable way to explain what I want or need. Anything I do to try and manifest that something is a problem for me is either ignored or used as a reason to prove I am bad.

I had to be willing to toss my relationship with Sarah overboard before I could say “The way you ask me to devote all of my spare time to you but then you rarely show up because your other friends are more interesting/important isn’t ok”. I am not allowed to object to being treated shoddily until I am willing to say “Fuck you. I am done.”

Then I have Borderline because I end relationships!

So what you are saying is that if I don’t let people treat me like I am disposable I have a personality disorder?

Ok.

I am tired of feeling like my emotions aren’t valid because they aren’t what other people want them to be. I am tired of having people (often strangers, but sometimes those who are closest to me–like Sarah) use weaponized language about my mental health. Either I act like they are perfect and never complain about their behavior or I have a personality disorder or a mental illness I have not been diagnosed with. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to figure out what is actually wrong with me because so many people have been confident telling me there is a lot wrong with me.

Yeah. There is. But I have a pretty complete picture of what that is now. And fuck you for thinking that your stupid, ill informed, ignorant, hateful opinion needs to be added to my mental picture of myself. You are a selfish asshole. How’s that for a diagnostic reference for you?

I am tired of feeling sad. I am tired of feeling less important than other people. Noah tries all he can to mitigate that for me but it is so big.

A talented Black woman I learn from said recently that she won’t engage with white women because white women are violent (verbally but this shit counts) in their pursuit of having the status of white men and they are happy to step on men/women of color in the process. I have not stopped talking to my friends who are not white because of that statement, but it makes me question whether I have the right to ever approach another POC for friendship because I am inherently violent and dangerous.

I don’t want to hurt people. But I absolutely have. I have significant power to do more damage.

The only way I know I can stop hurting people is to die. Which is not saying “Be my friend or I will kill myself.” I am saying that people are hurt in so many ways by so many things that the only way to FOR SURE never cross a boundary is to not be alive. Human beings fuck up. I fuck up. I cross boundaries and say things I shouldn’t and I hurt people. I am not entitled to that right. I shouldn’t be hurting people.

So maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about my feelings at all because I am the problem.