16,408. I’m not done with high school. Drat. I got distracted by this hot boy I slept with in sophomore year. He says it’s ok to write about him. Yay!
I’m going back and forth on where and when I’m using pseudonyms. Mostly I just don’t bother. I’m telling my life story. I think that’s ok. I’m trying to not piss in Cheerios, but I’m being blunt about what I experienced. We’ll see if more people hate me in the end. Cheers. Back to writing.
I’m in the middle of 1993. I hope to finish through high school today (class of ’99). I haven’t done pre 1988 yet. The early stuff is slightly speculative because my memories are hazy. I feel guilt writing something down as true when I have a less than crystal clear memory. I will do it. But I’m going to do the first pass through the older stuff first. I think I should reserve next Monday for the early bits. It will need to be done in a big burst.
Ok, that’s a good timeline for me. I want to get up to 2010 this week. Then I can do the earliest bits on Monday of next week. That means I will have the first pass of the whole story done by the 15th. I’m already feeling frustrated with myself for the bits I have missed. I’ll need the whole last half of the month to reread and add stories in here and there.
The first pass is just giving the skeleton. Where did I live. What kinds of schools. I haven’t gotten into too many awful bits. I’m saving them. I don’t want this story to be, “Krissy’s shitty life”. So much happened and a lot of it was amazing. It feels important to be true to the scope of the story and not overemphasis the trauma.
We’ll see.
So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom. I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.
I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood. One that my mother failed at. My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young. I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair. And I failed often. The result was that I got hurt often. I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people. I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.
I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude. And I want my kids to be allowed to be them. I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long. I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that. I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do. I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion. I can’t. It overloads me. Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult. If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time. It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.
I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day. You can’t do that and have a job. So really, I just don’t want to have a job. No. That’s not true. I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children. I would not be pleasant, ever. Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.
And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment. I am watching how Shanna changes. It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever. Hunh. How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?” I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something. My children get on my nerves. That is kind of their job. When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old! She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do! You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!” I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.
Do you know why I feel that way? Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues. You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike. I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”. “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me. I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me. I was a whiner. At least according to them. And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.
If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand. “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.” I feel like I’m going to lose my mind. She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body. When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her. When I haven’t touched her yet. I did that too.
Do you know what my mom did? She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible. Oh how I screamed. I have done the same thing to Shanna. You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm. But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank. I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers. I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother. I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair. My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that. And she was in a hurry a lot. I was the youngest of four. She worked most of my life.
If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship. She wakes up slow. We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day. Calli is joining us now. Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us. If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing. That is when I have that time. The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else. I would just lose writing.
It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing. It feels so banal, so unimportant. Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say? Who the fuck am I? Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this. I want people to give a shit what I say. But I’m not sure anyone should. Have I thought anything useful? Have I taught anything? I don’t know. Not enough, I’m sure. What is teaching anyway? When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year. I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions. I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe. Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.
I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite. That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment. It’s hard. It means I don’t get to coast for long. What are my priorities.
Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah. Not necessarily in that order. Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking
It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties. I’m following my priority list. I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now. I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house. Seriously. Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me? I’m writing, damnit. Why am I writing. Why does writing matter.
Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic. If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train. The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop. Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place. Just pick one. Are any of them really worthwhile? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better. I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier. I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.
I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!” Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste. It’s pretty vague. And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that. I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body. I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.
I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed. We’ve been married for five years. Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff. I was self-sufficient enough. Now I have no form of income. Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.
Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book. I don’t want to be a god damn dependent. But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people. Err, well, that kind of limits the options. And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now. For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified. I think I could overcome that though. It’s called lying. But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more. I don’t want an office job. I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work. Ha. I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks. And I want to write. And my husband wants me to write.
I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing. He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do. I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer. That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer. That’s just not normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. I hate that word so much and I use it constantly. I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.
Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else? When I stand near people too long I start acting like them. I conform. I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming. Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation. They are just standing there confused. In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it. So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future. You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?
Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children. And a bunch of grandkids and SOs. Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors. They will rise or fall as a unit. They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny. Like obsessions with collecting useless things. Everyone has a different animal. For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it. But they are all dirt poor. So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless. And they have LOTS of it. That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.
When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face. I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?” Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors? Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling. They were caves. I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls. We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places. Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.
So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors. They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled. Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base. That was as much of a home as I knew. That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me. I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house. It feels oppressive to me. But I like darker, more saturated colors. Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature? I never got that memo. I guess I ditched that day at school.
This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems. Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them. I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends. We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.
I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well. That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet. I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family. I respect that fear. I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it. But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends. They haven’t done anything. This is my fuck up.
I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out. I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well. It cycles so fast out of no where. When I am at home I take a time out. It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.
The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me. I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice. That is not a relationship I want. But I want to be effective. Three sucks.
I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure. We can learn how to be a family together. Because really I don’t know much more than them. Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher. She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions. She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok. Hormones are rough. I try to be gentle and understanding. For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her. Minor injuries and scrapes. Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of. If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her. This is part of the circle of life. I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.
But that is when we jump on the merry go round again. I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child. I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal. I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked. I am indeed, white trash. Even that didn’t go how she planned. One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty. Blood is everything. How do you think they get away with incest? If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.
Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor. I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point. My friends aren’t trying to convert me though. Gah.
I should stop writing. It’s already too long. But I don’t want to. This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries. I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line. How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head? But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts. And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want. I wish I didn’t do this to myself. Shit. This is over twelve pages long. Ok, I’ll stop. And it took me just over an hour. That’s actually kind of hot.
I spend a lot of time feeling very mixed about what I write here. I honestly usually forget what I have written almost as soon as I hit post and I don’t reread things very often. I use this space to dump the thoughts that are intrusive into the rest of my life. They are the harshest things I think. I’m aware that I am “mentally ill”. Whatever that means.
It’s hard to not feel ashamed of myself for putting these things out publicly. You are supposed to put these kinds of thoughts in private journals you later burn. You don’t want to taint the world with any of this. I worry about some of the processing I do here. People don’t like finding out how deep my rage is. It makes them uncomfortable. I am going to, once again, alienate people. Not everyone. Not the people who matter. But I will lose people who are only casual distant social contacts at best.
It’s weird to know that I have to live with the consequences of my words, for better or worse. I say a lot of very harsh things. I’m trying to walk a fine line between talking about the emotions I experience and why I have them and blaming other people for upsetting me. I know I’m crazy. I know I’m having a reaction that is out of proportion to our exchange. But I’m still having it and I have to deal with it somehow.
Just doing deep breathing exercises is ineffective at managing my rage. Writing works. And so I will write about things that make me very angry. And people will get upset with me. I’m pretty sure this is an unavoidable fate. Given what I’ve read today I feel like I should be braced at any moment for a death threat. On one hand that makes my paranoia sky rocket. Because do you know who is a credible threat to my life? Pretty much anyone in my family. Hello illegal connections. Not to mention that the whole lot also has serious mental health issues and lots of guns!
Awesome. I really and truly believe that my brother would never come after me. I think he wants to believe he is above such things. And his wife is awesome and balances him really well. He married a really good woman. The only credible threat is my sister. She has threatened to beat me up in public in the last few years. If I publish there is a very real chance she will show up on my doorstep out of the blue with a shot gun. She’s pretty insane. And she has done a lot of very bad for your brain drugs for a very lot of years.
Even though I want to puke on the floor thinking about that… I’m going to keep going on writing. And internet threats seem so very non-threatening. So laughable. Really. Does some wanker on the internet think that they can hurt me more than my family? More than my father raping me? More than my brother beating me, arranging to have other children beat me, and sexually assaulting me repeatedly?
I don’t think I will lose sleep over emails. I’m already up. Bah. That’s a snotty ass thing to say. I’m in a really bad phase right now in coping with my shit. Some day I will go back to not dwelling on being less than. I think. At those times I will be vulnerable. And it will make me lose sleep. But I don’t really think there is much that can be done to cause me to stop writing. Not anything in writing, anyway. Not from fear. I think I am kind of looking forward to that first burst of adrenaline. I do love a good threat.
I don’t know if it is ok to talk about things that hurt other peoples feelings. But I’m not sure I can help it.
Somehow I feel like the definition of white trash is very important to my personal lexicon. After all, it is my self-identity. What do I mean by it? I mean that I startle people. I mean that I experience sudden rage and lash out at people in socially unacceptable ways. I mean that many of the things I like are demonstrably low class.
Uncle Bob, when I was a little kid, would spit out the car window when we drove past the house where the black guy lived. That’s all I knew about “the black guy” who lived in the canyon. When I was in high school and I lived in Bakersfield I was accosted on the bus by a black girl who yelled at me that I was a racist because I was reading a book and giggling. I think the only reason she didn’t kick my ass is because my response to her yelling that I was a stupid bitch was to say, “Come on! You haven’t even met me. Normally it takes someone at least five minutes to decide I am a bitch.” Her boyfriend said I was alright and to leave me alone.
I don’t know why that story stays with me so much, but it does.
It’s hard to talk about different things from my childhood happening because I know the stories are confused in my head. I know they are confused because sometimes I know things happened when I was living in a certain house but I can’t remember when I lived there. I’m afraid of trying to take the pieces apart. I’m afraid of trying to make this a real narrative.
I’m afraid of remembering something wrong, writing it down, and being called a liar. I’m not lying. I’m just trying to remember things that happened a long time ago. I’m trying to string together why they are important. Why is my life worth reading about? It’s kind of weird as I look at my over crowded bookshelf and think most of them are not better writers than me. But they are published and I’m not. I think that’s the biggest difference.
I’m terrified of trying to publish. I’m terrified that I won’t have the drive to push it through. I can’t expect to be magically “discovered” and babied through the process. I will have to make it happen. I will have to shop around for an agent and a publishing house. It scares the pants off me. I am going to have to actually deal with being judged. I’m not so good at that part. I have to feel like this is really and truly honest to god worth doing.
It’s hubris. But I think people would… if not enjoy… then at least appreciate reading this story. I think that even though a lot of people will hate me and revile me and say nasty things about me… I think somewhere there is a young girl who will get out of an incestuous family because of me. Some day some girl is going to say, “You saved my life.”
That’s reason enough to do something hard and scary. One life is enough. Well, I’ve already saved mine. I suppose by that metric it’s enough. But it’s not. I want to be a hero. Ok, that made me smile. I do, I want to be a hero. I want to learn how to say just the right thing to make people know that no matter how bad you feel about yourself, there is hope.
I kind of hate Elizabeth Wurtzl. I think Prozac Nation was a horrible book about mental illness. I spent the entire book wanting to bitch slap her and tell her to stop whining about her cushy life. For the record, should Elizabeth Wurtzl ever come read this… I wouldn’t ever say that to you in real life. Pain is pain. But seriously dude you had an easier life than me and I’m allowed to be pissy in my blog about it. It’s not personal.
The reason it bothers me so much is because I have a hard time with pampered rich people who get to be depressed and non-functional. I’ve been depressed most of my life and I’ve been more functional than most people. Depression makes everything harder. It doesn’t make it impossible and it bugs the shit out of me when people say it does. Ok, maybe it does for you. I can’t know what it is like to be in other peoples heads. I know that I have not had the luxury of being non-functional while depressed. I’m too busy surviving. No, I wasn’t happy, but so what? Who the fuck was promised happiness or a good life? Not me.
When people talk about how we should have universal health care I laugh. It’s not nice of me, but I do. I feel like universal health care in this country is a pipe dream. We have too many people. Unless you, generic person who is espousing universal health care, want to go become a doctor and work pro bono for the rest of your life, how do you think that doctors should be paid for their time? How should medical equipment be paid for and acquired? Should everyone in America get to have million dollar surgeries when they get sick?
Money is finite and people die. I think that even if America managed to get the basics covered, I would be opposed to absolutely across the board health care coverage. I think we are all living too long. Honestly. I think that humans were meant to die a lot earlier than we do now and make room for new people. I don’t like most life saving operations.
My personal experiences with life saving operations gave me back Uncle Bob and Tommy. I’m not sure either were good uses of money. How do you say in the conversation about universal health care, “Actually the reason I oppose universal health care is I think they shouldn’t have brought my brother back to life so he could beat me and attempt to rape me for nine more years. The piece of shit should have been allowed to die when he was twelve and it was his fucking time.” How do you say that about your brother? How do you form a political opinion that endorses other people dying? Because I endorse my family and me dying in the same way. I’m ok with it. I’ve made my peace with death. It will happen when it happens. I don’t want to cause my death right now, but I don’t know that I would fight cancer.
Humans are meant to die. I can’t help but think that I’d rather die of whatever disease strikes me than miserable old age and being lonely. I only want to live to be 80 if a million people will light a candle for me. Otherwise, well, whenever it happens is ok. That’s life.
I think the only part of death that bothers me any more is knowing how devastating that will be for my family. I cry and smile at the same time thinking about it. Now there are people who would mourn. It wouldn’t be like Tommy’s memorial up in Redwood Estates. By the time he died he only had one friend outside our family because everyone else abandoned him. People aren’t nice to disabled kids. He was an asshole too, but people aren’t nice to those who are disabled.
I hear people talking about how things should be “fair”. To whom? Why? What the fuck makes you think that? What does that even mean? Does that mean everyone gets the bare minimum? Does that mean everyone gets what they want? I don’t know. I have an easier life than I’ve ever had. I just went out and bought a bed last night for the garage so we have a more comfortable place to have sex. That’s fucking spoiled. I don’t know how to reconcile my unwillingness to share with the fact that I’m very willing to share.
I’m ok with paying high taxes. I think we should. I like roads and fire fighters and schools. They should exist. I like being the one who can give my friends financial support when they need it. I feel kind of weird about the word charity but I give a ton of money away. Only occasionally to organizations. Mostly to individual people who need help. It feels related to me. If I am giving it to an individual person I know if I approve of how they are likely to use it. I do give or not give based on my judgment. I will admit that. It also depends on how close to my monkey sphere someone is. I can handle that.
It’s kind of hard having a different opinion than most of my friends. I feel like I should apologize. When people get all huffy about human rights I want to laugh. I think that I no longer have the same entitlement as my friends. I don’t believe I deserve good treatment. I like it. I want it. I don’t think it’s about deserve. Not really.
That said, if I win the lottery I am starting a domestic violence shelter. I do believe that people should help people. I feel weird about the government doing it.
Whenever people tell me that welfare fraud doesn’t exist I laugh and laugh. Bullshit. It depends on what you mean by “fraud”. Are there people who get welfare and buy drugs instead of food. Yup. My sister did. I’m tired of having my liberal, upper class friends talk about the poor as if they are some deserving group on the mist who should be cared for.
The poor are the people on the bus in your town you ignore. The poor are the people with ill behaved children in the store that you glare at. You think you are better than poor people. Well, a lot of people in my social group do. I am white trash because I am still fucking angry at all the rich people I hang out with. I resent them. I resent them for acting like I pass. It doesn’t matter how much money I have in the bank I will always feel like the dirty little girl you people walked by without meeting my eyes.
I am white trash because white trash take care of their own. Near as I can tell middle class values are shit. I have no respect for them. It involves a lot of “being polite” for the sake of not ruffling feathers and blending in. No thanks. I don’t blend in. Not once I open my mouth. These days not at all. I love my hair.
(Err, uhm, disclaimer: I don’t actually hate or resent my friends. I have emotional issues. I write about them because I’m trying to work through them not because I am trying to alienate people or say they suck. I don’t actually hang out with people I don’t like. I like my friends. But I have mixed feelings about some of the things they say and do unconsciously. That doesn’t make them bad.)
I am white trash because I can’t let the little classist and racist and feminist things go in conversation because I believe direct confrontation is preferable to being passive aggressive. And I’m ok with shouting. A lot.
I’m white trash because when I speak about myself in public people quickly dart their eyes away. They can’t look at me. Not always, not everyone. But the vast majority of people I meet. I haven’t met very many people in my life who can hear me talk out loud about incest and look me in the face without flinching. I’m sure I shouldn’t take that personally. But I do. Things that have happened to me mean that sometimes people can’t look at me without flinching away. I do that. I can control whether or not that happens. I can decide what to tell people. I can decide to pass and be nice and middle class and stop making people flinch.
Only I can’t. Because I’m white trash. Because I will always blurt things at uncomfortable times that make people flinch. Because I will always be just a bit dirtier and worse and more disgusting than everyone around me. Because who and what I am seems to be an affront to so.many.people. I am white trash because I think it is sporting to warn people that if I think they are a fucking asshole I just might tell them so. While I am visiting their house. In another state. I’m just kind of awesome that way. I don’t seem to be able to control my rage after a while. I have to say that my outbursts have gotten way more socially acceptable over the years. Yelling at Rebecca’s dad was really rude, but he deserved it. He was a twat.
Do you know why I blow up at people who are in authority? Because blowing up at people in authority saved my life. No. That’s not hyperbole. Think about my parents. Think about being brought into the world to parents who are ok with me being raped by every male member of my family. I was born fighting.
That is why I am white trash. Because I’m ok with that fight. Because I accept that fight as being just life. Because I don’t think I deserve anything better. Because I don’t really think anyone else does either and fuck you if you think you deserve better treatment. I did not god damn deserve being raped over and over and over. But it happened. I can’t let it end my life. I can’t sit around and whine about how not fair life is. If I had done that as a child I would have died. There is no fair. I did not deserve being raped.
How many times was I raped. I try not to think about it. I don’t think I’ve had a number in my head for it in a long time. Michael, Jeremy, I’m blanking on that guys name in high school. Memories are awesome. The guy that I met at Lauren’s house. The one I thought was safe. The guy from the coast guard. My dad with the gun. My dad all those other times I can’t count. That’s only five. That’s not so bad, right? Oh, and Paul. And countless times when I lay there and cried and didn’t bother saying no. That’s been a lot of people.
I don’t think that people understand that I take pride in being white trash. I take pride in my strength. It’s gotten me a long way. I will always disconcert people, I have no interest in being a different person. That’s the hard part. I don’t want to be anything other than who and what I am. But people tell me I should. I shouldn’t call myself trash. It’s not nice.
Uhh, piss off. Life isn’t nice. I can deal with that in the ways that work for me, thank you very much. Life isn’t nice and life isn’t fair. See, these are the things I don’t want to say in an actual conversation with a friend. When they tell me, “Oh don’t call yourself that” I have to bite a hole in my tongue to not respond with, “Who the fuck died and made you the fucking arbiter of what I should mother fucking call myself?!” It’s not very nice. And I try to be nice to my friends, mostly. But I feel these things. That’s why I call myself white trash. Because that is my emotional process around people telling me not to call myself white trash. I want to cuss them out and say I will do so if I please. And that’s why I’m white trash.
Hm. I’m not just trash. I’m not and I know it. I’m not garbage. But I am a specific cultural construction that I refer to as white trash. That’s a useful way to think of it. Gotta make breakfast.
Recently else-net some folks were talking about the fact that getting into the nitty-gritty of their trauma just feels like rewounding. It serves no purpose so they avoid doing it. I immediately felt defensive. I have been explicitly told by a therapist that I am damaging people by writing about what happened to me. I only had one appointment with her. Whereas it is good and healthy for me to journal about it… I shouldn’t inflict my trauma on anyone. I am in fact abusing them.
Let’s uhhhh look at that for a minute. If I sit in the privacy of my garage and write about things that happened to me as a child on the internet I am an abuser. Even though no one (not even my husband) is compelled to read what I write? If people are not interested or it is too intense, they stop reading. Most of my closest friends can’t handle reading my blog and they are very frank about it. Not only do they not want the intensity of the stories they can’t handle the volume of reading. I’m uhm prolific. That’s ok.
This kind of thing is a difference in philosophy. In my opinion. Now, I don’t have a degree to back me up on this topic (psychology) but it seems as though most of them are just making shit up. I might as well do the same thing seeing as I’m only trying to make me happy. My theory is: I feel better when I talk about the stuff from my childhood. Not right away. Not when I am doing it. After every mad rush of writing I feel relieved. I feel like I no longer have to carry the secret around any more. It’s not a secret. It’s just a story. It’s a story that other people know now. It’s a story I can look at and try to find value in as I go about my life. It probably won’t have value to other people because their lives are different.
I’m not really writing for anyone else’s benefit though. I write because I am compelled to. I always have been. I don’t think my approach is necessarily sane but I’m not sure you can call it insane exactly. Well, I do the same thing over and over and I hope to keep getting the same reaction–self improvement.
I write because I want to. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think that means anyone else has to. But I want to. If you don’t like what I write, don’t read it.
Now if only I believed all this.
I have a secret. I carried a balance on my credit cards last month. Almost $10,000 (it is more than that now). I did it on purpose because I knew that I would be able to pay them off now. I just got my last annuity check. Every month since I turned 18 I have received a check for $1,200 every month completely tax free. I was attacked by a pit bull when I was a child and my friend’s father represented me. I think he did a fabulous job of handling my settlement. On my 30th birthday the payments end with a $36,200 check. (Last monthly payment + $35,000 pay off.) I’m so thrilled about how much cash I have in my bank account that I’d kind of like to take a screen shot and frame this. Before the credit card payments go out this month I will hit $50,000 in cash for about a day.
I’ve been talking to Sarah about this a lot. I’m not sure if someone who grew up in a safe, secure home can understand the kind of elation I feel right now. This is so much safety and security. It’s freedom. If I was truly feeling like I could not handle my life right now I could bail. I’m not going to. But right this minute I have all the means I need to disappear if I want to. I don’t want to. I choose to be here. This is what I want. That’s a weird feeling. I am not a victim of anything in my life because I choose it.
Right now I’m having a lot of strong mood swings. I’m doing a lot of hiding from the kids. As a result the kids are extra-super-clingy. Which cycles my moods faster. It’s really nice to have this money appear right now to smack me in the face right now that I really and truly want to be here. Even with the things I miss about going out. Even though I miss friends and communities… I can never get this time back. I really want to be here with my kids.
I’m struggling with the fact that I will no longer be supplying $14,400/year to the household. I am, in fact, increasing how much I take out of the pool because I am going to do less work (hiring a maid) instead of working more and contributing money as well. It’s hard to feel like I have enough worth to be in this position. I find it rather odd to be trying to live more according to Noah’s principles than mine. You see, I didn’t grow up with intellectuals. I grew up with stupid, uneducated people. Not all stupid people are uneducated and not all uneducated people are stupid. But my family is both. The idea that any mental work I am doing has value? That’s odd. If I have not done substantial physical labor I feel guilty all day. I’m not supposed to rest. People like me have to earn rest and there is no chance I have worked enough lately. I’ve been lazy all week! Well, sorta. This is all vague.
Noah believes that me reading, improving myself as a person, writing, and interacting with other adults in intellectual ways are actual priorities. He wants there to be time in my life for these things. He does not think I should be working all the time. It’s weird. Those are not pastimes I was raised to appreciate. I have always done them, but it was furtive and hidden. Shameful. My secret life. But what if it isn’t a secret? What if I get to sit out here in my personal Wonderland and write. What if that is totally ok? How about if I learn how to write while sober so that the kids can wander in and out so they don’t feel cut off from me? Enh, that may be a stretch. Hm. I should think about scheduling. The problem is that I don’t generally smoke on a regular schedule so I have ebbs and flows of how effective it is. This is why I’m thinking about scheduling things. I can’t believe I am thinking about scheduling my life so I can be a more effective stoner.
I’m weird, Sir.