It seems like everything is going wrong all around us. It's almost enough to make you wonder if its Ragnarok or something. (Loki tells me that Ragnarok happens every night and everything resets again in the morning, he's been telling me that for years.) I am looking at turning fourty-two in this mess and realizing that I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. I'm realizing that I never expected to live past thirty. I was that brainwashed into thinking I was going to have a short lifespan.
Now ... now it seems like the disaster that I was raised to believe was going to destroy the country is happening. It just doesn't happen to involve nuclear weapons yet. I have been running smack into all of the damn conditioning I was raised with all the time of late. I find myself afraid that my parents are going to come kidnap me and force me to work the farm. I find myself afraid that they're going to punish me for walking away from them and the rest of the family (in some especially brutal and ghoulish fashion, because that is the only way they're creative it seems). I haven't been sleeping well because once my anti-nightmare pill wears off, I start reliving my childhood through my nightmares.
I find myself trapped in this apartment because I'm afraid to leave. I'm afraid that some rando neighbor is going to sneeze or cough on me while I'm getting the mail and I'll catch Covid-19, or something somehow worse. I'm afraid that my parents are going to show up. I'm afraid that if I go for a walk, I'll miss the bus dropping the kids off from school and then I'll have CPS called on me. I'm afraid to go to the store even though I need to buy some clothes because there's so many people there that could possibly get me sick. It's all irrational but no one said fear was rational.
At the same time, I feel this conditioned sense of guilt for leaving "the family". Some evil part of my brain, where the conditioning lives, tells me that my family isn't really my family. That my life isn't real. It tells me that this is all fantasy and that I'm still a kid. That's on the really bad days. On the moderately bad days, it tells me that Beloved and I are "playing house" and I actually should be "responsible" and be back at the farm.
In the midst of this dumpster fire of a year, up until I blocked them on FB, I heard nothing from my parents. I have gotten stuff about a wedding for a cousin of mine. It's funny, his sister didn't invite me to her wedding. Must have gotten lost in the mail, right? I don't even know if his brother is married or if that child I was introduced to is his. I have lost touch with all of them. Why? Because I didn't matter enough to them to pick up the phone and call once in a while. Because I wasn't servile enough for my parents to be consider a 'good' daughter, despite the fact that I graduated college from a good college with good marks. Because I married a man my mother despised because he wasn't rich enough for her tastes, so she did everything she could to sabotage my wedding by undermining what I wanted and then showed up wearing a tacky black wannabe evening gown and a horrible dye job.
Nope, I don't matter to my family of birth. The people that I mattered to were my paternal grandparents. Their dead now. The rest of them don't care much for me because I had the misfortune of being a daughter. My brothers can do no wrong. Despite one of them having no job and living in squalor (in my parents house, which they abandoned for my late grandparents house) and the other being a deadbeat dad and a drunk. Nope, they can do no wrong. But I had to have an "intervention" because they assumed I was an alcoholic because I could hold my own in a conversation with my alcoholic brother regarding hard liquor.
I'm bitter. They told me as I was growing up that family was everything. They told me that we had a moral obligation to our ancestors and our descendants to be "more than right" and honorable. It looks like I'm the only one living up to that obligation. I'm bitter because they said that the family would stick together and take care of each other. What they really meant was that I was supposed to drop everything and take care of them. What they really meant was that I was supposed to be their meal ticket.That's why my Dad called me a failed investment. That's why my Mom kept telling me to leave Beloved and go marry some supposedly rich guy she knew off in gods only knows where. Because they wanted money and thought that the only way to get it was by marrying me off to some wealthy person, since I didn't land a "good" job right out of college, I haven't made a ton of money off my writing, and my brothers have proven unreliable.
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