general pet peeve rant/my crazy is showing

[jaeliyah]

I was raised to believe/realize/understand that too much of my presence is undesirable and to be avoided at all costs. My mother was always very emphatic in explaining to me that there is a time threshold in human interaction and once I passed it, the people I cared for would no longer tolerate me, and she was careful to ensure that I observed

Comments

[cloverest]

If anyone I know deserves a do-over for life with the stipulation of new parent selection, it's you.

[jaeliyah]

Eh, they could be worse. I lived. And my mom really does mean well and she really does believe that people start to dislike you if you spend too much time with them.

[horatio09]

Wasn't there something about a comic book/button store? We could add yarn!

[horatio09]

Also, I third the "you're awesome!" motion. There are many guys out there who'd love to be with a girl like you. I mean, you know comic books. Don't underestimate the appeal of the nerdy girl.

[jaeliyah]

It's not even that really. It's more like I see so many of the things that I suspect contributed to my parents' crappy marriage and parenting in myself, and I just don't want to be a wife or mother if I suspect I'm gonna suck at it, and I'm tired of people just dismissing that like it's unreasonable or absurd.

[horatio09]

Ah, that makes sense. I can see how you'd worry about repeating the mistakes of your parents. Bad behaviors do have a way of transmitting themselves through the family tree, and it's legitimate to be worried about perpetuating the cycle.

That said, why should you live your life, or more to the point not live your life, in fear of what might go wrong? Would you have gone to college if you'd lived in fear of not being smart enough? Would you have taken up crafting if you'd lived in fear of not being good at it? Would you go to work if you lived in fear of getting more than 14% errors on any given day (or whatever the threshold is)? If living in fear of failure and your failings in these areas is inappropriate, how is it appropriate in any other area of life? And heck, even if you had lived in fear in those areas, would it have been the right way to live? We were not made to live in bondage to fear, but rather to seek out in freedom the abundance of good that life has to offer. So cast off your bindings and live!

[horatio09]

And this is where I hate not having the ability to edit my comments.

For what I just said, I do agree that you should be aware of your past and how it influences your current conditions. I just think that the proper response is to learn from and change those destructive behaviors, not to avoid the problem altogether.

[jaeliyah]

But I think it's also important to consider the stakes. I mean, it's one thing to blow a few bucks and a few hours on a project that doesn't work out. It's different to gamble someone else's happiness or a child's well-being on the possibility that I'm not a bad person when I suspect I am. It's not that I'm opposed to working on not being a bad person or that I think I will always be a bad person. I just think that I can't guarantee that I'll ever not be a bad person, and right now, it seems unfair of me to drag someone else into my drama when I know beforehand they're getting a bad deal out of it even though they might not know until later.

[jaeliyah]

I think my mom's way of protecting me from getting my feelings hurt by other people was to tell me first and try to head it off at the pass. So I have all these memories of my mom telling me how I can't wear what skinny girls wear or pinching my stomach rolls and telling me how we needed to diet and exercise and one day we'd be little and cute or how I should drink more water and eat less chocolate because my acne was flaring up again or how I shouldn't spend so much time with my friends because after a while they'd get tired of me or if we were somewhere out in public that I needed to keep my arms down because she could smell me or how I shouldn't speak too highly of myself because nobody likes a braggart, and growing up I resented her SO MUCH because she was so hyperaware and vocal about all my shortcomings, real or imagined, and I thought she was ashamed to have me as her daughter, but now I think that she just didn't know how the things she said sounded, and for as sorely lacking as her execution was, I think she meant well.

[jaeliyah]

This is true, but I'm the one who has to unravel and untangle my mental mess and figure out where all this crap came from and how much of it is worth keeping. So I guess I'm not really upset with her anymore because I know that she doesn't think she did anything wrong and probably never will, so she's not going to change or apologize. And I know that I can't unhear all the stuff she said to me, so I just have to decide how I let affect me now, whether I still believe it, and whether it's worth still being insecure about.

I've stopped photographing for the moment. I'm back to hyperthyroid again because they're tweaking my meds, and I'm so tired all the time that after I make the thing, I just want to go to bed. So I do. So I think I'm just waiting this out for now, and I'll play catch-up later when I'm not so worn out all the time.