Ten years... overlooked freedoms
It struck me today. This isn't an anniversary date, but this is ten years from the year that I wound up going into the homeless shelter. That triggered something in my mind, something good. It feels like something that was years ago.
I live in a good neighborhood. It's quiet and people have yards. Their homes are painted regularly and their yards kept up. Whether it's local law or community consensus, their yards are all kept up and a few gardeners have turned them into personal expression. I like those yards best of all, always have. There are sidewalks. I live in a house, not an apartment. It's got a yard and some trees, one of which has apples. Children in this house are giggling and happy and playing with their toys. The older dog's an adolescent very proud of being the lead dog and the best dog for tricks and obedience and Being Good, she's bringing the puppy right along in the Good Dog tradition and both of them are so well behaved I feel like I moved into a Disney movie. Neither would dare threaten my cat.
My cat has grown sleek and healthy. His fur's become glossy and kitten soft, he's gotten kitten-bouncy in his Midnight Crazies. I've been recovering and regaining strength from what the long sickness did to me and before it the long malnutrition and overexertion of the shelter and subsidized-housing and couch-crashing years did to my health.
The cool little tick is that it became the past as solidly as being overworked in Chicago in the 1980s became the past. This post is not about the horrors of homelessness or about the tragedy of poverty in America. Which isn't tragedy. Tragedy takes a tragic flaw on the part of the person who gets shafted. Pathos is when it happens to good people who did nothing to deserve it and still got the shaft, yet somehow that gets far less respected than a tragically flawed hero who shot himself in the foot and walked right into it.
It's more about reclaiming a piece of my mind and soul.
The best times of my life were not the times I had the most money. I lived in the suburbs as a teenager and had money coming in all over the place. We ate expensive food. I was out of my mind from all the mind games and couldn't even put my finger on what was wrong, but I was living a lie with every breath. Every dime I earned got thrown away on junk, by various mind games and logistic tricks involving transportation a lot of it got directed away from bookstores or music stores or art supplies or gods forbid, postage and a typewriter and mailing supplies for manuscripts.
My writing got sabotaged so deeply and so subtly that I only now begin to understand some of how it was accomplished. That was the worst torture. Meanwhile everyone around me thought I was crazy for feeling imprisoned, angry and despairing because I had everything. I had nothing. None of it was mine. None of the things I had then felt like mine. Even if they were. I had trouble accepting my car was mine after I got one, even though it was exactly the car I'd have picked out for myself. I miss it -- but wish I'd thought of that and bought another like it shortly after selling it so that it wouldn't have the familial ties and memories it carried, so that it really would have been mine. Something I got for myself.
Imagine this. You have a vague idea for a story. You get excited about it. You sit down to work on it, getting out the typewriter you had to spend months discussing and begging for "in order to do homework, it'll help with school, my grades will go up if I turn in typed reports." (You paid for it out of your job after being harassed and challenged about whether it was a good idea, whether you really needed it and whether that one was a good one over and over every day till you made the purchase after a half hour muttered argument in the store and have no idea if you will be able to get a new ribbon for it, paper or envelopes again without weeks of fighting.)
As long as you sit there thinking, quiet, nothing happens. Five minutes after you start typing, the idea takes off and you get into the flow. As long as you were hesitant, typing a little and stopping, nothing happens. But as soon as the keys chatter and you're happy, you're running with it, it's going well... then the door opens and she's got cookies and she chatters on about her day and things and asks how you're doing. And reminds you how depressed you get when you Try to Write. Asks what it's about and then whatever it's about, no, I don't think any of the magazines would take that, it's too weird. No, the science fiction magazines would, they ARE weird, it's that sort of thing. Yes but you could get a lot more money if you wrote for the big magazines. Why don't you do something nice about what it's like to grow up on a farm? Because I never did and don't even like farms.
And the point you get mad and the argument flares, there's the evening gone to the argument. The two paragraphs on the page are like a dead thing, like some wildflower picked and shoved in your pocket. You can't remember what you were going to do with it, the idea's gone, there's only this warmup description of something on another planet. It feels like a total flop. It's an unfinished fragment. The next time, and it is very soon, that one of them says "But you never finish anything you start" the fragment becomes one more mark of shame and one more reason you have No Talent (if you did, your rough drafts would have Shakespeare's quality but be in exactly their genre and express THEIR political and social and religious slant, not your own), and they say it was All For Your Own Good.
And they say You Have Nothing to Complain About, You Have Everything Any Teenager could Want.
Except your friends have 150 albums and have been collecting them since late in grade school. Your friends who read have rooms full of science fiction and fantasy books they take for granted, even sell off or give away duplicates they picked up by accident. They have notebooks whenever they run out of paper, just pick up new ones without having to fight about it or explain What Class It's For. Many of them have diaries or journals that don't get read. The ones that write got typewriters early on. The ones that paint got oils before they got into junior high school and have no trouble justifying a Conte Crayon or an Ebony pencil that costs a dollar. (But you could get a whole box of pencils for that, twelve of them! What makes this one so special? It's darker. It draws better. It's better for drawing. Better be a whole lot better for that kind of money.)
All that was why being artistic-poor in New Orleans, eating on $10 a week, paying $200 a month rent and not having to go to a job that drained more body energy than I had just to pay the bills felt like ultimate freedom. Even if it was only a rented room. When it was an actual apartment with at least one cat in it, it was ultimate freedom and I was happy as I could get. Life was good, I had all the good things in life and some luxuries, because at that level anything after necessities went toward something I always wanted. Usually something tangible that would still be there to be enjoyed if I wound up short next month.
The dumb habit of throwing away money on things I hated and didn't want but avoiding buying anything I needed, liked and wanted really flourished in the 1980s when I had a ton of money from the job and most of it piffled out into things I didn't want or need or care about, everything from business casual clothing I loathed and paid haircuts to furnishings I thought were ugly and expensive kitchen stuff I didn't like. I got into that pattern with my ex and while I did occasionally get books or music or something in art supplies, it was only because he liked to read too and it was usually only something both of us liked. Because I had been trained like a dog with positive reinforcement --often in the form of extra money handed to me -- to buy what other people approved of and think of anything I wanted as Too Expensive and too much trouble.
That, for the record, was not the fault of my ex. It was that I couldn't actually buy anything without sayso from who I lived with. He'd have had to be inhumanly self disciplined to see the pattern and hold off and go "No. You take this $50 and get something YOU want, something that's just for you that I have no interest in and don't like and could care less about," when deciding what to do with what was left after the bills. He had his own interests, cooking among them, and a lifelong list of cool things he wanted.
kkitten42 has sometimes looked at part of this pattern and called me on it, calling it a fear of success. In a way it is. I look at my past and the freest, best time I ever had was not when I had the most money to throw around. Those times, all of them that I had, were under someone's thumb and subject to the effects of those supposedly wonderful suburban teen years when I supposedly Had Everything Any Teen Could Want. (Except music, my choice of clothes, art supplies, books to read, writing materials, postage and mailing supplies.) Even choosing NOT to buy clothes was beyond me, the pressure was on to throw money into overpriced disposable clothing in the American Way instead of getting the one dang item of clothing I still haven't in all these decades bothered to get. A pair or two of Levi's 501 button fly jeans. The sort that last a decade and look fine worn and fitted to your individual body. Last more than a decade if you rotate them and don't wear the same pair all the time till it's dead.
I broke that habit in two areas. I broke it down on art supplies because when I wound up alone in New Orleans and shifted from white-collar Job to self employed art, the art supplies were For The Business and paid for themselves. I felt a little queasy about the mediums I used that I didn't sell the results, like my giant set of Prismacolors. But I've gotten over that and now that dovetails well into my writing. I write art supply reviews and I write about how to draw and paint and that's become one of my steady genres. Something I could write all my life along with SF and Fantasy and really enjoy doing the next one.
I broke it down on what to wear somewhere between leaving the shelter and staying with various people in various households, when I got rid of every single item of clothing I owned that wasn't black. I stripped down what had been about a third of my total possessions to an amount of clothing that fits in a couple of Sterilite tubs. None of it needs ironing except possibly a couple of my Best Shirts, black renfaire type poet-shirts. At least I broke down the half of it about being able to Not buy clothing. Whew. I still need to relax now that those clothes are starting to seriously wear out and consider bothering to buy clothing again -- this time without advice or regard from any other person on the planet, going for good value that'll wear a long time and always seem cool to me whenever I pull it out of the laundry to wear it. It's time to bother spending that much on jeans and get the damn Levi's. Even if I have to hem up a leg, at least I can get them to fit otherwise and they'll look good.
Two areas, I'm beginning to desensitize and slowly catch up to myself. One is actually buying books when I want to. I've leaned a lot toward reference books rather than fiction, but I need to start somewhere. The best place to start would be to set a small budget and just relax and do it regularly till my library stops being just the pickings of whatever box of free books I pick over and whatever was on the cheapest stack in the used book store. I'm starting to lighten up on that and I got a completer book for a series where I had three out of four from a giveaway. I can start there -- with things like that, completing broken series. And maybe relax and take a chance on new authors. Or even start subscribing to the magazines I plan on sending stories to. Geez, what genius didn't bonk me on the head when I lightened up on magazine subscriptions and tell me "Go look for the existing SFF magazines and sign up for THOSE online! They're your career dummy. Try to find out what those editors like before you send your stuff cold!"
That same mental barrier against moving toward making my career real is a freaking mind-maze composed of conditioning from that one short time in my life when I had Everything and had Nothing and was more poor than I've ever been when my pockets were empty. Because I had it in my hand and it wasn't mine and I was supposed to pretend I was happy and be grateful, or I'd wind up back imprisoned again. I went from an obviously bad situation to a minimum security bad situation with silent blackmail and constant conditioning, and this is what I need to overcome in order to be a successful writer.
I am a writer. The big black and red book is still available. Google on Raven Dance and buy it at iUniverse.com if you do, I get a better royalty there even if B&N has it online or Amazon still does (there's some question about that since they bought a print on demand printer and now are trying to get all POD companies to use their provider or they take the buy button off their customers' books. Just like that. An individual can get around it with a membership fee and a lower royalty and other terms like buying them five consignment copies just for the privilege of a much lower royalty than direct ordering.)
What I need to do is make a leap from that to "I am a successful writer" and earn enough to make what other people would think of as a good living. Not just settle for freedom on a tiny budget. My health doesn't allow that any more. My medications alone cost more than I lived on in New Orleans -- and gods, did I resent that from the first moment I got any regular maintenance medication being necessary. I resented the loss of freedom, of being able to flip off the money crazed culture and go live on a merry shoestring only bothering with necessities and making my luxuries myself out of the time I bought by not chasing the dollar.
The other mental barrier was against buying music. Once in a while I'd get up enough willpower to go through and get an album or two that I liked, and then life happened and most of those are gone. Feh. I'm annoyed I did not manage to keep the tapes and CDs that I bought. Having a replacement list really makes that hard, especially if on some of them I forgot the title or don't remember the name of the band. But it's something to think about next year instead of proceeding with anytime I have any extra, getting more art supplies.
There are some goals I have in art supplies, that Master Sets thing and one or two other large items. Most of it after that is maintenance or little. Replacement pencils, often-used supplies, new papers and things. I'd still like to get the entire range of Canson paper in full sheets to be stocked up but it's not urgent. Most of what's left is so not urgent -- so much so that I might enjoy it more doing it less often.
The other huge mental block I have is against saving money, just saving up and not doing anything with it. Having a contingency savings. Or saving up for things if I can't reach it right away. I realized this blind spot when I tried to save up for two very large wonderful pieces by John Houle and only managed to get them when he got paypal and I could do small payments spread out over time. I can handle a layaway like that, but just setting aside some of it when I have money is the mental barrier I have to leap. One, I need to have that. I need to set aside at least enough to replace my computer if it dies. That simple.
I know in those teen years if I saved up for anything I would not get that thing. I would get sidelined and tricked and wind up spending it all on something stupid I didn't want, like clothes I only wore once because they were the less obnoxious choice of several offered at my grandmother's choice of store. I did not think at the time that this was irrational. She was so generous and would throw in more money on the clothes trips. She made such a point of letting me pick out what to get -- but she picked from where and that was the big trap. But when I saved up for something like a typewriter, she'd ask how much I had and suggest something like a general trip to the mall and sure enough something else would intervene. As a last ditch trick she'd let me go into an art supply store, music store or bookstore and wham, my savings would vanish in a split instant because something I could afford right now and was always forbidden would be in reach.
There's how it happened.
I had to think it through. It's far easier to identify stupid ideas that get beaten in by abuse. They don't hold water looked at as themselves. But every step of that game my grandmother arranged it so that what I did was my choice. And so before getting an $80 typewriter on sale, I wound up getting a $300 music system because it was less annoying to her, pushed closer to the life choices she wanted me to make. She was manipulative in the extreme. And after being picked on directly, shouted at, hit, beaten, imprisoned and kicked around in a thousand ways and shamed constantly, someone with a soft voice who said she loved me and that she was doing it all for my own good, opened her heart and wallet and was generous with me and set it up so that it looked like it was all my choice while leaving all my real choices off the menu got away with it and drove it way too deep.
I need to break it up now. Because it's time to make her roll in her grave and become a successful writer anyway. She always said "I just want you to be happy in life." And then blocked every road that could have led to my being happy in life. I have no idea and never will, how much of her BS she actually believed, whether she lied to herself to justify it and thought I would actually be happier locked into a life that I hated, or if she just filtered everything she said so well that the truth was never out.
I live in a good neighborhood. It's quiet and people have yards. Their homes are painted regularly and their yards kept up. Whether it's local law or community consensus, their yards are all kept up and a few gardeners have turned them into personal expression. I like those yards best of all, always have. There are sidewalks. I live in a house, not an apartment. It's got a yard and some trees, one of which has apples. Children in this house are giggling and happy and playing with their toys. The older dog's an adolescent very proud of being the lead dog and the best dog for tricks and obedience and Being Good, she's bringing the puppy right along in the Good Dog tradition and both of them are so well behaved I feel like I moved into a Disney movie. Neither would dare threaten my cat.
My cat has grown sleek and healthy. His fur's become glossy and kitten soft, he's gotten kitten-bouncy in his Midnight Crazies. I've been recovering and regaining strength from what the long sickness did to me and before it the long malnutrition and overexertion of the shelter and subsidized-housing and couch-crashing years did to my health.
The cool little tick is that it became the past as solidly as being overworked in Chicago in the 1980s became the past. This post is not about the horrors of homelessness or about the tragedy of poverty in America. Which isn't tragedy. Tragedy takes a tragic flaw on the part of the person who gets shafted. Pathos is when it happens to good people who did nothing to deserve it and still got the shaft, yet somehow that gets far less respected than a tragically flawed hero who shot himself in the foot and walked right into it.
It's more about reclaiming a piece of my mind and soul.
The best times of my life were not the times I had the most money. I lived in the suburbs as a teenager and had money coming in all over the place. We ate expensive food. I was out of my mind from all the mind games and couldn't even put my finger on what was wrong, but I was living a lie with every breath. Every dime I earned got thrown away on junk, by various mind games and logistic tricks involving transportation a lot of it got directed away from bookstores or music stores or art supplies or gods forbid, postage and a typewriter and mailing supplies for manuscripts.
My writing got sabotaged so deeply and so subtly that I only now begin to understand some of how it was accomplished. That was the worst torture. Meanwhile everyone around me thought I was crazy for feeling imprisoned, angry and despairing because I had everything. I had nothing. None of it was mine. None of the things I had then felt like mine. Even if they were. I had trouble accepting my car was mine after I got one, even though it was exactly the car I'd have picked out for myself. I miss it -- but wish I'd thought of that and bought another like it shortly after selling it so that it wouldn't have the familial ties and memories it carried, so that it really would have been mine. Something I got for myself.
Imagine this. You have a vague idea for a story. You get excited about it. You sit down to work on it, getting out the typewriter you had to spend months discussing and begging for "in order to do homework, it'll help with school, my grades will go up if I turn in typed reports." (You paid for it out of your job after being harassed and challenged about whether it was a good idea, whether you really needed it and whether that one was a good one over and over every day till you made the purchase after a half hour muttered argument in the store and have no idea if you will be able to get a new ribbon for it, paper or envelopes again without weeks of fighting.)
As long as you sit there thinking, quiet, nothing happens. Five minutes after you start typing, the idea takes off and you get into the flow. As long as you were hesitant, typing a little and stopping, nothing happens. But as soon as the keys chatter and you're happy, you're running with it, it's going well... then the door opens and she's got cookies and she chatters on about her day and things and asks how you're doing. And reminds you how depressed you get when you Try to Write. Asks what it's about and then whatever it's about, no, I don't think any of the magazines would take that, it's too weird. No, the science fiction magazines would, they ARE weird, it's that sort of thing. Yes but you could get a lot more money if you wrote for the big magazines. Why don't you do something nice about what it's like to grow up on a farm? Because I never did and don't even like farms.
And the point you get mad and the argument flares, there's the evening gone to the argument. The two paragraphs on the page are like a dead thing, like some wildflower picked and shoved in your pocket. You can't remember what you were going to do with it, the idea's gone, there's only this warmup description of something on another planet. It feels like a total flop. It's an unfinished fragment. The next time, and it is very soon, that one of them says "But you never finish anything you start" the fragment becomes one more mark of shame and one more reason you have No Talent (if you did, your rough drafts would have Shakespeare's quality but be in exactly their genre and express THEIR political and social and religious slant, not your own), and they say it was All For Your Own Good.
And they say You Have Nothing to Complain About, You Have Everything Any Teenager could Want.
Except your friends have 150 albums and have been collecting them since late in grade school. Your friends who read have rooms full of science fiction and fantasy books they take for granted, even sell off or give away duplicates they picked up by accident. They have notebooks whenever they run out of paper, just pick up new ones without having to fight about it or explain What Class It's For. Many of them have diaries or journals that don't get read. The ones that write got typewriters early on. The ones that paint got oils before they got into junior high school and have no trouble justifying a Conte Crayon or an Ebony pencil that costs a dollar. (But you could get a whole box of pencils for that, twelve of them! What makes this one so special? It's darker. It draws better. It's better for drawing. Better be a whole lot better for that kind of money.)
All that was why being artistic-poor in New Orleans, eating on $10 a week, paying $200 a month rent and not having to go to a job that drained more body energy than I had just to pay the bills felt like ultimate freedom. Even if it was only a rented room. When it was an actual apartment with at least one cat in it, it was ultimate freedom and I was happy as I could get. Life was good, I had all the good things in life and some luxuries, because at that level anything after necessities went toward something I always wanted. Usually something tangible that would still be there to be enjoyed if I wound up short next month.
The dumb habit of throwing away money on things I hated and didn't want but avoiding buying anything I needed, liked and wanted really flourished in the 1980s when I had a ton of money from the job and most of it piffled out into things I didn't want or need or care about, everything from business casual clothing I loathed and paid haircuts to furnishings I thought were ugly and expensive kitchen stuff I didn't like. I got into that pattern with my ex and while I did occasionally get books or music or something in art supplies, it was only because he liked to read too and it was usually only something both of us liked. Because I had been trained like a dog with positive reinforcement --often in the form of extra money handed to me -- to buy what other people approved of and think of anything I wanted as Too Expensive and too much trouble.
That, for the record, was not the fault of my ex. It was that I couldn't actually buy anything without sayso from who I lived with. He'd have had to be inhumanly self disciplined to see the pattern and hold off and go "No. You take this $50 and get something YOU want, something that's just for you that I have no interest in and don't like and could care less about," when deciding what to do with what was left after the bills. He had his own interests, cooking among them, and a lifelong list of cool things he wanted.
kkitten42 has sometimes looked at part of this pattern and called me on it, calling it a fear of success. In a way it is. I look at my past and the freest, best time I ever had was not when I had the most money to throw around. Those times, all of them that I had, were under someone's thumb and subject to the effects of those supposedly wonderful suburban teen years when I supposedly Had Everything Any Teen Could Want. (Except music, my choice of clothes, art supplies, books to read, writing materials, postage and mailing supplies.) Even choosing NOT to buy clothes was beyond me, the pressure was on to throw money into overpriced disposable clothing in the American Way instead of getting the one dang item of clothing I still haven't in all these decades bothered to get. A pair or two of Levi's 501 button fly jeans. The sort that last a decade and look fine worn and fitted to your individual body. Last more than a decade if you rotate them and don't wear the same pair all the time till it's dead.
I broke that habit in two areas. I broke it down on art supplies because when I wound up alone in New Orleans and shifted from white-collar Job to self employed art, the art supplies were For The Business and paid for themselves. I felt a little queasy about the mediums I used that I didn't sell the results, like my giant set of Prismacolors. But I've gotten over that and now that dovetails well into my writing. I write art supply reviews and I write about how to draw and paint and that's become one of my steady genres. Something I could write all my life along with SF and Fantasy and really enjoy doing the next one.
I broke it down on what to wear somewhere between leaving the shelter and staying with various people in various households, when I got rid of every single item of clothing I owned that wasn't black. I stripped down what had been about a third of my total possessions to an amount of clothing that fits in a couple of Sterilite tubs. None of it needs ironing except possibly a couple of my Best Shirts, black renfaire type poet-shirts. At least I broke down the half of it about being able to Not buy clothing. Whew. I still need to relax now that those clothes are starting to seriously wear out and consider bothering to buy clothing again -- this time without advice or regard from any other person on the planet, going for good value that'll wear a long time and always seem cool to me whenever I pull it out of the laundry to wear it. It's time to bother spending that much on jeans and get the damn Levi's. Even if I have to hem up a leg, at least I can get them to fit otherwise and they'll look good.
Two areas, I'm beginning to desensitize and slowly catch up to myself. One is actually buying books when I want to. I've leaned a lot toward reference books rather than fiction, but I need to start somewhere. The best place to start would be to set a small budget and just relax and do it regularly till my library stops being just the pickings of whatever box of free books I pick over and whatever was on the cheapest stack in the used book store. I'm starting to lighten up on that and I got a completer book for a series where I had three out of four from a giveaway. I can start there -- with things like that, completing broken series. And maybe relax and take a chance on new authors. Or even start subscribing to the magazines I plan on sending stories to. Geez, what genius didn't bonk me on the head when I lightened up on magazine subscriptions and tell me "Go look for the existing SFF magazines and sign up for THOSE online! They're your career dummy. Try to find out what those editors like before you send your stuff cold!"
That same mental barrier against moving toward making my career real is a freaking mind-maze composed of conditioning from that one short time in my life when I had Everything and had Nothing and was more poor than I've ever been when my pockets were empty. Because I had it in my hand and it wasn't mine and I was supposed to pretend I was happy and be grateful, or I'd wind up back imprisoned again. I went from an obviously bad situation to a minimum security bad situation with silent blackmail and constant conditioning, and this is what I need to overcome in order to be a successful writer.
I am a writer. The big black and red book is still available. Google on Raven Dance and buy it at iUniverse.com if you do, I get a better royalty there even if B&N has it online or Amazon still does (there's some question about that since they bought a print on demand printer and now are trying to get all POD companies to use their provider or they take the buy button off their customers' books. Just like that. An individual can get around it with a membership fee and a lower royalty and other terms like buying them five consignment copies just for the privilege of a much lower royalty than direct ordering.)
What I need to do is make a leap from that to "I am a successful writer" and earn enough to make what other people would think of as a good living. Not just settle for freedom on a tiny budget. My health doesn't allow that any more. My medications alone cost more than I lived on in New Orleans -- and gods, did I resent that from the first moment I got any regular maintenance medication being necessary. I resented the loss of freedom, of being able to flip off the money crazed culture and go live on a merry shoestring only bothering with necessities and making my luxuries myself out of the time I bought by not chasing the dollar.
The other mental barrier was against buying music. Once in a while I'd get up enough willpower to go through and get an album or two that I liked, and then life happened and most of those are gone. Feh. I'm annoyed I did not manage to keep the tapes and CDs that I bought. Having a replacement list really makes that hard, especially if on some of them I forgot the title or don't remember the name of the band. But it's something to think about next year instead of proceeding with anytime I have any extra, getting more art supplies.
There are some goals I have in art supplies, that Master Sets thing and one or two other large items. Most of it after that is maintenance or little. Replacement pencils, often-used supplies, new papers and things. I'd still like to get the entire range of Canson paper in full sheets to be stocked up but it's not urgent. Most of what's left is so not urgent -- so much so that I might enjoy it more doing it less often.
The other huge mental block I have is against saving money, just saving up and not doing anything with it. Having a contingency savings. Or saving up for things if I can't reach it right away. I realized this blind spot when I tried to save up for two very large wonderful pieces by John Houle and only managed to get them when he got paypal and I could do small payments spread out over time. I can handle a layaway like that, but just setting aside some of it when I have money is the mental barrier I have to leap. One, I need to have that. I need to set aside at least enough to replace my computer if it dies. That simple.
I know in those teen years if I saved up for anything I would not get that thing. I would get sidelined and tricked and wind up spending it all on something stupid I didn't want, like clothes I only wore once because they were the less obnoxious choice of several offered at my grandmother's choice of store. I did not think at the time that this was irrational. She was so generous and would throw in more money on the clothes trips. She made such a point of letting me pick out what to get -- but she picked from where and that was the big trap. But when I saved up for something like a typewriter, she'd ask how much I had and suggest something like a general trip to the mall and sure enough something else would intervene. As a last ditch trick she'd let me go into an art supply store, music store or bookstore and wham, my savings would vanish in a split instant because something I could afford right now and was always forbidden would be in reach.
There's how it happened.
I had to think it through. It's far easier to identify stupid ideas that get beaten in by abuse. They don't hold water looked at as themselves. But every step of that game my grandmother arranged it so that what I did was my choice. And so before getting an $80 typewriter on sale, I wound up getting a $300 music system because it was less annoying to her, pushed closer to the life choices she wanted me to make. She was manipulative in the extreme. And after being picked on directly, shouted at, hit, beaten, imprisoned and kicked around in a thousand ways and shamed constantly, someone with a soft voice who said she loved me and that she was doing it all for my own good, opened her heart and wallet and was generous with me and set it up so that it looked like it was all my choice while leaving all my real choices off the menu got away with it and drove it way too deep.
I need to break it up now. Because it's time to make her roll in her grave and become a successful writer anyway. She always said "I just want you to be happy in life." And then blocked every road that could have led to my being happy in life. I have no idea and never will, how much of her BS she actually believed, whether she lied to herself to justify it and thought I would actually be happier locked into a life that I hated, or if she just filtered everything she said so well that the truth was never out.