I feel as though I sound like a 16 year old in my previous post. Sorry for that. I am, indeed, 10 years older. I was so upset, which probably goes without saying. I feel very rejected by my mom, and it's tough. Sometimes it's tougher than others.

I need to not let her behavior (and my dad's) hold me back. I need to continue to really work hard and rise above it. It's tough to know how to do that when I was raised in such a dysfunctional environment. If your caretakers can't take care of each other/themselves, how are they supposed to teach you to care for yourself? If your caretakers reject you, how are you supposed to accept yourself?

I wish everyone who was seriously contemplating being a parent was magically infertile until *boom* they could care for themselves well. When setting out to become a parent, it's not imperative to have all the answers to life. That's impossible. But it is important to have the basics down, to know who you are, to be secure with yourself and your place in the world, to be secure in your relationship with your significant other and yourself.

Too upset to explain.
How can my mom fwd mail
To my address from 3 years ago?
Not realize for a week
Blame me when it doesn't arrive
Only to put two and two together
So symbolic of her disdain
Her distance
Her disaster

The lack of mail is no bother.
The lack of knowledge
And/or interest in my basic existence is.

Let This be a Reminder

I just got back from a 8 day vacation with my family. Now, they are crazy. You'll have to trust me. I can't write everything on the internet, you know. But never again. I would say that 4 days is my max to spend with them.

It's a slow adjustment. My anxiety is really coming out. I think it's here to say, "Yo, something's wrong. Please don't spend that much time with a bunch of people that hate each other again." Hopefully this post, among other things, will serve as a reminder to not agree to that much time with them again.

They work their way in though, and gradually they always make me think that maybe this will be the time when everything is 100% a-okay. They call multiple times a day (red flag!), and I've gotten it down to where I only actually answer once every day or so. Talking to them that infrequently makes them seem quite pleasant, and it forces them to behave. Spending 8 days with them allows them to think they can act all crazy-cakes on me, that I'm no longer enough of a stranger, fronting is no longer needed. Well, I prefer that they put the whole act on for me. Really, I do.

Written at Work

I just found out I'm not going to be able to take Christmas Eve off in order to travel home. I do get the 25th through 3rd off, though. I think that more than makes up for it! And I do not care one tiny bit that I don't get the 24th off. My mom and dad, on the other hand, may be a different story. I think, logically, this should not be the case. I mean we already get special holiday time at work. Who else gets the 25th through the 3rd off?!? That means I can actually visit with them longer than I normally would be able to. Hopefully they will see this as a win-win. They're very unpredictable though so we shall see.

I had another series of bad dreams last night, which makes complete sense because I just decreased my dose of Zoloft to 0mg on Wednesday. The last time I cut my dose in half I had bad dreams 36 hours later. It's crazy, huh? I think it's crazy, but Liz just said, "Well, it's medicine that's designed to work with your brain chemistry so it makes sense." I think it's more fun to think of things as awe-inspiring, but it's good that Liz can bring me back down to earth from time to time.

I've started doing some podcast meditations. It's nice to expand the scope of my practice. For so long I've just stuck to the recorded meditations from the class I took. Granted, it's 8 different meditations I've been cycling through, but none of them deal with compassion for oneself, etc. It's more just meditation basics, which are oh-so-important, but I think I'm ready for something more now.

Judging

Too often we cannot tell other people our innermost hopes and dreams. I think for me, and a lot of others, this creates a sense of alone-ness and anxiety that doesn't necessarily need to be there.

For the past year I have focused on fostering a community for myself where I can express me without fear of judgment. I've also focused on judging others less. Though I still fall prey to judging and worrying about being judged, I am better able to catch myself when these things start to happen. A year ago I also quit my job in lobbying to work in social services, a career where I am much more free to be me, and I am lucky in that I found a wonderful, fairly non judgmental organization.

Another big thing I did was distance myself from my parents judgments about me. I was not able to do this by distancing myself from my parents. For so long I tried to rid myself of how much their judgments bothered me by creating more and more actual, geographical distance between us. I was still miserable that they chose to judge me so often via the phone or email. When I was finally able to stop being bothered by their judgments, I was free. And I was not just free from their judgments, I was also free to stop judging them and appreciate them for what they are. I was able to respect their recommendations while acknowledging that even though they're my parents, they don't always know what's best for me.

I'll end with this quote from Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie:

"I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting edges, a world in which I could not longer tell the people who mattered most about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I entered the swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for."

On the Subject of Parents

"We honor our parents by taking what was good and leaving the rest." -Bruce Springsteen

This quote is from an article by Mark Epstein in the Summer 2009 edition of tricycle, The Buddhist Review that really helped me change the way in which I view my parents and my relationship to them. Once I had read this article, I hungrily searched for more Buddhist writings that would enlighten my perspective towards my parents and my pretty dysfunctional childhood. This helped immensely with my anxiety issues because so much of my anxiety was tied up in my relationship with my parents--in what had happened in the past and also in how they still acted.

I cannot remember where I read it, but on my search I came across something that said helped me to understand that my parents' behavior was not such because I had done something wrong. Maybe they had difficult childhoods...actually, I know for a fact my mom did and I can pretty much say for certain that my dad did, too. And then I realized that the same probably went for their parents. They weren't mean to their kids because their kids did something wrong, something must have happened to them, too! Or maybe it wasn't their parents at all, maybe their parents were perfectly wonderful and caring, but some other thing affected how them and this in turn affected their children.

It was a big moment for me. Everything just seemed to click. So much of my anxiety and anger towards my parents instantly disappeared in this moment. I understood that what they said or how they acted towards me was not about me. It was about them, about something that was going on with them. I stopped taking their uncaring comments personally. I started appreciating the positive. I stopped overreacting when they were rude, and instead found that I was able to calmly but forcefully explain how their statement/action hurt me.

So tonight, as I have been working on weaning off Zoloft for 6 days now, I re-read this original article and re-affirmed for myself that I will focus on taking the good and realizing that the rest is not about me.