Just One More Day

Just  one more day, in fact, only until noon tomorrow, and the toxic tenant who lives below me will be moved out. Well I have been assured and reassured by the new apartment manager that yes indeed she will be moved out by noon tomorrow. I am not celebrating, and I probably won’t be celebrating until there is silence and the manager confirms that she has moved out. She’s banging around downstairs right now. She was quieter over the weekend, I had called the police on her in the early morning on Saturday, due to marijuana smoke. I think she got scared from that and then I had one whole day of wonderful, respectful peace. Then she smoked cigarettes all day on Sunday and there were several incidents of marijuana smoke. And then the noise started up again, so I think she is recovered enough to be an unbalanced whack job once again.

I saw my therapist today and we talked about her some and all the negative tenants who violate their leases and how little that has been enforced in the last 18 months, due to very bad management. We talked about lots of other, more important issues, most importantly going into more detail about my siblings and mother’s varied and all-encompassing emotional and verbal abuse of me.

I talked to her about all my efforts to have boundaries and enforce boundaries with my family. She was encouraging and supportive of that. That was nice. I like the validation. It is a part of my healing work that I don’t get much from my family. She agreed with me that reaching out to others and forming new involvements and potential friendships are good use of my limited energy.

I talked about the Myer-Briggs personality test and how it showed how different I am from my family. Beyond the fact that most of them are introverts and I am an extrovert, they are incredibly inflexible in understanding that other people are different than them and that that too is normal and acceptable. They have a rigid and inaccurate perception that they are the norm and everything else is worthy of rejection, stigma, exclusion, and scapegoating. Their perception and beliefs of reality and the world are really diametrically opposed to my beliefs.

They don’t have a lot of tolerance for accepting and adapting to differences from themselves. In that too I am different from them. I am very tolerant of others, of cultures, and of accepting all the ways that people are. They are rigid and intolerant in a lot of ways and it has never occurred to them that from my perspective they are the ones who are different, not me. I told her that I believe I got these personality traits and differences from my ancestors.

My family have a whole belief system that is entrenched and rigid and pretty unmoving. It is the basis, the foundation of all the emotional and verbal abuse that my family perpetuated on me all my life. I object to it. I have always objected to it. But reasoned, rational argument has never moved them. Appeals to my heart and emotions have never moved them. Familial appeals have never moved them. Gender appeals have never moved my mother or my sister. They say, at times, that they love me, but very little in their words or actions could be defined as loving. They suck at this.

As I was leaving my therapist’s office she brought up the tenant again and I said, I wish her well, just somewhere else as far away from me as possible. And I guess that is how I feel right now. Go in peace, but just go.

Dr. Strange was just released today on Netflix streaming. It’s a good movie to watch on perceptions and beliefs and changing reality. I saw it once before, but I was definitely ready to see it again. I’m watching it right now. I hope you all are doing something fun for yourself too.

Good and healing thoughts to yous.

Emotional/Verbal Abuse is Abuse

I have expressed a hatred of teasing and emotional/verbal abuse to my parents and my siblings all of my life. My parents and some of my older siblings gave us children very abusive nicknames. Some were given to my older siblings when they were teenagers. Mine was given to me when I was three. My siblings around my age were given their nicknames when they were older children. Just based on the age when abusive nicknames were given,  you can see they started after mine in age and in time. I was named two nicknames filthy and abusive and my siblings had very less damaging and abusive nicknames and they were done when they were much older than I was

My mother, who I used to confront often on this issue, would gaslight me and say, well all your siblings have nicknames they don’t like either, like well they are all being treated like shit and I am normalizing shit, so you can’t complain and have no right to complain and have no rights  that you can appeal to, because this is normal, they are all treated like you are treated, it is not mistreatment, it is normal, it is okay, no one is going to stop. And if you want to stop them, if you want this to end, then what you have to do is not be hurt or complain or say anything. They are getting a reaction and that is why you are to blame for the perpetuation of their treatment of you. My mother was a master at blaming victims for being abused, even while she abused them.

When the only person that I could go to for relief from emotional and verbal abuse against me by my siblings was my mother, who was my sexual abuser and my emotional/verbal abuser and who encouraged and perpetuated sibling emotional and verbal abuse against me , that made life very hard for me. Still, I was very determined that they should stop and that I deserved better treatment by my siblings, that I persisted. I don’t know where I got this strong belief in myself and that I deserved good treatment, but I had it, all my childhood. I think that is very strong of me and I am very proud of myself.

I knew that I deserved better from them all, even though none of them agreed with me. I knew that none of them should be called nasty and vicious and filthy nicknames. Some of the nicknames were not very bad, compared to mine, though they were all emotional and verbal abuse.

I didn’t just ask my mother to intervene and stop abuse. I asked other siblings as well. I don’t recall any of them trying to stop.

I don’t remember ever asking my father to stop. I don’t believe that I thought that he would, since he was the one who gave me the nicknames and the one who spread it all around the family and who allowed it to continue without ever once commenting about it or ever once trying to stop it.

When I was ten years old my father retired and was at home all the time, all day long and all night long. That was when the two nicknames about me stopped. I know that he did nothing to stop it. I just think that having him around, as a witness, is what stopped others from abusing me as much as they were. I suppose it was a shock to him to see how bad it was, how much of a scapegoat that I was, and how much I was being verbally abused.

I know that he enjoyed mistreating others, especially with words, especially with his children, but the bad nicknames stopped. I don’t believe that he ever lifted a hand to stop it. In fact, he started verbally abusing my brother more directly, who is 18 months older than I, during that time period.

It’s hard when this is the closest man in your life; someone who cruelly enjoys mistreating you with words and mistreating your emotions. It’s horrible that this was the closest example of an adult man that I had. It’s sad and pathetic that this is the best that he could be for his own children. I didn’t have a male teacher in my life until sixth grade, and that was a physical education teacher who was verbally and emotionally abusive to students. So not a good man or a good human being either.

I never felt that my father was on my side. I never believed that he would protect me. never felt that he loved me, though there was a time in my childhood when he would say that, though that had been some time before that.

If only there had been one person in my family who loved me and was good to me through my childhood. That would have changed my life so much. But none of them were willing to stand up for me and to suffer the consequences. With my mother, there was always consequences. I know that I deserved their love and loyalty.

Dysfunctional Family of Origin Interactions

The thing about being in a family that is dysfunctional, mine was due to abuse and alcohol addiction, is that you are all divided from one another. Children in the family are often put into restricted roles within the family, which helps perpetuate and enable the sickness and dysfunction.

My mother encouraged this division and bad feeling among all us siblings. She seemed to really enjoy it a lot. I know that she felt more confident and in control when we were all divided against one another. She really didn’t like or encourage family feeling or devotion or connection with all of us. On the other hand, she got to decry that we didn’t get along and that we didn’t manage to have any solidarity, so she got it both ways.

Now my father emphasized the opposite, but he wasn’t around much, what with work and drinking. My father loved family and seemed to always emphasize doing good for your family. I suppose a lot of that family feeling was because he lost his mother when he was still a young child. Since she died young, he only had one sibling and always said he wished he would have had a sister, because he would have been so good and loving and kind to a sister.

He would tell our brothers to be good to their sisters and how important that was to do. I don’t think that they liked being told to do that. I wish so much that he had been better to me and more protective of me, most especially that he had stopped drinking and became a better man.

When you teach and encourage your children to call one another filthy nicknames and to insult and demean and bully one another, you will get results. When you never stick up for your own child when she is being bullied and chased and hit, well you get results. When you practice favoritism with two of your children while denying what everyone can see, you get results. When you use some of your children as though they are adult caregivers to their younger siblings, you get results. When you treat your children abusively, you get results.

One of the worst results to my family is the one thing that I hate the most about our family of origin, we are still divided. Here is the thing; I don’t care about being with anyone who was sexually abusive towards me, so I would never reconcile with my second brother and my first brother is dead already. But the rest of us are still trying to cope with divisions over and over again.

One of the biggest things that I hate the most about our family’s division is that siblings grew up, went away, and didn’t give back to the younger siblings. That left us at a terrible disadvantage. The worst part of it is that they did give extensively to their wives siblings, in-laws, and extended family, instead of to us younger ones. Now it is right that they didn’t owe us anything, but we were their family and they should have had helped us more than they hurt us. And they hurt us a lot.

I believe in taking better care of the younger peeps in my family. I do the best that I can. My first nephew was born when I was sixteen. Although I had never had parenting from my mother, I tried to be an extra positive influence in his life. I helped raise him, loved them and told him repeatedly what a great kid he was and why, spent time reading to him and playing with him and babysitting him, bought him lots of books and toys. I’ve done the most that I can possibly do for all of them. And now that the next generation has grown up, I am giving and loving and good and kind in the same ways to their children. My great nephews and nieces are great.

I give them a lot of my love and yes gifts and good words too. It is what you do for family, in my opinion, give them everything that you’ve got to give. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have other stuff to give to other peeps that I love. I choose to take after my father’s best thoughts and beliefs and actions.

My Creative/Artistic Self and Dysfunctional Family Stuff

My family has never been supportive of my artistic or creative work. After a long period of that, being diminished and ignored, I really would not look to them to be supportive, loving, kind, or good about anything that I really care about. I tend to share less and less as the years have gone by and I have to say they don’t seem to notice that I don’t share about my heart and what fills me with joy with them. Since that is so important to me and to my life, it makes it hard a lot of the time to find something to talk about, since so much of it is private and needs to be protected from them.

One time I did try to describe the inner creative process to one of my brothers and he burst out laughing and after my asking him repeatedly to share what he found funny and why, he made fun of me and the way that I had chosen to talk about my collage artwork.

I really have to admit that he broke my heart. That’s my family… and that in no way is diminishing how much he and they have hurt me and hurt my heart. That’s my family… they break my heart. Interacting with them means being self-protective of my life, myself, my creative self, my thoughts, my emotions, my beliefs, and so much more.

Sometimes it just leaks out of me, and I can’t stop myself from sharing, and it doesn’t go good and it doesn’t lead to good. It’s sad to me that sometimes I can’t stop myself or us from sharing things with our family and that it leads to more pain, more hurt, and more of a broken heart. It’s so sad to me that this is my family.

I don’t tolerate anything from my sister and when I started seeing her again almost three years ago, after not associating with her for almost ten years,  I promised myself that I was not going to endure another incident of emotional/verbal abuse from her and that if it happened I would never see her again. She hasn’t. Bizarrely she hasn’t. But I can’t talk to her about all the pain that she has caused me and how all that pain is still inside of me/us and how much it still hurts and how she derailed my life, many times, and made it so hard for me to have self-respect or self-love, because she undermined and humiliated me and verbally/emotionally abused me all my life and how my mother was my primary abuser and bully and how my sister was her toady, until I cut her out of my life. Part of her doesn’t know, part of her doesn’t care, part of her loves being clueless, part of her loved and still loves being both of our parents favorite little girl, part of her has cut me off when I’ve tried to explain in the past, and part of her would hurt if I tried to talk to her about it all now. I know, because I have tried.

One of my other brothers routinely makes fun of me, the things that I say, my politics, my beliefs, facts that I relate from studies, if I have to pause while finding the right words, etc, etc, etc. I limit him in my life, but even a little bit means emotional and verbal abuse. He only gets a little bit of me. After a few conversations in the last couple months I have decided to start hanging up on him again, it is the only way to have a healthy boundary with him.

The worst part of this all is that these are the two brothers who have the most interactions with me in my life right now. They have collectively done the most for me and at different times been my best support. They wound me and that is the best I am getting. Saying no means absolutely nothing.

My brother that shouts at me on the phone refuses to stop shouting at me, insulting me, demeaning me, misrepresenting me, and mischaracterizing me, no matter what I say to him. If I thought the things about him that he thinks about me, I would never have anything to do with that kind of person, I would hate that kind of person, I certainly would not have even one phone conversation with them.

I know all of it is lies, but it makes me wonder why he feels the need to be thinking so little of me and still associate with me. I don’t want to have anything to do with him, but then he acts like he cares about me, but then turns around and treats me like excrement. I know he finds it highly enjoyable, but I don’t. He is going to get the click on the phone line the next time we talk, if he goes there.

I’ve Missed You All

Well I’ve missed  you  all. I’ve been sick a lot  these past two  weeks. My sinuses again. I went to the hospital  clinic that is closest  to  me and since i didn’t  have a high temp they refused to give me zpack, the antibiotic that kicks it out of me. I’ve been dizzy with horrendous vertigo for about a week.

I really should have stayed home alone for the holidays, cause I was so sick and in so much pain.  I was too stubborn and too positive that the meds would help a lot, they didn’t.

The holiday interactions went well, mostly, but I ended up saying things that I should have kept silent about, because they are long standing hateful  patterns and no good comes from trying to deal with that with family, as I  have  experienced  lo these many years. So again I  got  denials, stress, bad and hurt  feelings, and no resolving of the old wounds.

Same shit, so no surprise that I still get gaslit by siblings each holiday season. And when I  confront any of them I still get to see how they refuse to connect the dots to childhood patterns of gaslighting, emotional and verbal abuse and how they treat me now.

They truly expect me to not see those patterns  repeating over and over.  They truly think I  am supposed to disconnect from myself as a  child and not be hurt or harmed by their current or past emotional and verbal abuses.  I told my sister, that was me, not another little girl, those things happened to, I am that girl, those things happened to me. It hurts when someone repeats those behaviours now. Then we had an argument that when she is frustrated with me and raises her voice and/or tells me what to do that I  should not experience that as anger. I told her frustration is an anger emotion.

Its like living in the dark ages on an emotional  level with this kind of stuff.

That is a whole  bunch of posts when I  am  feeling  up to it. I don’t  feel heard or validated. So I  tried to be clear, the only coping I  have  for this is to distance myself. I realize I’ve  spent  too much time and need to draw back, because I don’t  want to be bossed or teased and to have it called normal and my reactions out of proportion to what  is happening.

The dramamine doesn’t seem to be working this past week, though I  suppose it is fair to say it is only half working, though I’ve  had much better  results in the past.

I’m using  a lot of remedies but not much is helping. I started adding more and more things each day.

I started using hydrogen  peroxide in my ear yesterday, a home remedy I’ve used in the past for liquid in my ears and it has decreased the pain and pressure in my ears right away.  You put in a small smount of hp and leave in for one minute, turn over and drain. If it is potentially bad for me I don’t  have anything else that works as good. Today I am feeling the best in over a week.

 

 

Verbal and Emotional Abuse

One of my brothers is still verbally and emotionally abusive. We have very little to do with one another. Unfortunately, though, in the last two weeks we have spoken three times on the phone, which is a lot. I think that he is bored a lot and wants me to entertain him. I wouldn’t mind if he treated me with respect and kindness, like a normal human being would treat me.

We don’t share a lot of common interests and our political views are opposites, so there isn’t a lot that I can talk to him about that is neutral to him or that he doesn’t use to turn around and insult me.

Today it was to make a negative comment about my having a college degree. I hate when people do that to me. I worked very hard to get my degrees and I hate when someone tries to insult and demean me for working hard and getting myself further educated. Having college degrees is not something to be humiliated and stigmitized over.

I have had a few people do this to me as well. I just assumed that they are so insecure, uneducated, and paranoid that they cannot keep their rage and shame to themselves and instead have to spread it all over someone else who is innocent and learning something.

My father used to do this to my brother who I was closest to, and it was so cruel and evil. He used to make fun of my brother when he would say something that he had learned. He would be belligerent, yell, and laugh at him. I don’t know how much you have to hate your 12 year old child to treat them like that, but my father did. He was so hateful. Although I wasn’t the object of his verbal and emotional abuse, during those times, it hurt me so much to hear it, to see it, to remember all the times that he had done the same thing to me, and to know it is what he would do to me too given any little opportunity. After that time period I would not talk about things I had learned in school, in books, or on tv with my father around. My father was very cruel to all his children verbally, for tons of reasons. All my siblings have been like that, as children and some of them as adults.

My brother is loud and I have good hearing, so it hurts to listen to him yelling at me. I have told him repeatedly that I have very good hearing and that I realize that he doesn’t, because of loud music he has damaged his hearing. But I tell him I know he can tell when he is yelling and he needs to stop it. He yells over my talking and interrupts my sentences. He tells me to stop talking and he will repeat something over and over when he is being demeaning and belligerent to me. I tell him to stop that.

There are some people he doesn’t act like this to. I’ve told him many many times that I expect him to stop acting like this to me. I told him again today when he called me and quickly degenerated into yelling at me and telling to stop talking. So I was very clear to him that I did not want to be treated like that. He said yeah right, yeah right, which translates into yeah fuck you I’ll do whatever I want to do. That is based on knowing him and having already being very clear on what I am willing to tolerate from him and what I am not willing to tolerate from him, not that that seems to have much of an effect on him.

I picked several other topics and we talked about them for a while and that went sort of okay. That always seems to be much more effective, to use subterfuge and guile to divert him and his inner turmoil. I have told him many times I am not his therapist, that if he wants to have a conversation with me, then he has to shut up long enough to listen to my sentences, long enough to know when I am done talking and not keep interrupting me.

He said lots of stuff that I normally would have made comments on, but when I engage in a real conversation that is what seems to make him blow up at me, so I let a lot of it go and didn’t say anything. He doesn’t like me when I am real, when I feel, when I think, when I talk, because he is not in control of me and he is not subjecting me to his narrow expectation of what he is willing to allow when he interacts with me. It is like it is not a conversation and perhaps I am like a doll to him that he can talk to but one that is forbidden to have views, beliefs, experiences, words, and personal power. But I am not a doll. I am not his dollie. I am a real human being. I have my own thoughts, and beliefs, and feelings. I deserve to have them. I am not his dollie!

Ghosts of Roommates Past Part 3

I hated living with my brother, five years ago. He too had lied to me and just wanted my money. He didn’t want to give me a place to live, he didn’t want me there, he couldn’t be nice to me, he refused to be loving to me or kind to me. It hurt so bad, it was like being punched in the chest. I stayed primarily in my bedroom and got out as much as possible.

Even if I went into the kitchen for three or four minutes he would try to start an argument with me about religion and politics, yelling, belligerent, mean, hateful, vengeful, raging.

He tried to kick me out of the house, twice, the first time happened when I had only been living there three days. He became enraged at me.

I had moved there, across half the country, spending all the money that I had on his promises, taking two and a half days to get there by bus, without any sleep and he refused to heat the house the first night I was there or to take me to a store to buy a space heater that evening, even though it was not far from the bus station, so that I got sick, a cold, he kept the house unheated and cold, yeah that again, but at least it was southern California but still got cold overnight, usually 50 or lower and colder as time went on, even many times going below zero, so that I had one warm and comfortable tiny room to live in.

He was mad that I got a cold, not my fault. He was mad that I was not happy and upbeat. Yeah sorry I just had to move across country in order to get away from abusive freaks that I had trusted. Yeah sorry I am disabled, and poor, and not happy and not doing so well. Sorry that is harshing your buzz dude. He was mad that I had anxiety, something I had been dealing with the reality of all of my life, but okay since my anxiety is bothering you and you want me to shut up and pretend to be happy while I am sick and can hardly breathe and talk, okay dude, whatever.

He got enraged because I did not want to stay in his freaking cold tv room and watch the second half of a Larry the Cable Guy special and said something that he took to be derogatory about white southern racists. Cause according to him many of them are wonderful people, though I don’t agree, racists by definition are not wonderful people.

But what really teared it, according to him, was that I refused to thank him and his on-again, off-again girlfriend for Thanksgiving dinner. Which I don’t think that I forgot to do. So apparently I am an ingrate, an accusation that I have had from my family of origin all of my life, but I don’t believe that I am ungrateful, just humiliated over their grandiose concept of how much they do for me and how little appreciative I am. I am appreciative, it is just that they seem to expect and demand that I put on a dog and pony show for them, and they are not satisfied until I do so. But they naturally seem to accept that everyone else is appreciative without all the bells and whistles.

But after traveling across country for 60 hours on bus without any sleep, being forced to sleep in the cold, getting a cold my first night in a new place, the rude awakening of how he was treating me and the fact that his secret plan, which I found out the second day that I was there, which made me burst into tears when I was in my bedroom alone, was to coerce me into working for him for free, doing things that I was not trained to do nor capable of doing basically and especially due to being disabled, I might have forgotten to say thank you, but I think that I did. I tried to explain to him over and over the definition of disabled and unable to work. He harassed me over and over until I broke down and called his son asking him to intervene for me.

So when he told me I was getting all my stuff and taking it outside, I told him that I couldn’t move out and live on the streets, I had no money and no check for another ten days, I was disabled, I needed somewhere to stay and there wasn’t a homeless shelter in the town where we lived. When he relented I told him that I would rather go home once my check was deposited into my checking account in ten days and live in the streets, in the middle of winter, rather than stay and live with him. He said that he would rather I stay with him than live in the streets in the middle of winter. I think that was all about and only about how the family would feel about him and treat him if he didn’t try to reconcile in some way with me.

He was loud and played his music and tv shows loudly.The second day that I was there he did take me to the store and borrowed me money to buy some food and a space heater. I had trouble sleeping due to his loudness and tried to avoid him. I would sit in my room as long as possible before leaving it, after waking up. I would stay up as late as possible and sleep as late as possible to avoid him, because he was a morning person.

The second time he insisted that I move out and live in the streets I decided that I had to limit all my money spending in order to get the fuck away from him. He got into a rage with me and was jumping up and down and rushing towards me and shouting. He made me fear for my safety, that he was going to attack me, and perhaps even rape me in a rage. I had never feared rape from him before, but his rage was out of control and I could not feel safe near him, in any way, after that. Seeing someone that out of control shattered me and my confidence that he was a human being, he looked and acted like an animal. I was not safe and I wanted to get as far away from him as soon as possible.

The argument he escalated over his rage at me and his deciding to take computer access away from me, the only access I had to anything in the outside world. I had a crappy unsmart phone with limited minutes, based on cards I had to buy. I insisted that he allow me to keep using the computer, since I was paying for half of the internet fees. He took the keyboard and locked it away in a cabinet in his bedroom, and kept his bedroom door locked as well. It took him a couple of days to leave me a note in my bathroom, saying that i could use the computer once again. I had already cancelled my internet company so had to pay again for a re-connection.

After two months of living there I finally bought a bike from Target, which was a huge money compromise, but necessary to get away from him and that house, and used it to get away from him, as much as possible, which was difficult and challenging because I did not have extra money to spend out in public, so most of the time I was at the library or as an extravagance a cup of coffee somewhere.

All I wanted was to save up enough money to get away from him.I was there five months. Everything revolved around saving enough money to get away from him and to find a place to move to once I got home. Again, none of my family, offered to help me financially or to have an emergency place to stay. Still, no matter what I wanted to go home and as far away from him as soon as possible.

He lied to me about the house being sold, it hadn’t, insisting that I had to move out in a month, but he lived there for another year after I moved across country to once again be in my home state. He was shocked and amazed that I wanted to go home.

I Got it Right the Second Time Around or I Found Your Noses, They Were In My Business, Again, Butt Out

A few days ago I had an incident by the downtown library. I was on my bike, but stopped at a red light. Two females were on the sidewalk, after coming out of the library, walking towards me. One of them was yelling about me, an insulting comment. I didn’t want them to come near me so I looked back at them to let them know I heard them and didn’t like the way they were acting and that I didn’t want them coming nearer to me. I will point out that they could have gone in any other direction, but chose to wait more than twenty feet away from the curb for the light to change and for me to bike away. I think I communicated what I wanted in that one look.

One stopped and grabbed the other female and said don’t go any further. And then she repeated her insult to me, blankety blank biker. The blankety blank was a slur about a body part, apparently they both thought they had a right to judge and insult and bully me. They believed that someone has to be tiny in order to be a bicycle rider! What incredible misogynists and body haters they were.

I love biking and I love the freedom and independence that it provides. Nothing else matters when it comes to biking but my own inclination and joy. I won’t be doing less biking because of any haters, I love my body, no one else gets to tell me what to do and how to think, act, and feel, and how much to love my body. Like what they think, believe, and say has any effect on me, how I live my life, my self-esteem, my self love, and my body love. It doesn’t. At this point in my life I can confidently say, it won’t ever.

As a consequence of their behavior and beliefs they mean nothing to me. They will never mean anything to me. I will never love them. I will never be their friends. Their losses. They might not ever know how big a loss it is to lose me, but I know. I am wonderful. I am a great person. I have tons of great qualities and I love people and care about them. But I will never care about them. They will never have me in their lives.

As the saying goes haters gotta hate. And squeaky wheels gotta squeak. That doesn’t mean I am going to listen to haters spewing hate at me or squeaky wheels squeaking at me. Those two hate-filled haters sure were entertaining themselves and they sure were toxic.

The light changed to green and I biked away. I didn’t give them any words and I was proud of that. But as I biked away I gave them the middle finger and I know they saw it and knew it was meant for them by the hooting and yelling they did right after they saw it. They appeared shocked and amazed that someone would not stand there, be silent and endure their abuse.

I biked down the road and then decided to take myself out to supper, because I love me and because I deserve it. I had a great time and had a great meal.

In reflecting on this incident I have to say I wished that I had not engaged with them, by looks or in any way. But I was not going to bike blocks out of my way, I told myself, and they can stay away from me. I think my look gave them that message loud and clear. And I think that I intimidated them and that is why they continued being loud, even though they knew that they should respect my space and not come near me. Like how dare I not care about them, their opinions, or how they were acting. And I don’t.

I would have preferred to not give others a hard stare or not to lose my temper and give the finger to someone. I don’t like behaving badly, even in minor ways. I like being good and kind all the time, even though I know that I can’t always be good and kind when interacting with others. When being yelled at and bullied, and called names I can make the best choice for myself, while trying to behave as good as possible. Having good boundaries sometimes precludes having a tender heart, being good and kind to all others. Practicing good boundaries is a good thing.

I would have preferred to ignore them and ignore what they were saying and to ignore their existences. It’s a bizarre thing but I was thinking how I would like to have another incident in order to do it right the second time. Let this be a cautionary tale to all of you, be careful what you wish for. Here is the bizarrest thing! I saw the same two awful young females a few days after the first incident! I am not kidding, the same two!

I was on a bus going down the same street, right by the library. They must have got on the bus at the library stop and sat down, but I wasn’t paying attention. 🙂 Freaking hilarious. When all of a sudden I hear, very softly, the same voice saying, I can’t believe it, it’s the same blankety blank biker. It was said in a way that sounded like she couldn’t believe that they hadn’t driven me off the streets, hiding in my apartment, ashamed of myself, my body, and in fear of being abused in the future. Didn’t happen. Not going to happen.

This is the bizarrest thing, I don’t normally have other women saying hateful things to me, when I am on the bus, in the library or stores, on my bike, walking into a building. I am flabbergasted, mostly because I am at a place in my life where the opinions and words of others that are hateful don’t mean one single thing to me. I have a good self esteem and I accept and love my body. I’ve done a lot of good and hard work on healing and they don’t even register a tiny blip on any of these areas in my life. They are pathetic and cruel.

My resolution had been to give nothing back to someone who bullied and verbally abused me. Cesare Millan, The Dog Whisperer, who I love so so much, teaches something fabulous, that I love very much, and had been trying to do myself for several years before learning about his technique; when around people who’s energy is hyper, mean, inappropriate, scary, etc, is to step outside of their energy field, physically and metaphysically, and not interact with them, to resolve not to take part in their energy.

So I gave them nothing. I didn’t look at them, I didn’t give them any hand signals, I didn’t acknowledge their existence. Neither of them said anything else about me.

I stayed on the bus and a few stops later, where I wanted to go, I got off the bus. I got off the bus and I went to Target and had a good time shopping, bought something extra special just for me, and then went home.

She Refused to Apologize

Several years ago an aunt told me, on the phone, that she used to emotionally abuse me with filthy name calling when I was a child. She was an adult. She had her own girl. She did not treat her own daughter the way that she treated me. She did not live with us. She did not take care of me or babysit me. She never bought me gifts or spent time with me or treated me as though I mattered to her or that I was special or that I was loved. She just visited and treated me the same way that my parents and siblings did, she called me filthy names that my parents started and encouraged my siblings to do.  She came into my own home, as an adult, and was vicious and cruel to me when I was a child.

I have to say that I was shocked. I never remembered that from my early childhood. I did remember that while she seemingly worshiped my older sister, treating her like the golden girl, she never seemed to express or demonstrate love for me. I remembered that for no reasons that I could see she would make fun of me, she would invade my space or life, even to the point of reading my private diary or evaluating a hobby or activity that I would do and enjoy. She would enjoy making fun of me. She would grab my belongings and wave them around, shouting, making fun of me, and laughing at me. I remember those times. I remember the kind of aunt that she had been to me.

We were never really close for decades. But over a number of years we had become kind of friends, talking on the phone late at night from states far, far away. She knew a number of issues that I was dealing with because I was an abused child. She knew that I had been sexually abused as a child and emotionally abused as a child. She knew that my father had been an alcoholic and that my mother had been a sexual offender against me. She had heard me talk at length over several years about how painful it all was. There were specific times that I had recalled telling her how painful it was to be the scapegoat child in my family of origin, especially with all the filthy names that I was called. She never told me she did the same thing to me.

So I was shocked and flabbergasted when she finally admitted it to me on Christmas Eve one year. I told her immediately that she owed me an apology for treating me like that when I was a child and she was an adult.

She started making excuses. I was shocked and appalled. I was sickened. I thought how dare she excuse her malicious and cruel behavior by acting like she could do anything that abusive parents and siblings were doing to me.

I explained to her that as an outsider in my home she knew that there were different rules of conduct, as an adult and not one of my siblings she was held to a different standard of behavior, that she was not my alcoholic father nor my sexual abuser mother and as such not my parent and that she had no right to do that to me, no right at all, and that I knew for sure that she had never treated her own daughter that way. Even so her daughter has a very antagonistic relationship with her mother, my aunt and considering the kinds of abandonment issues and emotional abuses she went through, I am hardly surprised.

I told her I am not filth and she doesn’t get to tell me that I am filth, then or now. I told her that no matter what my family did to me in my home that does not make it okay for her to do, and I told her that I know that you knew that as an adult. I told her that what my siblings did to me when I was a small child was when they were children as well. That I understand they were abusive, but that they were also children and that I hold them to a different standard than I do to my parents, to any adult. I told her that she knew it was wrong then and she never said word one to stand up for me, to try to stop the abuses or to be on my side. I told her I know you knew it was wrong because you never did that to your own daughter. I know you saw what kind of lovely little girl I was and your response, instead of to be loving and good and kind to me, was to crush me, to try to crush my soul and my spirit and to make me hate myself, my body, my life.

I told her she gives me an apology or I am out of her life for the rest of my life. She refused, she continued to deny wrongdoing with a number of excuses. I sent her a letter later outlining exactly why again and that she owed me an apology if she ever wanted to be in my life and it has been more than five years and nothing from her. I am fine with that. I never miss her. I hardly ever think of her. I have never refused to apologize to someone. I have always forgiven someone when they have asked for forgiveness. I’m nothing like her. I’m nothing like my mother.

I Saved Three People’s Lives

When I was nineteen I saved three people’s lives. I had a roommate, we lived in the upstairs of a house.

She had her cousin staying over for the weekend from out of town. Her cousin was the kind of woman who would throw herself at any guy she saw. She was throwing herself at the guy who lived downstairs that weekend.

The three of them were up very late that night, drinking, talking, laughing, etc. They were making a lot of noise and kept me up late that night. I sat up in the bedroom reading. All of a sudden I started smelling that horrible smell that you smell when there has been a natural gas leak.

I went out into the kitchen and noticed that the gas had gone out on the stove, though the fixture was still turned on. I turned it off. I went and woke the three of them up. They were all dopey. I opened the front door, though it was late in the Autumn and very cold outside, because it was necessary. The stink was awful.

I read recently that our sense of smell turns off when we are sleeping. The horrible smell never would have woken them up. If I had not been there and not been awake, they could easily have all died from poisoning. If I had been sleeping I might have ended up dead. Their drunken behavior could have killed me.

The next day they acted like nothing had happened, even after I told them explicitly what would have happened if I had not been awake to turn off the fixture. None of them apologized for endangering my life.

While living with her, she emotionally and verbally abused and threatened me. She made me feel like a hostage in that place, none of it was my place. I had one half of a very tiny bedroom and she occupied the rest of the space, though I paid for half of the rent and bills. She was an ungrateful bully.

As horrific and ungrateful as she was, then and during the few months that I lived with her and knew her, still she is not the worst roommate I have ever had. But she is definitely clumped up at the top of my worst roommates list.

I saved their lives. None of them told me thank you. Their ungratefulness was horrific. They even refused to acknowledge that it happened. They stared at me and refused to say anything. They acted like it was no big deal, but I know that they knew how dangerous it had been and that it could easily had ended in death, because I told them.

I saved three people’s lives. I think that is a very big deal. I made the world different for them and for everyone in their life and their futures. I think that is one of the biggest things that one human being can do for another. I do value and treasure human life, but the way that they treated me when I knew them, it makes me never want to see or know them ever again. I am well rid of the three of them.

Actually, I saved four people’s lives that night, including my own. I’m proud that I saved my own life.