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Colorful and hopefully optimistic but maybe hateful occasionally

I missed the deadline to submit my research article to a journal... ugh. Stupid dirty house and not having a desk. I'm always on time when I'm not in this cluttered house :(
 
Good news: I think I've cleaned out all the recycle, trash, and donate from my room! I've counted 54 bags, and five boxes of different sizes. Yay!

Bad news: I have no idea what to do with the stuff I'm keeping?

Dorm rooms have shelves and empty closets... so apparently that's different from a bedroom. I was apparently not prepared for that?

Still excited to finally have a room for myself :D But currently discouraged while looking around, trying to figure out how to organize it.




I also found a letter from my dad in the mess, telling me he was proud that I had graduated (from high school). The letter promised that he would get me a graduation present (which he did not do) and I couldn't help but remember that he had no part in helping me graduate -- except being kicked out when I managed to get law enforcement on my side (for once... -- because of a sexist judge, not because of bad police officers or other law enforcement, actually). In fact, he prevented me from getting any homework done. He'd keep my mother from helping me.

Yet, I still had the strongest urge to call him up and ask him how he's doing, when I saw that on the front of the card, he had drawn a badly-shaped heart on one of the balloons. His handwriting looks like a young child's handwriting, and his shapes have the signs of someone just now learning to make shapes. A young child. The sentences in the card? Not complex enough for an adult to have written them.

I remembered that my dad was abused as a child himself. His mother was actually even crueler than he was. But my father is a pathological liar, so it's difficult to learn his own views on what my grandfather told me of it.

Being filled with pity, the urge to call him up, and also anger at everything he put us through? Confusing. Very confusing. But it's not my responsibility to get him help. Everything he did was wrong, and I'm done feeling guilty for everything I had to be responsible for.
 
I wonder if he's intelligent/self-aware enough to get help. Seriously.

If he wasn't a dangerous psychopath, I'd never hesitate to help him. It's almost hard to understand how dangerous he is, even to those who lived with him. I'm angrier at his mother who abused him than I am at him sometimes -- because my dad clearly has something bad in him but I firmly believe (and have some science to prove it?) that he would not have grown into the psychopath he is without his mother.

I mean, CAN I blame him for his behavior? Is he even smart enough to be to blame? He was dangerous enough for my mother to not act for fourteen years. I remember the horrible things he did, not caring how much he was hurting people. I have nightmares constantly of the violent acts he committed.

I wish he'd gotten help as a teenager. I feel so much pity for that man.

You picture psychopaths as being cunning and intelligent because of movies and shows... I've seen him try to convince others how sweet and charming he is. To me, it's downright disturbing. But he also writes on resumes that he's a known genius. He has no job experience to speak of, so that's really all he puts, besides insisting he's been to space or the moon. It fools no one, but he doesn't even know. And he doesn't care. He never holds down jobs.

And his brother sexually abused his children, and his brother's wife lived with us while my mom was dying because of a tricky and actually very clever way of getting at my mother. They were not particularly nice?

My dad could plan ahead to get attention. He had so many elaborate plans, at least one that can't be proven and that few seem to believe me on. Yet he is also not smart enough or adult enough to form sentences correctly. Confusing.

Very confusing.
 
I keep having flashbacks at bad times. Some of them don't even seem like they should be traumatic, but my mind plays them like a vivid flashback and I have all the emotions I did then.

Mostly I'm feeling incredibly angry and incredibly guilty. Finally realizing that none of this was my fault was at first very liberating, but now I'm angry at everyone around me for letting me believe for YEARS that I was responsible. When in fact, I'm doubtful anything would have been done without me.

It's so unfair that I was held responsible for as much as I was. My father's hoarding was my responsibility as a teenager, even after my sister got me hospitalized-- in fact? That made it even MORE my responsibility.

My father hoarded so many animals -- more than 100 different species. Most of them? Highly illegal, even dangerous. To us. To our environment. But who cared for them? Me.

Maybe a good thing, because I have the ability to love and my dad sucks at it.

My dad used cleaning as punishment. So did my sister.

And my mom? Stood around and watched it happen. She never stepped in to help me or my siblings. Even made fun of us and talked about us behind our backs to my sister and her husband. She'd do it in front of me, like she thought I'd agree that my brothers were lazy during days when we worked hard. Cleaning up someone else's mess.

More abuse happened to me as a teenager after I had gotten rid of my abuser. The world was bleak and utterly f*cking stupid.

I wasn't allowed to react. I was treated as stupid and an idiot and told constantly that I couldn't discuss anything with anyone because I was just a teenager. So no one listened to me. Ever.

Despite the fact that it was me who got rid of him.

I'm guilty because I don't know what my mom should have been responsible for. My sister was her favorite. I'm the problem. So is my little brother. My mom wanted babies but I don't think she cared about us as teenagers. She just let us do whatever and she got us help only if we pushed or it was convenient.

One time I wanted a therapist who wasn't a male. Because she didn't know how to find one? I was in trouble. It was suggested that I just get over it.

And if I react with anger? I almost never have. It's not debatable. She'll get sad, feel guilty, and I'll be the one responsible for fixing it.

I know she actually feels sad and stupid for letting us be raised by Alex. My dad. A f*cking psychopath. But she doesn't seem to feel bad about her own f*cking reactions.

I wish I could be taken seriously by her just once, and it not be a loaded thing. I hate being around her because she doesn't take my actual illness seriously. She has not been there for me at any point where I needed her most.

The time I was kidnapped, she had no idea. Not because she was neglecting me, but because she had cancer that she was dying from that my dad caused that no one would listen to me on even though he was going door to door with the information AND the f*cking hormone cream, and the woman who WAS caring for us was asking my little brother if he had questions about his penis or if I needed her to help me decide how far along my breasts were to the end of puberty and insisting she had to see them. Normal adult woman things, to see tiny breasts. She insisted it was normal.

Also, feeling guilty because I am upset still about what happened between me and B, my ex. I still feel responsible for needing a fantasy world. I swear I didn't know how far she'd go with it. I tried to stop it. I tried to get help. Adults didn't believe me. But I also wanted it and at times believed it myself. It was better than the reality I knew. But also I knew it wasn't reality. Why didn't she know? Why did I end up having to call her every night out of fear of the consequences over a game that turned into make-it-reality or I'll kill myself and maybe take you with me.

I felt so bad and evil. I thought I deserved the way she was treating me. I deserved nothing good. And I was going to go to hell so it didn't matter.

And constantly when I was having fun world building? Character building? "I'm so depressed because that couldn't possibly be real," "I'm going to spend the rest of the night cutting myself and making suicide threats because the characters are too happy, so it can't be real" and I didn't know how to solve this.

I had way too much weight on my shoulders and I still do. For years? I've felt guilty that this house is a mess. It was my fault. Even my mom
Kept saying things like "don't you want a house like your sister's?" Acting like it was MY responsibility to clean up this entire mess.

They have professionals for this. I did so many things that professionals do. Obviously I didn't have confidence. Frequently I almost went blind or got seriously injured doing this for this family that someone should have been paying a professional adult to do.

I've had fiberglass in my eyes. I've had to clean up literal health hazards that a professional team should have been dealing with. I've have glass wounds so deep from abuse AND from doing work I shouldn't have been allowed to do that the scars aren't gone after more than ten years.

And STILL. My advice was never taken seriously. I was just a stupid teenager.

and my only friend forced me to help her live a fantasy so rigorously that I barely had enough time to complete basic tasks like sleeping. And it was so focused on sex.
 
In my teen years, my sister helped us clean the house. We wanted our dad's presence to be gone. That involved clearing the house of his junk.

My sister and her husband quickly turned the effort into a hell. It was already difficult. I was already diagnosed with PTSD at age 13, and my family was not educated on what that meant. But it was no excuse for the constant bullying and severe emotional neglect I was feeling.

When I went for a regular doctor appointment, the doctor could tell something was wrong. She was kind and legitimately worried.

My mom was upset that I needed help. She kept saying, "What YOU told [doctor]" and acting like I had said the wrong things and should have been more secretive. I don't think she even knew she was doing it.

They admitted me at a psychiatric hospital I shouldn't name probably but I'll call it RH. It was tiny and in the middle of nowhere. The nurses were abusive. I mean it. It was better than when I lived with my dad -- for example, I was given food when meals were around. It was better than when I was a sex object in a home with his mother and his brother and his niece and nephew who were around my age.

But I didn't get enough water. To the point that I got dehydrated enough to be unable to stand up, or call for help, to give the nurses their blood samples. When I was attached to a needle to give me water through my blood, the nurses refused to come in and assist me when my roommate stood over me and threatened to pull it out violently. She described it in detail.

I was left in a soft solitary confinement room -- one of my major fears because of something my dad had done to me -- for at least a day (I wonder if I was even fed?) after they basically experimented on me to see if the synesthesia would go away, and to see if I could talk to demons.

That was the worst. I was given some sort of drug. I cooperated because that's normal in a hospital. But it was the worst experience I'd ever had. My synesthesia was messed with, to the point that language sounded wrong and I couldn't recognize anyone. I hear colors and use that to know who people are. So understandably I was very upset. But I'm not a violent person. I wasn't hurting myself. I wasn't hurting others. But they didn't want to deal with me being unable to know who they were. They put me in a small locked room for a day.

I'm claustrophobic and afraid of solitary confinement. THAT'S the ONLY moment I began to panic.

The nurses also allowed me and others to be bullied. By other inmates. By other nurses. Horrible things happened.

My best friend in there happened to be mentally retarded. He was very self conscious about that fact. He wanted to be intelligent. He wrote me a poem about how kind I was to him. The nurses hated him. He nor I could get away. So he got impulsive. I watched frozen, sitting across from him, as he impulsively dug a pencil into his eye.
 
Once my father was upset because my neighbors had kindly been taking me to church.

He was okay with it at first, sort of. He made fun of it. He referred to my neighbors as brainwashed and stupid.

My father was (is?) very anti-religion -- unless it gets him attention. Last I checked he was pretending to be pagan while also talking about how stupid religion is in general. Only he can be interesting enough to say things about witches.

But we could go to this church. My neighbors let us go anytime we wanted.

Until the church invited my little brother and I to be baptized.

We kids thought that maybe if our male adult neighbor who had been so kind and strong for us asked our dad for permission to let us be baptized? Our dad would allow it.

We were very wrong. My dad told our neighbor that religion was stupid. We should never have been allowed there.

I think my dad was angry that the Christian God was more powerful than he was. Not really sure, but I've seen that before in people. My dad liked control, though. This was one moment when I guess he felt he had lost it.

My dad lorded It over us. He ranted, threatened to make us -- very young (less than 12 years?) -- live out in the streets. He fed me less, he left me alone in my room until the sun went down.

And he sent the one other adult I trusted, my mother, to come tell me I was crazy.

My little brother and I were in my bedroom, on my bed. My mom came in and told us that being baptized was useless. It would not get us into heaven -- sure. That's an okay thing to tell a kid.

But then. She told us there was no heaven.

I agreed instantly -- to get her out of my room. I instantly knew my father had sent her. She wasn't here to help me. She was here to calm him down, to get us to quit talking about it.

My little brother was confused. He looked devastated, scared. He was tiny. Maybe 7 or 8, I don't know. Being told that when you die, that's it. And seeing me just agree.

He reasoned a little, saying that the people in our church said differently. That the Bible said differently. My mom denied it all, as if telling a 55-year-old tiredly that no, Santa doesn't exist, and everyone our age should know that by now.

I felt betrayed. Maybe she was trying to keep us safe. But for once I wish she would have actually helped us.

What drives parents to be more afraid of their spouse than worried for their children? I know she cared, but she never acted like it. It's more confusing than I want it to be.
 

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