Snacking with Obama

What the heck did I write (and scream) and do? How could I have ever lost myself like that? I can’t forgive myself. I want to hate myself more than anybody else probably hates me (which is a lot). I was intimidated and my early childhood abuse was triggered like it never has been before and I freaked out and gave up my car and my independence out of fear and I am sure I hurt people I care about. No one deserves to have all those projections put onto them, to be seen through all my distorted fear and paranoia, and like ouch ouch ouch how will I ever find a way to stop believing I am terrible and that it is worth it to try not to abandon myself even if friends I disappointed turn out to hate me? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry…

I felt like my horrendously inappropriate words were so objectifying and I didn’t mean it and ugh please forgive me but no how can I deserve it? It is like all the ways I actually care no longer meant anything, I ruined any possibility of the realness of my own heart being received, I broke my own heart and I feel more than I can ever say like I disappointed people who loved me but I don’t know if there is any way to ever get clarity in my heart and maybe I disappointed them a long time ago and was just onlivious then that my words had been hurtful and were not welcome all along. I do not know but there is more live in my heart there than I have ever felt and can even imagine and I don’t know what to do with my heart anymore, don’t know what it means to let my heart decide.

I was not in my right mind and I reacted immediately and impulsively from my wounding: I thought if I expressed my pain screaming and crying like that someone would hear how much pain I was in and that I was trapped in sudden intentionally triggered recollections if horrific abuse, had run out of road for expressing myself in a healthier way. I just don’t know if my disappointment in myself ever has an end. I don’t know if there is any way to ever forgive myself for it. I’m so so sorry but what is the point of asking in my heart for forgiveness when I don’t feel like I could ever deserve it and there is no foreseeable way to get clarity on what torments my heart?

I feel like I abandoned myself, broke my own heart, exiled myself from my own heart, and I am too exhausted to get my life force back. I feel like such a horrible, inadequate, untrustworthy person. I prayed to God as a child of God in the wailing kind of torturous heartbreak of the prophets and the psalms. I want God to let me feel the depths of the woundedness and the brokenness in my heart, to remove my defects of character, to give me clarity and some kibd of comfort. Today I feel like I have been too much of a disappointment and my life is over.

Well. I talked to my ‘mother’ today which was a little easier since yesterday she actually sent several texts trying to reach me and in her text said something that felt more like caring than anything I have heard from her in a long time. When I called her yesterday, briefly, I didn’t call back, because I didn’t want to be brought down again, but the tone with which she answered sounded more caring than I have heard her since I made the mistake of returning to that house. Then again today the way she answered the phone was… so different, gentle rather than ouch ouch ouch what is this, you are freaking me out for the first time in… way too long. I was soooo reactive to her and she must have been sooo reactive to me and it was just horrible.

Her texts for the first time sounded… not meant with every word to horribly trigger me? I wrote to her after she said reading my life ngtexts was hard:

“I have problems talking on the phone with you, too, text is much easier… and whenever I talk to you it seems to being me down. At least you sent several messages after that like you were actually trying to get back to me… I went to the store and felt better and didn’t want to risk talking to you and getting brought down again. Don’t get mad at me please for not being able to trust that you care at all…

you don’t have to respond to every bit of it, just take it in and try to understand if you care to do that and then when you talk to me you will hopefully speak from more understanding and care not to hurt me (unless you do want to hurt me) and you won’t have to respond to it all, just read it slowly several times maybe and try to take it in… don’t worry about remembering it all, just be yoursrlf and care and try not to be defensive and if you do love me it will hopefully come through when you talk to me

but i’m scared to talk to you on the phone like i said, it seems to bring me down and i hate arguing with you on the phone. i don’t want to argue i just want you to hear me and care (though it is impossible right now to trust you care you can at least keep trying to show tgat you do and not give up if that matters to you)”

She wrote in the past tense mostly which was one if the only things that hurt about her texts:

“I understand that you don’t want to talk to me on the phone period but for some reason when I’m texting texting. I feel like all of doing is trying to defend myself And that’s not the way I want it to come out” (she seems more defensive to me on the phone)

“I feel like I gave you a super lot of attention when you’re a little boy. We did things together, we played at the pool when on vacation to all kinds of things I did my best. I’m sorry if it wasn’t enough, sorry, sorry if it wasn’t enough. Sorry” (this made me feel sad: I’m okay with her calling me a boy, and yeah, there were plenty of times when she was going through stuff and was so negligent and emotionally distant, but there are also so so many times she cared and was there for me. I remember so many good times, it’s why I love her so much and can’t stop loving her even if she hates me, and the last few days I’ve been thinking if she were on her deathbed her last words to me would be, haha, I hate you.) So much happened later that terrified me and showed no concern for my well-being and somehow the last few months especially since she seemed to want to mess with my mind and make it clear that she tricked me in some big, hurtful way I wasn’t supposed to find out about and more than ever she and her husband seemed to be abusing me together… and she dissociated and glazed over when I asked her to look in my eyes and tell me she loved me, but she looked in my eyes and told me I hate you I hate you I hate you right after she called 911 to force me to go to the hospital out of supposed concern for my well-being which honestly was not that at all… and it felt like the most honest look she had ever given me; after the collective abuse of the previous few months it felt so real. And yet the other day she flat out refused that she would ever say that to anybody, and she says sooooo many things she insusts she would never say, that is such a frustrating thibg about her. You cannot get an apology which I like not because I think she should feel bad but because I want to know she cares that she hurt me and knows what she did… she has no reason to apologise that all the things she did for me as a kid were maybe not enough because as far as the positive things go it was more than enough! Hearing her say she’s sorry about that, I think it could be one if the first times I’ve heard it from her in my life. it is really big…

Anyway, today, she finally did not talk to me with defensiveness even when I mentioned, without getting into specifics, that she had hurt me in so many ways. She was mad at me for asking her to come to me and then becoming unreachable; she said she tried to find me for four hours and who else would do that for you? I told her someone soent just about that amount if time truing to help me today; it feels bad when she says no one else would do for me the things she does for me, like I’m not worth it, like nobody else could ever live me, which is hard to hear when I am terrified she does not. I need to put up stronger boundaries with her than ever, for both of our sakes. But today unlike in our last conversation she told me that her mind and entire attitude was different when she was sick the last few months and that she didn’t even realise that until the last few days. She said it in a way that almost sounded believable and it was the closest she had come to acknowledging that she hurt me. She said if I don’t try how can I ever know for sure if I can trust her, and maybe she has a point; but I need to find out in a healthy boundaried way and really explore what it means to trust and how I can find that again with anybody. It is so hard even with the generosity that has been offered to me to trust…

That was kind of my last hope: I was thinking she was being abused along with me until it started seeming sooo much like they were in in it together. Now she says my thinking they were in on it together was probably her being too exhausted to fight him on anything but no tve things she said and the ways she acted towards me felt like the most hurtful collaboration ever and the way she responded when I brought up fears of sexual abuse just felt like absolute hatred and lack of concern for what I basically needed to feel safe. My last hope was that just as her husband was manipulating me and putting a sort of imperius curse on me — tried to make me think he was going to kill my mother, before she seemed to take his side, made me fear he had hurt my grandmother! (I could not even find out for certain if she was still alive while I was still there, that’s how scary intimidating it was) — he knows how to psychologically affect her responses and make her say and do things that aren’t *meant* to hurt me but end up making me feel like this huge collaboration against me is going on. He will prine her with certain ideas that ‘match’ the ways he is wcaring the crap out of me so the things she ends up saying and doing feel like she must be in on it too and I’m going crazy trying to figure out what is going on. I cannot acvount for a lot of the really mean stuff she said and did or the timing; I believe I was under 24/7 surveillance in that house which messed me up into such a helpless creature. Everything I did even in supposed privacy was ridiculed and shamed by him and it seemed so often that my mother, to a less decypherable extent, was doing it too… but maybe both the men in this family with their surveillance techniology have become madter manipukators nit only of me but of her and that is what I am terrified to acknowledge. If I can’t trust her and she hates me it is almost safer because all I wanted was for her to be okay and at least if they are all in on sonething against me she is safer. But it makes me so sad because if it turns out I can trust *her* the corollary is I do not think she is in any way at all married to someone who cares about her at all and more and more I don’t know if my ‘brother’ even does wither. The men of that family put terrifying things into my mind about what murderous and evil thibgs tvey were capable of — I even started to fear my brother wasn’t living in his trailer anymore but was nurdering people and piling up bodies in there. It was the same kind of psychological torment I got from her husband’s older brother; and the truth is, my mother does have a switch, she can be mean and callous and incredibly neglectful but I always thought it was psychological stuff going on and not intentional maliciousness… until very recently when everything she said and did started confirming the fears put into me by those men. But there is maybe an increasing chance, as I had been hoping, that she did not mean to join in such evil, but he know her so well and how to create an environment, especially when she is sick and not in her right mind as she admits, where he can sort of control the tooics she brings up and primes the words she uses so when she interacts with me it sounds like she means to be just as evil as the other two; often it felt like they were both using *her* without her knowing ut to get to me and that feels absolutely awful! Maybe he caused that in her too and she doesn’t realise her not being of right mind was not from being sick but from manipulation… I thought she was too naive and would never catch in to being manipulated until I started fearing more and more especially in those last weeks that she was manipukating me too. And… in some ways I think she really was, she messed with my mind too in ways I absolutely cannot account for and that is so unlike ways she has ever hurt me before, and it feels intentional but maybe it would not seem quite so bad if it were not reinforced by the awful ways the others meant to bring me down. Anyway, I didn’t and don’t know what is real anymore, and all of this is so, so hard… I cannot just naïvely trust, it is going to take a long while to start to figure out what is even going on…

Past night I enjoyed eating tortilla chips and salsa and lustening to Barack Obama’s A Promised Land. I love how he sets the scene at the beginning of the book, peaceful natural scenes at the White House. I think I will make up some dinner and listen to more tonight but oh how much my heart needs to break and how kuch it does break at the world as it is; are we almost there, can I have that audacity to hope? The way President Obama is humble about his knowledge and understanding of politics as a young college student and the way he wasted away his youth just puts me to shame. For President Obama, yes, I’m sure he has his self-criticism, but if I were only the kind of person he was in his youth I would write a book about it and hope to win a Pulitzer Prize. I just can’t measure up, I’m sure, even to his worst and most wastefully spent days, and I certainly can’t swim laps in tbe ocean like him. Will I ever amount to anything? Is there a plan for me? What was I meant to be? I’m sad.

Oh, I am so glad my host and I are in tbe same page about Biden too: he has done an amazing job putting through legislation in a recalcitrant congress…