Over the weekend, I made some alterations to my cell service plan and added one of my younger siblings to it. Since they wanted a new phone, I had to upgrade my plan and that, unfortunately, meant that the way that I understood cell phone service plans no longer applied. Instead of just “adding a line” to my existing plan and paying a reduced fee for the additonal line, I basically set up a copy of the plan I upgraded to for my sibling. A complete duplicate of all benefits, fees, costs, and everything. I’m still saving a bit of money thanks to adding them, but I’d have saved the same amount of money just changing my plan from what it was to what it is now, a thing I only put off as long as I did because it wouldn’t save me that much money and I simply did not want to think about it. But, years after my initial offer, as they’ve grown further from our parents, my sibling wanted to leave our parents’ phone plan and join mine, so I had to think about it. And am still thinking about since it will take a while for all of that to settle out (as coverage changes, plans update, new numbers/lines become accessible, and so on), which has gotten me thinking about the role that (cell) phone service plays in our lives. After all, when I was young and learning to use the phone, cell phones weren’t as common as they are now. Cell phones became common while I was in high school and smart phones rose to the fore while I was in college, so I’ve gone from having access to an old rotary phone in my parents’ garage to having a front row seat for the rise of voicemail and then the ultimate takeover of smart phones.
Continue readingFamily
Family Like An Open Wound
A bit over a week before writing this, I got a chunk of skin taken off by a thing I was working on at work. A ratchet slipped and my hand banged into a hard metal edge in a way that gouged me pretty deeply. The wound was about the size of a dime (which is a bit less concerning when I tell you that my fingers are at least as wide as a quarter) and I spent the three days after that taking special care of it. I wanted to keep the wound clean while I continued to work and to keep it from getting irritated by coming into contact with anything. Once I was through the work week, though, and just spending time in my apartment, I stopped covering it and let it air out a bit. Now, a bit over a week later, it mostly doesn’t hurt. There’s still some tightness when the heat of my office dries out my hands, there’s the occasional twinge of pain if I bump it into anything, and there’s the dull ache of it every time I was my hands. It’s healing well, it looks much less horrible than it was, but a closer inspection reveals the true depth of the wound, as does running my hand or fingertips over it. So while it mostly doesn’t hurt, every so often, I am reminded of the severity of this injury and am inflicted with the full pain of the injury all over again (I never realized how much I use that knuckle for tapping things until doing that shot a lance of pain deep into my finger and arm). Which is kind of like the experience of cutting off contact with my biological family, just compressed down into seven days instead of seven years.
Continue readingEven I Struggle To Write Sometimes
I meant to write a letter to my aunt (the one who I’ve decided to stay in contact with because she’s been pretty good about everything). I even have most of it written! It’s five pages long, so far. Single-spaced. Which means it’ll get quite a bit longer whenever I edit it. Whenever that happens. I didn’t really choose to stop writing so much as… well, struggle to write it at all. It’s exhausting to talk about family stuff at the best of times and these are not the best of times. So I sporadically worked at it for a while, went on vacation, got sick, and now it has been a month and a half, at least, and I’m finally turning my mind back to it (assuming, of course, that my brain fog continues to diminish). I wish I’d been able to focus on it more. I wish I’d been able to spend more time on it. I wish a lot of things, to be honest, and none of them are going to happen. All I can do is carry on from where I’m at and hope that I can get it written by the time you’re reading this [which I’ve managed] so I’ve got time to edit and then print it before I leave my workplace for two and a half weeks. That’s the only place I’ve got access to a printer, you see, and there’s no way I’m writing all of this by hand. I lack the strength-of-writing-hand for that in any kind of quick or even legible manner. So I’m on a bit more of a deadline unless I want to let this time grow into two and a half months. I didn’t even want it to grow into three weeks back when I was still working on it, and yet it did. You would think that, given how much writing I do, something like this would be easier, right?
Continue readingI’ve Even Stopped Wishing I Could Put An Optimistic Spin On These Posts
It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.
Continue readingAn Out-Of-Mind Experience
Today, the day I’m writing this (a week before it gets posted), is the first day any of my relatives could have reasonably received the letters I sent out earlier this week. It might take longer than usual, given the government shutdown and everything, but today’s the day were my anxiety goes from “steadily bubbling” to “boiling over” as I begin to flinch every time my phone buzzes or it’s little “you’ve got a notification!” light turns on. I do not want to hear from any of them. I’m not interested in what any of them have to say immediately upon reading my letter and explicitly mentioned not sending me texts or calling me in the letter itself, so I should not be hearing from any of them. I will, almost certainly, be hearing from at least one of them at some point this weekend, though. Not sure what it’ll be about, considering the various relatives getting a letter and their wide range of knee-jerk responses to stuff, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. After all, it’s not purely unhealthy communication if there’s not also communication when you’ve explicitly said you want none. I expect that the general content of whatever message I get will include some form of apology, some number of excuses or “explanations” for past behavior, and then either a statement that they’ll do what I asked in my letter (despite already contacting me) or some statement about the importance of family connections with a deflecting acknowledgement that our family communicates poorly. Bonus points if it includes both.
Continue readingOne Last Letter To Bring An End To Years Of Waiting
One of the most difficult things I’ve ever done was choose to cut off my biological family. Though I’m still in contact with two siblings and briefly reconnected with a single cousin (who stopped responding and fell silent at some point last year–or maybe the year prior, I really don’t remember), I haven’t exchanged more than pleasantries with any one else in years (barring one moment of connection with an uncle I thought would be cooler about everything than he eventually was and my multiple attempts to extend a hand to my parents in the hope that they’d be able to grow enough for me to build some kind of relationship with them). Only a few still try to keep in contact and while I absolutely could do more to stay in contact with my wider family, that’s not really something I want. I cut them all off, not just my parents. I would tell pretty much anyone that my primary reason for doing so was because I didn’t want to come between my parents and their siblings, or drive any kind of wedge into the family at large, but those are things I’m currently discussing with my therapist as a result of how reflexively I say them and how they all center the well-being of my parents and family rather than admit the truth, which is that I can’t just ignore the fact that they all bore witness to the abuses of my childhood in some capacity and chose to do nothing. Regardless of the reason behind it, I still made the choice to potentially never speak to any of them ever again. I didn’t do it as directly as I did with my parents and I didn’t go as nuclear as I did with my brother, but none of them know where I live and I haven’t responded to any of their attempts to draw information out of me despite knowing exactly what all that would mean. I did, after all, set a rule in place for what it would take to reestablish contact with any of them, like I did with my parents and pretty much anyone I’ve ever cut contact with. And like my parents and most of the other people I’ve cut contact with, I knew from the outset that it was incredibly unlikely that my rule would ever be satisfied.
Continue readingAll Of This To Say…
Growing up, in the simplified lessons of conservative Catholicism and childhood emotional grow, I was taught that love and hate are opposites. That they’re so opposed they cannot exist together such that, should you feel love for something, you are incapable of actually hating it, or if you burn with hatred for something, you are incapable of loving it. This was taught to me again and again as I dealt with my abusive elder brother and neglectful parents, alongside the lesson that of course I loved my family since anything less would be some kind of sin or moral failing on my part (these are equivalent in the version of Catholicism I was taught as a child), and since I had little access to people outside of my family thanks to being homeschooled, I didn’t learn any different until high school when I finally got out from under my parents’ teaching and learned from people who had different ideas and understandings of the world around us. There, as I began to develop emotionally and learn things about myself and others, I learned that the opposite of love wasn’t hate but a lack of care or concern. In fact, love and hate were two sides of the same coin, emotions so intense that they couldn’t help but overlap in ways big and small that could not only lead to some incredible opportunities for change and grace (since this was still a Catholic high school and everything was taught as close to a religious framing as possible) but also to some of the most toxic and horrible relationships that humanity had to offer (I was, after all, finally learning enough to know that my life at home was not normal or good). This mixture of emotions contributes to codependent relationships, manipulation, many different forms of abuse, and an inability to escape these things because, culturally, US society places a huge degree of importance on the power of love to overcome and redeem those who ahve hurt us.
Continue readingI Have Never Experience Irony As Bitter And Cruel As This
Content Warning: mentions of my childhood trauma, focused on threats of violence and non-specific references to violence.
I’ve had a very weird twenty-four hours. I was just minding my own business last night when one of my siblings texted our little “middlest siblings” groupchat to let the other two of us (who are largely estranged from the family) know that our eldest sibling had been targeted by a scammer. Given the proliferation of scammers and how little is done to prevent them these days, that alone was hardly surprising. What was surprising was that the scam was the “Mexican cartel threatens violence against the target and the target’s family if money is not sent” and the family members listed to shock the target into compliance were myself and my younger sibling. The two estranged members of the family. There’s plenty of explanation why the two of us would be called out by a scammer. We’re the two who have moved the furthest from the rest of the family and I’ve put a lot of effort into keeping my digital footprint small, so I would appear more distant and less likely to be in contact. Levying threats against me, by dropping my name and vaguely reference the potential for violence, could be difficult to confirm or refute since, due to distance, it’s more difficult to visually confirm that there’s nothing wrong. And while my younger sibling’s digital footprint is larger than mine, it’s still much smaller than most people our age and they’ve done a lot of the same work to create distance from our family even if they didn’t move as far away. By all accounts, anyone with access to one of those phone number lookup databases (which I used once a long time ago to confirm that I’d managed to largely excise my recent information from the internet) would be able to look at the available information and see that the two of us are far removed from the rest of the family and probably the best names to drop for unverifiable threats.
Continue readingGrowth, Change, and The Illusion Of Both
It has been a bit over a month since I first wrote about it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about the Ship-Of-Theseus-Of-The-Self in regards to myself, my biological family, and my experiences with them. It’s not really an active, all-consuming thing, but the entire train of thought hasn’t been far from my mind in a while. Historically, summers have always been rough for me, especially in regards to family issues, due to a string of birthdays and how often the worst events of my childhood happened during the summer, so it’s not surprising that I can’t really get these thoughts that far from the surface of my mind. I’ve also been encountering a bit of family issues in media recently, what with watching Fruits Basket and finishing Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion, so that certainly hasn’t helped keep it off my mind. It was actually the stuff from Final Fantasy 14 that prompted the latest branch of this thought tree. In Endwalker, there’s a difficult family situation that is resolved by the end of the expansion and, as I played through the post-expansion patch content, the thought occurred to me that the family member causing problems in the expansion “lived long enough to grow into a better person.” Which got me thinking about my grandfather, who probably did the same thing, and my parents, who might never. It’s a grim thought, that, and one that filled me with a great deal more grief than I expected it to when it popped into my head, but I genuinely have no idea if my parents will accomplish that particular feat or not.
Continue readingWishing I Could Sail My Own Ship Of Theseus Into The Future
This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I discovered a pile of sleep shirts that I’d forgotten to put away last night after I finished folding my laundry. Absently, barely dressed and still damp from my morning shower, I split the shirts into stacks that would fit in my dresser and moved to tuck them away when I noticed that the shirts I’d split the stack at both probably needed to be thrown out (because the armpit holes had become visible while the shirts were folded). One was a shirt I’ve known for a while I’d need to throw away but have resisted doing so because I really like the graphic on it and there’s no replacing it. The other one was a shirt I’d gotten some years prior, after doing a canoe-marathon-fundraiser event with my father for an organization that maintained a large stretch of the Des Plaines river in Illinois. As I thought about throwing it away, I realized that I would be disposing of a connection to my parents and replacing it with some other shirt that is too stained or holey for regular wear. That thought spiraled out and I realized that, like the proverbial full refreshing of your body via cellular replacement every seven years and the Ship of Theseus that leant it’s name to the paradox, it would not be long before all the connections I had to my parents would be gone. Perhaps this thought was circling my subconscious already since I made myself a big meal the night before using a recipe I’d inherited from my mother, but I’ve thought about little else since it came to mind this morning.
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