Archive for the 'the almost divorce' Category

No time to go round and round.

Published on April 3, 2011 by Corinna Carlson | 13 Comments

The latest session that I had with my psychiatrist was one of the most needed ones I’ve had in a while. I’ve moved into this new scary place, and I’m finding the fear induced anxiety, eight full days of it now, incredibly painful.

I was straight up honest with him that last Sunday I’d upped my Clonazepam by a milligram because in order to be in the gym I have no choice but to find ways to get food down my throat and this is the fantastic it feels like I have a dryer than fuck metal bar across my esophagus anxiety the kind that if I do get food by it’ll just laugh at me whilst I double over from the waves of nausea. Given that I have been learning to sit in my feelings this new thing where I actually learn to experience feelings in the real word again and do things for me is turning out to be a wee bit challenging.

I’ve had more than one situation trigger me into this anxiety but unfortunately to get out I can only deal with one thing at a time. It may seem strange, but I don’t often find myself crying in my sessions, lately though I’ve noticed that I have been crying more in general. I used to be a crier and then I wasn’t and then I learned how to accept being a joy crier and I left it at that and kept suppressing real tears and firing them off in destructive bullets of anger instead.

When I found out in February about a week before what would have been her 89th birthday that my grandmother had died in January and that no one had told me I was quite devastated. After the vitriol spewed by my Aunt in my comments you’d really not think that things could’ve gotten much worse from there. I didn’t call my mother right away to offer any condolences, I had no idea how to deal with a betrayal of that magnitude, had no idea how to put my anger aside, myself aside to make it about her loss and I questioned whether I would call at all. I did end up calling, I called her on what would have been her mother’s birthday, it was still the day before here. I don’t remember a lot of the conversation but I know that at no time was any mention made of anything except my grandmother and current events. I don’t think I need to go into detail as to how fucking hard that was I wanted to explode on the inside.

Shortly after this phone call we received an email saying she wanted to come stay with us. We were both pretty floored she had the balls to ask considering no explanation, no apology has been issued for the offside attack launched on me, not to mention she doesn’t think that not telling me that my grandmother died was wrong she feels she did the right thing. And in this case I don’t really give a fuck about opinion entitlements, I don’t know how to forgive that, but somehow I found myself telling her she could come for five days.

Enter discussions with close friends who ask me very very good questions and challenge my decision, to the point that I even tell the Dr. I ain’t letting her come. But he talked me out of it. He suggested some great ideas and we discussed for about the millionth time laying down boundaries with her. The boundaries I try to set with my parents generally dissipate into the depths of I give the fuck up pretty quickly. But at that moment, I felt good, for real, I figured that I’d handled the phone call and left my dad and everything else out of it, so fuck it, I could do it, I could have her come visit, plan it all out before she got here, not even discuss my father, I even emailed her and offered an olive branch of another day saying she could leave on the morning of the sixth day, I told her the schedule with my psychiatrist so she could book the week around it, getting the full five days with me and was confident with the right boundaries we had a shot at a new beginning, for just the two of us. Or at least a start.

As I’m writing this I realize how ridiculous it sounds.

I’m 33, when the fuck will I ever learn.

To save a few bucks she decided to ask me if she could come for eight days; let us not forget, I used to be a travel agent so I know damn well that all international scheduled fares go down after a seven night stay, but she decided to show complete and absolute disrespect for this entire fucking try-a-thon, one I felt forced into anyway. But you know what? I didn’t freak out. But I did hold my ground and it was hard because she of course said she was sorry and that she was crying but piss off with your guilt trip seriously. The exchanges we had made it clear that if I didn’t do this now If I didn’t say no, NO this is our year, and I’M doing things for me right now and it isn’t a good time and it isn’t about you and NO I’m NOT saying that I’m never going to talk to you again but I can not do this right now.

I feel really fucking guilty and it was the initial anxiety trigger but it is fear, fear of finally putting my foot down, the pain of knowing that she hurts but that she has to live with the decisions she has made in her life and that I can’t do anything about them. My parents keep accusing me of not moving on when in reality I don’t think they realize how far I have moved. It hurts, but it isn’t forever. If I hadn’t set this boundary with her then there wouldn’t be any chance for change because I’d have only been enabling the same behavior I have for years.

I’ve been advised to cry more and feel the sadness, It is supposed to help me push through the anxiety and fear. I think that I had been concentrating on the same goals and personal improvements for so long that I forgot how scary it is to start new ones. But if i don’t move on, neither will the anxiety that keeps me down.

Now I cried a lot.

Published on February 9, 2011 by Corinna Carlson | 14 Comments

You know how sometimes someone will say something to you about yourself and at the time you think you don’t care? Like say someone said, “and people hate you for it too” [in this case the topic was how I tweet]. I know I said something back to the affect of, “if I cared about numbers I’d have changed how I tweet a long time ago”. And that is true, if nothing else I’ve made a point of becoming even more myself on Twitter and tweeting out the most random of random shit that comes into my head, because in general I tweet how I talk, I also write in a very similar fashion to how I talk, but only to a degree, I don’t talk in under-punctuated run-on sentences [very often]. I’m well aware that my form of humor and almost constant sarcasm and/or realism in my tweets is an acquired taste.

This comment has stuck with me. It’s been bugging me. I guess I don’t understand why anyone would read or follow my tweets if they hate me. I also don’t really know why when I’ve clearly separated myself out from the Vancouver Social Media scene why I’m STILL a hot hate topic. I have made some friendships with people inside the scene but I hang out with them outside of it.

It makes me feel bitter and bullied, like people are just sitting back and waiting for me to lose it, hospital style. If I get upset to any degree on any public forum, including my blog, it feels like I can’t just be upset, it feels like the haters are sitting in anticipation of when they can declare that I haven’t changed.

I have a temper, no matter how hard I work on myself I’m always going to have a temper but I’m not going to blog from the perspective of forcing all the progress I’ve made down people’s throats, I simply write how I feel on whatever medium I’m on. If you have to ask yourself why someone would be as open as I am about my life, and my trials and tribulations then you aren’t my target audience.

Normally I wouldn’t even address this because it feels like I’m defending myself, but I’m feeling pretty down right now. I suppose it only makes sense, to me anyway, given the posts from January that I am feeling a certain amount of insecurity online. I make a point of not checking my stats unless I’m under attack, which I was and so I know that my parents are stalking both my blog and my twitter page. I don’t know if they think this will intimidate me into not posting and if they think it’s been working, when in reality I’ve been super busy with a new kitty who came to us with some health issues which lead to me being pretty down and having a tough time going from taking care of my sick old best furry buddy to taking care of a sick kitten with no one but myself to blame for my emotions. Feeling like I got a new kitty too soon but knowing I couldn’t give up on the little guy. Breaking down somedays out of emotional exhaustion and feeling like a fucking loser because it was triggered by cats. But coming home to an empty apartment after Christmas was hard on us both. I had no way of knowing, thinking we were rescuing a healthy cat, which was naive in and of itself, that the wee Roy Kucing being a bit sick for over half the time we’ve had him would take an emotional tole. I do have an introductory post for Roy in drafts but never got it finished.

I would also be a flat out liar if I were to proclaim that certain aspects of things happening or rather not happening with my immediate family weren’t bothersome. The fact that I’ve made three attempts to obtain my grandmother’s new address and phone number and have been ignored on all fronts. But yet my parents stalk my site. It makes me sick. Regardless of what is going on between my parents and claims that I never contact this woman and then refusing to let me contact her when she’s dying doesn’t even make sense to me. It certainly isn’t making me want to have any sort of civil conversation with them, but if they actually think I’d bring any of this up to my almost 89 year old dying grandmother, fuck it, I can’t even entertain these ideas because it simply makes my blood boil. The fact that they are stalking me instead of giving me a simple fucking address speaks volumes to me.

For me, right now, I’m dealing with the fact that I AM dealing with things. I’m dealing with feelings. I’ve never kept it a secret on here that I’ve abused prescription drugs in the past. This has gotten me into A LOT of trouble online and in my personal life. It made me feel invincible and I got behind a computer screen a few too many times under the influence and well, I think the majority here know how the rest of that story goes. Even this time last year I couldn’t sit in my feelings. That is why it is ok if I simply do sit in my feelings and don’t exercise, don’t read, don’t write, just sit, I can’t do it forever but it’s where I’m currently at: because at least I’m sitting at least I’m not fucked up on a stash of clonazepam and seroquel. Having real feelings is a trip, it has allowed for many breakthroughs with my psychiatrist but it is incredibly hard at times. I’m used to freaking out and then freaking out some more with maybe a bit more freak out thrown in for good measure but not freaking out means the pain has to go somewhere and if it isn’t going into the drugs and it isn’t going into freaking out then where it is going is where I’m going right now and those places suck balls but if I don’t go to them then I can never get better, I will never know if I can be one of the lucky ones who does recover from this at times debilitating illness.

This morning when I woke up feeling suicidal and outed myself with my dailybooth photo I was glad to find myself with words not going straight to draft because I won’t suffer in silence, I will put it out there so that I don’t do stupid shit and end up in the hospital again or have friends running around trying to find me and contacting Adam and afraid for my safety because I know having lost someone who stayed silent and from the life I’ve lead that if there is one thing I’m not no matter how shitty I feel is alone in this and if I have to put my pain out on the internet to keep myself here then I’m going to put it out on the fucking internet and haters gonna hate no matter what, but the people who love me are also still going to love me.

Life Happens

Published on January 11, 2011 by Corinna Carlson | 8 Comments

I feel like if I just go on and write posts from the pages of notes I have on things I’d like to write about that I would be leaving a huge elephant in the room but at the same time I don’t plan on saying anything I wouldn’t have already said anyway nor do I plan to give it too much attention. But in having put myself out there and written about my family in the way I have over the almost six years I’ve been blogging for now I can’t say it surprises me that someone related to me has viscously attacked me, no one ever said trying to break cycles of abuse was easy, I’m not going to say I’m not hurt and that I wasn’t really pissed off but I can’t say I’ve lost any sleep over it. Given that I have never not approved a comment on this blog, no matter how mean, and the fact that all members of my family or anyone who reads here is entitled to their opinions and although there is no question that it was hard, there was no way I wasn’t going to approve it; a part of me knew it was coming from the four emails of a similar, granted shorter, FULL CAPS nature that I had already received and ignored.

If there is one thing I have learned in the last two years it’s that you can’t tell people you have changed, people either see it or they don’t and no matter what I do or don’t do, there will always be people who don’t like me, will never like me. And you know what? For a while now I’ve been okay with that and it isn’t easy by any stretch, given I crave approval and want everyone to like me. But 2010, although a year of little blogging, was a year of many, many lessons learned.

The fact of the matter here is, whether you find out from reading through my archives or have been following this roller-coaster with my family from the beginning, I have always made it clear that there is no one that I feel close with in my family, the one person I did died in 2001. So when it comes right down to it, I don’t feel the need to really defend myself against anything she said, take it or leave it, buy it or don’t buy it I’m not here to appease anyone. I acknowledge that reading some of the things that I have written about my parents over the years can’t be easy for them, but at the same time – then stay off my blog.

You can tranquilize your mind

Published on January 7, 2011 by Corinna Carlson | 26 Comments

When they read the email he’ll insinuate that I don’t know what I’m talking about, he’ll say that I’m trying to make it worse and to make it about me. But I’m not and it isn’t. Anyone who knows anything about my family dynamic has at one point asked me if a free trip to Bali every year is really worth putting up with my parents’ constant drama and bullshit. I have always answered with a resounding FUCK YES. When I went to see them in 2009 things were only semi awkward, but because I was in a really good place for a change I gave it a go and about 90% of the trip was good. I even kept my lips zipped right shut when my dad made some witty remark about how the depression in our family had skipped a generation [delusions of grandeur much]. It didn’t take me long to see beneath the mask my father wore while I was there, I left knowing he hadn’t changed a bit. I probably said a lot to the contrary back then but I wanted to believe.

Over the last year the answer to that question has been changing more and more to FUCK NO. The ignorant and racist letters they send when they moved to fucking ASIA are quite shocking. I’m simply not capable of using them for a free trip and last year we didn’t go anyway. The older I get the more I simply can not live with “we’ll just have to agree we remember things differently” being good enough for me. It isn’t. A lot of days my resentment builds, and shit man, I’ve been working on this relationship with an incredible psychiatrist since 2003. I know that I either have to walk away or accept them for who they are.

And I can’t do either. Despite trying and failing at both.

Since they’ve moved to Bali it has been one thing after another. For two people who inflicted the level of abuse and neglect on me that they did, I honestly thought that them moving to Bali would result in us simply drifting further and further a part like we were doing before suddenly they woke up one day and realized they had a daughter well after I realized I’d grown up way short handed and it has been a battle ever since. I’m sorry but you just do not get to neglect me to the disgusting and gross extent you did and suddenly decide we are going to be friends. No, it’s over, it ends here.

And now I’m being accused of trying to get my mother to have another breakdown [again] because that is how my family rolls and he reacted like I said he would in that first sentence I wrote at 2:22 PM looks like he was out of bed for about two minutes before he blasted off his ‘I’m a five year old and it’s all your fault’ message to me.

Right, so my Grandmother is in the hospital and long story short she should have either been put in a home years ago or have a paid nurse who looks in on her weekly, she is 88 years old and is basically left with distant relatives of relatives of friends to look in on her, when she talks to her children she lies to them about how she is doing because she is fucking 88 and last time she was in the hospital having HEART SURGERY instead of her daughter who lives in a suburb of Toronto going to visit her the relatives of the relatives of the friends were left to handle it all AND my Aunt still bitched about the costs.

My father because he has never liked my mother’s mother has refused to do anything to help her, like say having a professional check in on her, which has now lead to my uncle entering her apartment to find it reeking of feces, the bed pot not changed for days, the bed-linens un-save-able and bloody Kleenexes everywhere. I’m fucking furious. I’m livid. Is this for fucking real? No matter how I feel about my parents, even if I’m taken out of their will, I would STILL not allow what has happened to my Grandmother to happen to them.

And his excuse, she at 88 wanting to keep her independence and not telling my Aunt and Uncle how she was actually doing and he knows that under no circumstances can my Aunt or Uncle afford a nurse or a home, to which I reminded him that the elderly don’t always know what they want and what they need and that someone as independent as my Grandmother would NEVER give that up without a fight. There is no excuse for her living like that none. I can not believe these people expect me to have a relationship with them just because THEY are the lonely ones now. I’m not ready, I don’t know when I will be but I’m not and this just makes it SO much worse, so much worse that I may never be ready. I’m pretty sure the admittance forms to whatever home I end up tossing them into can probably be signed without my having to see them, but at least I’d still fucking help.