Project "Friends"

I don't want any more project "friends". In fact I am going to be careful to avoid people who want to turn me into a project or want to "fix me". I can befriend people fast online and have found various friend soulmates via the internet. It seems like the Internet is my mecca of friendship and social connection while the real world, it just seems harder.

One thing I noticed that happened to me is I seemed to hook up with all these people who wanted to FIX ME.

Disabled people are very prone to project "friends". Legions of church ladies will go befriend the disabled lady to prove their holiness to their congregation. Some will be seeking bennies for heaven, in being your friend. They can fool you smiling at you, and you think there is mutual like and sharing of the minds there. You even make them laugh but watch out, inside they are horrified by you. Think of the Movie, "My Fair Lady", but with two females instead, they want to whip you into shape.  Changing your speech patterns, social personality and more. Often they will direct you to some volunteer projects and will insist on you "improving" yourself. They will tell you things like "Let's not talk about that now!" or "Lets be more positive now!"

If anyone wants to fix me, goodbye. I'm done with it. This doesn't mean not trying to progress but I am tired of being tested and given hoops and endless goal posts that are always moving from other people. I am tired of being told that it's my fault spiritually or that I am a bad person or I have to do this and that to be deemed worthy of existence. Is this something my ACON upbringing gave me? Falling into this pit of dealing with these people who put me in this position. I don't think many people would put up with it.

I am tired of being judged for my feelings. Some of these people have had completely different lives from my own where they had good health and close families who were always there for them. I don't expect everyone to "get it" but it seems a few of these church going types could dig into their cold hearts for a little bit of compassion.  They do not know what it is like to be running away from someone coming at them with a knife or what it is like to dig food out of a trashcan. If you think I'm a freak, next time just walk away, don't waste my time.

I am tired of being judged for my health. So your body works and you don't have severe obesity and can eat food and don't look like a melting candle from the waist down. Maybe I should have showed the projects how I really felt, and laid in bed crying and groaning from all the pain I was really in. My stiff upper lip stuff failed. They don't think you are brave, they are embarrassed by you and consider you a lesser being.

Next time I feel like I have to walk on eggshells or censor myself around someone, I may as well not waste my time. If someone tries to control my speech, and tell me what to talk about or tell me my feelings are wrong or too extreme, or if my problems are "too great" for their self help group and my pain embarrasses them, I should just walk out and slam the door. Otherwise I will be pouring energy into an already doomed relationship.

This may be partially my fault, as I have so many problems and a life that seems spiraling out of control and a body from Hades itself so maybe I present myself in a way that draws these people out of the woodwork. Some may have good intentions even from the start but they really hurt people like me. It is just another person telling me I am "bad", "wrong" and "not measuring" up.

I may present myself with too much pity and pathos. It's probably my fault. Stir together Aspergers, bad health problems and an INFP personality too, and well, I'm too sensitive for this world. This means keeping more of my problems to myself as the new answer.

Many of these types will fool you easily. They can appear to have empathy and to "care" even with all the volunteer and other projects they take on and even "help" they do. But it seems when push comes to shove and you are crying and upset, that empathy vaporizes like a fart in the wind. If you make the "error" of refuting them or standing up for yourself, they discard and devalue pretty quick.

Sadly you find out their lack of respect for you eventually and it usually has to do with how they treat you regarding other people. Just like our narcissistic mothers threw us scapegoats overboard for everyone from the milk man to a cousin, the same likewise will apply to "project friends". They won't stand up for you even if someone insults you to your face several times with your husband witnessing it and telling them because you are a lower social status. Sometimes they claim they stood up for you but will be pissed off and resentful about it.  They won't have your back. They will go running to talk to someone else even if you are mid-sentence with them.

I guess I can die of boredom behind a fake smile. Of course when I try to fake it, it never worked either. Sometimes you will think there is even mutual sharing of challenges, and that you are balancing things out nicely but supposed they can vent while you are always a complainer. My life seems to have been one of sinking into the wallpaper and/or opening my mouth and pissing everyone off. Now that I am old, hopefully the "Fix-It" and "Improve-It" Queens will find a younger victim. I'd rather be a friend to someone eating out of a trashcan and living in the park rather then another woman who will tsk her tongue at my bad housekeeping or get angry at me for having feelings or who will tell me I need to do this and that to be a "worthwhile" person.

American society and me don't go together well. I'm a crappy stoic. I smile but the sadness still comes through in the eyes. I'm bad at hiding depression or anger. I would flunk salesman school and charm school. Maybe some think they can solve my problems of no money and health from the gates of hell. If I can't fix then how can you? I have failed to solve them and I'm tired. I just want to live in peace and be left alone now.

I had this one friend who was one of these types in my old rural town, and I feel like I repeated the same scenario with the latest friend. This friend was older, very religious in a mainstream church and had 4 children. I met this one when I was still in the Catholic church. I would go eat at her house and even befriended her children. We got along pretty well, but then things got kind of weird. She started the "project" stuff.

She wanted to get me another friend saying that this woman who was in and out of the mental hospital every week and who had made several suicide attempts in a row, would be my new perfect friend. Now I am open to everyone even people with severe mental problems, but it really worried me in that she saw this very troubled person as my peer instead of herself. I was not in the psych ward, I was a newly disabled ex-residential counselor. The whole thing bothered me inside. I was noticing then she was befriending OTHER disabled and very troubled people! A pattern was being set. She also was going through these disabled and troubled people like toilet paper. I was one in a long line. One thing these project friend types will do is seek out troubled people. They can forget their problems while attempting to fix theirs. Some of the more toxic ones will feel superior and better about themselves to have a more "screwed up" person next to them. Sadly our society is so competitive and narcissistic, these things shouldn't even be occurring to people but they do!

I still remember the day she came to my house with 8 boxes. Back then I was a more eager to please personality and she said, "Hey I have something for you! It's a bunch of craft supplies!" I thought "Oh boy!", and took the boxes. It would be a metaphor for the friendship as the boxes were full of scraps and trash, tin cookie cans, ripped up old ribbons, bits of yarn and twisted wires. I ended up throwing away the whole lot except for some old buttons and pieces of pins and beads, I used for a community art project later on. She was moving the very next day and hadn't told me. So much for it being a close friendship. She would later tell a friend she had unfriended me for leaving the Catholic church I don't know, but this was my first run in with a "project friend" or someone who felt they were superior to me. I can't say she was a totally bad person but she was working her way to heaven using me. She rescued me from an ice storm. She helped me with church groups. Was she really a friend? Not really.

Five Year Old Me Knew

I "rebelled" early on. Imagine drawing a picture like this when you are 5 and 6 years old and knowing you have to hide your sketchbook from "Mommy". I did. I don't think she ever saw this picture because if she did, she would have shredded it and my sketchbook [actually a school notebook I turned into a sketchbook] would have been in the bottom of long ago 1970s trashcan. There are other drawings of my mother in this sketchbook and she is always yelling with a giant oval circle for her mouth and the ever present curly hair. A line across the forehead suggests the anger too.

In my papers, I kept this now 40 year old sketchbook. I had this weird thing where I drew myself as "Lucy" from Peanuts comic strips in this sketchbook.  My ability to read early came from Peanuts comics and they formed kind of an escape hatch for me. Here I drew the Peanuts gang playing baseball.

Maybe it was a way to find an identity of some sort at the time. There are cute pictures in it where I am playing with Charlie Brown who appears in place for my brother. Linus shows up too as another brother "replacement" on some pages.

 There is an especially poignant one with a favorite teacher from that year. Sorry it is so light, but I know that teacher showed me love and care. Teachers can make a difference in young people's lives. This teacher gave me some esteem based in schoolwork and learning. This would be a life long positive thing in my life.  She definitely had to be a good teacher to form a bond with a little Aspie. As you can see both are smiling and no one is yelling.

 I used to show this sketchbook to therapists, it has some disturbing pictures in there especially for a little kid to draw.  It probably has around 30 pages so here I am only showing a few. My work as an art therapist gave me interesting analysis too of this sketchbook years later and I plan to post some other pictures from it. You can see "Lucy" above sticking her tongue out and saying "Your Bad" which is supposed to be "You are bad". I was an art teacher long enough to know most young children will draw "I love mommy" pictures, but then abused ones will draw their own kind of pictures too. Art was my escape very early on.

I'm tired!

I am failing to lose weight and maybe I should just get myself put in the hospital and get some weight off to reduce my diabetes. Even 50lbs off could reduce the blood sugars. Of course what would they do with me that I am not doing at home? My food at home is probably BETTER. I do not know what to do. I am stumped. This is fat insanity. Nothing is working.  Nothing works. I even worry that my diabetes has gone off the rails because I got so scared of weight gain and from trying to do more caloric restriction. I get weighed on May 5th, and if I have gone up in weight, I am going to ask to be put in the hospital to get some off.  In pictures I do not look I have gained. I do have phobias about weight gain. Not everyone here knows this, but I am deathly afraid of weight gain and entering the 600s and 700s and losing mobility I do have. The world does not realize that I have to pay attention to every bit going into my mouth even to hold weight gain off.

There seems no rhyme or reason with the blood sugars. Supposedly exercise is supposed to lower blood sugars but not in my case. At least I proved my case to medical professionals already but could they get more weight off me? Should I starve or become a bulimic?  I am going to die of being fat, and from diabetes soon. Sometimes lately I worry all this medical stuff is going to give me a nervous breakdown and I am working through enough emotional stuff, with my going no contact from the toxic family, NC has brought a bunch of memories back too. Add in the Aspie and poverty issues and my brain is spinning. What should I do? What scares the crap out of me is, I am not eating that badly at all. In fact my emphasis is on healthy food all the time.

Even if the doctors know I have severe rare disorders making me so fat and bloated and water logged, there is still some semblance of control over things, they expect me to work for but I do not feel that control or see the results outside of the legs.  I am spending 4-5 hours a day on medically related things. This can include 1-2 hours for leg wrapping--this depends on how much I am up but two wrappings a day takes time, lung nebulizing--half an hour, two hours for Flexitouch, another half an hour or 20 minutes, taking pills, probably another half hour or hour, doing stretchy bands or walking, hours on cooking where I can't eat ready made things and have to cook and chop and make soup, and I haven't added in various other things like apply creams, daily grooming, washing my CPAP humidifier etc. Even remembering to take endless vitamins is a lot.

 I don't want to lay in bed all day. I will get fatter. The Lipedema stuff is driving me mad, my legs are being kept down with wrapping and such but the more hyper I am and moving around the bloating and pain is the stuff of insanity. There are lymph nodes in me that when I bloat hurt like hell. Lumps all over me swelling. I have this bad thing constantly happening where I start peeing very little and my body bloats horribly the more I move around. How does a person win with this?

It happened yesterday because I was running about the apartment and very hyper, and then went to church and ran other errands. The funny thing lately is I can walk farther and easier, which has been an outcome of the leg therapies but I am sicker otherwise with the diabetes.  What what would you think every time you try and exercise, you see your body visibly grow including your face and arms? This has been true for many many years. Remember with stage IV lipedema you have body wide lymphedema. Yes the doctors know about this.

At least everything goes down when  Flexitouch it and lay in bed, but it is very painful. I sit up or I am doing things and the pain grows and grows. The pain forces me to take to my bed to pee. The pain hurts. I am tired a lot. One thing happening lately is I feel like pushing through the pain to do everything, it isn't even my legs hurting--Flexitouch helped that but just the body overall hurting. I used to cry from leg pain and that is out of my life. My legs are better but my body I feel inflamed all over. Like Fibromylgia from the depths of hell. Even my wrists and arms hurt. My neck kills me. I can cook standing up and was chopping salad and vegetables yesterday but while there was energy for that, there wasn't for doing any dishes so a giant pile of them awaits me. My spoons feel very limited. I am tired even of my constant medical duties. I can't decide if I am doing too much or too little. Self-care mingles with guilt. The undone chores stare me down. Why am I writing online instead of cleaning?

I wonder if the hospital could help me. Maybe they could address the weight loss failures. I don't know. Sometimes I feel so tired it's like I could lay in bed for a week and just sleep. I sometimes wonder if something endocrine is happening to make the diabetes run completely off the rails too. I have to tell the doctors about the fatigue and pain. I am living my life but there are times I am crying inside. I have been sick since I was 27 years old. I had a lot wrong by age 13.  I was nearly 700lbs at age 29. I am 46 now and tired.

Fat People Are Told They Smell

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-obesity-smells-foul-20150320-story.html

Smell-a-phobes can make people's lives hell, because it is so often used to abuse people. Sure there are street people or those who become mentally ill and can't wash, don't wash or are unable to, but no person on this earth was helped by being told "You stink!"

At one job, there was incredible bias and harassment shown to me. The me of today would pursue a lawsuit, but more often then not while at this job I was told "I smelled". I under went so much harassment and abuse at this job it was disgusting. Because of these experiences, I am paranoid about smelling, never miss a shower, sometimes shower twice in a day during the summer and never re-wear a piece of clothing ever. This means my laundry bills are incredibly high. We spend easily 120 dollars a month on laundry. Bullies and narcissists often will use "smell" because it can't be proven and only discerned to attack people and often for the fat person this will be a source of incredible abuse. When it happens in the work place it is the worse.

When I was at my residential job, there were probably some days, I got sweaty cleaning and moving around during the16-24 hour shifts in an overly heated house. We weren't allowed to take showers there. I showered everyday but today I know the co-worker who complained most about my smelling and got others including the clients to join in, was participating in extreme fat bigotry. It is a technique that works. Be caught on a 105 degree day with a little bit of sweat and weighting 400lbs and they will treat you like you are scum of the earth and feel smug while doing it.

This is one un-spoken thing fat people don't talk about too much.  I have to overcompensate to manage in society, while some people may run out to the grocery store in the morning without a shower, I would never dare. I would never dare re-wear a piece of clothing either.  This is what helps sell the idea of spraying chemicals on everything to cover smells. Frebreze is definitely helped out.

When I was in extreme poverty, in the ghetto, this was after I was disabled but the year before I escaped, there was one woman from the size acceptance community who visited me and told me, that I and my apartment smelled. She was so ignorant that she didn't realize I was screaming to the landlord on the phone everyday about the mice taking over the apartment and the fact they had poison in the walls and more probably dead mice in them. I know most people probably would have ditched that apartment and left, but for me it was living there or in the streets at the time. Water in the ghetto is not as clean as water elsewhere. Every time our rickety bathtub backed up, the water would turn black. Our bathtub has backed up a few times here and I have never seen that happen. It still scares me wondering what was in that water. Anyhow this was the water I was forced to wash my clothes in. Was there an odor I was no longer detecting? It was possible. My furniture was ugly, stained and used to the falling apart point.  While this lady was midsized, she was also upper middle class and had a job as a system analyst. While she pled that she was a liberal at the time, she didn't have one clue about what it meant to live in severe poverty.

She sent me a letter telling me, "You and your apartment stink!".

So back then I was getting it coming and going.

A reality about poverty, it's harder to keep things clean, my walls need painted in this apartment, but I can't afford to get it done, I need money to get the carpet ripped out, I bleach what I can, when I can, and hope it does not smell. It costs 100 bucks a pop to get the carpet steamed cleaned. I had it done last November. Money makes it easier for things to smell prettier. In my case being a severe asthmatic means no trash is allowed to fester more then 24 hours in here, and any mildew or mold has to be immediately stamped out.

I almost get flashbacks when everyone starts sniffing their nose around me. Unless someone is a close friend or my husband I keep a 3 feet away rule. My mother was a smellaphobe, she crinkle her nose up and one huge part of my abuse growing up was being told, "You smell!", "You have B.O!", "You're disgusting!". This never ended and continued into adulthood. I am sure there was a huge amount of fat bigotry involved. According to her, her own poo didn't even stink. Her constant offense at way-ward smells was never ending.

What gets me I have Aspie sensory stuff that makes me live in the shower and wash up more then other people. When I am sick, I will stand in a shower to comfort myself, I may need husband to help me if I am ill enough that day, but the heat helps take away pain. I will wash my hands even if I just touch pennies or money or feel something sticky and they are washed at least 20 times a day. I wash under my belly around 2-3 times a day.  I took a daily shower every day from the time I was eleven years old. During the summer I can easily be in there twice. In hospitals I have broke the rules and gotten myself into a shower even with an IV hooked into my hand. Oh I wash my hair every single day too.

Finding out about this smell and bigotry study was very interesting to me. How much of it is bias? Some may claim maybe fat people do have a different scent producing a very different metabolism? I don't know, they could study that. There could be health problems causing problems too. PCOS is known to cause grooming challenges. I know my sense of my own smell changed even when I was forced off a testosterone lowering drug [spironolactone] which I had been on for 15 years. However this said, wouldn't thin people even have some health conditions that affect them too?

I do agree there is massive bias towards fat people and the "fat people stink", is one major prejudice, that fat people are suffering under.

Anyhow I am glad the researchers are challenging some of this stuff.

The Cricket and Me

The above is a snippet and  the complete poem reads:

ODE TO ******

JIMMINY CRICKETS AND GOLLY GEE
********'S RECEIVED A COLLEGE DEGREE
SHE EARNED IT AT ********* IN ART EDUCATION
AND IS READY TO START ON HER NEW VOCATION.

IT SEEMS ONLY YESTERDAY SHE WAS A KID
AMUSING US ALL WITH THE THINGS SHE DID.
LIKE GURGLING AND COOING LOUDER AND LOUDER
WHILE HER BROTHER DOUSED HER WITH BABY POWDER

HER LOVE OF RAGGEDY ANN WAS LEGENDARY,
SHE WASN'T HAPPY WITHOUT HER DOLL TO CARRY
WHETHER SHE WALKED OR WHETHER SHE RAN,
SHE ALWAYS HAD A HOLD OF HER RAGGEDY ANN.

IN WILLIAMSBURG, SHE SUFFERED A SERIES OF SHOCKS,
WHEN SHE SAW HER BROTHER LOCKED UP IN THE "STOCKS"
SHE THOUGHT FOR SURE HE'D NEVER GET OUT,
POOR ****** WAS FRANTICALLY RUNNING ABOUT

WHILE VISITING IN OHIO, SHE CRIED THE BLUES,
WHEN A CRICKET CRALWED OUT OF ONE OF HER SHOES
SHE REFUSED TO TOUCH THE OTHER SHOE,
CERTAIN THEIR WAS SOMETHING IN THAT ONE TOO.

IT WAS EXPLAINED TO HER BY DEARGRANDMOTHER,
THE ODDS AGAINST ANYTHING BEING IN THE OTHER
AND WE COAXED HER TO PUT HER FOOT IN THE SHOE,
TRUSTING "HER GRANNY" AS A CHILD SHOULD DO.

I DOUBT IF WE'LL EVER FIRGET THAT DAY,
WHEN THE CRICKETS ALL CAME OUT TO PLAY.
SHE PUT HER LITTLE FOOT IN THE OTHER SHOE,
AND CRUSHED A CRICKET INTO A WAD OF GOO!

SHE ATE "DOLPHIN FINGERS" IN THE STATE OF MAINE,
BUT APPEARED TO BE IN SOME KIND OF PAIN.
SHE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, JUST A LITTLE "ZIPPER"
AND THOUGHT SHE WAS EATING "GOOD OLD FLIPPER"!

AT THE SEA AQCUARIM, "SHE SHOWED HER STUFF"
AND LET US ALL KNOW SHE WAS "TOUGH ENOUGH".
SHE HELD A SQUISHY SEA URCHIN IN HER HAND,
WHILE EVERYONE CHEERED TO "BEAT THE BAND

SHE RECENTLY, WAS AT A GIRL SCOUT CAMP,
TEACHING ARTS AND CRAFTS TO EACH LITTLE SCAP
THEIR TENTS WERE ON PLATFORMS THREE FEET OFF THE GROUND.
TO AVOID ANY CRITTERS THAT WERE CRAWLING AROUND.

WELL ******, FORGIVE US FOR HAVING OUR FUN,
YOU KNOW WE'RE PLEASED WITH WHAT YOU'VE DONE.
YOU'VE EARNED YOUR DEGREE AND WE'RE REALLY GLAD,
BEST OF LUCK FROM YOUR MOM AND DAD.

When I graduated from college in 1990, this poem was my present. My parents did not come to the graduation ceremony, I was there with one of my best college friends who I remain in contact with to this day and believe she drove me there. There may have been a dinner with a few office friends and family members.

 I suppose one could say there was some thought behind giving me a poem but the day I got it, I turned red. It was embarrassing. My stomach had a pit in it. These were the stories they told their friends and other family members of my strange habits when I was young. At the time, I smiled and nodded as they read it to a couple friends and family the night or week of my college graduation.

I was dying inside as it was read and the room laughed. Can you see why? The cricket tale is one they tortured me with for years. It was strange the whole thing wasn't even that funny to normal people. To an Aspie, the joke has fallen flat for 40 years. I never laughed at it but protested. One time I even sassily told them in my late teens, it just tells me I knew more then you at even that age.

A five year old child, me, finds a cricket in her shoe that crawls out and refuses to put the other one on claiming there is a second cricket in it.  During this event I am at my grandmother's house and some uncles, aunts, cousins and my parents are there as well as my siblings. I cry and refuse to put the shoe on. For some reason, I know another cricket is laying in wait. The family protests and yells at me to put the shoes on. "Its time to get going. You have to put your shoes on. " None of them shake the shoe or check it for me.  I relent and inside is a cricket waiting and I squash him into my bare foot as I put the shoe on. The memory of the feelers and crunch of the cricket's body are there in my brain still.  The family laughed and laughed some more.

The first cricket made me sniffle and worry, and the second made me scream and cry even more. Like many young children I am afraid of bugs. They would tell this story for years and years of my distress. A cousin of mine reminded me of this story when he plastered a picture of his Aspie son, screaming with his mouth wide open at the apex of a roller coaster hill by one of those automatic cameras. For some reason this was considered "funny", and I thought of the "cricket story". Now mind you, I do not blame the poet, he seems like a fun guy and he wrote poems for everyone in their office.

They don't have much more to say about me then me being covered in powder as a three year old, I actually remember that day,  or crying over the marketing name of a fish dinner at the age of eight?
The final line basically admits fun at my expense. Some may ask where is your sense of humor but consider this poem in the context of everything else. I am 21 years old when I get this poem. I am a young woman, they are frozen in time not even knowing who I really am.

I remember thinking at the time, "This is how they see me?" No that was worse, this was the surface play of "fun" Mom and Dad joshing their daughter. To outsiders, this was a "fun" poem but inside I was hurt, and no one knew. I hated that damn cricket and hated that stupid story.

Living Next Door to the Country Club

I wrote this essay some years ago, in a senior center memoir writing class that allowed disabled people in it.  It was the year my husband's first lay-offs had occurred before we moved here. While the elderly people fondly remembered good times on the farm and grandchildren, there I was, just starting to process my crazy childhood and life. Hopefully my essays didn't shock them. I have added a few corrections here.

I was raised to marry into wealth. My mother had escaped her hardscrabble farm kid's lifestyle and had escaped to a big city by the age of 19. Poverty suffered as a child is easier then as an adult. At least when you are a kid, it's not your fault.

So while I would be an adult of currency exchanges, Save-A-Lots, scrimping every penny and living in fear of ghetto criminals, shopping was a fun hobby to my parents, the overpriced mall a center of delights. I grew up among Ethan Allen furniture, private school education, vacations and in high school lived on what was considered the richest street in town. Thank goodness, I had no idea what would await me as adulthood beckoned.

My parents lived on a near six figure income by the late 1970s and I grew up clueless. I had no idea what a sirloin steak really cost, my mother would fill 2-3 grocery carts full should relatives visit from out of town and think nothing of it. I didn't realize that a 5 course dinner could sent you back forty dollars. I grew up in a house that if the Russians had bombed, there would be food for a year. Today towards the end of every month my fridge is absolutely barren.

                                   this isn't my mother's collection this is a normal sized one.

Money was wasted on strange things. Thousands of dollars on china figurines was spent freely. One day I entered my mother's living room during a warmer December day to see at least three-five thousand glass snowmen of various kinds standing like a snowman army. My eyes bugged out as I calculated how much money she had probably spent on the endless variations of clay, porcelain and fabric Frosties. There had to be at least $30,000 dollars invested in this particular shopping spree. My mother should have bought stock in Hallmark.

For my father there were car parts to be refurbished in the garage, and entire "muscle" car in one side of the garage to be redone, and endless gadgets and tools. He had everything from an air compressor, two or three riding mowers and endless construction and house re-modeling items.

I was no spoiled kid, as I actually got goaded by the other high school kids for living in a 6 bedroom house next door to the only country club in town. While the neighborhood kids went on constant vacations, and got to play golf, we never joined. Everything was about keeping up with the Joneses, model households, "work til you drop, children or not. Today several family member's houses look like untouched museums and the houses you see in magazines. While I would get a decent number of Christmas gifts for good pictures, I didn't dress like a rich kid. I was befriending the kids who lived in the projects and the working class neighborhoods nearer to my school. My mother didn't buy me very many clothes and when you show up in high school wearing the same 2-3 outfits over and over, it establishes your social rank more then your parent's address.

The rich kids of my neighborhood rejected the whole lot of us, my family didn't realize that farmer's daughter and that a man with an New Jersey accent who cussed his head off in a Honeymooner's a la violent Fred Flintstone fashion don't quite fit into some upper class enclaves no matter the pretensions made. If anything after the neighbors called the cops, on my Dad cussing his head off so loudly they covered their children's ears, we were forbidden to play with the rest of the neighborhood teens. They avoided us like the plague. One popular girl fled my house during her first visit, when my father stomped up the stairs screaming about some lost papers and throwing things. She was petrified. At least she could run away, I was stuck!

My family never had heard of women's rights. While I was a good student, having free laborers came first. I still remember 10-14 hour workdays, scrubbing, polishing and dusting the 3,500 square foot house we lived in. Cinderella just wasn't a fairy tale. Before anyone says, "Quit yer whining all kids have to do chores!" This was a labor camp with a mean drill sergeant by your side. Perfectionists out of the gates of hell--Mommy Dearest and Daddy Dearest nightmares that made Joan Crawford's whining about the wire hangers and chopping down the tree in the backyard a slight tiff. No one would ever realize there are 5,000 ways to rake leaves the wrong way or even fathom that a rake had to be held the right way. I would grow up with a lifelong distaste for housework and yard work.

As college rolled around, my father kept threatening to throw us out on our ear by the age of 18. Having a father who won a full-4 year ride to university due to extreme math skills I did not inherit meant as a normal kid, you were simply resented. I worked 30 hours a week, my last two years of high school in restaurants as a salad and prep- cook. I used to hoard money like a fiend. The irony would occur to me years later. At one point in late high school, I had the greatest amount saved in the bank that I would have for the rest of my life which was $5,000. College and payment on my first car soaked it up like a sponge.

Things got only worse, in college, I in youthful idealism chose art education as a major not realizing it would sink me into future poverty. Some people make that one bad decision that turns their life on the dime towards the bad. For some it's getting pregnant as a teen, dropping out of school, doing drugs. This was mine 3.4 grade point average or not. I was good at art and actually a very good art teacher in the few years I got to work in it. The subject of art had served as my escape for survival. It was not only an interest but a vocation, but sadly my declining health blocked me from the good teaching jobs.

My parents hated what I stood for. The money I got for help to get through college was paid for with as pound of flesh attached even as I worked my way through college in the dorm cafeterias. I was called an evil hippie and a prima donna because I wanted a state school education and wanted to be a high school art teacher. One would think I wanted to run away and join the circus or had become a prostitute by the reaction of my father to my choice of a future career. He even tried to get me to join the convent and got angry when I refused, saying they would pay for my college.

No one warned me of how hard it was to make a living. No one told me that young adults could struggle. No one told me or prepared me for the fact that life may brings struggle or turmoil. With parents who could indulge in immediate gratification, what did I know? My mother who had no college even got a $40,000 a year job via my father who gave it to her. No one told me how to write a check, or how to budget or that the wrong step could lead to years of poverty. No one told me that things had drastically changed since the Baby Boomers made their first steps out of college. There were losers and winners and the winners had money.

By age 22, even with a part-time $14.00 an hour art teaching job and then making the decision to go back to school for a paralegal degree, I was considered a wash-up by my family. The summer I graduated from college, my 20 year old sister was marrying the ex mayor of a big city's son. She never would have to worry about living out of milk crates or struggling to pay bills. My parents would tell me, "Why can't you be more like your sister?". She went to community college and met her husband right after high school graduation. She has never lived on her own and went right from her twin bed covered in Garfield sheets with stuffed animals on top to her suburban housewife bliss. I wondered if the marriage was arranged since she never dated in high school, went from zero to 60 and they both treated each other like they were entering a business partnership instead of showing normal love behavior like kissing and hugging one another.

My sister had reached the pinnacle of success in my parents eyes by being engaged at age 19. My college graduation was ignored and neither parent showed up. One of my friends drove me to my college graduation. I would be stuck living at home for a year paying a small amount of rent and saving money for my great escape into my first no contact.

The years then came where as an adult, I would visit my mother's house with the perfect rooms, with one room of new furniture equaling a year's salary for me and my husband. Two doors down from multimillionaires, she added onto the house, and remodeled to her heart's content. After my father died, the insurance pay-offs made her even wealthier and more self satisfied. She has no idea what my day to day life is like. She doesn't know what life without money is like. The glass snowmen stand on patrol every winter with their empty eyes surveying the suburban landscape.

See:  Money, Snobs and Narcissists

Why is my Life so Rotten?

Dear God, Tell Me Why It Went So Bad.

Sometimes even a Christian wonders why so much is going wrong. I don't buy into the Christianity that tells me if I have enough faith the piles of money will show up like Joel Osteen but sometimes I am serious wondering why the suffering quotient is going up so high. My husband bless his soul too, has been shaking his head regarding our collective misery. I have to pray about what is becoming of me and seek the spiritual answers too.

Sick And More Sick With No End

Why was I on antibiotics for three weeks, [swollen saliva glands] and then got a leg infection this week? That scares me. Maybe the doctor's aren't calling me back because they are stumped too.  All Aspies hate making phone calls, I can cry from the stress of trying to get something I need from neurotypicals. How pushy should I be? Should I yell at them yet? Will I offend them and ruin the medical relationship? Did I say the wrong thing? I may tell my doctor who knows I am an Aspie, that I can't take it anymore and want extensive refills on my antibiotics.

If anything the antibiotics should have prevented a leg infection. I did not have any leg infections for a year and a half. I felt free and like I had hope, only now to realize that has now passed like a fart in the wind.  I did my Flexitouch every day, except 1 day when I had the flu for 7 months. I wrapped without fail. Why am I being punished for something I did not do? I worked hard to keep my legs from being infected. I don't want to go back to the leg infections slamming me, and being afraid everyday. When they hit it is like the worse flu on earth and 4 days ago, I got a revisit to flu land with a high fever and pain. Will they even believe me? Or will they think I was not compliant when I was to the max?

Typhoid Mary ruined what little good in my life there was. I am sure by now she is on another tens of thousands of dollar cruise, enjoying her life. She would cry if she had my life and was forced to give up recreational shopping and traveling.  I am sure as I almost puked my guts out this morning from stomach acid run amuck and handed two-thirds of my income over to keep a roof over my head--my husband pays the other bills and put the check in the manager's slot yesterday, that Mommy Dearest is busy shopping from her second home in a warm state and going out to eat and enjoying her life.  Fun for them, and constant misery for me. Why?

Why did I win the CRAPPY LIFE AWARD? The only people suffering more then me are in prison or the street. I even watched Intervention the other day thinking, look at those thin bodies, and their families still love THEM with a feeling of jealousy. I know people aren't supposed to feel sorry for themselves. I have to smile and act with it, so I don't scare people away in the regular world and since this is my blog why not be honest. I know nice people around here who have helped me, and don't want to stress them out more. How did my life become such a mess? Every one I know who hit my age, got at least one break. Where's mine?

I'm supposed to start a new lung medication today but afraid wondering what else will go wrong?

Nothing but Endless Disappointment

I have gotten to a place where I expect disappointment. That is not good. I have prayed to God incessantly about what to do about my rotten life and have hit a brick wall.  I am sad and upset about many many things.

Self-help and endless advice books do not provide the cash or decent body I need to be happy.  Every time I relax and get happy inspite of these things and it has happened on occasion, it's like the rug is pulled out from underneath my feet. There is a void in too many places I can't seem to fill. There are things I want to do that keep getting thwarted. My life is one where I am too tired to do everything and crying in frustration about all my undone tasks and people I have failed. The literal physical exhaustion is wearing me down, and I fear a totally bed-ridden life awaiting.

I don't want to be Aunt Scapegoat with her head hung down, and the black cloud growing and sitting alone one day staring at a wall totally broken. I am scared.  I do not want to be her. I fear spiritual destruction at the hands of my Job-like existence.

 What happens to someone who is an outcast mentally whose body is an enemy from hell? Now I understand why people do drugs and drink themselves into oblivion. I don't recommend this of course but this world sometimes has so much sadness on the menu.

 For seasoned ACONS who I know read my blog, please tell me if this can be the stresses of no contact. A lot of people disappointed me within the FOO beyond measure. Why can't my brain stop ruminating about it? Am I buckling under the pressures of my year and half into no contact, having to walk away from the majority of my family and severe disabilities and financial problems combined? What if I am tired of having to be strong?

I Need Something To Look Forward To.

I need something to look forward to. Why can't I have ONE THING to LOOK FORWARD TO? I have hope in heaven but I need SOME HOPE in this life.  I do not think it is wrong to pray to God for some hope in my earthly life too or even just a time of respite. If I was a normal healthy person, I would hit the road right now seriously, go somewhere warm, go find some FUN.  Hey I could do this now but it would mean not paying the rent and flirting with homelessness. There must be some reason I keep telling my husband as a joke, or maybe it's not a joke, "Lets run away!"

All 12 step programs warn about the geographical cure not working but sometimes you just feel trapped. You want an escape from the grind. Some people with jobs may say "Every day is a vacation for you! Shut yer trap!" but everyone needs time away.

Positive Thinkers Prattle On

The positive thinkers would tell me, "you're not thinking positive enough", this is why nothing but bad things happen to you. In other words, the whole you are creating your own reality. But the inverse of that is they are just like my narcissists who told me everything bad happening is my fault. Both things are wrong.

 I'm sick of thinking everything is my fault. I am sick of being told if I do this, that and this, that the results will ensue. I spent three hours a day on my stupid legs for the last year and half and my bad leg still betrayed me. Why don't I get good results? I am sick of waiting for the hammer to fall, for the car to break down and the streets awaiting. I need a break.

If you were my life coach, what would you tell me?


Update: 2019: Dump the religion with it's endless false promises and the positive thinkers who do nothing but lie.

No more Crushing Us!

We are being sued by someone who hit our parked car almost two years ago. Yesterday we got served. You know when you feel like throwing up whenever there is an uninvited knock at the door, this is not good. We had and have car insurance so hopefully will be okay, but why did this guy wait? And what kind of person waits til two days before Thanksgiving to serve you papers, almost two years after the fact? I don't blame the server, she was nice.

So add another one to the list wanting money we don't have and add that to the mega tax debt. The whirlpool into the financial abyss seems never ending. Well one advantage of homelessness is no servers at your door.

 I hate money more and more, to me it's become a joke, like the magic green stuff that vanishes into thin air. They seem to want me to be like a magician snapping my fingers for it to show up, how am I supposed to do all of this? The demands are insane. I am surprised we have made it this long. At least I can get medical care but this is one reason America is going down the tubes. Many people are getting crushed. I know the hands out for the cash of the better off then me never end however I still see the people too who have lives and vacations I never could dream of. If I had money though I would not be blowing it on cruises and being stuck in a floating prison tin-can with 4,000 souls--my idea of a nightmare.

 What would life be free of money-burdens. Definitely a lot happier. Time to become a freegan? Move in with someone? I can't stand to be without my own household. Absolutely cannot stand it, even if it would mean less pressure on us both. I am free of my family but no one is lining up for the job and I hate having roommates and would never burden friends this way so our only option is to keep paying these impossible bills. The pot is empty Mr. Lawsuit! Can I join the Hutterites or something? Would they take a near elderly couple with messed up bodies?

 Religious morality supercedes my idea once voiced under duress, that we each go get a sugar-parent, no sugar daddy for me! One can't divorce someone they love even if they are dead broke on either side. Divorce only makes you poorer! Two Aspies [he doesn't admit he is an Aspie] suck at "life skills". Many of the normals have broken the code of actually making a decent living but my body can only do so much. The hours to stay alive are many, it takes me longer to do things people take for granted. Time for me is a rushing river. I'm not someone who "gets bored".

My husband is constantly writing only to lose work via contract employers, that always happens during the holidays. I think he is stumped on how to improve things too. Problem is life coaches cost money. Maybe they should have a special brand of them for the poor to help us get our lives in order. The psychological counselors, will pass out the pills but really can't help you if your main problem is lack of the green stuff. I'm trying to get him to go to career counselors for a new action plan or something. I need to make pin money on etsy or something, but need to figure out how to get more craft supplies. My comic could be sold on there perhaps but is still in progress. Too bad nothing is selling on ebay, it's gotten bad.

 For the poor the holidays are not a shopping spree full of rich food and parties, and presents but when one's income usually drops. I have never gone shopping on a black Friday with the stampeding idiots. Most poor people secretly hate the holidays, they may try to do what they can for their kids but most of us just want the annual greed fests to be OVER. Thanksgiving I am cool with but the rest of it forget it.

We are down to just so much for the last week of November. I bought the turkey three weeks ago, to make sure we would have one, as well as the boxes of stuffing, a can of green beans, and rutabagas but planning a Thanksgiving feast in a week of major food insecurity feels weird. We even ate a charity cabbage I got from the monthly church soup kitchen mixed in two meals of rice noodles and I made 4 meals out of a package of chicken thighs this week. I am so tired of cooking it's not funny but frugality this month has demanded endless from scratch cooking such as the soups made with parsnips. I can cook anything now. I could be a chef if I was in good shape. I wonder if I can make an apple tart with olive oil? Can one make hummus out of dried garbanzo beans and peanut butter? I suppose the internet can tell me.

 My friends help me out all the time, I am very thankful to them. They keep me going. They don't realize how much. Man we are so tired.

We need a break! We are far overdue. I told one friend I am so tired, if everything collapses, maybe I would be relieved. Maybe some take to the streets to escape the bill marathon. I wonder. I want to feel hope again. So many years of struggle JUST TO STAY ALIVE.

I was so upset yesterday, after he got the papers. My husband told me "Calm down, or you are going to stroke out". The last thing we needed was this guy suing us. His own too fast driving caused the accident to begin with. I wasn't there, I was home when it happened. Did he want some cash for shopping or something? He's gone to an empty well!

 See: Materialism, Crushed by Bills and Baby Boomers

Aunt Confused

                                                     

                                                                                     [snippet from photo of Jon Lewenstein]                                    

 This is the same Aunt as Aunt "No Pictures for You!" I have named her Aunt Confused because I believe she was another scapegoat, but one who has remained within the fog life long with incredible damage done. She is another person my mother destroyed my relationship with. Yes, there are parallels with my story of Aunt Scapegoat!

I grew up with a woman that whispered in my ear while at a family meal at Denny's and told me,

"The mafia's coming after me"

as she popped multiple blue pills into her mouth.

She would get drunk and high and one could tell. Is this something a 9 year old should have dealt with?

I dealt with that and other crazy stuff as a child, the two times she lived with us.

This was my father's sister. She was the product of the 1950s, New Jersey culture, and of an alcoholic father, enabling mother, and narcissistic brother who became my father who was around 5 years younger. She had and has serious problems from earlier drug addiction to possible multiple personality disorder. What can I tell you but to say at times it seemed she "switched"? There definitely is some kind of personality disorder in the mix there. I have never been diagnosed with one in case anyone is interested, and have seen enough therapists in my life time.

At this point you may be asking, "How could fivehundredpoundpeep have such disturbed aunts on both sides of her family?" How can someone's family be this crazy on both sides?" But it was. Recently I watched a video forget where, where the presenter said, that narcissists will seek out other narcissists. Water will find it's own level. "Romance" and connection blossomed between two dark souls that slithered out of dark families.

Narcissists do drive people to insanity. There is a special sort of soul murder at the hands of sociopaths and narcissists. I am not sure sometimes how I myself even survived. Sometimes I think Aspergers gave me some distance with an analytical mind surveying the insanity from above, knowing the people I was surrounded by were not normal. Spiritually I sought out God to rescue me from insanity too.

If you are in a family full of cold and cruel individuals, you will also have the ones you see who have cracked up. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger they say but many people are destroyed in family systems like these. You see the human emotional casualties strew around like chopped and tossed firewood. Aunt Scapegoat and Aunt Confused are definitely among their number.

 There had to be incredible abuse back there somewhere for her. When talking to her even in recent months and years, she would seem lucid and then would segue her way into talking about how the mafia was after her, or she was being watched or how all her neighbors were her enemies and trying to steal her husband. Her third husband is now deceased and she lives with her daughter, but the odd talk still would pop up from time to time.

I was doing some family research, and founds this old gossipy neighborhood newspaper that covered
my father's neighborhood. They actually reported on his birthday party at the age of 7. It looks like big money was poured out on this festival especially for the late 1940s and for a lower middle class factory worker who had been disinherited and cut off from his own father who was a multi-millionaire.

  Is it possible to be spoiled into being a narcissist? Was she the scapegoat compared to my academically achieving in math and science father? It makes me wonder. My father was an obvious golden boy, he would go on to earn a full ride 4 year scholarship to a well-known Ivy League university. He would go on to marry a golden daughter who outshined her four living siblings from the farm.

 One thing as I look back at the past, my father put his sister down constantly. He had no respect for her and no love.  I grew up being told Aunt Confused was trash, was "crazy", and even at one point my own father told me, "She's a sociopath!" as he told me she would hide beneath his bed to scare him as a kid. Perhaps that was a dose of projection?

One creepy thing, is both of my parents would express outrage that she dared to leave her abusive husband and leave her children behind. When I became an adult and learned about domestic violence and volunteered at a shelter in my 20s, this lack of mercy over a woman getting beaten by her husband  totally disgusted me. I don't understand why she left her kids behind perhaps it was her lack of money, but grew up being told she was the devil incarnate by both parents!

 She and her husband lived at home with her parents, my father's parents and grandparents. She married young and had two children. Her husband was a factory worker she married right out of high school. He worked at the same factory as my grandfather. He was an alcoholic and beat her to the point of punching and black eyes. What gets me is thinking how could an abusive husband go full froth with her parents there? But he did. Things were so bad for her that she disappeared, leaving her two children home with her grandparents and husband she was fleeing from. My early memories of the grandparents on that side are very vague. [When I was very young, my parents had me and my brother live there too for some months when my sister got sick]

She would disappear. Literally off the map for several years. She paid one visit to my family and then went poof! My father was angry about this too, but when we moved out of state, she reconnected with him to her own detriment. During this time she hitchhiked the roads being homeless.  I suspect did what she had to do to survive. Why didn't her parents help her throw out the abusive husband? That question comes to my mind. But anyhow she disappeared, got divorced from afar and got rides with truckers. She found a nice one to rescue her. She would marry an African-American trucker [her second husband] who had a side line business as a pig farmer his relatives helped with while he was out driving truck. They lived in the wilds of the state my family just moved into. It was a very small town and extremely remote, poor and rural. I never met her husband but sadly he died. She reached out to my father out of desperation being left penniless with his grown kids inheriting just about everything. My father loaded up us kids into the family sedan and my mother too, and we drove up there.

As we drove up to the trailer on a muddy road, my parents argued. My mother expressed her disgust, with the rural area, it's poverty and everything else. There was outrage over her choice of husband as well with mean-spirited racial overtones.  We would drive up to her trailer and knock on the door. I was around 13 years old. I remember her looking shell-shocked, but she gave a wary smile and wave and "Hiya!". I had not seen her for a few years. The trailer was in horrible shape and had become a hoard, with piles of trash piled up. Bottles, piles of dirt,  rags and newspapers laid scattered all over the floor.  Obviously her grief and new loneliness had pushed her over a new edge. I walked gingerly in behind my father and my mother was there too.  My parents yelled at her, "What in the hell happened here?". She didn't respond.

She then laughed and said, "I made youse lunch!, it's in the oven!" My father handed me a oven mitt, and said "Go see what roadkill she made for us!", I went over to the oven, and opened it, and in it was a ROTTEN PIG'S HEAD! It had been cooked, but was at least 3-4 days old and left unattended. It's eyes bugged out, it's ears flopped. Flies poured out of the oven. "It's still good!" my aunt cried. I literally swooned across the table and almost passed out. My father yelled at me, "What in the hell is your problem?" but took a few steps closer and looked into the oven.

My father's response to all this would be getting her committed to a psych ward. That would happen twice in the few years that followed. I remember mutterings about speed induced schizophrenia. She speed loaded diet pills to remain under 200lbs. This definitely wasn't the full picture. I doubt the psychiatrists warned her about her brother or narcissism and sociopathy though.

However one thing that followed is my parents started to use her to abuse me further. They laid on the threats to commit me as well. At the time they scared me saying they would force me into an institution for life. No psychologist or counselor ever was ever sought for me. Why not? I would have told them about all the abuse. Multiple times, they would slap me in the face if I said the "wrong thing" and scream "You're just like Aunt Confused!" with a sneer of disgust.  My Aspergers brought me severe abuse. 

If I had not been a quiet and dutiful student, with a 3.5 grade point average, and had run into even a little bit of trouble as a teen, I could see my parents using something like that to destroy my life. I knew enough to hide my worsening OCD problems and to internalize any risky Aspie meltdowns into withdrawing instead. Constant comparisons reigned, "You are as crazy as Aunt Confused!" "Do you want to end up like Aunt Confused?"

I would hear this for years. Double-tag-team scapegoating. My father was a cruel brother as well as cruel father! The evil mindedness shown towards the mentally ill was something to be disgusted by as well. This has continued to this day, where any mental health problems are seen as an "in" and something to condemn a person by. As someone who has done volunteer work with a depression group and been part of one and worked with young people with emotional challenges earlier in life, their attitudes sicken me. That is narcissists for you! This aunt got no mercy from them either just like Aunt Scapegoat. They had no mercy for my physical problems either.

I would spent a lot of time with Aunt Confused after she was more stabilized when she lived in a trailer in my family's town. I would leave my family's 6 bedroom house near a country club to sit in her trailer in a seedier part of town and watch TV.  In my early to mid-teens, I would prefer her company to that of my cold mother. I knew something was wrong with her, but she didn't yell at me or criticize me every minute. She was nice enough to me at least on the surface, but sadly there was rejection there too, that would come. We would talk about current events and share meals of home-cooked hamburgers with fried onions on top and reading Globes and National Enquirers. My family would mock me for spending so much time with her. Sadly my parents scapegoated her so much, they got my GC sister to reject her and even my brother to express disgust with her "craziness", and to make up rude nicknames for her. Neither of them talk to her or her daughter to this day.

                                                  From Pinterest snippet of photo by Andre' Gamma

My mother did what she could to destroy that relationship. One day when I was around 15 years old, Aunt Confused simply moved away and didn't even say Goodbye to me. I think my mother forced her in some fashion to leave town seeing our growing "closeness". My mother never allowed me to be close to anyone and always did what she could to take people away from me. This devastated me at the time. I would later get some phone contact and write letters but it was never the same. The same thing that happened with Aunt Scapegoat, happened with her.

She would move back to her home state and meet a financially comfortable older man, married him and moved with him to Florida. I would only see her once in person 30 years. She forgot about me, and kept me at arm's length at the behest of my mother and would not visit even when I asked as an adult years later.  One odd thing is she would send my brother and sister $1,000 dollars on their wedding days for presents but ignored my wedding and did not attend. This should have given me a clue.

 Aunt Confused was scared of the narcissists in her life. She never confronted my cruel father but submitted to him.  She had cloying respect for the man who committed her twice and who never stood against her first abusive husband. Where did I come from? I refuse to submit to any narcissist or abuser. I match none of these people. While she called me "her buddy" even to two months ago, she betrayed me as well multiple times when it came to the narcissists.

So she was no loyal ally. She would throw me under the bus in a milli-second if it kept narcissists pleased. I realized this was true too when I was teen but I was desperate for love and digging for what crumbs of it I could find. I did truly love her too but here too was cast aside. She put my parents way above me.

For years, I took the few morsels that came from her and now realize, there really was no relationship anymore and I was fruitlessly trying to recapture the days of my youth where I and her could talk to one another. There was only feigned niceness and more rejection. My narcissist mother is friends with her son's wife who displays the same personality. There is some massive control via that network. Her son controls her money and could be a possible guardian over it so perhaps you can see where I am going with this.

 She decided to bow before the narcissists like Aunt Scapegoat on the other side of the family. I found out I was chopped liver very recently. Like Aunt Denial, I took her crumbs of a kinder tone of voice with me and didn't face the facts of how much she lied to me. I suppose it was easier. I also ignored too long how she took my mother's side on everything and served as her enabler. She also does fear my mother. She lied for my mother as well.

 While she would admit some of the narcissist wrong-doings to me, my mother always came first to her. I never will understand this. The second to last time I spoke with her, she kept telling me that my mother loved me. If that is love what is hate?

She knew of the abuse I faced, and as an adult, I have faced facts, she served as another enabler too, too mentally ill to really lift a finger herself to help. While I worked to form a stronger relationship with her over the last year, there was my mother, always put first even though they live 1,000 miles away. Her grand-daughter would not invite me to her wedding but would invite my mother. I tried to talk to her about all this and how it hurt me but it was a fruitless venture. I went no contact with her recently after she refused the pictures. It does hurt but I see no other choice. She was telling my mother everything I told her. I could not trust her. I asked her not to even let it be known we were still in contact.

It was scary to have that cousin call me and use threatening language. Aunt Confused never tried to fix the relationship or reach out to me. Sadly I think she is glad I am gone. She doesn't care. The relationships my mother have destroyed are endless. My would be family is so sick on both sides. I'd rather be alone then sacrifice integrity and my well-being to any of these people anymore.

Looking at her story, she is just like Aunt Scapegoat. Driven to mental illness, scapegoated to the max, abused, stockholmed, institutionalized, left in extreme poverty for a time-though she was driven enough to find husbands to take her out of it in this case, and submitting to the wicked. Narcissists destroy entire families. 

Be careful of the "NICE" ones!

This article is regarding my aunt who is my father's sister. This is the aunt whose granddaughter [my cousin] married a multi-millionaire and where I was not invited to the wedding, My mother was. This is one of the many events I discussed as leading up to my going "no contact". This aunt lives around around 1000 miles from me.

 Soon I will write about her very interesting life story which even blows Aunt Scapegoat's story out of the water. Parts of this story include what happened to me too. Her personality and history definitely displays extreme signs of abuse and other hard to define personality disorders. I'll go in more detail later. Let's just say the narcissistic plague of insanity hasn't just cut one swathe across one branch of the family but both.

 She has been far more stable in her old age, but let's just say I do not consider her totally trustworthy and I knew with her, I could be going no contact with in the near future. What happened lately is enough to be a warning to me.

She does have contact with my mother, and well I am realizing this is a danger. I don't think I will ever be able to trust or form a decent family relationship with any relative that is in contact with my mother. Around any relatives,  I feel on guard, and betrayed inside as was written about next week.

They seem to have enough attachment to say hello on FB and with my brother an occasional phone call, but I can tell I am being held at arm's length to keep my mother happy, and I am not happy about this. It hurts and has hurt for years and right now self protection is my first order of business. In return, I have limited my emotional investment with these relationships.

So keep in mind even with my father's sister, I am tentative. My contact with her is only about 5-7 times a year. She did tell me some family history and helped spark my memory on many issues. I talked to her this year an average of once every 6-8 weeks. Her third husband is deceased and she moved up from Florida to live with her daughter who has a good manufacturing job.

Due to the adoption pursuit and wanting to find out what my grandmother on the paternal side looked like in her older age I asked her if she could send me some pictures. The reason for this request is to find out how young am I in the pictures? Are there pictures of me before that 9 month mark? Are there pictures to describe my baby book devoid of pictures unlike my brother's and sisters? I remember crying as a kid because my book had less pictures. Imagine that!

Another reason for the request is I want to see what my paternal grandmother looked like. I have only one picture of her from the 1940s where she is still relatively young. Could she have had lipedema? Years ago I used to be told she was large but then this aunt told me "Oh she didn't leave the 200s weight wise and had normal-thin legs".

I did not just call up and start asking, I sent her pictures of me, cards and had other discussions with her for over 18 months. I always had kept consistent contact. She told me "Sure, I'll send you some." It seemed like it wasn't going to be a big deal. I haven't seen any pictures yet and I've brought it up a few times. I thought her contact with my mother was minimal but it doesn't seem to be as yesterday I decide to call up and ask how is the picture sending going, and she tells me "Oh I talked to your mother, I told her you were asking me for some pictures, and she told me not to send you any!"

She then proceeded to tell me, "I'll still send them and I was looking to add one from ****'s album." [her daughter's]

I will believe it when I see it.

I plan to ask one more time with husband's help but then I will have no choice but to drop it. You can't make other people do what they do not want to do.  Another betrayal. More liars. More doors shut in my face. When I tell you this aunt's story it will blow your mind, but I knew I was taking a long shot.

My wicked mother has interfered with every relationship in the family. This net extends out to all of my father's relatives, including cousins [some of whom I sought to have contact with and was refused], divorced spouses from even ten years ago and every third cousin, great aunt and any other category that possibly shares DNA. I think she still even has contact with my uncle's girlfriend he split up with when he was 26 years of age, before he married another woman. I do not know how a person has the time to stay in contact with this many people or direct them but she definitely found it.

My mother's messages to all my family members regarding me has been...

1. "Ignore her".

2. "You don't need to visit her". "You don't need to invite her."

3. "You don't need to fulfill her requests."

4. "I have pictures, lots of them", you don't need to send them" [this aunt knows I am no contact with my mother]

5. "Don't listen to her, she is a liar."

6. "Don't listen to her, she is crazy."

7.  "She is fat and it's her fault!"

and over and over.

And as I have seen it is still going on.

Kind of puts those phony "We miss you cards" in context doesn't it?

Deep, deep wedges driven in deep.

No chance of being heard, always dismissed, always ignored and always disdained.

Now I knew betrayal was possible and unless my mother knew something, I kept my mouth shut about it even to this aunt. Talk about having to screen every thought to the finest tooth.

 My mother already knows I am on an adoption search in my last NC letter and questioning about my origins. If I am a biological child, she could have simply sent me a young baby picture earlier then the 9 month old one I have seen and gotten me to shut up. Life is weird when you have to find out a great-aunt died on the internet, but that is how life is with a clammed up secretive narcissist.

 I reminded this aunt, that I had told her not to tell my mother I was even in contact with her. She didn't seem to care about this request but made some vague excuse. She has a wicked wavering two sided mind, saying one thing one minute telling me "Yes your mother treated you badly!" and then stating "Your mother loves you!" while I am ignored and otherwise abused.

The control freak narcissist interferes every minute. 

I don't think I will see the pictures. If I do I will be happy and relieved.

I scoured the internet to see if there was a picture of my grandmother who died in 1969 in their local paper. I found her name in articles several times, and a picture of her gravestone but no picture of her. 

At least I was prepared to be disappointed but the sheer scope of my mother's power and control over all my relatives even ones that live thousands of mile away are extreme. I also have realized that I am invisible to them all. They only see me as she does, no matter how nice I am or how I tried to reach out in the past.

If the pictures are not sent, add another NC to the list of over 14 people. If she can't even give me this one small request of pictures of myself when young or a picture of my grandmother, I will be done with her. I will ask politely one more time and if I am told "No", I will tell her I am moving on.

I have realized there is no love, or even attachment with these folks. There is nothing. It is scary. I know as a person I sought to look for it. With this aunt years ago I drew closer to her, or tried, but my mother even there held the power. I will write more later on this issue and tell you her story too.

One question I have for ACONs who read my blog, Have you ever seen this much control over this many family members by a narcissist? I also am realizing that none of them see me outside of her definitions, no matter what I do.

Another question I have is, have any of you hit a wall, where you thought, if I have a relationship with a relative, they need to stand up for me or not have contact with the narcissist?

All my relatives, every one is in contact with my mother. 

I may be no contact with the whole crew the way this is going and not just 85% of them. No pictures sent tells me I am wasting my time with this woman and she has none of my best interests at heart and doesn't want to tell me the truth. I will see if I am pleasantly surprised but for now, my expectations are incredibly limited. 

Update on this one: The Aunt Never Sent the Pictures and More

The First Time I went No Contact

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The first time I went "no contact" I didn't know what no contact was but I disappeared from my family for around three years. Just like a domestic violence victim hiding from an abusive ex-husband, I went into hiding.

I was twenty one years old and went POOF! leaving false flag information of moving to a different town east when my actual town of residence was west-ward.

I knew I was the scapegoat too since my journal of 1989 still in my possession states...

"I am the black sheep of the family, they use me as a scapegoat."

This was during college but soon I would disappear from them.

Was that a normal thing to do? Even therapists at the time were in shock that things went so far. My year of student teaching and later while living at home was a nightmare. Days that lasted from 7:30 am to 11:00 pm, were not smart, but at that point in my life, self-care was not part of the picture.

My parents wanted rent even though student teaching didn't pay anything whatsoever. This meant working basically a double day-student teaching plus telemarketing at night with a weekend job latched on too to meet all my bills. Lesson plans for hundreds of students also were necessary. With no rest, this was also the time my health started to break where asthma, breathing problems and migraine headaches came in full force. My weight was getting harder to control though, the start of the huge weight gain was 4 years away.

My abuse worsened when I went home for that year and half at the end of my college sojourn. They were angry about money they had borrowed for part of my college education even though my mother used a lot of that loan money for shopping. In those days, pre-insurance and lawsuit payoff-my parents weren't as well off and decided to blame me. My brother was in the same college too on their dime totally just a year ahead of me but for some reason I was the focus of their ire. With my cafeteria job over every semester and summer jobs, many of the bills were covered by me including some dorm bills. The me of today wouldn't do college again, but would have exited their world upon high school graduation and gone to Vo-Ed in high school. The pound of flesh for every dollar was not worth it. My suburban high school drumming on the college dream had done me a great disservice.

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My rage-filled father screamed and yelled daily and even threatened me with violence. His anger and hostility was always present but that year it was upped a few notches. He didn't know I could hear him talking about me through a heating vent in the corner upstairs bedroom I rented for 120 dollars a month. Shouts of "that prima-donna is a burden around my neck", cuss words I can't write here, and that he wished I was dead. The fear alone led me to barricade my door at times. My mother voiced her agreement. Often their conversations centered solely on their superiority, and everyone else's failings including trashing people they smiled in front of at their respective offices.

My mother would egg my father on, complaining about me, getting him to grow more angry. At times I feared homelessness as they threatened to throw me out or destroy my things. The criticisms flowed, "You're too fat, too messy, too weird, too ugly, too slow, have your nose in a book too much.". I think back to some of those years, and know this year where my college friends had moved home, where my future no longer seemed as bright as it did sitting in class when I started having a life-long problem with depression. What would the outcome otherwise be for someone who had no love in their life? One close college friend who I still have weekly phone contact with to this day, literally kept me alive, as we called each other crying, wondering why our families hated us and nothing was ever good enough.

My mother and sister worsened in their symbiotic narcissism and joined together to call me a "loser" and discussed my faults openly while planning my sister's $25,000 plus wedding. She was never yelled at or abused for the costs of her wedding which actually was more then any money given for my college. This was the one I was left out of where they told me I was too fat to be in the wedding party and that the pictures would be messed up. There was no celebrating of my college graduation. One thing that will happen with scapegoats is their achievements will be ignored as well.

This is the year that my low status in the family was intact as those two poured out every negative emotion on me. Looking back I look at the rejection of my sister, and how my mother instigated it telling her I was not good enough for her. A pattern got set for years that was never broken with too many wasted tears on my part where my sister showed no emotions. I hadn't yet admitted to myself what she had become. Now I have. Back then I still loved her, but it was love wasted on someone who could not love just like my mother.

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 If I had not been large and standing up to my father, who knows how bad things would have gotten for me. They were angry that I seemed to be having difficulty finding a regular teaching job this being the recession of the early 90s. Student teaching would end and somehow I would scrounge through managing to graduate from college. I would return just to sleep even doing all my eating away from their home because of the constant barrage of complaints, criticisms and screaming. Working three-four jobs consisting then of day care, substitute teaching, restaurant work and factory temp jobs, I saved every penny knowing another better car and money were needed to escape. Escaping was my focus. I knew I had to survive, emotionally and even physically.

 

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It was very hard to try and maintain confidence as a teacher in the class room, one ding on a review was for lack of confidence but no wonder! It was weird to maintain classrooms even later in rough inner city schools where substitutes were considered cannon fodder then going home and being abused. There was no more hitting because few years earlier, my father had started to punch me in the arm and being a few inches taller then him, I grabbed his arm and wrenched it behind his back and said, "You aren't going to hit me anymore".  So my abuse was all emotional, and verbal with narcissistic game playing added in but that was bad enough.  Unlike some ACON's, my knowledge of being abused was there but I was in denial about it's severity. The fog still surrounded me. I simply did not know what normal was.

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The insults never ended. Being midsized around 70lbs overweight at the time, my weight was made fun of, I was offered money to lose and look normal and so I would get a husband like my sister. My father would threaten to pack me away to the convent because I was "too ugly and weird for any man to want to marry me" and would state, "You better lose weight to get a better  job!".  Another time when cleaning the basement out with him on one of my rare days off, he would approach me and say, "I hate your personality, it's awful.". I think back to that time wishing I had fought back more, the feeling was mutual after all. My life was one of nothing but criticism. In college, I carried a 3.4 GPA, worked, stayed out of trouble. What would have this family had done to someone who slide even more through the cracks? They deserved a crackhead as an offspring for all their whining and abuse.

My chosen career field of art education was insulted, "art hippie, you arty farty!" and there was a day I brought home paintings from college where I remember my mother and father saying "Your paintings are ugly." The class I did the paintings in, I received a B+/A-  One of these paintings I would sell years later for a hand-sewn wedding dress that was valued over a 1000 dollars. My love for art was a place of salvation for me, a place of refuge, they tried to even take that away but failed.

Even my brother had one of his moments with my father in the garage, standing up to him to end the physical abuse we both experienced for years. However even with this I still felt physically afraid especially of my father. I was not treated like a girl at all and never protected. There was no proms, or Daddy-daughter dances in my life but housework, fixing cars, raking and digging holes in the yard with my brother. Next to the mother who never bought me a dress or showed me how to paint my nails or do make-up, feminine things were left for nice, sweet petite girls not me. I never went to any school dance or had a formal dress bought for me or went on a date in high school or had any friends for that matter outside of my freshman bowling league. I was too abused.

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My father never touched my mother, he wouldn't dare but she stood by and even joined in on the physical abuse pulling strings to increase his rages. They never beat us enough for any of us to be hospitalized, they had to keep their upper middle class life and jobs intact, but being hit was at least a weekly occurrence. My father until I stood up to him even into late high school had no problem with pinching me hard or kicking me in the butt to make one of his points. His eyes would shine and show glee upon humiliating others. His perfectionism and other traits were extreme, to this day I would peg him as one of the most miserable people on the face of this earth. Ironically he'd go to work with a sweet smile on his face, all his employees loved him, but no one knew what happened behind closed doors. Mr. Rogers at work and Hitler at home.  He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, same as his psychopathic, narcissistic wife. Both prided themselves on their hardness and ability to "get over" and disdained empathy and sensitivity as weaknesses.

I did start standing up for myself in college. Both narcissistic parents would complain and say, "We don't know what that college did to change you but it changed you for the worse". I went from quiet, withdrawn, beating down and afraid to finally talking back a bit. Rebellion for ACONS isn't always a bad thing, for many of us it means survival and drawing one's boundaries. I didn't drink or party or date or go looking for fights but I started fighting back against the parents who saw nothing positive in me whatsoever.  Cipher-hood for me would have meant absolute destruction. It also means I did not become a replica of my Aunt Scapegoat who in essence never left home, living next door to my grandmother in a broken down trailer into her 50s. She is still there. This is when I began my "goth" years, though I toned the dress down at jobs to keep employed. I awaited the day though where a good job as a teacher and independent life would "save" me but considering the health and financial problems that awaited, maybe it's better I didn't know at the time.

A few months after the grand production of my sister's elaborate wedding, one day I came home from work, and found a box in the mail addressed to me. It was from a company known for knickknacks. I was suspicious opening it because I had not ordered anything. Opening the box, I found a paper within it, and saw that it was addressed to me, and a credit card number I did not recognize in my name.

Then I realized, I had sent away for a credit card in the mail a few months earlier!

My mother had taken the credit card when it arrived in the mail, and used it without my knowledge. At the time I had forgotten about my application thinking I had been turned down.


So my mother had stolen my identity!


Calling the credit card company, I found out over $1700 dollars had been charged under my name. No one asked for this financial help, no one talked to me saying "We are short on funds could you help us out?"

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I knew then I had to leave and do it quick. I was employed and had some money saved. I was too afraid of my parents to report her. The statute of limitations is long up. I confronted her and she said because of the money borrowed for some of my college, she said, "You owe me!". Crying I said, "Why did you lie to me or just not ask?" But she refused to respond. She never would apologize for this or anything else in her life. My father simply refused to believe she did it even with the evidence in front of his face and simply threatened me.

I took a day off from substitute teaching and went to go rent a room in a woman's boarding house in a neighboring town. By then I had my juvenile home art teaching job too which was second shift and weekends, part of the recreation program for the incarcerated youth. I choose to commute a distance three times a week, rather then even live in the same town of my parents.

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The day I moved out, my mother was at work but my father went ballistic, screaming and yelling. Trying to tell me I couldn't even take my clothes because he had "bought them" actually by that time, all the clothes outside of gifts were purchased by me. Screaming about a blue chair, he had thrown away but decided I was "stealing", my escape was very frightening. I ran out to my car, that was thankfully mostly packed with him cussing me out, grabbing at me and throwing pant cans at me, some full, some empty and clattering on the drive-way. I was lucky to get away without being hurt.

I wouldn't talk to any of them for three years.

Why did I go back?

The therapists I voluntarily sought out, even though they admitted I was seriously abused told me to reconcile with my parents, the pastors--UU at the time--I'm now a born again Christian told me to "forgive" and let by gones be by gones. I heard that my parents were "under stress", to "honor" my parents, to realize "everyone makes mistakes", to "not hold grudges". 

Other relatives joined the foray, telling me "that's just the way they are", "you have to accept them for who they are". "You don't want to live your life angry do you?" Others told me it was simply wrong to cut off one's parents no matter how badly they had treated you.

I never heard anything about narcissistic personality disorder, or how severe emotional abuse can affect a person life long or about protecting myself or boundaries.  For years I would blame myself. I was a "bad daughter", "cost too much", "shouldn't have gone to college", "didn't get along with people", "didn't make enough money", "messed up the relationships". I worried that I was everything they told me I was, unworthy, fat, lazy, and worse. For many years I dreamed of the day I would be thin or average sized and have great job making lots of money where my parents would finally love me. That was a wasted dream.

But I had enough fire in me at a young age to cut the chains, once upon the time. This time I will stay free.

Looking back on this all from the vantage of a 40 something, I am literally horrified. The abuse I suffered was immense and I believe high on the scale. To be frank, I lay at their feet the breaking of my health and almost the breaking of my spirit.  Keep in mind, I was getting already sick, in and out of the hospital for severe asthma, showing terrible signs of PCOS. My periods completely stopped. Today I have faced their cruelty, medical neglect, and devaluement of me as a person head on. There was no excuse for the way I was treated and the me of today, wishes I could go back and hug young me and say, "You don't deserve this, stay far away from these people they only wish you harm. The word family means nothing when you are treated this way."