Bad Children

Medicaid achieved. Or at least advanced to the next step, wherein I have to call a bunch of providers and get them to reprocessed old bills with a secondary insurer. Or I guess step 0 of finding all the old bills. But still, progress. In theory I won’t have to call directly about Medicaid for the next 9 months or so. There wasn’t anything more they needed from us, they just failed to properly finalize things the last time we called. Which was itself just a call to get them to finalize things after we did all their verification paperwork. It’s a big relief to make progress here after months without anyway, even if there is still work to do.

Feeling medium today ¹That was Wednesday. Thursday was better again. No dizziness, normal O2 levels, and at least as of 2 PM not feeling unusually tired. Though I notice one of the first things I did during the day was deny my hunger. To decide that feeling hungry was not only irrelevant but perhaps even evidence of my inhuman need. And I didn’t fix it until lunch, … Continue reading, in a physical sense. Not as good as yesterday but still better than Monday. I’ve got some tinnitus on the left side (or at least did this morning; it’s too noisy to tell right now), which is disturbing but presumably temporary. And my intestines are less than placid. I’m still tired, but I also didn’t sleep well this morning, so that’s to be expected. My O2 seems to be back to normal at least during household activities; we’ll see later today if walking is still an intense activity or if I can move like a human again.

And then failed to achieve a Screed despite stronger than average preparation and a decent chunk of time to myself in the evening. I did go on a walk though, and found I was at maybe 80% on the not being tired from walking around scale. And the tinnitus does seem to be gone. But I didn’t do any more writing before bed and sleep felt like better relief than ranting.
I think it’s possible I have secretly been a makeup blogger my whole life and just never noticed [fig 1,2]. It would explain some of my YouTube subscriptions. If that turns out to be true I hope I grow up to be @Tadelesmith ²https://youtube.com/user/tadelesmith. I miss her critical tutorials ³https://youtu.be/4MZ-miR0dd8 https://youtu.be/LnU1WU2K77gd, and the ratfam.

Therapy finally got back to LI today. Worked with a feeling about manipulation, and the way I’m convinced that predicting someone’s reaction to me and choosing a behavior based on that prediction is always abusive manipulation, even if they like the outcome. Started with a memory about lying to obscure Mother’s neglect when I was in 1st grade. The pressure I felt to be sure neither Mother nor my teacher were upset by Mother’s failure, and how that put me in a position of lying to my teacher about how I was a bad person. Finding a way to make myself responsible for whatever Mother hadn’t done, so that Teacher’s bad feelings could be directed at the socially-acceptable target of Bad Child. And then walked that feeling back up to present day.

I really could have used an emergency contact when I was 7, someone to sign things for me to prove that my parents didn’t care enough to do the signing themselves ⁴I used to fantasize about about having a “legal guardian” assigned to me, when I saw the term on school forms. The idea of an alternative to my assigned old people for managing my interactions with the world was very attractive – I could do the work but I needed some with the right social status to sign-off on it. Because the oppression of … Continue reading. If anyone had just bothered to note that some of the things assigned to me in school were actually meant as work for old people it would have made a big difference in how I understood myself and my role in the world. Or even if they just acknowledged that punishment for non-compliance would be the responsibility of the young person even if the failure was elsewhere – I could have at least felt like I was doing my part by taking punishment for Mother, rather than being made to feel like I deserved punishment for not properly managing Mother.

So one of the reasons I feel like I’m always manipulating people is because I was asked to do so to protect Mother from the consequences of her own actions. I imagined at the time I was protecting people from finding out my inhuman status, from seeing how bad I was at managing my life, from discovering my unreasonable amount of need and being hurt by it. I could see them being hurt by it even when they only suspected. And I knew if I let them be hurt they might spread it to Mother, who already knew about my inhumanity and would be forced to punish me for it if anyone else found out. It’s for my own good, really, so I can learn to better pass as human.

Which I see now is an abuse narrative. It’s also one that’s easily detectable even through the lies of a 7-year-old, if society didn’t want so badly for us to buy into it. Because there aren’t “bad” 7-year-olds, there are just young people who aren’t being supported properly. I shouldn’t have been able to lie about how non-compliance was my fault because no one should have understood compliance ⁵Not that we should demand compliance in the first place, from young people or anyone else, but even if we do it’s insane to imagine that a young person under the continuous control of old people is responsible for it. as my responsibility in the first place. Take a minute to imagine any “bad kid” you knew from school. Now imagine they were dealing with my same situation and merely less successful at the self-support plan that I used to (sometimes) avoid detection. Feel bad about it for a minute, and then use that feeling to be sure you never make this mistake again.

Consider this film trope: abduction as romance. @PopCultureDetective ⁶https://youtube.com/rebelliouspixels has a great piece on it: http://popculturedetective.agency/2018/abduction-as-romance I was lucky enough to have a captor that (mostly) didn’t want to bang me, but my whole life was this situation. I was abused, isolated, and asked to feel loved by my captor. And the whole world supported and reinforced this plan. Told me I wad wrong if I reacted against it. That I would learn to appreciate this “love” once I gave up my selfish desire to not be hurt. In media about adults we see this framed as romance because that’s the way that old white men are supposed to want love, but the basic behavior maps to any relationship with a perverse power dynamic, and it’s societally-endorsed anywhere that power dynamic is acceptable. Mother “tried her best” and you must love her in spite of the abuse – it’s your duty as “her” child to provide the thing she demands, and to like it.

Shanda is working on some religious abuse feels. Which ties right in. Jesus is the son of an abusive father who spends his whole life trying to get people to turn away from the terrible power structures his daddy claims to control and is eventually tortured and murdered for his efforts. Later daddy pretends that killing his son was a “sacrfice”, takes credit for his son’s actual good work despite not participating in it and often having taken a public position against it, and then reminds everyone that someday he will kill all of humanity except for the people he likes, who he will force to live with him in an environment where he has complete control and absolute power. And that’s the version told by people /selling/ this story, let alone the version you might get from a less biased source. So I feel your religious abuse. Ask me about how Mother imagined that 7 Brides for 7 Brothers might be the right plan to combine abduction as romance with intergenerational familial isolation.

I’m trying to imagine that “manipulation”, as I understand it, isn’t immoral. I could start by calling it “empathy-based prediction” instead of “manipulation”. It’s not wrong for me to imagine how you feel and choose my behavior based on my best guess at how you’ll respond. That behavior is, when used to drive good outcomes, clearly useful. But it’s hard for me to imagine that any outcome that imagines me positively is good, or at least the it wouldn’t be better if the same thing happened while I remained invisible. Because I know that I’m bad and what I want is bad even if other people temporarily or naively assume that it’s not.

In therapy we also talked for minute about how LI might work for even even younger periods on my life; typical procedures involve the idea of touch as comfort – imagine someone holding infant you – but to me that feels like a threat not a reassurance. And we talked about how I imagine that my physical existence hurts others.

I am comfortable with the idea that other people like some of the things I do. That I can guess what people might like and arrange to have that thing happen. But I can’t make myself believe that people actually like me, seperately from the things I do. And so if I get any good feels from the outcome it must mean that my impure motivations have hurt someone, or will in the future. Because I’m bad and I want bad things; things that are good for me are bad for others because my selfish intentions taint anything they touch. I’ve got a pretty airtight defense against other beliefs too, since any testimony to the contrary is obviously the result of my unethical manipulation, and is therefor itself tainted.

This is also why I can’t imagine that anything is as good with me around as it would be with me elsewhere. Telling me otherwise makes me believe that I’m a danger because I’ve somehow hidden the badness that is me. Covered it with some attractive facade that obscures the otherwise obvious harm I will cause. The very fact that you like me is evidence that I’m hurting you, and it’s only a matter of time before you discover this fact and correctly choose to abandon me.

I spend a lot of effort trying to prove to myself that there is zero narcissism in my life. That I have received no benefit from my actions and so those parts might actually help people, unlike all the parts that are ruined by my need or desire. I arrange to be able to prove that my existence isn’t the reason for your pain. To forgo things that might produce even the appearance of a conflict of interest. And I am crushed sometime when I can’t figure out how to help you from arms length, without accidentally doing something that might also be good for me.

I also see how I feel like my body and other parts of my physical life hurt not only others but me. How I could learn to not want attention or sharing or other forms of social support but I could not learn how to stop needing food or access to sanitation. And so my existence brought pain no matter how much I practiced needing less. I could will myself to not respond to physical need but I couldn’t actually make it stop happening. Thus my existence betrayed me all the time, and made me a burden to others. Nothing I could do would let me stop this shameful, endless need.

There’s also the bit where you perceive me doing something for myself and in your anxiety you respond as if it’s about you. I finally risk exposing an inch of myself, hoping maybe this is safe enough to do where it can be noticed, and the immediate and clear message I get from you is anxious concern. I’ve hurt you in exactly the way I hoped I wouldn’t – made you feel bad by sharing with you a thing I thought was joyful. Your reaction proves that I’m a monster because I though this part of me was safe but there’s some way I didn’t predict – still can’t see – that it hurts you. I selfishly assumed this aspect of me was tolerable or even good but I now have proof that it’s not, even if I still don’t know why. And the message is clear: I should never have done this, because I can’t even be trusted to know if it will hurt you.

Sometimes, if we can talk about it, I can see how it’s your anxiety about you. How I triggered a feeling in you that has nothing to do with me, and the thing you’re worried about is not a thing I’m threatening. But other times it’s just you fearing my expression or activity or even my idea to try such a thing in the future. It’s you clearly showing me that this situation is so bad that we can’t even talk about why. So bad that anyone less selfish than me would never have exposed you to it.

Which is why it would be great if, after you get past your initial reaction to me – my presence or expression or appearance or writing or plans – you could let me know that you heard me and that you haven’t decided never to talk to me about it again. If when I trigger your defensive reaction to a thing you’re avoiding or that you have your own trauma about or even that just feels like too much for this immediate moment, you could circle back and let me know it’s a thing I can ask about – or better still, that you’ll bring up – once you’ve had a chance to examine your own feelings. Because as it stands I often hold things that you are anxious about against nothing but silence and negative feedback from you for soooo long. Even if it’s something you want. Even if it has nothing to do with me. And when it does have something to do with me it’s just that much more painful to hold seperate from you. To be alone with.

It would help me a lot sometimes if you could go back to that message you ignored, the topic you avoided, the interaction you wanted to escape from. Not to force you back into the bad feelings it brought up but just to send me a versatile fruit so I know it’s a thing you’re struggling with for you own reason, and not a thing I’m torturing you about.
This whole thing is a mess. And like in real life I’m ignoring work and other things. Let’s hope it comes into something more coherent in the coming days.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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