It’s been tough. When I was still in communication with my mother (so, birth through my mid 20s), everybody’s perspective mattered except mine. Any time I told Mom about anything difficult that was happening, she immediately wanted to “see it from the other person’s perspective.” Even if I wasn’t angry at the person. Even if the story didn’t really involve another person, she would find someone – anyone – even tangentially related to my situation who she could claim she was helping me to understand the perspective of. Now, in the past couple of years, I’ve figured out that Mom wasn’t always very reliable with her take on other people’s perspectives. She always thought that they were thinking the same thing, and that thing was that I was totally abnormal and shameful. And if only I’d been able to see that without Mom’s help, I would have known to hate myself. It was dual layers of shame: I was to be humiliated that I hadn’t known to be humiliated.
So, because I was never validated and I was always a failure and everyone could see that except me, I grew up to have a lot of shame and self-loathing. Then, around the time that Mom excommunicated me, I ended up in this really abusive relationship with a “therapist” named Dr M. She claimed that I had a personality disorder, and that because I was so deeply flawed, my perspective on reality was warped. Only she could tell me the truth of what went on around me. Which, she always thought that I was completely different from everyone else. One time I showed her a picture of me and she thought it was exceptional because “You look like a normal girl!” But the rest of the time, she went to extreme lengths to help me understand that I was not a normal girl. Any time I told her about anything I had done outside of therapy, she would cringe and squeal, and/or ridicule me. She even specifically said that because of my terrible personality disorder, I had to assume full responsibility for absolutely everything that happened around me. It was always my fault. Even when all the evidence was that it wasn’t my fault, it was still my fault, and I just couldn’t see that because of my personality disorder. I was on Dr M’s caseload until I was 29.
So. I’ve explained on here why I think I should have been allowed to deduct expenses from my rent that I incurred as a result of the landlady saving herself money by not doing repairs in a timely manner. I still think I should have been “allowed” to do that, and I think it’s ludicrous that the landlady has the final say on that and I can’t dispute it anywhere. Anyway, I saved all my receipts and told her multiple times in writing that I was deducting expenses. She never said she was going to dispute anything. Rather, she waited several months and then sent an eviction notice over the deductions, at which point everyone went into panic mode and nobody is considering whether I was in the right to make the deductions in the first place.
Anyway, I went to a meeting the other day and was told that the whole thing was my fault because the landlady never specifically said she didn’t object to the deductions, so I was supposed to assume she did. Again, note that it’s not like she was ever going to be open to discussing them, because I could explain why all the deductions I made were completely legitimate. I was supposed to just know that her unwillingness to talk about the issue meant that she was going to try to evict me over it. Furthermore, in terms of recertification, I was supposed to just know that she needed a specific form from the school district saying that substitute teachers don’t get paid over the summer. Never mind that I never got anything telling me that I needed a document like that. Never mind that I asked the landlady several times in writing whether she had everything she needed, and she always didn’t know because she was very busy because she was moving offices. Never mind that everything was digital so moving offices shouldn’t have been a factor. And, of course, I was supposed to accept that she got a pass from everything when her life was chaotic, but I didn’t get a pass for having endured extremely severe life-altering trauma over the summer. Oh yeah, and I would have been able to see how everything was my fault, I was responsible to have had information that I had never been given, and the landlady was being perfectly reasonable and just doing what any landlady would have been required to do… all that would have been perfectly clear to me if I weren’t mentally ill.
And it’s like, I work harder than anyone else I know. I’m extremely responsible. And somehow, it’s never enough. There’s always some paper that I didn’t have but should have known to obtain. Other people have to bail me out (“advocate” for me) because I’m inadequate. I consistently make the best choices at my disposal even when it’s hard, and I’m always the bad guy. Other people get away with whatever and there’s always some tiny detail that I overlooked that makes me deserving of homelessness/death. It’s not enough to beat myself up when I actually can see my mistake; I have to always beat myself up no matter how illogical it might seem. Because of course I would see myself even more unfavorably if my perspective weren’t warped.
So my thing is, I can’t go through life always being in the wrong and I can’t make better choices than I’m making. What you’re seeing is the best I can do. And if it’s still not good enough, then obviously the only way to appease society will be by killing myself. Do I want to die? No, of course not. But I can’t be what people want me to be, so it seems like the next best thing I can do is to be dead. Then people freak out like “Why didn’t you tell us you were suicidal?” And I’m like um, I’m doing this for you.
