Open Thread for Personal Stuff: November Rain Edition

I am a nasty person. I rather like the image of Ally being free and safe from the parental unit, and of him getting a visit from the IRS. There aren’t enough legos in the world for that man.

Also, katz, if it makes you feel any better, my mom thinks you’re totally trustworthy. She used her dowsing pendulum to ask “Is [katz] trustworthy?” and the answer was a yes. In case it’s not clear, she’s very much into new age stuff. I don’t believe any of that dowsing stuff (well, not very seriously anyway), but that’s just how she is. And frankly, as long as she supports me I’m okay with that. =P

In fact, she’s the only family member (among my older siblings and her) who is okay with me going with you – she just wishes I could stay with her instead for obvious reasons. She basically said “It’s okay, but please always think of family first!”

Ouch, Alice, what happened? Can you put any weight on it at all?

cloudiah – I had an exam this morning, so I had to get on a bus to go on campus to take it. I went to hop onto the bus, tripped on the bus edge (I think I missteped it or something), and faceplanted, scraping my leg and hurting my ankle. OWWWWWWW.

I had/have to walk on it all day too, since Student Health was closed. Been walking on it for the past five hours, although to be fair, three hours worth was me sitting down and taking the exam or bus rides. Currently at home with my ankle on a pillow.

I’m thinking it’s probably a sprain right now, but still, ow. I have to wait till Monday to see Urgent Care and get it xrayed to make sure though.

auggziliary – Would frozen veggies work? Closest thing I have that’s has no meat in it (the other thing I have is a bag of chicken and cilantro potstickers, but that doesn’t sound like a good idea….).

Frozen peas are better than ice packs, they’ll bend around your ankle, so yes, stick some frozen veggies on there.

So, I was a weird kid, I read my aunt’s 80s EMT books for fun, and at least then the go to for sprains had a fun little acronym — RICE — Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. In other words, stay of it, ice it, wrap it (not too tight and I’ll post the figure 8 bandage video again if you want it), and keep it elevated.

Does your student insurance cover ER? It must right? I ask because I knew a dude who broke his hand and failed to get it x-rayed for 3 days, I hear he screamed quite a bit when they had to re break it to set it. If it is broken, and you’re walking on it, you aren’t doing it any good.

Ok, stay off it as much as possible then at least. You ever broken a bone before? D d it have that almost electric pain to it? Idk if ankles do that though.

Ah, there’s no really good way to explain it unfortunately, which leaves my only other advice as — the ice should be on and off, not continuous, you’ll freeze your poor ankle.

Hope it turns out to just be a sprain!

Alice: follow the RICE mnemonic for ankle injuries. Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.

Hi everyone,

A family friend is close to finishing a documentary about survivors of sexual assault in Alaska. This is a Kickstarter page but even if you can’t donate at this time I would love it if you learned about this project and read about the featured women here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1051612730/breathe-in-the-light?ref=email.
Thanks and love.

NPR has an interesting article about inverted gender roles in The Hunger Games. Only a couple of misogynists in the comments so far, one of whom has been spouting MRA lingo (he won’t tell me whether he’s from The Spearhead or AvFM). Overall not a good spot for MRA chew toys, but the article is also interesting 😉

I’ll respond to your email soon, Rogan!

[Content note: verbal abuse]

I want to talk about an instance of verbal abuse I faced from my father when I was 15 – it’s really bothering me, for reasons I’ll mention in a bit:

I was stressed out and depressed one morning because I had been hiding a lot of information from him. I was (and still am) my mom’s and older siblings’ confidant, in a way – they told me to not tell dad anything about the child my mom was expecting and the fact that my older siblings’ partners were living with my older siblings. We were all afraid of what my dad would do if he learned about those things because he has always been abusive.

So I went downstairs to get my mind off of that, and I asked my father for help in ironing a t-shirt. I’ve always hated button-up plaid shirts because they make me feel dysphoric (I guess I just had this weird association between those shirts and casual guy style), but I wanted to learn how to iron t-shirts because my dad wanted me to wear that shirt and it was full of wrinkles.

He showed me how to iron, I ironed it properly, and then I reached for the plug because I had no idea where the off/on switch was. And then he got angry at me because he told me “If you’re going to do something, do it properly.” I just wanted to turn it off and go back upstairs because he was making me feel uncomfortable, so I tried unplugging it again and he started yelling “LOOK, LOOK FOR THE SWITCH! LOOK FOR IT!” almost right in my ears. His yelling wore me down and frightened me so much that I couldn’t focus on finding the switch, but he kept yelling at me and at this point I was on the verge of crying because not only was he harassing me but I was also already under a huge amount of stress. I finally turned it off and then tried to run upstairs to my room – tears were running down my face and I didn’t want him to get angry at me for crying.

And then he stopped me and demanded me to tell him why I was running upstairs. I tried to make sure he didn’t know I was crying, but my voice made it obvious that I was crying when I told him that I wasn’t feeling well. So he got even angrier and ordered me to sit down on the couch right in front of him, and I begged him to let me go because I was bawling at this point and wasn’t feeling well. So he screamed “SHUT UP! STOP CRYING!” over and over again. Eventually his screaming was so unbearable that I decided to stand up for myself and say “You shut up!” After that, he got silent and scolded me for talking back to him, and then I ran upstairs to my room because I was in need of some safer place where I could calm down and finish my crying. From upstairs I heard him say “Oh, now you’re going to call your mother to talk about how horrible and abusive I am. I’m a bad man. Go ahead and tell her everything.”

He now uses that incident to guilt-trip and manipulate me. Whenever he really wants to make a point about how I’m so disrespectful and rude, he brings up the time I told him to shut up. And honestly, I feel conflicted. At once I feel proud that I actually stood up to him back then and horrible for saying something that harsh to his face. Do any of you think it’s okay to not feel bad about saying that to him? I just would like to hear what other people can say because I usually don’t tell people that story. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

Does anyone with depression have this problem with exercise? Exercise usually makes me happy(it releases dopamine), so it’s my anti depressant pretty much. But some days I’ll start and my mood will crash completely, like it amplifies my depression.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes you feel happy.

Sometimes you find yourself lifting a weight and thinking that you’re only really doing this because you a shallow charicature of a human being with no capacity to enjoy life, be positive or bring about good things in the world, and ithat there’s no pointing in continuing to bother with this exercise because in 40 years, your body will be deteriorated anyway.

Sometimes you find a coin on the street outside the gym.

I can’t speak for you there, augziliary, but I find that sometimes my everything just isn’t into it, and trying to force a good outcome out of a situation I am not feeling won’t do much more than make me more upset. It’s possible it’s related to surging / varying hormonal levels in relation to the exercise, but if that were so, I don’t know about the impacts or ways to mitigiate it. Best response I’ve found is, well, to accept that sometimes your body doesn’t want to get strained, breathe out, and come back to doing physical things another day – because that works at clearing my headspace of the way my particular glibbelygobblery manifests, and allows me to feel happy again.

I can wager a guess, by what also happens to me, which would be that sometimes you might be going into an exercise with the mindset that “This’ll make me feel happy!” and then, when that doesn’t happen instantanously, you accidentally unleash a spiral where you brain goes “It’s not working. I’m not feeling happy. I am now sad. Sad. Glibberyglobblery misery all around”

The awareness of the lack of joy manifests more misery, and then it’s a crash. I solve that by meditating, because again, that clears my head. Maybe find a trigger or some action you can take to make feeling unhappy… okay… so you uncrash by allowing yourself to be sad – which, for me, makes space for happiness?

Anyway, that’s conjecture. Apologies if it’s not applicable.

Do any of you think it’s okay to not feel bad about saying that to him? I just would like to hear what other people can say because I usually don’t tell people that story.

Ask the question another way. Do you think it’s okay to keep feeling bad about having a justified, angry reaction to a bad situation?

I don’t think the issue is the legitimacy of your concerns, I think your issue is the legitimacy of someone elses actions and your perspective on that. In a perfect world, you might be ever patient and ever capable, unperturbed by stress or insult or perjury or anger or surprise, and you might have nodded and understood and been instantaneously capable of findng the switch or opening the door or putting the egg on the plate in the right order or holding the fork in the right way to pick from a laundry list of innocous mistakes I have been berated for over the years, but whether or whether not you can live up to someone’s overwrought expectations doesn’t reflect on you at all, because this isn’t a perfect world, and when put under pressure, you don’t get to make the perfect choice.

The question you are asking is a trick, see, wherein your behaviour at the time might be okay or not okay, as if what is important here is your measure of culpability (Did you do wrong, or did you do right?)

It’s not about whether or whether not you were disrespectful and rude for demanding someone who was shouting at you to shut up, it’s about what kind of person would demand that you remain respectul and polite when that person is shouting at you.

Who is he to proclaim you did wrong? By what moral authority, other than the one you’re asking me to continue giving him by judging if you… did right or wrong? That’s not the sodding point! What you did was perfectly, utterly and entirely okay, and the question is what kind of person keeps banging on about that?

Hopefully, you see the distinction. You can beat yourself up over your lack of tact (and, in a strict measure of the world, you did tell someone to shut up), but that ignores the little bits of everything else, like the fact that the person wanting you to feel bad about lacking tact… refers to a situation wherein it’s perfectly allowable for them to be as angry, shouty and domineering as they can.

Put another way, Ally – No one gets to bring up how disrespectul you are being towards them, when they cause that disrespect by doing the same, and worse and instigating the event they then complain about.

There is a word for that, and the word is hypocrite.

That got a little long, sorry, but I figured you wanted some words when you appenhended not having shared that story before.

Ally, he IS an abuser and he IS a bad man, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with you for telling him to shut up. That was brave, doing so when you were so distressed and frightened. You have nothing to feel guilty about.. Shit, as far as I’m concerned that man should be in prison for the rest of his life.

I hope you get as much support from your siblings as you give them. They seem to be pretty comfortable using a young teenager as their confidant, but they’re falling down a bit now that you’re getting ready to get the hell away.