evile

Happy Birthday, Bart.

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 19:18:10 GMT

Today, or maybe tomorrow..actually, I think it is tomorrow...is the birthday of my friend Bart. I've written about him at least once before. He died by suicide in 2015.

I'm glad he missed all the terrible losses that followed,.I'm glad he doesn't have to be here suffering, still. But, damn, I miss him. And it's not like we had been close in the last part of his life. I don't think I had seen him in person or spent any time with him in years. He was just .. the first of our gang to die. The first of my high school friends to go. Another shiny beautiful piece of my past, gone.

You always think you have more time; that if you get that once in a blue moon impulse to look up an old friend, there they'll be--married with two kids, doing something boring, or maybe amazingly successful, or maybe living an eccentric life that leaves you delighted to find out. You always think that everyone you know or knew or loved is just 'out there' for a quick email, phone call, facebook message, and you take it for granted and you don't do it that often, because on some level you know you've grown apart over the years and it'd probably come across as wierd and creepy and stalkery...but you sometimes do that internet search and look at pictures and smile at the familiar face grown unfamiiliar with time and all the things you don't remember but somewhere your heart remembers and your skin remembers, and so those feelings stay and stay.

His death was a shattering of that easy assumption, that silly illusion that things and people will always be right where you left them, just as they were. And shards of that shattering went into every single person he loved or who loved him, ever in our lives.

Happy Birthday, Bart. My brain doesn't hold memories too well, but my heart holds this shard of pain and for your sake I will always love it because it's proof I knew you and because I loved you, and pain is a price I'm grateful to pay for all the laughter and fun we had together. Thank you for being my friend.

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I am responsible for what I say. I am not responsible for what you hear (or feel)

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:32:29 GMT

10-10-2016 at 12:41 PM (67 Views)

This seems to be coming up a lot in conversation and I think it's a pretty common codependent sticking-point. We don't want to be disliked. We don't want people around us to be angry or sad. We feel responsible when people don't like us, when people are angry, and when people are sad. We try to do and say things so that people around us will not be angry or sad. There's a fine line here, and I think a lot of us miss it. We speak and behave in ways that are attempts at communication with others. We try to conform ourselves to a person or group that we find admirable and want to belong to/with. We are human, I think it's human to want to belong and fit in, to find our person and our 'tribe'. But as codependents, we take it too far and do damage, both to ourselves and to the people in relationships with us. We enable people we love to make bad decisions and not face consequences. We allow people we love to become lazy, infantilized, and less than they are capable of being, because part of our sickness is to do things for people when they're perfectly capable of doing for themselves, or they need the challenge of figuring out their own problems and solving them. We want to help, and we help too much.

All of which fits in perfectly with the Narcissist/BPD/Cluster B tendency toward a Facts=Feelings mindset, to be selfish and self involved to the point of missing out on reality completely.

I have run across a few disordered people in my life, maybe not all of them were pathological, but at some point this conversation always seems to take place. They tell me: "When you say ____________, It makes me feel you are saying __________."

I got into this twice as a result of being child-free. (I do use this term, and apparently it's offensive to some. I don't apologize for using this term. It is shorter than 'childless by choice,' which is also a term I use.)

One person said something like this: "When you say 'child free' it makes me feel as though you are calling me an animal for breeding," I didn't say this, I didn't think this, and I had no response for this person because I could not make the leap from her 'what I said' to how she felt. It made no sense to me. We were not close friends, this basically ended our being on speaking terms as 'friendly acquaintances,' I retreated in confusion. I don't know how to fix a misunderstanding like this, because the offense was not at what I actually SAID, it was about how she FELT, which I had no control over and had not deliberately tried to offend her feelings....

Another friend, a woman I'd known since childhood, a mother of 3, made a similar complaint at one point in our friendship. I had happily attended every baby shower, kindergarten 'graduation' ceremonies, talent shows, birthdays, etc. I had taken the kids to museums and movies, theme parks, book stores, parks, swimming pools, etc. I took care of them while she went through various medical issues, and I was on the list of adults for the school to call in case of emergency. I loved her, I loved her kids, I was part of their lives as a loving auntie....but for whatever reason, she also took offense to my "child free" status, telling me "When you say you're child-free, it makes me feel like you are calling me a bad person for having kids," (Now, in hindsight this person is a total CB; she was allegedly diagnosed as infertile --I was there the day she came home from the Dr office and I cried with her when she told me she couldn't have babies--and yet she has 3 'miracle' children, timed just far enough apart that she wouldn't have to go to work. The family had financial problems since only the husband was working, they were always on the verge of having utilities cut off or being evicted--and I helped with all that--so, yes, probably she should not have had kids she couldn't afford but...I never said that or even thought it back then)

Incidentally, it's a really great CB detection device when a person tells you "When you say ___, it makes me feel ___."...If you refuse to take responsibility for their feelings, but only for the words you actually said, a CB will melt down, freak out, and decide that you are the devil. And then come the flying monkeys! (Mother of 3's husband came to my house and told me I had until ___ time that evening to say goodbye to his children forever. Broke my heart.)

My Honey and I are both codependents. One of the healthiest, and scariest moments of our relationship came the night he told me "I'm not responsible for your feelings,"....I hated it. It scared me. It felt like a physical gut-punch. But I took the time to think it through and realized that he wasn't saying what it FELT like he was saying. I think that CB's don't have the ability to parse that out. Facts = Feelings. Always and forever. "If I feel bad, it's your fault, and now I have to make you feel as bad as you made me feel!" It's a sick, sad way to live.

When I took the time to think it through, I realized he was being absolutely truthful with me, and saying something totally healthy and non-codependent....and once I took the time to process through everything that was happening and my feelings, our relationship has only gotten better and stronger. It is such a burden feeling responsible for someone else's happiness; and an unfair burden to put on someone else to make them responsible for yours. There is a wonderful freedom in a partnership that exists because each person is taking care of their own emotions and chooses to be together, doesn't "NEED" to be together in order to fix a problem or fill an emotional hole. Slow going, but totally worth it.

So that's what came together for me today!

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Intergalactic Royalty in Exile - Goodbye Pam.

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 03:02:26 GMT

I first met Pam when I was 18 or 19 years old; I had just gotten my first real job (Bookstop!), first apartment, first time living on my own like a real grownup.

Pam was only 10 years older than me but to my naive view, she was impossibly mature and wise; her cynical and witty words on life, relationships, and the world were the words of The Ages.

She had a boyfriend named David who was an on again off again bad dude in her life. An addict, a user, and a liar. He had some story about how he'd stolen some lead from a radiological clinic to sell, melted it down and became sterile but somehow mysteriously got her pregnant after telling that lie. (all of that just to get out of wearing a condom, what a guy.) She didn't keep David's baby. I guess he eventually ended up in jail, prison or dead. I don't remember if she told me what happened to him, or if she knew. She described him as this impossibly beautiful, golden-tongued god of a man...I was disappointed when he came to a party at my apartment behind the bookstore and he was just this stringy hippie. She said he was as smart as she was, but I didn't see it.

The first time I went out to her place (I think she lived out in Lakeway?) I remember she had two cats, a Siamese and an orange tabby. I think the Siamese was named Valentino. Her cats' fur smelled of her perfume. I think I remember him fetching bottle caps. If I don't remember that correctly, then I will just say that I do. Her home was cosy and dark and mysterious, full of her fragrance (YSL Opium) and, it seemed, treasures from many lands and many exotic places lived and loved. Dim lamps draped with silk scarves. I want to remember the quote she gave me about how every woman should have a beaded lamp but I cant, quite.

She drove a Jeep-like car but smaller. Suzuki Samurai? She drove with an open tallboy can of beer in the cup holder and a menthol cigarette between her long delicate fingers, only paying passing attention to silly things like traffic and red lights as the hot Texas wind whipped her long blonde hair around & she shared her wit. She was the most bad-ass woman I'd ever met in my life.

I thought she was the most sophisticated, intelligent, amazing person I'd ever met. I wanted to be Pam when I grew up. Of course, time wore the shine off my infatuation; I quickly learned that Pam had a tendency to pick the worst men, the most self destructive and negative thoughts & behavior...she was a pessimist, a cynic, and yet she always had a perfect literary quote to sum up all the bad times, bad men, and bad choices, and managed to always laugh bitterly at it all.

I remember that laugh, and no one else will ever have it; usually starting with a cough, smoky, snarky, as rich and bitter as the finest cup of coffee.

I remember kissing her at a party; we were drunk as hell.

I remember her imitation of Nancy Spungen from the movie "Sid and Nancy,"--"But Siiiiid, what about the farewell druuuuuuuugs?"

I remember the title of the biography she was always going to write: Why I Hate My Miserable [fucking?] Life By Pamela Miller. It was the refrain for many of her updated tales of male perfidy.

I came back to Austin to visit after I left Bookstop for college in Indiana. I know we hung out a few times. There was always talk of a Bookstop Reunion that never quite happened.

we reconnected some years after my Bookstop Days; I was with the guy who is now my ex and she was with a guy who eventually became her ex, a retired military guy. They lived in a trailer in Dripping springs on some acreage; she ran a little bookstore out of a storage building. Mostly online, I think.

We lost touch again; next time I saw her, she hinted that her retired military ex husband had used her badly, become an addict, and so on and so forth.

She came to my 'throwing out my ex/changing the locks' party. She gave me a CD of music, a playlist for just such an occasion, entitled "Bitch Goddess #1: Music Dealing With Feminine Rage"

Thax and I met her in Austin on Guadalupe one afternoon, "The Drag," where we stood across the street from The Scientology Building in our "Anonymous" masks or bandannas or faces concealed "T-Shirt ninja" style, with silly signs and taunted the khacki & polo-clad Scientology employees as they came and went. Then we got Thai food at Madam Mam's down the street. She paid; she always paid, she was always the one giving, and that was what attracted the users. It was almost as though she felt people wouldn't spend time with her unless she did...I will always feel that money warped her life in some terrible ways.

She had mysterious family out somewhere--wealthy, estranged & dysfunctional, but somehow stil connected; her life seemed to be an attempt to break free of them, but also prove herself to them by making it on her own--waitressing, cashiering, bookstores, banks, whatever--and whenever her life got too upside-down, she could 'always sell some stock' and buy a new car, house, whatever. It was very glamorous but also very sad to me.

I met her brother once or twice; he was quiet and intelligent in that aspie computer guy way. He died of cancer. Her father died of something awful, too, and her mother was last to go. I don't know if she ever felt loved by any of them. She spoke so admiringly of her mother's intelligence, and watching her mom's intellect decline with age really upset and frightened her. She didn't call her mom 'mom'..she called her by her first name.

We reconnected again, via Facebook I guess, and I remember going out to wherever she lived. She had put out a spread of goodies and wine to welcome me; other than the wine none of it was for her--though she loved to cook, she didn't eat much. or sleep much.

I talked her into going on vacation with me and some other folks, a cruise out of Galveston. She brought along a male friend. Another user? At least he was somewhat charming...I had fun, and there are pictures of us dressed up and smiling, but in hindsight I'm not sure how much fun she had. Then...or ever, really.

Friday July 28, she decided to end her stay on planet Earth. On the cruise she'd talked a lot about walking out onto the Glacier so I knew it was on her mind even then. Her dog Nali was the reason she gave to stick around. Nali died a while back. She'd gotten another dog. I guess I hoped that was enough.

I don't know what else to say; I wish I remembered more. She was smart, cynical, beautiful, amazingly funny, miserably sad, and so fucking angry. It was a fire under her skin and in her eyes. I always knew she was going to leave this disappointing world on her terms, it was just a matter of timing. She was Intergalactic Royalty and I hope she's found her throne and the love and light she needed in life and couldn't find or allow herself to have.

I listened to the Bitch Goddess #1 CD today on repeat/shuffle. I heard a song I don't remember ever hearing before. Janis Ian's "From Me to You," and it was the perfect goodbye. Wherever she has gone now, I hope it's not a disappointment.

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