Greenstorm's Journal

So my dad is crazy. I don't have a ton of interest in trying to diagnose him, but his behaviour is well outside anything even near normal in a society. He hasn't really held a job. He has initiated and attempted to initiate a lot of very weird lawsuits. He writes relationship-revenge books and self-publishes them. He didn't mow his lawn for 24 years so now the mouldering house inside is invisible. He knows how things should be done. He's That Guy running in local politics. Etc.

Two of my three brothers are crazy. They have been institutionalized in various ways, they're on psychiatric meds, etc. They've experienced psychosis, breaks with reality, etc.

My third brother isn't crazy.

He didn't live with dad when the other ones did. He had a pretty reasonable but sorta bouncy career trajectory. He hasn't had mental health Incidents, maybe a bit of depression like everyone. He works in trades, he's starting to supervise now. He's married. And.

He's been talking lately about how the news media is a vast conspiracy, I think in connection to wanting to vote for a far-right party in support of free speech.

He dropped it into a family chat and I'm having trouble even reading it because I'm terrified. This is the freeze response. It's an enormous trigger response, I literally do not know what is actually happening. We'd, I mean. If I was close with anyone of us it was him.

Please don't let this happen.

Please don't let him turn into my dad (though to be fair my dad supported the same political party I'm planning to vote for federally, so. But I'm just afraid. My body is afraid. I'm afraid of who dad was. I'm afraid of how much contempt he had for everyone who didn't serve him).

What I should do is listen and clearly state what I think: there are lots of frames in the world, there is always room for interpretation, and folks will always be interpreting in ways that they need to for various reasons. It's your job to parse all that and do your own interpretation. It's your job to be knowledgeable in the things you care about. And people having other frames, or multiple frames existing, doesn't mean there's a conspiracy or that things need to be squashed. It just means that there are people.

Mom is handling it cautiously and with real grace and integrity.

Everyone in the world is people, my brother. They're not objects set to willfully obstruct you. They're people. Inside they are just. Like. You. Don't go down dad's road.

Well, now.

Last night it snowed. I'm not ready but then I never am? The snow may not stick out the week yet and I may have a chance to rake before the snowblower.

Yesterday I was given notice; the company isn't waiting it out till the sale. That removes some of my decision-making load anyhow; I have the less money/more time offer in my back pocket and I'll move forward with that. My life will be changing. Last day of work is Friday the the 18th, federal election is the Monday. The following week is hunting/butchering with Josh. Then I will start the new job.

This week Tucker is at his parents'. He's... it's hard that he's on the other side of the continent right now, it's hard that he's seeing his other partners and not me, it's hard that he's not prioritizing time to talk to me over there. But, except, well. So this is someone who actually really does the work. In the couple years that we've been together he's been setting boundaries, striving for things, enjoying things. Being back there is like flicking a switch; we talked a little last night and the depression/self-loathing was turned up to 11, enough that it was very very difficult. Every couple sentences there was an insinuation that the relationship would end, that I was stupid and horrible for liking him, that he was going to do all sorts of deliberate self-harm that was just deniable enough that I wasn't sure what to say.

I don't know how to handle this. I am out of my depth. There's no way to argue with someone's self-loathing, and I'm too far away to get a blanket and offer tea and snuggles and a rewatch of The Last Unicorn. It triggers all my worries about being *inconvenient*: when my presence is treated with such indifference and I have to push hard to have time made to talk to me at all it's a struggle not to back right off. And maybe I should back right off? It has the effect of putting me in my abused place, in walking on eggshells and disappearing as much as possible.

And of course my emotional resources are so low right now. I'm losing my job, I'm going to be worried about money for a bit, my partners are far away and can't support me through this right now, my community has mostly been my work people & I'm losing those too. I haven't been sleeping well with one thing and another, mostly from just being busy.

Luckily I have a whole bunch of beets to can/ferment. Such a concrete gesture of hope for the future coupled with visible achievement always helps me.

I mean, I'm also hopeful about the new job, about having time to myself, about creating a domain and running it in reasonable and orderly fashion, and about doing so in service to the environment (my current position has been so removed from the ecosystems I work in, really). I'm excited about my hunting/butchering week. I'm enjoying my harvest so immensely and can't wait to take down notes on what varieties of which I'm growing again and how I'm organizing things in the future.

Things are really mixed right now. I'd like to have someone bring me a nice cup of tea with milk and honey and pet my hair. I'd like to rewatch The Last Unicorn while snuggling, and eat jam on sourdough english muffins (the sourdough is such an amazing compliment to fruit). I'd like to cry some and have that be ok.

Given a sufficiency of time everything will happen.

So I'm definitely neck-deep in school right now, and I'm remembering which specific issues I have that clash with the university model.

Pretty much, when I set my goals as "getting approval from distant and arbitrary authority figures" I have trouble with my life. School, especially UBC, is 100% under that category, especially when I'm trying for scholarships or particular grades.

My parents were extremely arbitrary and pretty distant authority figures: mom because of depression and other needier kids, dad because of his underlying issue of whateverthefuck. It's pretty easy for me to be triggered into the passive, desperate obedience required of a dependent in that situation since the behaviour was gauged so deeply into my head for so many years.

I dealt with this in high school by getting good grades, accepting the grades-as-approval-structure and excelling in it.

I dealt with it at BCIT by, eventually, getting to know my teachers, being friends with them and thus getting away from the idea of them as authority figures, and also by learning their criteria and styles so they weren't really so arbitrary. I developed a group of friends at BCIT who were all going through the same work as I was. Those friendships affirmed that we were all awesome people aside from marks. I had ultra supportive partners who loved me. Basically, I had other sets of external validation.

Over the years, my source of validation has been shifting from external to internal. This had partly occurred when I was at BCIT, but it has definitely become stronger since then. (As part of becoming acceptable to academia I'm training myself out of the trades talk I trained myself into: less concise but more 'correct'). So when I hit UBC this time I was almost entirely internally-validated. I had a great set of checks and balances to deal with moods, hormones, and other events. A lot of those were actually developed through this journal.

Part of being at UBC is submitting yourself for approval over and over. Yes, I know, it's submitting your *stuff* for approval, but-- at this level, in classes of over a hundred people, where everything is marked by TAs, pretty much a number and a sentence is what you get. So it's pretty hard to frame as submitting my stuff for feedback; to get feedback I need to make an appointment with the teacher by email, go in, bring the thing in that they haven't seen before, and we talk. That's feedback. The other is arbitrary (poorly-defined beforehand, not enough assignments to get a feel for it) approval on my work in an institutionally-enforced absolute sort of sense. By this I mean it's not a matter of taste, it's a matter of me having done it /wrong/.

So I'd kind of... sloughed off a lot of my external approval mechanisms, in favour of internal stuff (no one else really thinks my brewing or organising my house or caring about local farming is SO COOL like I do). And now I'm submitting myself for approval by this arbitrary body, and I don't have counterbalances. I can't just pull my validation back inside, because I need to care enough to do the stuff, even when the class is poorly organised and the information is easy to look up when I need it and so not necessary to memorize or whatever. I *cannot* use my judgement in this, so I cannot trust my judgement.

So I'm doing really poorly. Compounding everything is the way I have no time or money to do things that self-validate, because I'm working enough to eat into basically all my free time but not enough to have extraneous funds (tradespeak: extra cash).

Making friends at school helps SO MUCH. They are also having trouble this time of year, it's hard, just being assured that it IS hard and often arbitrary helps. But... I don't really have time to make friends, with work.

Talking to profs about assignments helps SO MUCH but. It got me through the assignment angst, but it can't get me through not knowing what my midterms tomorrow are going to be like, how they're going to be marked. 'A university-type answer' doesn't really tell me what's up with marking (I think tradespeak is more expressive there).

Brewing helps SO MUCH but. Money. I swear I need a patreon or a friends group at school that will pay me for beer.

Writing this, figuring out the issue, helps but. It's started me reorienting my validation to an internal source, and I know I'll pass things, so it drains my ability to shoot higher (I need to hit certain grade targets for both co-op and scholarships, and those are fiddlier than 'I know I'll pass things').

Long-term goal is to get student loans so I have time to have friends and do cool stuff. In the meantime, O suppose I can only be mindful of seeking validation in good places. When my friends are dicks about being critical of a thing, I tend to feel bad in myself because I place myself on the receiving end of it even if I'm not normally part of that thing.

I probably need to seek out friends who are especially kind, empathetic generally, and not given to vitriol. This will most certainly help me both short and long term.

Funny to think how things have changed. Fifteen years ago I was so into jerks.

It's also interesting to think about me, in school fifteen years ago, with all these things happening to me without my knowledge of what was happening in my head. I guess that's the growth of self-knowledge.

Hm.