Rants and Musings

So I made a small post on my tumblr about something that really bothers me, and I wanted to go into it more here.

My biggest 'pet peeve' is people who refuse to take responsibility for their actions and how it effects them.

This is something I've gone over with my therapist before, and I feel like it's a good idea to fully put it down.

I just can not honestly understand how someone could go through life and think that every single thing that happens to them is someone elses fault. I mean, some things, yes, but everything? Every single bad thing that has happened to you has been because of someone else? I know someone that is constantly getting evicted from their rentals, and every single time it's because 'the landlords an asshole'. Well yeah, he's probably pretty pissed at you for not paying your rent.

I mean, if you've been fired from 6 jobs within as many months, how can you not, at some point, think that maybe you're just a shitty employee?

I know where my strong feelings about this comes from. This is what my mother does. To the T. This is also one of the reasons I don't speak to my mother any more.

Story time. 

When I was thirteen, my mother took my younger brother and I and moved us a thousand miles away to live in Vermont. As if that wasn't bad enough by itself, it was to go and live with someone she met on the internet. My dad was absolutely heart broken about his, but he figured that children belong with their mother and didn't fight it. That is seriously a concept that just needs to die.

So she moves us up there in November. We went from 90*F to a foot of snow on the ground in less than a day. It was shocking to say the least.

Anyway, we moved in with this man, that we had never met before, and who my mother had only spoken with via internet and phone. So things were pretty tense to say the least.

We lived in this tiny 2 bedroom basement apartment out in a very remote area. The school I went to was the absolute worse place I have ever been to. I'd been bullied all my life, but these kids were just down right vicious.

This was my first time dealing with depression. It was so bad that I wouldn't even change my clothes. I would just come home, go straight to bed, and wake up and change my shirt before going to school. There were ink stains on the sheets because I didn't even bother to take the pens out of my pocket. It was that damn bad.

So of course, I wasn't exactly a ray of sunshine. Things were bad for my 8 year old brother as well.

After being there for 4 months, my mother and this man broke up. Not exactly a big surprise there. I mean, this whole thing was destined to fail, you could see it from a mile away.

So then he kicks up out. Straight up tells us to pack our shit and be out before he gets back from work.

We did that, and moved into a hotel until we could get tickets for a flight back to Texas. While we're sitting at the airport waiting for our flight, my mother than tells us that we would be taking the flight to Texas on our own, because she was taking a different flight to California to live with her dad.

Now here's the point of this story. She goes on a huge tangent about how we wouldn't have to be doing all this if we'd just behaved ourselves. It was OUR fault, mine and my brothers, that her relationship failed. Because we, being brother and sister, cooped up in a tiny apartment and had to share a room for the first time in our lives, fought too much. We did what every freaking brother and sister has done for all of time.

It wasn't because their relationship just didn't work out, it wasn't because (as I found out later) he had FUCKING AIDS!, it wasn't because THEY fought all the time, it was because WE fought all the time. WE were the ones to blame. WE were the ones that did wrong.

This is the first time (that I can remember) of many that my mother did this to me.

I could probably write a book on all the shit she's done to me, and maybe I should, to be honest, but this is with out a doubt why I have this very intense hatred of people who act like this.

It is also probably the reason for my intense anxiety that I have. I've gone full reverse from what my mother does. Rather than blame everyone else for my mistakes and problems, I feel like I'm responsible for everything that goes wrong, even if I'm not.

Only recently, with the help of the (finally) perfect cocktail of drugs and therapy have I been able to stop thinking like that. That I stop blaming myself things that are out of my control.

The unfortunate thing is that I have to deal with this a lot in my job. I work in driver licensing, what many states call a DMV. I have to speak to people that have their license suspended out the wazoo because of stuff they did, usually drunk driving.

Do they feel responsible for it? No, It's the officers fault for giving them the ticket. It's the states fault for having there be fines attached to DWI's. It's my fault for not just making it go away for them. Don't I know they have stuff to do? That they need the license to get on a plane tomorrow? That work is going to fire them if they don't get it taken care of TODAY?

I have been told, so many times, that I have ruined that persons life. I have been called the 'rudest person in all of Texas'. I have been called a 'cold hearted bitch'. I have been called so many different things, from so many different people, all because they don't want to except the consequences of their actions.

So I guess, it all being wrapped together, this would be why I can't stand it.

Ladies Craft Night.

So my lady friends and I got together for a late night craft party the other night. We got together to make tiny hats. There was plenty of wine and laughs to be found. 

Bonus: My hat was freaking baller. I mean look at this

 

 That's some Mad Hatter shit right there. 

 

My friend Heather made an adorable EXTRA tiny hat. 

Heather was the only one who remembered to buy hair clips, so she's the only one actually wearing hers. I didn't get any pictures of my friend Steph because by the time she got done with her hat we were all way to drunk to remember to do that. 

Spending the evening with them made me realize several things. One, these ladies are very much my best friends right now in my life. Which is a little weird because they're both coworkers. Secondly, they are the first friends that I've actually realized that they really like me as a person, rather than someone who just was being nice to me because they felt sorry for me. 

I've had that a lot in my life. That happened a lot in my childhood. Once, when I lived in Vermont, I had a girl who would be nice to me, but then she told me (via in a note in a Junior Mint box filled with rocks) that she never really liked me, and for me to stop talking to her because everyone else was making fun of her about it. 

That one hurt. It hurt a lot. I was at a very low point in my life then. My mom and dad had just split up, my mom moved my younger brother and I from Texas to Vermont in the middle of winter. No one there liked me, and they were all very very rude. I still remember how those little shits talked to the teachers up there. That shit would NOT have happened where I was from. You just didn't do things like that. All and all, it was the worst 3 months of my entire life, and I will never get over it.

That may have been the big one, but other things like that have happened over time. I think that scarred me quite a bit. I've always had that feeling, that people aren't saying nice things because they mean them, they say them because their nice, and that's how we are here. 

In Vermont, people just didn't care about your feelings, which is why no one was nice to me. Here in Texas, most people are raised to have manners and to be polite to others, so the thought of just coming out and saying horrible things to people (whether I think them or not) is really foreign to me. 

Anyway, getting back on topic. I don't get that feeling from these ladies.  Heather out-and-out said to me that if she didn't like me, she would not be hanging out with me. She would not have invited me to her house. That made me believe her. No one has ever put it to me like that.

So yeah, pretty much the point I'm trying to get across here, is that if anyone is reading this, and you have the same fears of rejections, come out and ask them. Think of them and how they are. Are they the type of people that would ever do that? If you know these people who are genuinely good people, do you really think that they would invite them into their life all while thinking venomous thoughts about you?

My therapist said that kind of thinking is to protect yourself. I would think that about everyone in my life (my husband included, who honestly could have left me years ago and not have felt any shame in doing so) was only trying to be nice to me because when they came out and said it, it wouldn't hurt as much. 

This is one of the big things I need to work on.