Prudence Deer

 I currently work for an idiot and it makes me feel stupid. Every day that I have to take idiotic directions that lessen the effectiveness of my own work, I feel like I just won't be able to take any more. I work remotely, so that's better than the years I had to spend in the office listening to this asshat talk incessantly about things that had absolutely nothing to do with me or my job. I honestly believe that he can't have a single thought without his loud mouth engaged.  And yet, I keep working for him and I keep trying to make his dumb ass happy in some way as he flushes the company down the toilet with his stupid decisions. Why do I stay? Part of it is that it's not much work for decent pay. I mean, I sometimes go full days with nothing more than a couple of emails and a facebook post. It's frustrating and humiliating but I'm sticking with the devil I know as I try and get my own company off the ground. This is a model I believe I was forced to learn from ...

At times - most times - I'm unable to understand how to cope with common problems that other people seem to deal with. It may not be easy for them, but they seem to know what to do. I've always felt like life was difficult every step of the way. No big problem has ever had a clear answer, or at least a reasonable choice. They all feel as though I'm reinventing the wheel while also knowing that it's been done before. I just wasn't clued into the solution. When I think about my childhood, I realize why I've felt that way my whole life. It's because my parents never tried to teach me anything about life. Granted, that may be due to the fact that they didn't know a lot themselves, but they'd done things. At the time i was born, my father was 28 and he'd purchased a house. I didn't buy my first house until I was 56, and I was embarrassed that I knew so little about how to go about it. My brother, who'd stayed at home until he was in his 30s, h...

 I wasn't a good scout. I was a Cub Scout and that went pretty well overall, given that the tasks we were given to do were all pretty easy and I wasn't at all ambitious about achieving anything. When I moved up to the Webelos, things got worse. They made doing the tasks to earn little pins more of a focus. There were also five "Tommys" in my group which was weird. But the worst part was dreading the move to Boy Scout. I kept hearing rumors about the things that happened when you became a Boy Scout. First off, there were camping trips. Ugh. I'll have to dedicate an entire post to camping, but suffice it to say that our family vacations were always spent crammed together in a camper because my cheap-ass father wouldn't spring for a fucking hotel room from time to time. Anyway, the Boy Scouts supposedly had something called a jamboree and it sounded nothing like the jamboree of the country bear variety at Disney World. There were stories that all new scouts at th...

 I've been thinking a lot about the various aspects of my personality and wondering which of them are truly mine and which ones were created by the treatment I received as a child. When I go down the list, I wonder if any of these traits actually belong to my true self. Sometimes, it makes me wonder how much I really want to complete this course of discovery of self. Will I even like who I find when I help my true self flourish and grow within me? It's scary.  While I want to be free of the pain that my parents forced on me, not knowing who I am deep down makes me feel like I could be on the verge of losing the only self I've ever known. Will I be lonelier without him? Will I be happier? Maybe more grounded but without many of my creative abilities?  Does it even matter? I've shown myself that I can't continue with things as-is. I've tried desperately to pursue relief for my TMS pain, only to have it return again and again. In some ways, this feels like my last ...

 Hello, Enlightened Witness. It has only recently occurred to me that my brother may not have experienced our mother the way that I did. I think that's why he venerates her while I work at digging out from the pile of shit she dumped onto me my whole life. I think this may have happened because she was never alone with him the way that she was alone with me. I was always there watching and witnessing. That alone may have stilled her harmful impulses, but I also think that she chose to own me in a way she never did to him. I was her first child. I was the first child of a woman whose parents had made no secret of the fact that they'd had her for the express purpose of being taken care of when they were old. I was the first "thing" she'd had in her life that she could call her own. This was the early 60s, which for all intents and purposes, was still an extension of the 50s, especially in the small town where my parents grew up. Women were not their own. Only their ...