Denial Gets You Nowhere

I moved to Eugene under the impression that it’s a progressive college town and a hippie mecca. It didn’t take long to learn that its days of being a hippie mecca are … pretty much over. I know this isn’t the 1960s or 70s but still, hippies are still a thing on the West Coast, and they were still a thing in St. Louis, at least in the 1990s.

In the past week or so, I’ve discovered disturbing things about Eugene via Nextdoor. I’ve learned that white supremacists are organized enough in Eugene to be making sure that no yards have Black Lives Matter signs. It got me reflecting on my impression—that started not long after I moved here—that while Portland has radicals such as anarchists and socialists, Eugene is more about liberal Democrats. It can be a bit frustrating.

On top of that, denial among white people in Eugene is apparently a normal everyday thing when it comes to local white supremacists.

I posted a link to the GoFundMe page to help Isiah Wagoner, the black activist who was supervising the Children’s March when a white supremacist deliberately ran over him. This was after I read about how the driver gave him the finger before stepping on the gas and aiming for Isiah Wagoner. This was obviously intentional… and yet the cops let the psycho free. Meanwhile, Isiah Wagoner is in the hospital—hence the GoFundMe page.

The only comments I’ve received for posting this on Nextdoor were a couple people claiming that maybe he isn’t a white supremacist. The second commenter even made some bizarre comment, suggesting that it wasn’t intentional and that maybe he was distracted… because people are pulling people out of cars?!?!?!? Um, no. So with a roll of my eyes, I found the original Eugene Weekly article and copied and pasted the url into my post about the GoFundMe page.

Denial isn’t just a river, especially with closed-minded fools.

This is What Fascism Looks Like

There’s a revolution and a rebellion or maybe an actual revolution going on—certainly, there have been some changes for the better, such as new laws against chokeholds (that’s not good enough!) and the Minneapolis police disbanding because it’s rotten to the core. There’s talk of having social workers instead of batshit armed police responding to mental health issues (so they won’t continue killing people for being suicidally depressed—WTF). There is change happening, though so far not enough. Also more white people are taking antiracism to heart and participating in the movement and watching films and reading books that are antiracist. Netflix, I discovered yesterday, even has curated a lot of films and tv shows as “Black Lives Matter” and that was the first thing that appeared on my tv screen when I clicked on Netflix.

But my point is this: we’re in a pandemic that isn’t going away thanks to the ridiculous way this country has handled it, and we’re in the midst of more or less a revolution. A protest against systemic racism and police brutality—that results in more extreme and obvious police brutality and more blatantly obvious fascism. I’ve had days when reading news has made me chant aloud, “This is what fascism looks like,” a twist on “This is what democracy sounds like.” It’s a weird time.

I have severe anxiety over all this, all the uncertainty and whatnot. This country is a dumpster fire. Ergo I don’t need extra crap to cause additional anxiety, especially when a psychic vampire, someone who doesn’t deserve all this anxiety, is the cause of the extra anxiety.

Anxiety… and Funny Cats

I just remembered: I forgot to do laundry. I could do it now… or wait until tomorrow….

Brooding about toxic people. They’re not worth it. A pandemic and a revolution and that’s what I’m brooding about. No, that’s the other thing I’m brooding about in addition to the pandemic and revolution and white supremacy. Lots to brood and panic over.

Not sure I’ve gotten through a day this week without crying a little. The crying is when the pandemic and riots and all that are on my mind, not empathy-less assholes.

Nasal congestion, a little phlegm, and very little coughing, so I’m getting better and might be up to taking tonic again starting tomorrow. Of course, I could also be Typhoid Mary–asymptomatic with coronavirus.

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A few minutes ago, I was pressing pieces of sleeves for my 1890s tea gown.

Virginia was dozing on the chair inches away from me. She didn’t react when I sprayed the bottle of spray starch. When I push the top button, it hisses a bit like a cat.

In contrast, Gabriel was sitting in the doorway and watching me the first time he heard the spray starch hiss. He jumped and ran out of the room and down the stairs.

Gabriel soon returned, and while he walked into the room, the spray starch hissed again. Gabriel jumped, turned, and ran back down the stairs.

Gaslighting in Hindsight

Response to a Twitter post about giving an example of someone accusing you of something and they turned out to be wrong:

A frenemy for years kept insisting I’m bipolar and schizoid (I’m neither). She finally called me a sociopath during one of her tirades. She also claimed she has no personality disorders. Turns out she’s a narcissistic sociopath and I’m an empath.

Boundaries

I’ve been a reject and a misfit all my life and always will be, and I do have to accept that. However, I do NOT have to accept toxic people in my life. I do not have to accept them whether they’ve been in my life for a long time or come into my life in the future. They have NO right to be in my life. They have NO right to verbally abuse me. They have NO right to project their traits onto me. They have NO right to gaslight me. They have NO right to have any contact with me or to take up any of my time, attention, or energy.

Shove Off, Narcissist

Oh, look, my inbox contains an email from Mindfucking Psychopath, who still believes he’s entitled to have contact with me. Nope, still incorrect. I can see the beginning of the message in the subject line, and it looks like a pseudo-apology at best.

Actually, despite the above sardonic tone, my reaction to merely seeing that in my inbox put me in a murderous rage. No, I am not ready to read a message from that narcissist who used some of the same manipulation techniques as the narcissistic sociopath who gaslighted me for six years.

No, Fuckface is NOT entitled to project his majesty’s traits onto me. He is NOT entitled to gaslight me. His belief that those closest to him have to walk on eggshells or let him lash out at them–or walk around on eggshells AND let him shower them with verbal abuse anyway–is bogus and always has been bogus.

No, he has NO right to have ANY contact with me. His delusions of entitlement are bogus, always have been, and always will be.

While I do regret texting with that narcissist and thereby getting into a fight with the parasite, I do NOT regret blocking his majesty’s phone number and social media accounts. I do not regret going No Contact, as I did with other toxic relatives years ago.

I DO regret that it took me this long to finally stop having blind and stupid loyalty to that narcissist. It seems ridiculous that it lasted as long as it did.

Since a narcissistic sociopath gaslighted me for six years and I broke up with her in 2016 and have learned a great deal from that experience, it was inevitable that I would FINALLY stop having that blind and stupid loyalty to that self-entitled parasite. His delusions of entitlement are as bogus as those of the narcissistic sociopath.

He should be grateful that my blind and stupid loyalty lasted so long—but instead he’s outraged that it’s finally gone. He didn’t deserve that loyalty, had no gratitude for it, took it for granted, and destroyed it. It’s never returning. Good riddance.

So yeah, while I’ve certainly gone through afflictive emotions and have been depressed since he lashed out at me via texting, days before social distancing became official here…. I certainly learned from this experience. My days of letting him lure me back into a false sense of security–my days of assuming he has a right to be in my life–are permanently over.

I’m sure I’ll read and respond to Mindfucker’s email at some point, but not today. Not while I’m in a rage. I intend to meditate a lot this month and read at least one self-help book and hopefully get back to reading a Buddhist book by Sharon Salzberg. After all of the above, then I should… probably… maybe… be up to reading Mindfucker’s email. That could be a month of meditating and reading. At least.

And I need to actually do this meditating–formal sitting meditation, not just tell myself to do it. That’s not only my usual informal meditating first thing in the morning and last thing when I turn out the light at night. I used to be seriously into meditation the first few years that I got into Buddhism; it was normal for me to meditate at least an hour a day, occasionally as many as three hours. I got out of the habit when I moved many states away.

I’m creative and suck at time management, so it’s easy to procrastinate and prioritize writing and sewing over meditating. But if I’m going to read that email without going into a rage and without writing an enraged reply, I need to get back into intensive daily meditation.

This pandemic would have been stressful enough without verbal and psychological abuse. The fact that Fuckface pulled that shit right before I began social distancing means that this social distancing has not been easy for me–it has involved a great deal of rage and brooding in addition to emotional sponge general pandemic anxiety. That’s another thing he isn’t entitled to: creating so much trauma.

He has no right to have any contact with me. In fact, his majesty isn’t entitled to a reply email. I don’t owe him anything, especially not even more of my time, energy, and emotional labor.

Bad Roommate Dream

My lower back is a bit achy, which might explain why I dreamed that I was a witch who put a curse on an enemy, giving them an achy back.

I had a dream in which I had two roommates. One of them was this rather conventional blond woman. She and I were in the laundry room, I think, and she owned the house we lived in. She was bustling around and having a monologue…. during which she said, “You’re a lazy roommate, but at least you can afford to pay the rent.” I froze in shock. She kept talking. She also continued bustling about and soon left the room.

At some point, I had processed enough to be walking around the house and grumbling. “If I’m so lazy, how do you explain the fact that I’m writing the first draft of a 90,000-word novel in only one month?! Oh, yeah, that’s really lazy!”

Next I was out and about in an urban area on a gray day. I parked in an alley, I think. I needed time to process, and now I was furious at the judgmental roommate and knew I’d be moving out as soon as possible.

I found myself at what may have been a yoga studio—an event was going to start soon, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t staying for it. I was walking in the opposite direction from everyone else in an alley leading into the yoga studio. Someone skinny paused in walking to do a yoga pose right there on the spot in the middle of the alley. I wondered if I could still do that yoga pose and knew better than to try it in front of others. The accusation of laziness was fresh in my mind.

At some point, I was one of three women who were wandering in an alley kind of lost. I wasn’t sure where my car was and was trying to remember where I parked. I ended up, still in an alley, where there was a concrete-looking building with a lot of clutter, junk, and people standing in line. One of them was a woman I had been walking with in the alley. Even though she was in line and I was in the alley and intended to continue searching for my car, I was still talking with her and vented about my asshole roommate. I may have said something about how I was going to start packing up and searching for an apartment today.

I woke up in a foul mood and remembered an occasion when a bunch of toxic relatives had, as usual, broken into my house and sat around my living room and accused me of being lazy. I was shocked and speechless in reaction. This was a time when I was working a minimum of 40 hours a week at a thankless job… and when I wasn’t at that job, I was writing, sculpting, or meditating. How does that fit the description of “lazy”? I was writing, among other things, a 500-page novel about those same relatives who thought themselves entitled to break into my house and take their personality disorders out on me.

Nightmares during a Pandemic

I dreamed that I lived in a large Victorian Queen Anne house in a fairly rural area. The house had a wrap-around porch and a stone foundation with a basement. Because the house was built on a slope, the basement had an exterior side door.

At some point I had a visitor who was a friend.

Toward the end of the dream, I heard people on the front porch. I was in the basement and didn’t want to talk to them. I wanted to hide. I slipped out of the basement side door without locking it and ended up… where? Under the front porch? On the porch? It seems like I ended up on the wrap-around porch, which doesn’t make sense if I was trying to avoid people whom I thought were at the front door.

Wherever I was, I witnessed a group of about six people slip in through the basement door I left open! They were breaking into my house.

Enraged, I went after them.

I went into the basement and grabbed a long piece of wood leaning against a wall and, yelling, “Get out of my house!” or something like that, charged at one man. A struggle ensued, with me pushing his throat and him against the wall while the others watched (or ran away?).

A male friend or acquaintance of mine came up behind me and tried to be the voice of reason, I guess. He said, “Don’t kill him! You’d end up in prison!” I just felt angrier.

 

I dreamed that my brother and I were in a car in a parking lot. We were having a conversation… and we may have been talking about the past, when we lived in Indiana.

He said something about Britney Spears. Confused, I knit my brow and said, “But… I don’t think Britney Spears was around in the 80s.”

Completely out of the blue, he yelled at me—how typical—I don’t remember what. His rage made no sense and creeped me out (what else is new?). He got out of the car.

I recovered from my shock enough—only after the asshole got out of the car—to become enraged and, giving him the finger with both hands and yelling repeatedly… well, something very vituperative that I won’t repeat hear. He ignored me

 

(Last night I was revising one of those autobiographical novels inspired by toxic people. That could well have triggered that dream, even though it was a different perpetual playground  bully. I am so sick of empathy-challenged perpetual playground bullies who harbor a bizarre delusion that they’re entitled to use me as their doormat/verbal and psychological punching bag and that it’s somehow magically my duty to be their doormat/punching bag. I was sick of them before the 1980s ended.

Cloister Monkey

I dreamed that I lived in a ranch house in which I had a doll collection so extensive that I had dolls in just about every room. I was showing this collection to someone female… who at some point I realized was Evil Aunt Ethel.

There was a small shelf covered with small dolls in one room, maybe a bathroom. The earlier rooms aren’t as clear in my head now.

Many of the dolls were similar to those I saw in the Cinema Manuel exhibit in the basement of the Hult Center. New-looking porcelain dolls covered several shelves (in the exhibit)—the dolls that were set up so that they could move and seemingly watch you.

Anyway, the dolls in the dream weren’t moving… but neither were they anywhere near as interesting as my real doll collection, never mind that there were more of them. (None looked antique, and there weren’t any Japanese dolls or anything Asian or foreign-looking.)

There was a dining room with a utility shelf or row of utility shelves, on which one large section was covered with a row of porcelain dolls with doll stands. The dolls were all about the same size.

On a wooden shelf, I had rows of dolls, some porcelain (including two very different black girl dolls in a row—and one was a couple inches shorter than the other, one wore red plaid—but they were both porcelain). This bookcase also had a few ceramic figurines, including at least one frog; and I pointed these out and said, “My mother made these.”

That’s when my guest turned into Evil Aunt Ethel. She said (condescending, sing-songy), “You could make ceramics like those, too.”

I felt nervous when she said that. It was like when I mentioned that I didn’t know how to upholster furniture and two aunts ganged up on me, smugly gloating because of this one thing I didn’t know how to do, and they said I could learn how. That was one of those countless occasions when aunts were eager to ignore things I’m good at and blow out of proportion something I’m not good at, trying to make me feel like shit for not being perfect or for not being their weird notion of perfect.

I think that’s when the dream ended.

 

It’s not surprising that I’d have a dream involving my aunts’ delight in this continual inclination to focus on the negative and come up with bizarre excuses to criticize me in attempts to make me feel like shit and hate myself—that was a very common experience around aunts. And it didn’t feel good.

You could say it was part of their gaslighting. Since I wasn’t an expert on every single craft and domestic skill, I was a piece of shit to ridicule. It didn’t matter that unlike them, I can write, draw, paint, sculpt, etc. But of course, nothing I was good at mattered—only what I was bad at or allegedly bad at (“You’re not as good at history as your brother”) or what I didn’t know how to do.

You can expect that sort of behavior if you associate with narcissists and narcissistic sociopaths.

 

I had another dream in which I was thinking about the above dream and described myself as a “wandering cloister monkey” or a “self-possessed cloister monkey.”

Haedrig

I have three very affectionate and sweet cats who are attached to me. And then there’s Haedrig, a. k. a. Asshole. Yeah, I just changed his name to Asshole.

I adopted Haedrig at a cat shelter when he was two years old—thanks to a narcissistic sociopath frenemy who picked him. Of course I couldn’t say no to a cat. If I hadn’t been under her influence, Haedrig would still be in that cat shelter, because he has a… difficult … personality. He doesn’t bond with humans. Sure, he can be cuddly, though it took him years to reach a stage of letting me pet him for more than a minute before scratching me or at least lunging at me. Occasionally he still does that.

You might think he simply doesn’t trust humans. True, but guess what: I’m the one who has no reason to trust him, not the other way around. He has repeatedly proved himself untrustworthy.

On the evening of February 24, I opened the sliding door and left it open, as I headed for the laundry room (which is only accessible from the back yard). I have a cat fence in the backyard, and my indoor cat Haedrig is the only one who’s never climbed the tree in the back yard to get out of the overpriced cat fence. (Do I regret not hiring someone to custom build a huge catio instead of getting this cat fence? Absolutely!) Even with the cat fence, I don’t regularly allow Haedrig in the backyard—sometimes he gets out through the kitchen window if I leave it open because another cat is sitting on the windowsill. Until this week, I’ve figured it’s okay if Haedrig is inside the cat fence.

After I left that sliding glass door open and did my laundry chores, I didn’t see Haedrig in the backyard, not for a second. I would’ve expected to at least see him slipping under the low deck, but no. Inside, I closed the door … and forgot the possibility that Haedrig might be outdoors.

The next morning, I woke at 7 am and realized that I hadn’t seen Haedrig all night and didn’t see him now. He always spends the night at the foot of the bed. Alarm bells sounded in my head: I remembered leaving the glass door open for a few minutes. Even one minute is enough for him to sneak out, and he’s quiet and fast. I concluded that he was in the backyard, and I opened the kitchen window. I went outside… and not only didn’t see him but also had a strange sense that he wasn’t in the backyard.

I reported him missing on the HomeAgain website (he’s microchipped) and on the Nextdoor app.

The following day, I spotted Haedrig: on the front porch! Of course, when I opened the front door, he ran away. If I’m standing and holding a door open for him, he runs away, unlike any other cat I’ve ever met, and I’ve lived with cats all my life. I caught another glimpse of him, dashing under my car in the driveway. Uncomfortable with doing this, I propped the screen door open and left the front door open… for twenty minutes. I figured that if I wasn’t close to the door, he’d get indoors. But he didn’t. So I continued leaving the kitchen window open, as long as I was at home and it was daylight.

Yesterday he finally came in through the kitchen window, and I watched as he scurried away through the living room. I figured he was headed upstairs (he was) and I dashed to the kitchen, where I shut the kitchen window. When I reached the top of the stairs—and expected to see him curled on the foot of the bed or slipping under the bed—instead I saw him just past the threshold of the sewing room. We made eye contact, and he turned around and dashed for the sewing room closet… where I’d left the panel to the crawl space open so that Virginia could come in and out of the crawl space without waking me. (She’s very vocal.)

Haedrig entered the crawl space.

I used my phone flashlight to peer into the crawl space and couldn’t see him… and  remembered that somehow Virginia can access that crawl space from outdoors. I’ve told myself she has magic powers. But it turns out that the crawl space has an exit to the outdoors somewhere, and cats can use it to get in and out, and Haedrig the cat from hell figured out Virginia’s trick. This utterly infuriated me: he had actually been inside the house… and yet he managed to get back outside! This is when I renamed him Asshole.

Last night, I intended to set up cat traps with canned tuna as bait… but I figured if the kitchen window was open and the other cats got outdoors, I might catch one of them. Plus last time I used a cat trap, I caught a cute baby possum. Besides, Haedrig ate in the kitchen before running up to the crawl space, so he wasn’t as hungry as he could be. I decided to put off the traps for one night: the kitchen window remained closed all night, and I opened it and the gate to the cat fence this morning.

I was upstairs when I heard a meow. I exchanged a startled look with my cat Gabriel, who also heard it. That meow didn’t sound like anyone except… Haedrig. I’d not only closed off the closet panel leading to the crawl space, but I’d also closed the sewing room door. (Normally it’s wide open, but thanks to Haedrig, I’m keeping that door closed until I can find a door for the closet. This house is quirky.)

I pushed aside the panel to the crawl space—and sure enough, I saw Haedrig. I descended the steps and closed the kitchen window and the back gate. Back upstairs, I saw him out of the crawl space, greeting Gabriel… and he saw me and dashed back into the crawl space, further proving that Asshole is the perfect name for him.

My new strategy: keep the kitchen window closed and the crawl space panel open so that he can only enter that way. As soon as I’m between him and the crawl space panel, I put the panel back, put craft supply bins in front of it, and close the sewing room door. Also, if he’s not in the house by sunset, I’m setting those cat traps.

Why has this situation been so infuriating? Well, I’m a cat person—really, I am. As I mentioned, my other three cats are sweet and affectionate. They come back inside happily, purring at me and plopping in my lap. They don’t avoid me.

Not so Haedrig. I’ve taken care of him since 2015, no thanks from him. He’s a bit like that narcissistic sociopath who chose him: an arrogant, self-entitled, and remarkably ungrateful mooch. At least he has the excuse of not being human, but still. If he’s going to eat cat food in this house, he’d better stay in this house and not avoid me, the person who feeds him and takes him to the vet. Respect and acceptance are needs, not luxuries, and this asshole deprives me of both, just like… a narcissist or a narcissistic sociopath. I finally have no toxic people in my life. It’s not the sort of behavior I’ve ever previously experienced with a cat.

After adopting him and discovering that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me, I still felt it was my responsibility to give him a home… and yet sometimes, such as today, I wish I hadn’t adopted him in the first place. If it weren’t for that narcissistic sociopath, I would have allowed a shelter cat to choose me.