July 21, 2010
11:42
Dear mom
you have been mean to me the past few days. Whenever I try to effect change, you get defensive. Lately you have been defensive. When I point out how much sugar is in your breakfast, I'm not trying to be condescending or cruel. I just see the horrible shape you are in, and I want you to be alive for as long as you can be.
Our lives have descended into a fraction of what they were before. You used to be my mom, you used to be everything in my world. Now I think of you more as a monster. As something I need to keep at bay at all times.
I got this version of OCD because of you. I got it because you scarred me, and when you get mad at me for taking the car and using the gas, it's because my fear of contamination spread to the other family members. So if I want to go pick up dad, I need your car so that he won't get in mine. It's a fear of contamination that comes from you. When you get mad at me for not feeling like I can take a package to the post office or something like that, it's again because you have touched it and I fear your touch.
You are deteriorating daily. You can barely leave the house. You seem completely full of shit. I believe nothing will ever change because of you. I don't ever see the money that I get for being crazy. I have no position. You make me feel completely powerless.
I hate to get you Coke, but you bully me. You drink so many cans of it every day, and the more I say no, I won't get that for you, the more oppressive you become until I get it just so you will leave me alone.
I want you to live for many more years so that maybe someday, we can be friends. So that I'm not afraid of speaking to you, so that I can tell you about my life. The life I've wanted is so long ago, it lives in my fantasies in the future. It lives in 2010 in some alternate reality.
I have vague memories of being a child when you were my mom, and now I feel like you aren't. I feel like you're the biggest, most oppressive force I have ever known. I suppose there is big business and government, but my powerless in the face of all those things comes from you. And I know I could never tell you that because you would tell me it's not your fault. I feel like it is, though. I'm free to say that here.
I want my bank accounts, I want my money I receive. I want to stop sharing my entire life with you. I want to have sex in my bedroom. I want to be able to walk through a house and leave things around. I want to be able to have a clean piano, to put music down.
I can't experience things the way other people do because I fear touching you. I can't store a lunch in the refrigerator and take it out and take it with me because it's contaminated in the fridge. I can't keep a toy piano in my room, or most instruments, because they will be contaminated by the room.
I want to create beauty. I know time is limited, but I feel like any decision I make is filtered through you. You taught me to feel powerless. When I wanted to move out, you convinced me not to. I feel like to move out, to be a normal functional creature� it is as outlandish as becoming a successful artist is to me. That's why I pursue art even though it seems hopeless. Because everything seems hopeless.
I am scarred every single day because of you, and I wish you could see that even if you don't see the role you play in it, so you could help me. I told you the breakfast you made was full of sugar because it was, because one of the reasons I made holistic health my minor was because of you and even though I utterly failed my HH class, I'm trying to get information from Anticancer for both of us. You claim to listen, but you never do.
I hear the grocery delivery guy now, and I dread what will become of the fridge that I cleaned. It looked like a corpse had rotted away at the bottom before, and now it looks more like an Apple Store. I can feel you behind me, and my typing grows more fervent because I know you will compromise me.
You have a compulsive urge to fill empty spaces, so that when it is time for the space to be used, it becomes necessary to stack things haphazardly atop other things. This is no life.
I told you that the key to happiness is to have all your possessions with all their feet planted firmly on whatever surface they are on. A bit hyperbolic. But I think it's advice you should have taken to heart. I try to organize things so they make sense, and you compromise that order. Putting food items on the drink shelf, barely wrapped, so they make a mess. Spilling shit everywhere.
I'll get your fucking Coke. I'll kill you like you ask me to, even though I don't want to, because you will punish me if I don't.
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