8.2

Damage Control

Some minor updates before I get to what I actually logged on to talk about: 

• First of all, I actually got my Tumblr account back a few hours ago! I just had to apoligize to 98 accounts for my account trying to scam them through DMs during the few days I lost access (and to the two that just blocked me, I of course understand but I wish I could apologize directly!)
• I also updated this blog’s theme because I got sick of the old one. If formatting looks weird for a while, that’s why.
• House is finally comfortable enough in his new habitat to start looking for a new shell! The one he came in was too small but now he’s picked one that's way too big. It sounds like it wouldn’t be a problem, but if a shell is too large it can cause health issues. I gave him even more options just now so that he hopefully picks a better choice soon. 

he looks so tiny in there!

Now on to what I came here for..

My family has been so stressful this past year and some of that stress came to a head yesterday and today.

I got dinner with my grandparents (my dad’s father and his wife) yesterday and it did not go well. The moment we sat down, they asked if there was any way they could get me to reconcile with my father. I gave them a hard no immediately, but despite this, they kept trying to guilt me into giving in. 

Regardless, they shouldn’t be trying to get involved in this, but what makes it worse is that my dad is feeding them false information about his situation. 

My dad is a CO at a medium security prison and it has entirely ruined his life. The job has traumatized him and changed him DRASTICALLY for the worse, whether he’ll admit it or not. While there was oppurtunities in the past, he now can’t leave this job because of how he’s gambled away tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on daytrading (he admitted to my mother that it’s at least enough to buy a new house). 

This situation is already bad enough, but what’s worse is that he refuses to take a single ounce of responsibility over it. His current narrative is that it’s my mom’s fault. He has convinced my extended family that she takes half of his paycheck for child support, and that’s the reason he’s broke. She actually only gets 10%, and because this agreement was made a decade ago, she could go back to court and get way more than she already does (he makes way more money now). There’s more examples of his lies and exaggerations but I’d have to write way more here than I want to.

I have tried to explain to my grandparents that he’s lying but they seem to never believe me. Instead of listening, they continued to try to make me feel bad for him and my grandpa even said he felt like a bad father because of what’s going on between my dad and I. It got to the point where I had to threaten to leave the restaurant and that’s when they finally stopped. Regardless, the dinner was entirely ruined for me, but I chose not to show it.

I had a feeling this would happen but it still shattered me regardless. Whenever I’m forced to think about my choice to cut off my father, I feel horrible about myself, not because I miss my dad, but because I don’t love him. He was horrible and is still horrible to me but it still feels very wrong to have a dad very much alive in the world but dead to me. My brother is still in his life and I worry that he’s going to face everything I have and more when he inevitably chooses to start pushing back against my dad’s bullshit.

When I got back from dinner, I slept for 16 hours on and off throughout the night and next morning. When  woke up for the day, I sobbed uncontrollably for hours and planned to isolate myself for the rest of the weeks. I’m seeing my dad’s mom for her birthday on Friday and I’m very worried that a similar situation will happen then. My boyfriend wanted to go out tomorrow and at first I said I couldn’t because of how bad things were going for me today.

After that, I tried getting my shit together by attempting to even just play minecraft with him and another friend of ours. While I got on the game, I failed to join the call after an hour of attempting to and this drew some more concern from the both of them. I felt so much worse afterwards because I felt like I was being too much for even saying that I was doing outright bad. I planned to just curl up and try to sleep until Friday but my boyfriend offered to bring me dinner, which I very hesitantly said yes to because of how much of a mess I was. 

*Shockingly,* talking to someone about my situation and eating something besides a single can of tuna today helped me a ton. I changed my mind about going out tomorrow and hopefully Friday goes okay. Ideally there won’t be a follow up to the main chunk of this post, but stay tuned for other things.. -G