20 december 2018
Today was hard. I miss my cat and my partner, and home is just so isolating. My mother was telling me that this house will always be home to me, and that home will always be where she and my dad and sister are, but that hasn't been true for a long time. It's hard to remember the last time this felt like home. It was probably in elementary school, when we lived in Nebraska. Once we moved to NC, things got worse. They fought all the time. I spent middle school curled around books at night, trying to escape. It wasn't a home. Home isn't a place where your little sister comes crying into your bed at night because she can't sleep with all the screaming downstairs. It feels... laughable, really, to call this a home. It's just a house that I'm required to visit. As shitty as Tech was at times, it was much more of a home than this house has ever been. Now, I'm lucky enough to have an apartment that's mine. I can create my own home, with my candles and my cooking and my cat and my partner. My mother will never see how much pain this house causes me because she refuses to listen when I tell her about the pain she's caused me. She talked to me about how much my sister is struggling, and about how society is causing all the mental illness in my generation. She won't shut up about her ideas re: why so many of my friends have been touched by suicide this year. It makes me so mad to listen to her, to hear her judge those people because of their decision. She can't see that the way she acts is why my generation is hurting. Her homophobia. Her racism. Her lack of care for anyone different. I'm so scared of what she'd think of me if she ever saw the real me. When I do inclusivity work, I feel like a fraud. I tell people to be brave, to confront the prejudice they see around them and I'm not even brave enough to come out to my parents. As much as they've fucked me up, I'm stil so desperate for their approval. Their love. Some would call that a manipulation tactic, a response to the mental and emotional abuse I've gone through. I can't seem to help it though. Maybe one day, I'll be braver. For now though, I'm scared. Just so scared, all the time. all the time.