Jacqui

My boyfriend alerted me to some of the nasty hurtful things that La_Lisa/Astral Bitchslap has been writing about me on her journal. Oh man it just sickens me. And there are two anonymous posters over there, people who read my journal agreeing with her, basically telling her, "Right on for standing up to fucked up Jacqui." Well, one of them was actually a little bit nicer about it, if they're even real people.

How much more hurtful is this going to get? I ban people when they cross a line, not when they say something challenging or controversial. For anyone who agrees with Miss Astral Bitch Slap, just go back three or four entries in my journal to the one where I dare to admit to having developed a dependency on prescription pills, a very small dependence, and you will see that there was another woman who posted a similar series of comments, but they were done with respect and kindness and while challenging, I responded in kind and did not ban her. However, when someone calls me a sweetly facile pathetic loser who is going to end up killing herself, I think I have the right to put up the defense shields. It isn't a matter of my not being able to hear her sage advice, it's a matter of needing to protect my serenity by deciding who is safe and who is not.

For Christ's sake, I am an intelligent woman. I have an extremely high IQ. There isn't a single thing she said to me that I haven't thought about, weighed, and taken action on. We don't all change or grow at the same rate. We don't get cured or fixed just because someone is abusive to us in some twisted form of "social engineering". Plants don't thrive and grow when their caregivers shout at them, and I did not appoint this total stranger, despite the fact that she claims to have been reading my journal for two years, as my caregiver. Pound, pound, pound, judge, wound, insult, pound, are you growing yet?

Silly me trusting the LJ community to handle this with kindness.

Why isn't there more tolerance out there for people's foibles and "self inflicted" problems? We are all of us imperfect. Every one of us does something that someone else thinks they would be able to fix in a second, thinks they have the solution for, if they had the chance. But if any one of you had to really live in my body with my entire physical and emotional history, do you really think you'd be able to do any better? I've had therapists and psychiatrists say they are amazed that I'm not schizophrenic or dead. I am resilient. I am loving. I am kind. I am good. My greatest mistake is in thinking that it is safe to share the darkest parts of myself here while there are people out there who, sharing nothing about their own lives, take it as their right to come out and pound on me.

Who here thinks that the way to help another person is to kick them when they're down? Who here thinks that the way to get someone to shape up and start acting like the rest of the world is to essentially call them a dead loser? Maybe I don't want to be like the rest of the world. Maybe what makes me interesting and special is the very thing you would change about me. Yes, I am different, I am imperfect, I prattle about my problems, but this is MY JOURNAL, your ability to trespass here is by permission only. If I don't ask for advice, if we haven't established a mutual trust and respect, then I don't really want it. However if you offer it in a way that is respectful I will weigh it and take it in and respond, but if you put me down in a high handed superior way, insulting me in the guise of trying to help me, then no, I'm not going to let you in any more.

You know I went over there and wrote a relatively forgiving, respectful letter, offering to forgive and move beyond this, but then I scanned down and read her first post and thought, oh forget it, this woman just wants to rip me apart, laughing while she does it. Why would someone waste their time reading the journal of someone they have so little respect for, was it some curious ride for her? She actually referred to my real life problems as "nonsense", and said, "you spew every minute ooze of thought in public like an overactive tomcat". And this is someone whose advice and council I should take? Someone who cares about me? This person who grants that I actually might have some nice qualities but am really just sad, welcomes her anonymous supporters to her grand "experiment in social engineering." Lovely, let's all just experiment on each other shall we? I have never been closer to taking this entire journal underground than I am right now, perhaps weeding out a few suspicious weeds along the way.

And calling all of my journal friends a bunch of cosigners, (God I hate that stupid expression), is just insulting. Bla bla bla therapy speak. So everyone who doesn't tell me off here, when I open up about my problems, is a cosigning wimp who is keeping me in the dark abyss of my deranged, self inflicted drama?

God damnit I hate this. Why do I give people so much power? I truly had no idea how many people read my journal. I had no idea there were people out there reading my hastily scribbled words, that are often just an expression of whatever I am feeling and needing to get out of my way at a particular moment, words that are not carefully weighed and edited but rather shared raw as one would do in a journal, damnit, and judging me. I had no idea there were people out there dying to fix me and unable to come out and say it for fear they would lose my good opinion of them.

How weird is this? What planet have I landed on that someone congratulates this person for supposedly making me think and perhaps take action based on her hurtful insulting words. And she thinks it's funny that I banned her, that this is the equivalent of putting my fingers in my ears and going, "La la la la la la la." She, or he for all I know, comes in to my journal, on an entry where I am saying that I recognize I have a problem and share what I am doing about it, then proceeds to tell me to do the very things I am already doing, criticizing me harshly along the way, and sees herself as some kind of brave heroic helper being? Oh puhlease, leave me alone, go pick on someone else, if you think I am self destructing, then let me self destruct in peace.

You don't know me as well as you think you do.

Here's the letter I wrote to her. ( Collapse )

Oh Lord what a moving and sad farewell. I cried watching all of the many people lined up along the route who waved and saluted the motorcade all through the service and then especially in the end when Nancy couldn't hold it in any longer, began to cry, kissed his casket and said, "I love you," and then it looked like she said, "I can't," or "I don't want to leave him." Then her family gathered around her and helped her leave.

The bag piper playing Amazing Grace did me in, as did the bugler, and the missing man formation, the twenty-one gun salute, the dignity with which everything was handled and the music. I was moved to see that huge piece of the Berlin Wall, the rolling California hills with the sea in the distance, and finally the sunset.

So many familiar faces in the crowd and reminders of my father, my grandmother and my grandfather's funerals. I sung Amazing Grace for my grandmother but I just couldn't do that for my daddy, it was hard enough to give his eulogy. Singing requires something more, there is too much feeling that escapes on the breath. How can I watch this and not think of my father and the way he died? My amazing, beautiful, sweet father, who despite his inability to really connect with me, and despite his old world ideas of discipline and models of behavior, really truly loved my mother and me.

The thing for me about this that is hard is that I knew him not as this president but as this funny, charming, elegant man, and I know that he deteriorated the way my father did, robbed of his sanity and health by Alzheimers. It's really sad to think of this big strong proud man dying this way. I knew him through my parents, their stories about him, and because he lived at the far edges of my social periphery. I remember my parents when they were young and handsome, dressed up to go to a cocktail or a dinner party, and how they would come back and tell me they had spoken with the governor and then later the president. I remember their dreams for him, how they wanted him to become president, all those fundraising dinners, and how happy they were when he won. Despite my rebellious, leftist, liberal leanings, and my love for President Carter, the Reagans were such a big part of my parents world, how could they not have touched mine? He was so charismatic that I once hugged him, and I saw Nancy frequently through the years. My godparents were their best friends.

I've remarked on this before here but the best funeral I ever attended was for the father of one of Beau's father's friends. The priest said that our dying is our final act, a sacrament as important as any other, and that in our dying we give others the gift of bringing them together. All politics aside I am praying that this week of mourning for this good man will unite our country, not behind any one political agenda, but in a non partisan coming together, in a remembrance of what is good about our nation and her history, and what is beautiful about our country. I hope that people who watched this funeral will take away from it that families, no matter how fractured and wounded, can heal, and that the love we feel for each other is, in the end, all that matters.