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I think under many circumstances I might write this for the blog, but I really explicitly firmly am not wanting to treat it as something fucking political right now, because getting political in my personal is part of what fucks me over, and I don't want to do that processing level right now.
I have a defective relationship between money and self-worth. Like pretty much everyone else in our fucking culture.
I'm writing about this because I was talking with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teinedreugan about it yesterday? Friday? something because this is one of the issues in our sex life, but it's also, I've got too much crap in my head, so I need to excrete it somewhere and that's what livejournal is for!
Necessary background to set this shit up:
I was seventeen when I went to college, all full of intelligence and promise, all full of ten or so ineffective years of counselling for major depression issues and major burnout from my high school academic program, which I completed based primarily on the strength of having started it, damnit. I had asked about the possibility of taking a year off between high school and college; as I recall it, my mother was ambivalent and my father was opposed. They and my own self-doubt convinced me that it would be hard to get college acceptances with a hiatus year on my academic resume, so off I went.
I crashed and burned the following May, melting down in a manner that alarmedteinedreugan, freaked out keshwyn, and bewildered my RA. I spent the remainder of the semester basically in bed except when keshwyn pried me out of it, at least as my memory has it; I remember very little, to be honest. I went home for the summer an invalid, needing recovery time desperately.
I was treated, in relatively rapid sequence, to finding my home had become a warzone while I was away because my parents' marriage had collapsed, overhearing my mother mocking the consequences of my mental health condition to my fiance, having my first second boyfriend dump me because I was engaged (not only adding to my stress but removing the readily-accessible refuge to escape from the emotional minefield), my fiance having a major car accident (teinedreugan was miraculously unharmed, but the car was DOA), Eric being wishy-washy and stressy and seventeen about whether or not we could fix our relationship in between having flings with other girls in my face, and ...
... I basically blew off the first semester back at school as recovery time because I was even more catastrophically broken than I looked, because the breakdown had not only not been mended, but had been added to with an interesting collection of stress fractures and losses of support and so on.
Which led to me being offered the "You can finish out this semester and be kicked out for violation of your academic probation at the end, or you can take medical leave now" declaration from the college administration in February of 1997. Complete with being browbeaten unto tears by the dean for being such a failure and then her having an earnest conversation withjenett about, you know, let them know if I might be showing signs of, you know, major instability. (Which I cannot help but translate as "Get her off campus and no longer our responsibility before she kills herself, we don't want the bad publicity." Yes, the dean was that hostile and unempathic.)
My father was worried about me and wanted me home. My mother was willing to attempt blackmail and deception to get me there. I told my father I couldn't handle being near my mother, and he anxiously supported my decision to stay in Massachusetts. What I didn't say was that I needed to get into a position where I was supporting myself in order to prove that I was a worthwhile human being, because academics had been pretty much my entire life before that and well, I fucked that up but good, right?
So that's the needful background about my breakdown; skippable for people who either know about the breakdown or might find it upsetting to read a summary of someone else's screaming descent into gibbering failure and the consequences thereof.
Because I was as much in the need to prove that I was capable of supporting myself to demonstrate my worthiness to live, basically, as I was needing to work to afford living, the whole structure of money and self-value was set kind of hard right then. But at the same time, I have a clear memory of my first day walking to the temp job that people had gotten for me through contacts in the SCA, stopping for breakfast and wanting to laugh and being suddenly struck with the realisation that I could not remember when I had last been happy before that moment.
(My music just started playing "You never give me your money." I think I have to giggle now.)
It took a lot of help from other people, but I eventually managed to get myself sorted, able to support myself, and paid off the debts I incurred while I wasn't doing so. And that was good. I proved that even if I had failed at my Primary Projected Role in academia I could handle a Secondary Projected Role as a wage-earner.
Maybe the story would have been different if the job I wound up having had been a better fit for me. On the one hand, I found that I loved working with the law and was a fucking fantastic secretary. On the other hand, being a receptionist made me increasingly stressed and started to sideline me with rapidly increasing in frequency migraines and I wound up having serious morality issues with some of the specific work (the evil parts were not our office's responsibility, fortunately, but I was still ... yeah). Perhaps some other job would not have sent me sliding into twisted forms of major depression and other health issues, and I wouldn't be where I am, but I didn't have some other job, and with only a high school diploma (and, by the time I left that gig, a paralegal certification) I wasn't likely to get something better.
After some negotiation withteinedreugan, who had moved to MA in the interim, I left the job. I would be able to write again, I thought!
I wrote The Devil's Dance in that period, which masked my slow slide into catastrophic depression; he was, he reminded me the other day, working 12+ hour days, which didn't help matters, and meant that he really did not notice. Because the being able to support myself thing had not been a transitory thing where I'd proved it and was done, unbeknownst to me; my entire sense of self-worth was propped up by a couple hundred a week.
And when I wasn't worth a couple hundred a week, what was I worth?
Whatever pocket change I could find in the street, I guess.
Before I could pay for a life, so I deserved a life; that was worthwhile. It was a bit marginal, but I could afford to feed and house myself and buy a CD on the paycheck that wasn't entirely devoted to rent, and that meant that I deserved to live.
The fact that the sorts of jobs I could get because depression had driven me out of college were universally the sorts of jobs that aggravated my depression meant that the life I deserved sucked, but it was a life, right?
So going off pay-for-play was a royal mess. And it was made all the worse by the sense that I was a failure at academia; I was a failure at the sort of work that I was "qualified" for; the depression crippled me emotionally so I couldn't even fuck for my keep, because that's what being a housewife is, right? It's why Good Women have jobs.
I didn't even have kids to make my inability to hold down a normal job without having to cut to manage the trauma of it something that some people might, reluctantly, find justifiable. (teinedreugan caught me at it once and took the knife away and held me while I screamed.) If I had kids I could claim 'stay at home parent' as my job, rather than being the freeloader and the woman whose "choice" is Disapproved by the mainstream because Money Is The Value Of Your Life.
"Choice" makes me want to bark out a laugh and then sob there, because I remember crying and crying, beggingteinedreugan to make me feel like it was okay to let him support me, because I had no value, because value is measured in dollars and cents, I wasn't even being a proper housewhore because I was not sane and not able to hold up my end of the classic woman's bargain, a 'bargain' that was only struck in my head because I could not imagine being anything other than a black hole if I was not proving my worth with cash on the table. I see people talking about disapproving of people's "choice" to be stay-at-home mothers (it's always women whose "choice" earns disapproval) or housewives or whatever and I just want to ...
Sidebar:
I commented toerynn999 the other day in a post she made about recent PTSD research that "well enough" is the monster under all of our beds - her original sentence was "If this is really the case, maybe I don't have to feel quite so guilty about not coping "well enough" with my life."
And this is where I wind up with 'well enough': Because depression isn't real. PTSD isn't real. That's all in your head, little girl. Other people can handle the real world, what's wrong with you? You weren't even raped, why are you upset? You don't deserve flashbacks, you didn't have real trauma. Everyone else can handle a job without going crazy. You're just lazy. If you're going to be this lazy, you should at least be putting out to make up for the expense of keeping you as a pet.
End sidebar.
... and I just want to scream and wail and snarl "Try my fucking mental issues on for size before you get so fucking smug about the superiority of your 'choices'" and I don't because maybe those people are Better People Than I and really could hack my life that much better than I can. Maybe I really am that worthless and it is all that I'm lazy and should be even more guilty about not coping "well enough" with my life.
As opposed to the crippling guilt that I bear for being a depressive ("making it up"), a failure (in academia and at work), for having a job that pays in resume credit, books, and royalties rather than a fat check (or even a couple hundred) every two weeks. My depression is just a cop-out, right? To get me out from under my obligation to be a proper moneymaker.
And I hate to say it, but there are times that KJ is a patch on this now.
Because there's no way in hell I could bring in enough money to handle childcare with my qualifications even if I were sane enough for a job. So suddenly, now, it's okay for me to be at home, for some values of okay, because I'm now a patch on a money expense. I'm not worth positive money, but I'm worth lack of negative money, and that's almost like having some value!
I hate this. I hate this so much. And I hate it all the more because being her mother is the work I've been waiting for at least the last ten years, that I've been working for, that I went into therapy to be able to do, and it's tainted by this stupid patch job on this haemhorraging hole in my self-esteem. And parenting an infant is hard work, and I really absolutely need my whole family to be able to do it too, and there are times I wind up feeling guilty about that, like I should be able to do it all, even though I know this is anthropologically idiotic and it's my self-hate talking and maybe me trying to prove I deserve a life again by some nonmonetary means. "I can't make money, but look, I can take care of babies!"
(I'm not actually that good with infants.)
It's not actually as bad as I've written it, the money thing, it's just. I need to write about this problem, so I've cut out the bits that aren't the problem. You know how it goes. But this is always there.
I have a defective relationship between money and self-worth. Like pretty much everyone else in our fucking culture.
I'm writing about this because I was talking with
teinedreugan about it yesterday? Friday? something because this is one of the issues in our sex life, but it's also, I've got too much crap in my head, so I need to excrete it somewhere and that's what livejournal is for!Necessary background to set this shit up:
I was seventeen when I went to college, all full of intelligence and promise, all full of ten or so ineffective years of counselling for major depression issues and major burnout from my high school academic program, which I completed based primarily on the strength of having started it, damnit. I had asked about the possibility of taking a year off between high school and college; as I recall it, my mother was ambivalent and my father was opposed. They and my own self-doubt convinced me that it would be hard to get college acceptances with a hiatus year on my academic resume, so off I went.
I crashed and burned the following May, melting down in a manner that alarmed
teinedreugan, freaked out keshwyn, and bewildered my RA. I spent the remainder of the semester basically in bed except when keshwyn pried me out of it, at least as my memory has it; I remember very little, to be honest. I went home for the summer an invalid, needing recovery time desperately.I was treated, in relatively rapid sequence, to finding my home had become a warzone while I was away because my parents' marriage had collapsed, overhearing my mother mocking the consequences of my mental health condition to my fiance, having my first second boyfriend dump me because I was engaged (not only adding to my stress but removing the readily-accessible refuge to escape from the emotional minefield), my fiance having a major car accident (
teinedreugan was miraculously unharmed, but the car was DOA), Eric being wishy-washy and stressy and seventeen about whether or not we could fix our relationship in between having flings with other girls in my face, and ...... I basically blew off the first semester back at school as recovery time because I was even more catastrophically broken than I looked, because the breakdown had not only not been mended, but had been added to with an interesting collection of stress fractures and losses of support and so on.
Which led to me being offered the "You can finish out this semester and be kicked out for violation of your academic probation at the end, or you can take medical leave now" declaration from the college administration in February of 1997. Complete with being browbeaten unto tears by the dean for being such a failure and then her having an earnest conversation with
jenett about, you know, let them know if I might be showing signs of, you know, major instability. (Which I cannot help but translate as "Get her off campus and no longer our responsibility before she kills herself, we don't want the bad publicity." Yes, the dean was that hostile and unempathic.)My father was worried about me and wanted me home. My mother was willing to attempt blackmail and deception to get me there. I told my father I couldn't handle being near my mother, and he anxiously supported my decision to stay in Massachusetts. What I didn't say was that I needed to get into a position where I was supporting myself in order to prove that I was a worthwhile human being, because academics had been pretty much my entire life before that and well, I fucked that up but good, right?
So that's the needful background about my breakdown; skippable for people who either know about the breakdown or might find it upsetting to read a summary of someone else's screaming descent into gibbering failure and the consequences thereof.
Because I was as much in the need to prove that I was capable of supporting myself to demonstrate my worthiness to live, basically, as I was needing to work to afford living, the whole structure of money and self-value was set kind of hard right then. But at the same time, I have a clear memory of my first day walking to the temp job that people had gotten for me through contacts in the SCA, stopping for breakfast and wanting to laugh and being suddenly struck with the realisation that I could not remember when I had last been happy before that moment.
(My music just started playing "You never give me your money." I think I have to giggle now.)
It took a lot of help from other people, but I eventually managed to get myself sorted, able to support myself, and paid off the debts I incurred while I wasn't doing so. And that was good. I proved that even if I had failed at my Primary Projected Role in academia I could handle a Secondary Projected Role as a wage-earner.
Maybe the story would have been different if the job I wound up having had been a better fit for me. On the one hand, I found that I loved working with the law and was a fucking fantastic secretary. On the other hand, being a receptionist made me increasingly stressed and started to sideline me with rapidly increasing in frequency migraines and I wound up having serious morality issues with some of the specific work (the evil parts were not our office's responsibility, fortunately, but I was still ... yeah). Perhaps some other job would not have sent me sliding into twisted forms of major depression and other health issues, and I wouldn't be where I am, but I didn't have some other job, and with only a high school diploma (and, by the time I left that gig, a paralegal certification) I wasn't likely to get something better.
After some negotiation with
teinedreugan, who had moved to MA in the interim, I left the job. I would be able to write again, I thought!I wrote The Devil's Dance in that period, which masked my slow slide into catastrophic depression; he was, he reminded me the other day, working 12+ hour days, which didn't help matters, and meant that he really did not notice. Because the being able to support myself thing had not been a transitory thing where I'd proved it and was done, unbeknownst to me; my entire sense of self-worth was propped up by a couple hundred a week.
And when I wasn't worth a couple hundred a week, what was I worth?
Whatever pocket change I could find in the street, I guess.
Before I could pay for a life, so I deserved a life; that was worthwhile. It was a bit marginal, but I could afford to feed and house myself and buy a CD on the paycheck that wasn't entirely devoted to rent, and that meant that I deserved to live.
The fact that the sorts of jobs I could get because depression had driven me out of college were universally the sorts of jobs that aggravated my depression meant that the life I deserved sucked, but it was a life, right?
So going off pay-for-play was a royal mess. And it was made all the worse by the sense that I was a failure at academia; I was a failure at the sort of work that I was "qualified" for; the depression crippled me emotionally so I couldn't even fuck for my keep, because that's what being a housewife is, right? It's why Good Women have jobs.
I didn't even have kids to make my inability to hold down a normal job without having to cut to manage the trauma of it something that some people might, reluctantly, find justifiable. (
teinedreugan caught me at it once and took the knife away and held me while I screamed.) If I had kids I could claim 'stay at home parent' as my job, rather than being the freeloader and the woman whose "choice" is Disapproved by the mainstream because Money Is The Value Of Your Life."Choice" makes me want to bark out a laugh and then sob there, because I remember crying and crying, begging
teinedreugan to make me feel like it was okay to let him support me, because I had no value, because value is measured in dollars and cents, I wasn't even being a proper housewhore because I was not sane and not able to hold up my end of the classic woman's bargain, a 'bargain' that was only struck in my head because I could not imagine being anything other than a black hole if I was not proving my worth with cash on the table. I see people talking about disapproving of people's "choice" to be stay-at-home mothers (it's always women whose "choice" earns disapproval) or housewives or whatever and I just want to ...Sidebar:
I commented to
erynn999 the other day in a post she made about recent PTSD research that "well enough" is the monster under all of our beds - her original sentence was "If this is really the case, maybe I don't have to feel quite so guilty about not coping "well enough" with my life."And this is where I wind up with 'well enough': Because depression isn't real. PTSD isn't real. That's all in your head, little girl. Other people can handle the real world, what's wrong with you? You weren't even raped, why are you upset? You don't deserve flashbacks, you didn't have real trauma. Everyone else can handle a job without going crazy. You're just lazy. If you're going to be this lazy, you should at least be putting out to make up for the expense of keeping you as a pet.
End sidebar.
... and I just want to scream and wail and snarl "Try my fucking mental issues on for size before you get so fucking smug about the superiority of your 'choices'" and I don't because maybe those people are Better People Than I and really could hack my life that much better than I can. Maybe I really am that worthless and it is all that I'm lazy and should be even more guilty about not coping "well enough" with my life.
As opposed to the crippling guilt that I bear for being a depressive ("making it up"), a failure (in academia and at work), for having a job that pays in resume credit, books, and royalties rather than a fat check (or even a couple hundred) every two weeks. My depression is just a cop-out, right? To get me out from under my obligation to be a proper moneymaker.
And I hate to say it, but there are times that KJ is a patch on this now.
Because there's no way in hell I could bring in enough money to handle childcare with my qualifications even if I were sane enough for a job. So suddenly, now, it's okay for me to be at home, for some values of okay, because I'm now a patch on a money expense. I'm not worth positive money, but I'm worth lack of negative money, and that's almost like having some value!
I hate this. I hate this so much. And I hate it all the more because being her mother is the work I've been waiting for at least the last ten years, that I've been working for, that I went into therapy to be able to do, and it's tainted by this stupid patch job on this haemhorraging hole in my self-esteem. And parenting an infant is hard work, and I really absolutely need my whole family to be able to do it too, and there are times I wind up feeling guilty about that, like I should be able to do it all, even though I know this is anthropologically idiotic and it's my self-hate talking and maybe me trying to prove I deserve a life again by some nonmonetary means. "I can't make money, but look, I can take care of babies!"
(I'm not actually that good with infants.)
It's not actually as bad as I've written it, the money thing, it's just. I need to write about this problem, so I've cut out the bits that aren't the problem. You know how it goes. But this is always there.
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