Messages By: annanut

Sometimes I feel so much like I’m talking but people don’t hear me because I’m speaking a different language from them. Sometimes I feel so much like people are speaking but I’m hearing them under water, unclearly, and distorted.

I saw my psychiatrist today, and he noticed the bandage on my wrist, so I told him. I guess in a way I didn’t hide my bandage properly on purpose. He said ‘Thank you for letting me see’. Myself, I don’t know if I would want to see, in his position. I would feel kind of like my patient is leading me on, manipulating me, trying to wring out compassion and interest with these meaningless gestures. I don’t know if that’s part of why I do it: to try and make him pay attention to me. Sometimes I feel like I’m screaming and no one is listening, because me screaming to them sounds like just so much more boy-who-cried-wolf, or maybe something else entirely. Sometimes I feel like the only way to make people listen is to tear myself apart. But that doesn’t seem very dramatic anymore. I’ve worn it out of all its value, and now the only person it says anything to is me.

I feel so exhausted and worn out and sick of myself. I don’t really matter to anyone, what I do doesn’t really matter. He’s just listening to me say the same thing over and over and over again, like a broken record. It’s boring and old and I hate it. I hate myself, the person all this repetition keeps spilling out of, like tears, like red tears, like crying and emptiness and solitude.

I cut myself last night, but I don’t even remember it. That’s the most terrifying part. I only saw it this morning. Sometimes I think people don’t believe me when I say I don’t remember, but if they knew how it really feels to wake up to this harm and its gaps, they’d understand what it’s like to be horrified and terrified by yourself, by your capacity to edit out the parts you don’t like. What does that do to who you are? You might not ever find yourself if enough of you goes missing.

In the bathroom at school, right before my appointment, I cut myself again. I was late. I’m never late. I thought maybe he wouldn’t be there anymore. I had thought I would be on time.

My psychiatrist says I’m just trying to make my way through the world the best I can. I should do better. He says he doesn’t think I cross the line at where hurting yourself becomes really bad. I didn’t even know there was a line. I think it’s dangerous to trivialize what I do. I’m afraid now it will escalate, if I fall into the trap of trying to prove to myself - and to him - that I am dangerous, that I am serious. I wonder how far I will have to go before it proves that I am hurting.

He says he thinks a lot of why I hurt myself is that the old feelings of having felt so alone for so long are surfacing. I wasn’t always alone, even though sometimes I was. Things happened that I only have fragments of, thank G-d only barely remembered. I wasn’t always alone. I don’t know if he wants to think that was part of the problem, or if he’s running away from it just like I am.

Sometimes I think he’s not hearing me. I don’t have time for these feelings, I don’t have time for this pain, I don’t have time for this lethargy and hopelessness and fuzzy thinking. I’m behind on my work, and I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll fail. Maybe it’s just one more way of hurting myself. Only that kind of screw-up can’t be undone. It’s the same thing, alone alone alone over and over, but I’m still hurting and sometimes it seems like the pain is getting worse instead of better. Sometimes I hate him and want him to go away. Like when he holds your hand, an empty gesture to reward you for telling, for not being able to hold it in, so I can hear the same thing I already know. I don’t want to hear it. I want it to go away.

Sometimes I think the problem is that I felt alone but really no one would leave me any space to myself, like they all kept pushing themselves on me, intruding. You can feel alone even with someone squashing you to death if they’re always with you but never hearing what you say.

Sometimes I feel like there’s no point. He’s not listening. I want it to stop. It has to stop. This is ruining any chance I have for a life because I can’t focus on anything but wanting to hurt myself, and how I don’t want to get out of bed.

He said it’s good that I’m starting to tell him how I feel when I hurt so bad, that I talk to him about it. But really he thinks I’m just some histrionic brat exaggerating things, and that I don’t really hurt that bad, and that you can’t see any of it. Stupid immature kid, just get out. Sometimes I feel like I’m outside of myself, watching myself say these things, like I’m pulling out of my body just far enough to see what’s happening without being in it. My voice sounds strange and hollow, empty, weak and small, just like me.

He said that when they get their group together for people who hurt themselves I should go to it because it helps people and they learn other ways of dealing. He just doesn’t want to deal with me anymore, with the stupid things I do. He doesn’t like me and he doesn’t care about me. He just wants me to stop so he can make me go away.

Sometimes I feel like I work so hard and it just isn’t going anywhere at all. I’m just useless at everything, and can’t pull enough effort together to make it better.

Getting off the train today, a long line of people filed past and trudged their dreary way down the steps and out the doors. I let a man pass in front of me; he looked so tired and worn down. He smiled at me, and I felt better. But it didn’t matter because when we were at the end of the line, the whistle rang, the doors shut, and the train headed back to the yards with six people still on it who hadn’t had time to get off.

Part way to the Depot, the conductor who goes through the train got to us. He asked us why we hadn't gotten off, and we said the doors had closed too fast. He asked us why we hadn’t gotten off at different doors.

I thought he would turn the train around and bring us back, because I’ve heard of this happening and that’s always what they do in the stories. But, instead he told us we’d have to wait forty minutes at the yard for the next train going back in that direction to leave. I felt really bad because I’d told the man I thought they’d bring us back since it was their fault for not giving us enough time. My mother called, and I told her what had happened. She said to call her back when I knew what was going on.

Out in the yards, following the group, I couldn’t see the road with the fence at the end of it that means freedom. That’s because it was half a kilometer away along a curving path.

The conductor drove four of us back to the train station. My mother was super pissed and bitching at me because she had gone to the fence to see what would happen and now she had to drive back.

When we finally got home, my father hadn’t taken the clothes in. While we ate dinner, he watched television, because he’d eaten without everyone else. In the car, I asked my mother how long it had been since my father had a physical, since when he went to the clinic today the doctor requisitioned blood tests. I think it’s been at least a decade, if not closer to thirty years. She said she had no idea, but that she hoped they found something. I was like What? And she’s all He never goes to the doctor, and he thinks he’s so perfect. And I was So you hope he’s SICK?! And she’s Yeah, then he’d have something wrong with him so he wouldn’t think he’s perfect.

What a psycho! I’m like Ma, for Christ’s sake, he has to get another tooth pulled, I’m sure he knows he’s not perfect. And she’s all Yeah, that’s true. You know, if I hadn’t already been saying this for a decade I’d say they need to get a divorce.

My Joyce essay is going badly. I have a page written and I can’t think. It’s like trying to swim through a cotton ball. I hate it. Who am I kidding: I’m too stupid to write this kind of paper, and so I can’t put my ideas together, and have nothing to say. Instead, I stare blankly ahead of me and think about what an idiot I am, and fantasize about slitting my wrists with a straightblade. I’ve had this fantasy before. I only fantasize about my left wrist though, getting the blade really in there, dragging it in over and over, the scrape against bone and the blood. I love straightblades. I saw one in a movie once and I thought it was so beautiful, the line while they bleed, dying.

I got 29 out of 30 in the History of Psychology midterm.

I went to the clinic as soon as History of Psychology class was over to get the burn on my wrist checked. I told the nurse that I burned it on a coffee pot while I was pouring coffee, the glass pots like they have in the Arts cafeteria. When she was looking at my wrists, I was afraid that she would see the faded scars and not believe that I burned myself by accident. I didn’t want her to send me upstairs, or put a note in my file. I didn’t want the look on her face. But I had to go to the clinic: I didn’t know how to treat burns. But now I do, and I don’t have to go back if I do it again.

I put out my cigarette on my arm. That’s not literally true: I thought cigarette burns would be too obvious. I just knocked off the ashes and held it at an angle right above my skin, burning the flesh slowly but without the charred look and defined shape that give cigarette burns away. It wasn’t that bad: the burn just made a bubble and it took a few hours to actually raise, which I hadn’t thought it would. I thought it would just stay red. The thing about heat is that it can hurt a lot without leaving more than slight damage if you’re careful. That way you won’t get found out.

I feel totally disgusted with myself. I’m so stupid! Why do I do these things? I only feel better for a little while, but now I feel like crap! I hate the way I feel that makes me do these things, the ideas that get in my head and won’t go away, compelling me to enact them with each futile emotion spinning itself out. I sometimes feel like I’ve broken a mirror and eaten the pieces, or maybe it’s that I want to eat the pieces, to take that mirror with my picture that’s been shattered and split and put it back inside of me, living and breathing in my agony.

I posted a message last night on the Dr. Phil message board where I talk to Labelfree about how I hurt myself, and how sometimes I’m afraid of killing myself by accident. I said in my message how I’m afraid to tell people about what I do because they might not be able to take it, might not be able to understand, and then I would just feel more alone than ever.

I’ve never been able to talk about what I do to myself before: people know that I cut myself, but I never describe what I do or how bad it can be. But my message posted on the board and I felt strangely unburdened, having said these things for the first time.

This morning, logging in, I was really nervous about what Labelfree might have said. I want her to understand me, I want her to like me, I want her honest opinion but without her making any judgments about who I am. Maybe that seems contradictory, but for me making a distinction between who I am and what I do seems natural. Making an effort to understand why I do these things is like trying to understand me, which takes looking past the face of the act itself. I also didn’t want anyone else on the board to have said something mean.

But then when I looked on the board, my message wasn’t there. I was sure it had posted, but I couldn’t find it. I guess someone complained to the moderators about it, or they found it themselves and got rid of it.

It’s hard to explain what I felt. I felt devastated, and numb, and uncomprehending, and so sad, and so invalidated.

It was so hard for me to say those words even to cyberspace where no one knows me and where I don’t have to face their expressions, the emotion in their voices, instinctive reactions that haven’t been thought through. It was so hard trying to share this part of me, even a little bit, trying to show the depths of my pain in telling what I have done, and still do, to myself. And I just felt so silenced, and rejected, and utterly alone. I know no one did it on purpose, it’s no one’s fault, but it was a realization of my worst fear about ever trying to disclose...that I wouldn’t even be allowed to speak, not even this space to speak...

I guess when I started posting it’s because I thought this site would be a safe place for me to say what I needed to say without any reprisal, that people wouldn’t be immediately judgmental when they’ve been through so much themselves. I guess I thought there would be freedom here. I didn’t hurt anyone, I didn’t insult anyone, I wasn’t mean, people don’t even have to read my post if they don’t want to. But I was wrong, I guess. This is just like everywhere else, where people want to be able to turn away and just not see anything unpleasant, and behavior that’s been so stigmatized even in psychiatric literature - parasuicidal acts as the client being manipulative, and incurable - and if you try to talk about these taboo subjects, you are marginalized, made invisible, silenced.

I don’t know if I can go back to the boards. I feel so betrayed: maybe that’s irrational, but I can’t help it. I feel like it’s not safe anymore. Now I get afraid that maybe the version of my diary I post [which is an edited version of the diary I write] will get axed, too. It all just drives home what I’ve felt, that all my life I will have to go on hiding who I am, hiding behind a nicer, false image of myself, hiding my pain behind a lesser pain, behind a smile, behind the lie that I am better, that it doesn’t wring me dry just to get through the day, that I get so exhausted I just want to lie down and go to sleep forever. I really am marginalized; people look at me and their eyes slide tactfully over the surface I am showing. My messiness, my truth, invisible.

Today, at Central Station waiting for the train to go home, with forty-five minutes to kill, I decided to go to Bureau Engros and see if they had any Xacto knives. They actually had a collection to choose from. I picked one that looks like a scalpel. It’s so shiny!

It’s amazing: walking into the store, knowing what I’m going to do, I feel so excited and nervous. I get afraid that the sales people will look at me walking in and know exactly what I’m up to. I look at all the knives in their neat packages, glinting and perfect blade surfaces, untouched, unsmeared by messy fingerprints, blood, and wear. Sometimes their slight nicks, each one unique, a perfect, unrepeatable snowflake.

When I pay for my new friend and leave, I get such a rush! I feel happy and pumped and full or heart-racing adrenaline. I pulled it off! If only they knew; the other customers, my psychiatrist, my parents, the cashier...I pulled it off, looking pulled together and glossy and perfect, an actor that no one suspects.

It’s funny: I never get that rush when I pick up disposable razors at a drugstore, desperate for pain that I carry with me to school bathrooms and cold stalls, inches away from recognition but not being able to bear it long enough to get home. But getting a new weapon, picking and choosing with my discerning eye, gauging sharpness and thickness and maneuverability, trying to asses how accurate I will be able to be, always makes me feel so high. That perfect control, not needing pain but knowing that when I do it will be new and different. Into the collection it goes, waiting for my need, waiting for unbroken skin, separate from the shame and pain and guilt and hatred it will later engender, today its blade is a perfect aesthetic and a reasoned, undriven, untormented choice.

I handed in a horrible essay for 19th century science fiction today about the mind/body problem and implications for the humanity of the creature in Frankenstein and derivations today. It was one of the dumbest, most vapid pieces of crap that I’ve ever handed in in my life. Like a stupid total failure, like I am.


I wrote a word on my leg and accidentally cut my finger. It’s surprising how different the pain is when it’s not on purpose, and it just sucks you back into yourself. I feel mad and clumsy just when I was feeling calm, and it makes me hate myself even more.


I keep scratching this spot on my head until it bleeds. It’s easy to hide.


I put bandaids over my word before going to school so that the blood wouldn’t get caught on my pants, making the fabric stick to me.


I like to wipe up the stray blood while they’re bleeding. I like neat lines, and I like the colour in neat lines against my skin.


At dinner, my brother left the table before we were done and went to watch tv really loud in the living room. My father put all the leftover food away even though I said I wanted more. “Ooops”. It’s okay: I wasn’t feeling really hungry anymore anyway.


It’s funny how a slight surface cut - like the one I’ve just made - can bleed so much, when really it’s nothing. These disposable razors just really don’t do the trick.


My father left to buy a computer. My mother was being really pissy and snide when I asked her what the hell she was talking about: she’ll be reading some announcement and asking you about it, even if you haven’t read it. She gets mad, like she expects you to read her mind. So then I get mad, and she yells at me why I’m always being so mean to her, when really it’s just her being mean and pushing everyone to that place and then forgetting about how she got you there.


My brother comes upstairs and offers us wine. No one wants any: we’re frantically trying to fix something on the internet that took our credit card number somehow without us having asked it to remember, and skipped the checkout part of the order to just tell us it had been sent without asking us to confirm anything. So we were freaking out and trying to cancel it, just in case, and erase the credit card from its memory. Plus it was 9:30 and we were going to go to bed soon. E***** was all Well I put the wine in the fridge because I wanted it tonight so I’m having it regardless of anyone else. And my mother tells him no. Se he starts yelling about how it can just lay there gathering dust, and it’s like but why can’t you wait for everyone else? Your father isn’t even home. And I say something like what the hell is wrong with you just taking her wine when she’s not even having any? And he starts yelling that I’m not talking to you, you can all go to hell. Bite me. And he’s still throwing his tantrum after he pitched everything back in the fridge and halfway down the stairs while I’m “Do you not even realize that we’re having major problems with the fucking credit card right now?!!!” What like it’s all about you? So he’s pitching his fit and yelling at me and swearing at everyone like a five year old, like he does every time he doesn’t get what he wants when he wants it. But he never thinks about the other people and what they want; he just takes and takes whatever and whenever and to hell with the fact that it’s supposed to be for everyone because I put it in the fridge and I WANT IT NOW!!!!!!


So he’s slamming doors downstairs and goes back to playing on his computer game and I just hate him SO MUCH! He throws a fit whenever anything doesn’t go his way, and he walks all over my mother not even staying for dinner, just picking up his food and bringing it downstairs if guild war is on, only being nice to someone or bothering to even talk to them (he reads his book at the table during dinner) if he wants something, and then ranting and attacking and insulting and threatening everyone when he doesn’t get his way (which itself just tramples over what everyone else wants). He says Bite me and I say I wouldn’t want to you’d probably taste like crap and he says You’d bite me and I could punch you in the fucking face. All he knows is take take take violence threats insults hate self-centered sycophantic my way or I’ll hate you and make you feel my anger and my demands and I will hurt you and belittle you in every way I know how.


So then I have to get out of the house, it’s suffocating, and I hate him for always only thinking of what he wants and for treating my mother like shit. And I hate the way I feel and the way he makes me act, but I get so mad at him I can’t help it I just want to scream at him and make him understand what he makes everyone else feel, the pain and the loathing he makes me feel, how I would slit his throat if it would make him stop hurting everyone, making my mother sad and angry and just so fucking pissed that she gave him everything and spent her whole life giving him everything and he treats her like this. I’ve heard him say that when she’s finally dead he’s going to dance on her grave, but he still takes from her whatever he wants, and doesn’t even thank her for it, instead berating her for asking him to help her while he’s busy (playing his computer game). And I hate him so much!! What kind of person feels this way? And I hate myself for my rage and for yelling at him and for telling him that he should stop being so damn self-involved. I am too. And I’m horrible and I hate myself.
My father comes home, and while he’s getting ready for bed he says his computer is like a twin of my mother’s computer, and she’s so bitter in her answer that it’s not because he’d never spend money like that on something for her. And he says they came out about the same; 12, 14 hundred for hers. “And yours is 22 hundred! How is that the same” That’s after a year of service and warranties and taxes, just like yours. “Yeah right!” And she sneers her ugly sneer and just holds so close to her the precious idea that everyone is using her and that her husband thinks she’s worthless. And she can’t see that she made herself that way and asks him to walk all over her, and rejects everything he tries to do for her, and is always pissy bitchy fucking mean to him, so everything he does must be about how he feels he’s entitled. But she needs that personna of the emotionally abused mother who’s sacrificed only to be walked all over, and so she pushes people into those roles through her anger and her manipulation and her turbulent moods, and then blames people she walled into that space for using her and can’t see that she made it that way.


And I take the bandaid off my words and they’re not a pretty as when they air dry and I don’t like them and I feel so sad and I cut some more but this blade isn’t working well and all I want is just one deep clear exclamation that can’t be erased.

I went to the astrophysics conference with C***** today; the topic was gravitational wave detection using LIGO equipment. This year, on their fifth science run, they think they’ll be operating at design limit, and maybe detecting some waves. Gravitational waves are huge, an in the audio band, so they need big equipment to find them. LIGO’s two arms are four km each, with a laser in diverted in two vacuum tubes and passing between the two mirrors before finally coming back out to be registered. One thing I learned was that there’s seismic interference because of gravitational flux and that gravity fluctuates naturally with any shifting of the plates or even if a cloud passes overhead. Also, I learned that you shouldn’t build a LIGO in a pine forest - although it sounds lovely - if it’s owned by a logging company. At least not if you want a lot of operational time without building compensating sensors and hydraulic stabilizing equipment. They’re thinking about putting LISA in space: three triangulated ships with lasers, five hundred miles apart and circling the sun, to measure gravitational waves. One thing they can do with these waves and not Electromagnetic Waves is they think they will be able to detect stochastic noise. Cool, huh?

At six o’clock, I met D***** at Stewart Biology and we drove to his house. On the way there, his mother called (how sweet is that?) and it turns out his music cognition book is due in like two weeks! The pressure! I hope everything goes okay.

While I was touching him, he said I was such a tease. G-d that threw me back to when [the professor who raped me] said the same thing, even though the context was totally different because he said that in his office when I wouldn’t show him something I’d written. I sometimes wonder if the endless string of associations wills top somewhere before I go completely insane. I don’t want to freak out in front of D*****. Luckily, he didn’t notice.

After we’d had sex, he asked me to go with him to get some food. We went to this Japanese place. It was really interesting and good! But I still felt really awkward eating with him watching, and vulnerable out in the open. Well, at least he’s not ashamed of me, right? He told me this story of something that had happened to him during his first year teaching at [the university].

[...]

He says it was absolutely horrible

He said some of his students always write reviews of him that are like Stop trying so hard to be our friend, and who don’t like his class ‘personna’. All I have to say is, man, cognition is weird!

Joe died today. The funeral is on Saturday. I guess this is better for him, and I know he’s with G-d now. I guess I don’t really know how I feel about it. Right now, I don’t feel anything at all. Guess that’s my cold heartless bitch side coming out again.

7 September, 2005

Yesterday in professor M*****'s Short Story class, he called on me and made me say which story was my favorite, and why. I felt so scared, I know I was blushing; my face felt warm but I was freezing. I thought I was going to have a heart attack and die, especially when he went after what I’d said. I hate it when he does that.

I went home and I felt so bad and angry at myself. This morning, I sliced up my leg. I like to keep the blood in a nice, neat, red line with no excess: I feel in control and so very, very calm.

I told my psychiatrist about it during our session, and I was trying to hide my face and crying. I hate myself. It makes me hate myself more when he offered to write me a note telling the professor not to call on me in class. I should be able to get past this. There’s a part of me that knows it’s so irrational, but I can’t stop myself. I made it happen, all of the bad things, everything, and I should be able to make it go away. Everyone has shit in their life, but not everyone is like me. He says it’s not true and that not everyone had such bad things happen to them. I said all of it was my fault. We had been sitting on the floor (because we were in a different office) and he’d been hugging me, but now he was trying to look at my face. I need to believe it’s my fault, and he asked me why, and I said that if it was my fault then I could make it go away. He said, “No, it’s because it’s not your fault that you can make it go away.” I started sobbing so hard, I don’t really know why. I said that I’d made it happen. He said, it’s true that when children need love sometimes people see that need and take advantage of it to hurt you, but that’s not anything you did wrong or your fault. He asked me whether anything bad had ever happened with him even though I needed him to care about me. I said no. I guess I’ve never really thought about it that way before.

My body has a mind of its own. So what does it need me for?

The mind is the absolute intentional object, a virtual machine. Picture a computer screen. What shows up on the computer screen is the image of code contained in a computer. But the screen is not the code, it is a projection of it, a way of accessing the information, that adds no content but only form - and not real form, just a different perceptual image. The screen is not real, it is created, it is only a virtual machine. Although it can be mapped entirely onto the code that produces it, it is not the code itself. It contains a subjective perceptual experience totally apart from the code yet entirely dependent on it and of it at the same time; the experience of the screen cannot be described by the code, or by referring to the code, but only by the screen itself. The screen is an abstraction level of the code which is itself an independent experience that cannot be reduced to the code. The screen and the code operate parallelly, but they have different aims, are trying to get at and do different things; thus, the screen can never be reduced to the code, nor can it be replaced by it in any theory. This is the problem with mind/brain dualism: we need it, and the ideas we are looking for in mind - attentional systems, memory, etc. - will never be found in brain, because physiology does not abide by the abstract categories and conceptions we have invented to understand the experience of its functioning.

My father has had the television on all day, so work has been nearly impossible. At dinner, I yelled at my brother that he really doesn’t give a crap about anyone, and he just expects people to hang around being nice to him and ready for conversation if he ever feels like having any. My father complained that we complain about him watching t.v. all day, and bitched that his (comparatively huge) office is like a closet now that he’s sharing. Well, he wouldn’t have to share it if he’d bothered to make my brother stop talking all night long and keeping me awake instead of not caring and doing nothing concrete. My brother wouldn’t have had to move into the office if they’d stopped his self-centered behavior in the first place.

So my brother threw a tantrum and left the house (after eating his entire dinner my mother made with no help from him and having to tell him three times to come and get it instead of watching the t.v.). My mother called his phone eventually and begged him to come home, apologizing. Of course, this is so typical: he throws tantrums every time he gets told off for acting like an ass, criticized, or not treated like Zeus. He plays off my mother’s fear of abandonment, forcing her to apologize to him in abject fear masquerading as concern, manipulating her into a place where she will never make any real effort to change his horrific behavior, so he can keep on exactly like he is with a few strategically-placed two-year-old style temper tantrums. Kind of like my father, who’s going around slamming all the doors in the house and saying he’s going to move the television downstairs - although he already has a t.v. in his office.

So now my mother and brother are having a real heart-to-heart conversation like they always do when he’s managed to manipulate her into acting the way he wants (apologetic and complacent), and she’s forgotten that every day he treats her like a servant and like crap, that he bitches whenever he’s asked to do anything, that he doesn’t spend time with her, that he plays computer all day and disobeys her rules about getting up during daylight hours, that he takes and takes and takes and is in every way completely self-centered and unconcerned about what other people might want - unless it conflicts with what he wants, in which case he throws a tantrum, usually threatening to leave. It’s ironic how she forgets she’s threatened to kick him out countless times this summer unless he changes his ways - which he never does.

After she got off the phone with him, my mother was all ‘If you can’t say anything nice to your brother don’t say anything at all.’ It’s not my fault that he can’t deal with people telling him that he’s self-centered and arrogant and treats people like crap all the time. So fine, he throws tantrums. That’s his problem, and he learned it from his father. But you know what? Fine. Let’s no one ever tell E***** again about how he treats people like crap, let’s never complain about how he is, so we’ll never say anything because it might upset him (which is childish and manipulative in the extreme). We’ll never complain, and he’ll be exactly like he is forever, and won’t that be just great! So he’ll only scream and throw tantrums when he gets asked to do something - like bring up milk or take a shower or wake up - and he’ll be threatened and act uncaring about everyone, but that will all be ignored because if anyone says anything his delicate temper-tantrum immature emotions won’t be able to take it. I don’t see why we’re not all like him.

[And this after my mother complains that her health problems are caused by stress, caused by my father and brother]

Well, if they want to believe that this collection of people who treats each other like crap and doesn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves and staying exactly the same and getting everything they want is a happy happy happy family, then they can all go f*** themselves and be poisoned by their screen-imparted soma.