I have a dentist appointment tomorrow.
I hate the dentist more than almost anything in the world. More than cicadas.
Y’all should distract me somehow.
Don’t Reblog This
So I don’t make a ton of personal posts. But. I don’t really know what to do.
Here’s the deal, kiddies. I have issues (anger issues, ADHD that’s been undiagnosed and sometimes penalized for…eh, going on 19 years–that public school system, though–some sensory issues, some other stuff). And some of them have been causing me trouble lately, specifically the ones pertaining to my extended family (more fun than a goddamn barrel of monkeys) and my delightful history with folks of the male gender (sometime I should tell the story about when I punched a boy in the fourth grade and got put in detention for it) and another incident that happened when I was eight that I’m not going to go into because I don’t want to upset anyone (if you want to know, you can ask, but…like…love thyself, it’s not a nice story). It’s particularly that last one that’s causing me trouble, though.
I’ve always been what my parents and I politely call ‘wary’ and less politely call ‘fucking wired,’ and I’ve always had more nightmares than peaceful dreams, and when I’m having a bad week I’ve been known to kind of freak out when someone opens a door and takes me by surprise. And from time to time I get flashbacks–not the full technicolor things you see on TV, just physical sensations and the occasional visual image, but trust me, I’ve tried really hard to come up with another phrase and there just isn’t one–and I get those anywhere from once every couple months to…more, depending on if I’m around the appropriate triggers (dentist’s equipment and anything else medical that comes toward my face, sometimes a handful of other things like being restrained or held down with a weight on my chest). And, you know, I’m a medical person, and furthermore I had the revelatory experience a few years back that I think a lot of people do after they leave an abusive situation (see previous re: my extended family) where I was like ‘oh, right, most people don’t have stories about the time they had to be rescued from their grandparent by their mother because that’s not normal’, so I’ve spent the last five years or so collating a mental list of the things that make people look concerned when I mention them. And it’s come to my attention that the flashbacks and the extreme startle reflex and the nightmares/distressed sleep-talking and the not-ever-sitting-with-my-back-to-the-door-and-always-knowing-my-exits-cold (fun fact: it’s called hypervigilance) are…not normal. (You’ve got to understand that they’re normal for me, though, okay, it took me almost 20 years because I’ve been like this almost my whole life, so cut me some slack for being dense.) And so I did some research and then I took an abnormal psychology class (as you do, because no one can ever say I’m not really really thorough) and…yeah, I have managed to drag myself, 11 years late, to the fucking blindingly obvious conclusion that I have some PTSD issues in addition to those listed above, pertaining to both the incident when I was eight and the other stuff with my extended family/men. Like, I am a fucking sparkling diagnostic example of post-traumatic stress disorder.
And I just. Feel so fucking broken about it. And before you jump down my throat, look, I have given the lecture about PTSD not being a sign of weakness, etc, etc, to several people, with extreme conviction and emphasis and I’ve been convincing as shit, okay, I convinced my dad to attend therapy and I talk to my mom about our mutual issues (her family is worse than Dad’s and fucked us up in some of the same ways, or at least relatable ways) and I get it, okay?
But.
I feel like the second I decide to live with that, all the really goddamn hard work I did over the last however-long to build the person I wanted to be after my extended family wrecked me will just fucking evaporate. Because they will have been right all along about how fucking weak and fragile I am, how I obsess over the little stuff and take things too much to heart, how I can’t just get over it. And I worked so fucking hard to be strong and to be able to protect people and take care of them and to not be this scared eight-year-old anymore, and…Christ. Am I making any sense here? I doubt it. I mean, good God, if you’re still reading I goddamn salute you. I wouldn’t be listening to me bitch about my relatively minor issues anymore.
Just. How do I even start to deal with that part of myself?
Mulan means a lot to me, okay
When I was a little kid, Disney’s Mulan was one of my very favorite movies (between that and my unwavering love for Robin Hood, a lot of my current personality traits should be easy to guess). And there were a lot of reasons, not least of which are:
a) the gorgeous animation (the avalanche, the smoke, the fire, it’s just so incredible);
b) the music (LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS); and
c) Mulan, come on guys, it’s a girl who cheats her way into the army and becomes a hero even when no one–not even herself–believes in her, you had to know that was going to be my JAM.
But…like…it was also one of my favorite love stories (I also really love Beauty and the Beast, which will get its own rant someday), which I recently discovered is not a standard opinion. A lot of people spend a lot of time making smart remarks about Shang’s gay crisis. And…this might have just been me, but the change between Ping/Mulan never struck me as the pertinent part of the relationship. I figured that, yeah, Shang was 100% Here For That even though Ping was his subordinate and therefore off-limits. And then I figured that Shang was still 100% Here For That after watching Mulan dismantle a palace and light a warlord on fire, with the added bonus that she wasn’t his subordinate. So my assessment was that Shang was in love with the person, the earnest but slightly awkward person who almost flunked out of the army and specializes in haphazard plans based on blowing shit up and looks startled whenever people like them. And since he was in love with the person, his anger was because that person lied to him, not because that person had a different set of bits than he’d originally assumed, and his interest was in the person, not in their face or their clothes.
And that meant a lot to me as a kid for reasons that I wasn’t really sure how to articulate.
Here’s the thing. I am conventionally fairly attractive, through a combination of good genes and good fortune, and I recognize the inherent advantage that entails. I’m not a show-stopper or anything, but my features are symmetrical and my skin is usually clear and…well, to be honest, the triple-D cup size means that the rest of that stuff almost doesn’t matter. My shoulders are too broad to look like a pinup and I’m too short to look leggy and curvaceous and I’m too curvy to be ‘petite’, but I did okay on the physical end of the spectrum. I could probably understand if someone came up and asked to buy me a drink or something. I consistently cannot understand when someone shows interest, romantic or otherwise, in me once I’ve opened my mouth. You know the running joke of ‘well I’m not stopping traffic but at least I have a good personality’? Yeah, my assessment of myself is the exact opposite. None of my self-esteem issues related to the way I look, they’re all about the person who lives under my skin.
And Mulan is pretty, she’s lovely, no one questions that, she doesn’t ever seem to question that. But she always looks surprised when people like her, and she tries so hard to act the way people expect her to act, and she looks ready to take punishment for acting outside the expectations, even when she’s been killing armies and slaying warlords and saving emperors. I like to think she’s like me: she knows the skin is pretty, but she’s terrified that the person underneath isn’t lovable. And then she goes to the army and breaks laws and dishonors her family. And she makes friends who risk their lives for that person, and she gains respect for that person, and Shang falls in love with that person, and it’s all done on that person’s merits, whether you want to call that person Mulan or Ping or whatever, not on the merits of how pretty her face is or how busty she is or how elegant or well-mannered she can act.
And…that meant a lot to me as a scared, damaged kid. It means a lot to me, now, currently, in my differently scared, differently damaged almost-adult self. I probably haven’t made a lot of sense here, come to think of it. If you persevered all the way to the end, I tip my hat to you.
