Why We Hate Our Life

by Laura

I was going to put a trigger warning on the title of this.  But then I thought, well, if the title itself isn't enough of a warning, then too bad.  We're dealing with more than enough crap as it is, and there's no need for us to take on anybody else's crap.  If you can't deal with hard feelings, if you can't deal with emotional pain, then don't read it.

More than once I've said to myself, said to Allegra, "I hate our life."  I've heard Rachel say it too.  I've wondered if I would hate our life if Rachel didn't hate our life as well, because sh*t runs downward.  And now we realize that Charity hates our life too.

It's hard to live when you hate life.  Hate the life that you've ended up with.  Hate the life that you supposedly chose, that you've kept slogging through, day after day, year after year, when you feel that you never really chose it at all.  Even the ones who made these choices--Charity, Rachel, whoever--only made the choices that they thought they were Supposed To Make.  Our life has been filled with far more Shoulds than are healthy.  And we've been miserable.  Flat-out miserable.  If you remember so much negative that any positive seems so rare as to have no meaning, you're miserable. 

The only thing that keeps us slogging along is our family.  We know what it's like to have a family member give up.  Our paternal grandfather took his own life when we were eleven and a half years old.  We don't want to cause the kind of anguish he caused by making the choice that he made.  Our life may be more miserable than we can describe, but we know misery well enough that we don't want to pass it on to others.

It's one of the reasons why we've never had a relationship or had children.  Taking care of our own needs consumes all our energy.  We also don't like feeling tied down or closed in, and we don't like obligation.  And 85 percent of our system is under the age of 18.  So the fact that many of us hate being close to outside people, being around outside people....well, the fact that we hate our life is only another bitter layer of icing on the cake.

We don't know what to do at this point.  We want to heal, but the pain seems so overwhelming.  [A little help from Allegra describing this next part.]  Charity is at the center of it, and she feels powerless, especially since Mary is still AWOL.  Charity can feel Mary trying to reach her, but there's something blocking this from happening.  Maybe the enormity of the pain; we don't know.  The only good thing is that Rachel realizes that the pain is rooted in Charity's life experience, and that our collective healing is more dependent on Charity's healing than it is on Rachel's.  This doesn't mean that Rachel doesn't have pain, or that Rachel didn't experience trauma, or that her need to heal isn't important.  But she doesn't have to bear the burden of the whole system's well-being the way Charity does. [Allegra steps back now.]

Whatever.  Back to our ongoing misery.  The hardest thing is having to play the responsible adult, to keep slogging through, to pretend that we're happy with a life that we don't feel we really chose at all.  And it's also hard keeping the misery and anger and depression at bay while we're trying to function.  Outsiders don't need to know what we're dealing with, nor are they obligated to make allowances for it.  So we're basically on our own.  Even though we want to be free from other people and the pain that comes from being around them, we have no means of support other than our T and our online friends.  Isolation adds to our misery, and we don't know how to break the cycle.  So for now, we just keep slogging along.