For me it's not even that I grew up in an abusive household or whatever. My parents are very supportive of making sure I'm mentally healthy and stuff but I have this intrinsic fear that they'll make it personal or something. Also, we're all kind of schizoid by nature - my mom deals with people all day every day at work and comes home exhausted; my dad is depressed and in too much physical pain to go out often other than the occasional movie, church, and date night with my mom; I kind of piggyback off of their behaviors. We don't talk to anyone at church unless they talk to us first and we don't talk about anything deep, and we don't stay long enough afterwards to talk to anyone because my dad is in pain and we have to get home. And house guests are a pain - my dad will usually barricade himself in his office and leave me to entertain, except sometimes when it's his mother.

Going out is an inconvenience to all of us. Talking to people makes it worse. If I want to do something I have to put out for myself. If I want to go talk to a counselor at my church my parents will know and will ask questions and whatever I do there's nothing to keep them from prying and I don't want them prying because the more they pry the more I want to hold back which makes them worry, and if I let something slip they worry.

My mental health is my problem. Not theirs.

So we pretend we don't have problems and nothing gets talked about and things bottle up. We put our bottles on the fireplace mantle and then go watch tv in the next room and somehow we survive. Every once in a while something will happen that'll knock one of those bottles to the ground and the glass shatters and my mom steps in it (it's hard to ignore a field of glass shards all over the living room floor) and gets splinters and I try to tiptoe around it and then one of my parents inevitably stumbles into me and I get splinters in my feet too. Eventually it all gets swept under the table and we go back to ignoring the mantle. Sometimes it's that my dad knocked over a jar while stumbling to the bathroom. Sometimes it's me stupidly going, "I wonder if I drop this glass jar onto this tile floor whether or not it'll shatter," and then it does.
</metaphor>

So I get no solace there.

I do have emotional and spiritual needs. My spiritual health isn't great at the moment and it's leaking over into my mental health but I don't think there's anything I can do about it as long as I live in my parents' house under my mother's paycheck. Counselling and therapy cost money and it implies that I have more jars on the fireplace mantel than my mom thinks I do.

Also, I can't help but wonder if this is all inside my head. ("Of course it is inside your head, [Snickie], but why on earth should that mean that it's not real?")

Actually I'm referring something akin to being a hypochondriac or Munchausen's Syndrome (see the deliberate jar-dropping reference) or just a plain old drama queen attention ***** type of thing. Then then I like to think that I can satisfy my own emotional needs and don't need to feed off of someone else or attact attention to myself but apparently that's not true.

Is it incredibly selfless that I don't want to impose my problems on other people, or is it incredibly selfish that I think I'm the only one who can do anything about them?


I saw my former flute professor a few hours ago after the opening concert of this year's concert season at my university. She retired at the end of last year. I saw her and she was talking with one of my clarinet professors and suddenly I felt like crying but letting myself cry would mean disrupting their time and would mean I'd have to explain why I was crying and that would mean opening some jars and that was not the right environment to open jars, not to mention I wouldn't have even known which jars to open anyway, and I think opening the wrong jar is worse than not opening any jars.