by Band Back Together | Aug 20, 2015 | Adult Bullying, Bullying, Childhood Bullying, Fear, Workplace Bullying |
When I was in school, I became a target for bullying. I feel like the main reason I was bullied was because I was white. Most of my bullies were African/Black. I am in no way a racist. I’ve had more black friends than white.
One day in gym class, my friend Robbie and I were sitting in the gym and a group of students came up to us. There were five of them, and they were skipping class. They started calling us names, hitting us, and even tried to get us to fight each other. We tried to leave, but they wouldn’t let us. They just kept pushing us. Eventually, they got tired and left.
The next year, the gym teacher would pay Robbie and me with candy for cleaning under the bleachers. A different group of students than before thought it would be funny to choke me with a belt. The coach was downstairs, and had no idea that while he was gone, they were trying to hang me with a belt under the bleachers.
The most recent bullying happened two or three years ago, at work. I was the only white guy on the day maintenance crew. I did the best job I could, without a complaint from anyone. The night maintenance crew took over at 10:00. One of the guys in night maintenance would target me, and me only. He would say the bathrooms weren’t clean, so he would make me go back and clean them again – even going so far as to make me pick up broken glass with my bare hands. The other night workers would just stand there, laughing.
I’m very shy. I’ve never been in a fight with anyone. I grew up in a Christian home, where I was taught to love others. But the guy at work just kept pushing me. I found myself hating him. Thankfully, he transferred to another store, so I don’t have to deal with him anymore.
All of my life, I have been bullied by nothing but blacks. I feel like there is a tug-of-war going on inside of me. I want to be friendly and outgoing, but all the bullying in my past has left its mark. I feel like it is holding me back from who I want to be. I don’t want to feel fear and hatred.
I’m terribly sorry if I have offend anyone with my words.
by Band Back Together | Aug 18, 2015 | Bullying, Depression, Loneliness, Sadness, Self Loathing, Shame |
Untreated depression leads to chronic depersonalization” would be a meaningful statement if you meant something, but you mean nothing.
You are not a hardy child of Appalachia; stop wasting your days listening to bluegrass playlists, pining for a time that will never exist. You are weak. People wade through hells far deeper than this one, the soles of their feet scorched but their ankles held intact. But your tendons are peeling like the stalk of a pineapple, the skin on your knee burnt off to display brittle bone, graham cracker bone, bone of yarn, bone of string cheese.
Stay inside where neighbors cannot see the grotesque state of your legs. Stay inside where you cannot chant for them: gooble-gobble, one of us.
Do you want to know what a real person looks like? Don’t skip class this week. Arrive late and sit in one of the satellite desks. Never learn what Marx said. Observe the others mid-digestion and covet their hairlines, their builds. Sketch a series of concentric circles and keep your head down, because you are not a scholar, you are a machine, you are an alarm clock, you are a Disney Channel original series, you are just a paideia, you are mendacity itself. Masturbate for me; you deserve the shame of an amputee juggler on a unicycle, you deserve the shame of a hapless fourteen-year-old YouTube celebrity. Look around you and tell me if any of the people you see had to order their bootstraps off the Silk Road. Every waste of Bitcoins is melancholy, o destitute child, they don’t weave bootstraps in your size.
What you are going to need is a course of Paxil. It is a medication that, by the miracle of contemporary science, will make it easier for you to be worthless. You will be glad to have taken it, as it will make you scream less and sleep more. It will take your ragged canyon and level it out into mesa, and then it will take your mesa and build a timeshare resort. Paxil is an electric fence between banality and suicidality. Paxil is the opposite of filthy, passionate fucking. The instructions on the back of the bottle tell you to stream amateur porn and look at the way they want each other, then take down two pills with a light snack. You are going to forget, but don’t forget: you have to be beautiful to be hired as a caricature artist at the renaissance fair. Don’t forget, you have to do your laundry more often than you do now.
by Band Back Together | Aug 15, 2015 | Anger, Anxiety, Family, Fear, Feelings, Loneliness, Prenatal (Antenatal) Depression, Sadness, Stress |
Maybe it’s not common, maybe it’s commonly forgotten, maybe I’ll feel too ashamed to even post this, but pregnancy isn’t what I expected.
Now don’t get me wrong, I KNEW what to expect, the nausea and fatigue, the moodiness and what not, but I wasn’t prepared.
I wasn’t prepared to shy away from my friends and family, to want nothing but my bed and books. I guess I’m still kinda me, but I am a me I haven’t been for a long time, a me I thought I grew out of. It’s not that I’m not happy, because I couldn’t feel more love for this child or for my husband that I do now, it’s just that I am also sad. I am tired and sick and rather than get better as I get closer to my second trimester it’s gotten worse.
Am I going to be like my mom? 40 weeks of throwing up just because the wind blew in my face? Dear God, I hope not.
The worst part is that I can’t see the end of this. I’m not miserable mentally, but physically I am and it’s draining the reserves I have in my brain to separate my logic and my emotions.
Part of it is that I am, frankly, a little tired of worrying about everyone’s opinions, preparing myself for arguments before they have the chance to arise. It’s to the point I don’t even want to talk to anyone about babies, birth, shots, slings, ANYTHING.
Unfortunately, I care what people think, and caring what they think but knowing that I am going to do what I think is best in the end, causes me to take things personally and feel a lot of unnecessary anger. Anger makes me tired.
It’ll pass and in a few weeks I’ll be laughing at this post, calling myself dramatic and eating 14 cinnamon rolls because that’s my new favorite pastime. At least, I fucking hope so.
Until then, this is me being honest, and begging you not to say “I told you so.”
by Band Back Together | Aug 15, 2015 | Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Estrangement, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Personality Disorders, Psychological Manipulation |
Oh, thank you. Thank you for creating this site. For bringing to light the disturbance and disruption created by having, knowing, or having the narcissist thrust upon you.
First thought: let’s build a gated community! Yes! A place where we can run free! A preserve! Where we are protected. A place where we can meander down to the watering hole, tell some marvelously offensive jokes, laugh till our collective sinuses are clear and then do it again.
I still want to just type the words “thank you” over and over. And I haven’t read Band Back Together but for ten or fifteen minutes, but I see that this is the place. The place where people say – hey, you’re not losing your mind. You’re not.
You’ve just met your first dyed in the wool, Grade A, First Prize, Blue Ribbon Narcissist. And you can’t return it. You don’t seem to have the receipt. No one is going to reimburse your account and basically, you’re stuck with it. You can’t unload it at a tag sale, you can’t give it away on Craig’s List, you can’t scour the shelves at CVS for a salve or a wash or treatment to make it go away. You can peruse the CDC in Atlanta and it ain’t there. You can read till you’re nodding off all of the archives of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly and there are no blips on the radar.
It’s almost a quiet killer. A killer of marriages. A killer of relationships. A killer, most assuredly, of peace of mind. It’s little like menopause when you have a hot sweat; the urgent need to pull off the sweater, fan yourself with whatever you can grab and declare to anyone nearby, “Oh my God, it’s happening!”
The need to share is common (thank goodness, we all get a turn! Just like your Mama!! Ha! Made ya laugh!) I wish having a Narc in the family was half as much fun as a hot sweat. As if the body’s response to the stress of their existence doesn’t do enough damage. My bod pumps out more Cortisol in that wretched persons’ company than is imaginable. Can’t sell that on Craig’s List either. Too bad it wasn’t like plasma and we could donate to help someone!
But! I’ve just found this site. And I said, “who is this broad? She sounds like me. That sentence sounds like mine!”
And I want to reach through the screen and shake her hand! Hi! Ohhh, you were on that bus, too? That was quite a cliff, wasn’t it? Our nodding the implied “YES!” validates the bus trip off the cliff and we exclaim heartily that we are so lucky to have come out alive. But – we’ll always be the ones who got on that bus. Unknowingly. Crap luck.
And today, out of nowhere, the other side of the luck coin crops up. Well, truth is I have read about narcissistic personality disorder, NPD, a fair amount, unfortunately leaves me feeling like I should find a rope and a branch that”ll hold me. One YouTube video left me in a funk for days – went from a fairly good mood into the bowels of hell. I yelled at myself, why oh why did you listen to that? And gave in to the tears.
Screw it. It is what it is. I’ve a habit of biting off my nose to spite my face, but my life is taking such a direction due to an extended family member’s personality disorder, that I admit I cannot do it alone. This is not a time that I’ll say that I’ll just take care of it myself. No. Nope. Can’t do it. Have been drowning for almost six years in the wake of her behavior and how the person closest to me has become estranged for his fear of being put out in the corn.
It’s a nightmare. Wake me, please. Help me. Help me to mitigate the damage she is doing to a little girl. It’s done. Done deal. And I am a piece of s?!
by Band Back Together | Aug 14, 2015 | Feelings, Trauma |
I have a bit of garden with herbs, tomatoes, peppers, things like that. Anyway, even though I love my garden, keeping up with the weeds is always something that I have a hard time doing. In any case, I let a few of the weeds grow, just to see them develop.
One of these is a particularly nasty specimen. It’s got spines just about everywhere. The edges of the leaves are all lined with needles. It has been growing to over six feet. When you pull them, they often break off, leaving a taproot which can be very difficult to remove. They are hollow, but the membrane that forms the stem is full of sticky white sap. In all they are none too pleasant.
This plant is growing right next to my porch where I usually sit of a morning, so it’s been really easy to watch the plant’s progress. I noticed that it popped several nice flowers, yet tiny, compared to the rest of it’s awkward growth. It made me think that this type of weed goes through so much work, risking daily that someone would remove it, being of little aesthetic value, to put forth these little blossoms, is something of a miracle.
It got me thinking further that perhaps there is wisdom in watching the weeds grow. The whole thing is an apt metaphor for all the trauma that people endure in life. That the ugly, prickly, nasty, and sticky things can bring beauty into the world. The condition is, we must not give up. The singular constant with inner work is that one must practice strict discipline. Difficulties cannot be overcome by giving in to the negative thought patterns which usually are the main source of difficulty. Like the weed, we must endure the dangers and difficulties in order to put forth our flowers.
