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Thank you for these insightful and compassionate replies, friends.  I appreciate your perspectives, and have been doing my best to work with them.  It's really hard.  Everything is really hard.  I get so discouraged sometimes, feeling that nothing I can do is enough.  NK, I really like your idea about engaging with those bad feelings, standing up to them, but it's difficult to challenge those underlying negative narratives.  I think one of my inner children is actually my mother, always lurking, ready to attack and undermine me.  My own worst bully seems to be built into me.

The other day, I realised that I have actually been fairly successful in life relative to the things my mother implicitly (and in some ways, even explicitly) taught me were important when I was a child.  These things are, finding someone to take care of me financially, being sexually adventurous, and not being fat.  Thinking about that really messes with my mind.  I know I'm a "better person" (more compassionate, more self-aware, less narcissistic) than my mother, but that doesn't really seem like enough measured against the thought of all the things I could potentially have succeeded at if I'd had better examples to follow. 

I'm feeling very low today, very bad about myself. I think what I'm supposed to do with that is acknowledge it, let myself feel it and not try to repress it or talk myself out of it, and then let it go. But I have trouble with the whole "let it go" thing. I don't seem to know how to do it, not with this, not with big things, not with anything. I get stuck in my negative feelings and can't seem to get out. Sad. Today I really feel like my mother's daughter, and that is not a good way to feel. I'm like a black hole of neediness with no real self.

hey, bach, could she be showing signs of dementia/alzheimer's or something to that effect?  it sounds very paranoid to me.  not that i'm trying to find an excuse, but it sounds like a trip to a doctor might be in order.  such behavior is intolerable and it's awful that your brother is going thru this and that you have to watch it happen.  so very sorry it's happening.  still, no excuse for her treating him like this.  love and hugs

It might almost be easier to deal with if these were signs of dementia/Alzheimer's, but I don't think they are.  She goes to the doctor frequently for all kinds of things, and never once has her mental competence been questioned.  The sad truth is, she's always been like this, completely allergic to ever taking responsibility for anything.  She always finds something or someone to blame for anything in her life that she's unhappy about.  There is always a reason that it's not her fault, she didn't do it, it was an accident or beyond her control or a genetic flaw, SOMETHING.  She is perhaps less filtered and more virulent about it in her old age, but nothing happening here is out of character for her.  I think that she knows that she is getting too old and frail to live by herself in that house, and deep down she does want to be someplace safer and more suitable, but along with the fact that she hates change and is very attached to the past, she is FURIOUS about being in that position.  Therefore someone has to be the villain, and now that her husband is dead, my brother is the only candidate.  She has more than once told me in the tone of a cute or funny story about the "terrible things" she said to her late husband when they had to give up their apartment in the city and were in the process of moving to the beach house full time, and how lucky she is that he put up with it.  Well, he was her husband and chose to spend his life with a manipulative woman-child who was highly skilled at getting what she wanted while getting him to take the responsibility for deciding, and he was a pretty nasty person himself, so whatever, but my poor brother who has plenty of his own problems is only trying to do his best and does not in any way deserve this.

My mother is torturing my brother, and I'm so upset for him.  The short version of the long story is this:  My mother lives in what used to be my grandparents's summer house.  The house is a big part of our family history.  My grandparents bought it in 1950.  My family spent summers there when I was a kid in the 70s, and my mother continued to spend every summer there until 2004 when for various reasons she took it for her primary residence.  I'd love to tell more about the history of that house in our family, but if I did I'd get bogged down in all the backstories and sidestories and never get to what I came here to write about. So maybe some other time.  In any case, ever since my mother's husband died in 2021, she started talking on and off about moving to a senior living community at the beach two towns over from the house.  It's for "active seniors" and not an assisted living facility, but it does have community spaces, a dining room where meals are served, and on-site support in case of problems or illness.  The house has not been maintained very well, and is not a particularly senior-friendly house to begin with.  It's a vertical house, three stories of tiny cluttered rooms, lots of stairs, and in the past few years there have been various issues related to the lack of upkeep such as leaks and pests.  Last year was particularly difficult in that area, as well as in some health problems she experienced, and at some point she seemed to affirmatively decide that she wanted to move.  The problem was that you have to buy into the place, and there were no units available.  So for a number of months the talk was about how the house wasn't safe or comfortable for her anymore and how she hoped a unit would come available soon so she could move.  Finally a unit            came available.  My brother came down from upstate to take her to see the place, and a decision was made that she would buy it.  She signed the contract and then all of the sudden she wasn't so sure.  Complicating matters was that the closing got delayed a few times by the seller.  Finally the sale was completed, and guess what happened?  My mother decided that she does not want to move.  What's worse is that she has decided that she NEVER wanted to move, that my brother forced her to buy the apartment and wants to get her out of the house so that he can have it.  This is of course entirely untrue.  He has repeatedly assured her that she doesn't have to move, that the apartment can be rented out or resold, that she can stay in the house if that's what she wants to do.  And actually, this isn't even half the crazy, merely the craziest part.  She says a lot of things, many of them contradictory, and all so out of touch with reality that I can't even put them into coherent words.  But the big issue is that all my brother was trying to do was help her and make sure she has a safe, comfortable place to live, and what he gets for that is hostility and wild accusations.  It's so upsetting I can hardly stand it.  I want to tell her to stop being so awful to my brother, but I know there's no point.  She just keeps doubling down.  Yesterday he told me that she said that he should have known better than to take her seriously about wanting to move, and that she vaguely threatened suicide.  What, and I can't stress this enough, the ****!

When I was in high school, my stepmother said that she thought that I should do a job where I worked with my hands.  She was right.  So why instead of exploring the possibility of trade school for me did they pack me off instead to an academic college that I wasn't prepared for, that I barely got into, where I bombed out and had a nervous breakdown within the first year?  They KNEW better.  They knew I struggled with the discipline of academic work.  They knew I was mechanically inclined and that I enjoyed making things and fixing things.  So, why?  Why?  I can't even blame myself for this, one even in my wildest imaginings of what I should have or could have known or done.  I was 17, for heaven's sake, I didn't know anything.  My parents just wanted me out of their hair.  Then after the breakdown and hospitalisation, they bought me off with a small monthly allowance, told me to go find a job and a place to live, and kicked me out of their house.  So I scraped by the best I could, never building anything.  I suppose I should be grateful that they at least gave me money for a while, but...Really? 

I keep thinking about this and I'm so angry.  I've never wanted to be a victim.  I'm tired of blaming my parents.  But the truth is, I AM a victim of their failure to look after me, and a lot of what makes me unhappy in life IS, despite my best efforts, the result of how they failed me over and over again.  What the *&^%$#@#%$^& am I supposed to do with that?

One of the things that stops me from writing is the need I have to give everything context.  Nothing that I feel or that I have to say makes very much sense without reams and reams of context.  There's just no way to understand any of it without the whole story, and the whole story is long and COMPLICATED. 

The noise in my head is really loud these days.  I have so much trouble doing anything above the very bare minimum that my living with and having responsibilities to another human requires of me.  I can't seem to do much to help myself.  Can't get out of freeze.  I think that I've been in a semi-freeze state for most of my life, and that the floods froze me up completely.  I worry that it's for life, just the way I am now.  Nothing gets me out of it anymore, not even cannabis.

Hi Bach, just barging in here... Functioning well despite feeling garbage feels a bit like magic, doesn't it? I've had a few of those days too here and there. It's really empowering that feeling like garbage does not have the last say in everything! 

It does feel like magic!  If I could do that every day, I'd really have something going on here.

I functioned very well today despite feeling like garbage. That's something to take hope from and build on.

    

I was very depressed for about 5 months.  Then I started feeling better around mid-December and I was really conscious of and grateful for getting a break from my intrusive death-wishing thoughts.  But in the last few days, without much of anything external changing, those thoughts have come back strong and it's painful again to be conscious.  I don't know why or how to fix it.  Unless it really is because of the swimming pool being closed.  I'm not sure if the lift in my mood coincided with when I started going to the pool regularly, but it may have.  I suppose I could try doing some other kind of exercise until the pool reopens, but it's really hard because swimming is the only thing that doesn't hurt. 

I'm so tired of myself.  Why can't I just be the person I want to be?

Today is the third straight day of blustery cold winds.  My house is not particularly cold or drafty, but wind around my house makes NOISE.  It sounds like thunder.  Or war!  Between that and the reports of the fires in California and my heightened emotional state from all this intense unexpected ongoing dialogue with Other, I am wildly overstimulated, on high alert.  I get so tired of being afraid all the time!

In 2019 I went to England to spend Christmas with my very special friend Penny.  She and her whole family, immediate and extended, were wonderful to me.  They included me in all their holiday traditions, gave me presents, and generally made me feel completely happy and welcome and wanted.  I wish I could spend every Christmas like that!

Thank you for the replies, friends.  My efforts to stay off from Facebook have been semi-successful.  For the first several days, I didn't have any problem staying away, and I felt great relief.  But then I started going there again, first only once a day popping on to see if I had any notifications, then leaving right away.  After a few days of that, I started scrolling again, just a little, and not clicking any links.  Once a day became twice a day, just a little scrolling became just a little more scrolling.  This morning, I clicked a link.  Now I'm fighting the urge to give in and lose myself in it.  Exactly like an addictive drug.  Scary!  I feel particularly bemused remembering how resistant I was in the beginning to even sign up for an account, and how I finally did sign up because my 25-years-younger half-sister who I barely knew encouraged me to, and I thought it would be a way to develop a relationship with her.  Not to mention that the online communities I was part of started dying because everyone was leaving for Facebook.  Now 15 years later, I still don't have much of a relationship with the sister, communities on Facebook are far too large and scattered for me to feel comfortable in, and it seems that I'm hooked on hurting myself mentally by hanging around on the periphery of everything looking for I don't even know what and getting anxious and dismayed both by the world I see there and the reflection of my isolated self. 

I long for connection.  But I cannot sustain it.  It's too scary.  The more I like someone and want to interact with them, the more afraid I get to even try.  I am not well, not well at all.

In other issues, my self-harm scars have started itching lately.  I desperately regret them.  Along with everything else I've ever not done, or done wrong.  I am not well, not well at all.  But I said that already, didn't I.