Top highlights from I'm Glad My Mom Died
I take a longer look at the words on her headstone. Brave, kind, loyal, sweet, loving, graceful, strong, thoughtful, funny, genuine, hopeful, playful, insightful, and on and onWas she, though? Was she any of those things? The words make me angry. I cant look at them any longer.Why do we romanticize the dead? Why cant we be honest about them?
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I dont like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, thats the person I work out with. Thats the person Im in a book club with. Thats the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship
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I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimatelywithout context, without boxesand I yearn for them to know me that way, too.
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Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can't we be honest about them? Especially moms, they're the most romanticized of anyone. Moms are saints, angels by merely existing. No one could possibly understand what it's like to be a mom. Men will never understand, women with no children will never understand. No one buts moms know the hardship of motherhood and we non-moms must heap nothing but praise upon mom because we lowly, pitiful, non-moms are mere peasants compared to the goddesses we call mothers.
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I'm becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I'm aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It's armor. It's easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.
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A pushover is a bad thing to be, but an opinionated pushover is a worse thing to be. A pushover is nice and goes along with it, whatever it is. An opinionated pushover acts nice and goes along with it, but while quietly brooding and resentful. I am an opinionated pushover.
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I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent. Cooperative.
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One of the more excruciating emotional disconnects for me is when someone says something they think is poignant and I receive it as complete bullshit.
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Loving someone is vulnerable. It's sensitive. It's tender. And I get lost in them. If I love someone, I start to disappear. It's so much easier to just do googly eyes and fond memories and inside jokes for a few months, run the second things start to get real, then repeat the cycle with someone new.
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I always forget that trying to reason with the unreasonable is... unreasonable.
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SLIPS ARE TOTALLY NORMAL. WHEN you have a slip, its just that. A slip. It doesnt define you. It doesnt make you a failure. The most important thing is that you dont let that slip become a slide,
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I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don't.
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The problem with this is that if we beat ourselves up after a mistake, we add shame onto the guilt and frustration that we already feel about our mistake. That guilt and frustration can be helpful in moving us forward, but shame...shame keeps us stuck. It's a paralyzing emotion. When we get caught in a shame spiral, we tend to make more of the same kinds of mistakes that caused us shame in the first place".
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I have over a decades worth of eating disorder experience at this point. There were the anorexic years, the binge-eating ones, and the current bulimic ones. The more experience Ive got, the more I recognize that the body is hardly a reliable reflection of whats going on inside it. My body has fluctuated frequently and drastically throughout this decade, and no matter how its fluctuated, no matter whether my body is a kids size 10 slim or an adult size 6, Ive had an issue underneath it. People dont seem to get that unless they have a history with eating disorders. People seem to assign thin with good, heavy with bad, and too thin also with bad. Theres such a small window of good. Its a window that I currently fall into, even though my habits are so far from good. Im abusing my body every day. Im miserable. Im depleted. And yet the compliments keep pouring in.
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She wanted this. And I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to be happy. But now that I have it, I realize that shes happy and Im not. Her happiness came at the cost of mine. I feel robbed and exploited.
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And if my entire life and point of view and identity have been built on a false foundation, confronting that false foundation would mean destroying and rebuilding a new foundation from the ground up. I have no idea how to go about doing this.
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Ive become a bitter person and Im resigned to that fact. I cant change my circumstances, so why try to change who Ive become as a result of them?
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Maybe its because she didnt want to be a dancer growing up, she wanted to be an actress, and maybe Mom only sits in when Im being the thing she wanted to be.
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Im pretty sure the God Ive learned about doesnt make exceptions.
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Mom didnt get better. But I will.
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This feeling of sadness and ending is really common on sets. You get to know the people around you so intimately because youre around them more than youre around your family. For a period of time. And then you arent anymore. And little by little, you realize you start talking less and less to the people you thought you were so intimate with. Until you dont talk to them at all anymore. And it makes you wonder if you were ever really intimate with them in the first place or if it was all just a facade. If the connections were as temporary as the sets they were made on.
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Im done being a good sport. I resent being a good sport. If I wasnt such a good sport to begin with, I wouldnt be in this predicament in the first place. I wouldnt be on this shitty show saying these shitty lines on this shitty set with this shitty hairstyle. Maybe my life would be entirely different right now. I fantasize about it being different.
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Im aware enough to know how fucking annoying and whiny this all sounds. Millions of people dream of being famous, and here I am with fame and hating it. I somehow feel entitled to my hatred since I was not the one who dreamed of being famous. Mom was. Mom pushed this on me. Im allowed to hate someone elses dream, even if its my reality.
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I'm becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I'm aware of this shift, and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It's armor. It's easier to be angry than to feel the pain underneath it.
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I'm allowed to hate someone else's dream, even if it's my reality.
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Recovery so far is, in some ways, as difficult as the bulimic/alcohol-ridden years, but difficult in a different way because I'm facing my issues for the first time instead of burying them with eating disorders and substances. I'm processing not only the grief of my mom's death, but the grief of a childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood that I feel I had never truly been able to live for myself. It's difficult, but it's the kind of difficult I have pride in.
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I dont like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, thats the person Iwork out with. Thats the person Im in a book club with. Thats the person I didthat show with..." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship.
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At the beginning of the decade, the people I was close to seemed like friends for life, people I could never imagine not seeing every day. But life happens. Love happens. Loss happens. Change and growth happen at different paces for different people, and sometimes the paces just dont line up. Its devastating if I think too much about it, so I usually dont.
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Fuck being a good sport, Id rather be playing charades with Tom Hanks.
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Maybe I feel this way now because I viewed my mom that way for so long. I had her up on a pedestal, and I know how detrimental that pedestal was to my well-being and life. That pedestal kept me stuck, emotionally stunted, living in fear, dependent, in a near constant state of emotional pain and without the tools to even identify that pain let alone deal with it. My mom didn't deserve her pedestal. She was a narcissist. She refused to admit she had any problems, despite how destructive those problems were to our entire family.
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I'm so unimpressed by people. Even irritated by them. At times even disgusted by them.
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I know focusing on myself wont be easy. It will take continuous effort, time, and attention. It will mean working on my issues, facing them head-on instead of letting them serve as distractions or trying to pretend theyre less than they are. It will mean doing THE WORK. The soul-scraping introspection it takes to understand where bad habits and insecurities and self-sabotaging patterns come from and why, plus the motivation to challenge and change those bad habits and insecurities and self-sabotaging patterns even as they continue to get triggered over and over again by various life events.
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Why do we romanticize the dead? Why cant we be honest about them?
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My mother emotionally, physically and mentally abused me in ways that will forever impact me. She gave me breast and vaginal exams until I was seventeen years old. These "exams" made my body stiff with discomfort. I felt violated, yet I had no voice, no ability to express that.
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The fragility of Moms life is the center of mine.
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We talked about how sad and miserable we are and how we feel guilty about it because we have so much to be grateful for. We watched "Dance Moms" until we fell asleep. Between Abby Lee Miller's abusive tactics and the intensity of the parents, we relate deeply.
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I've gotta something more important to offer, something I'm sure mom cares about more than anything. "Mommy, I am... so skinny right now. I'm finally down to 89 pounds."I'm in the ICU with my dying mother, and the thing that I'm sure will get her to wake up, is the fact that in the days since mom has been hospitalized, my fear and sadness have morphed into the perfect anorexia motivation cocktail, and finally I have achieved mom's current goal weight for me: 89 pounds.
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She took care of me and my brothers, Im sure that was really hard for her.That was her job. I feel interrogated, like I cant say the right thing. I speed up, trying to explain myself. Well, but I mean this was different from most parents. Shit. I hated how that came out.How so?I pause to compose myself. Laura wont rattle me. I speak in an even, measured tone.She sacrificed everything for me. She constantly went without so she could take care of me. She put me first, ahead of herself.Hmm. And do you think thats healthy?What kind of fresh hell is this? What is this impossible-to-ace quiz? I have no idea how Im supposed to be answering to make Mom look good.
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Through writing, I feel power for maybe the first time in my life. I dont have to say somebody elses words. I can write my own. I can be myself for once. I like the privacy of it. Nobodys watching. Nobodys judging. Nobodys weighing in. No casting directors or agents or managers or directors or Mom. Just me and the page. Writing is the opposite of performing to me. Performing feels inherently fake. Writing feels inherently real.
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My grandma frequently refers to me as "bitch". She always throws a little extra salt on the word too, for effect.
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That guilt and frustration can be helpful in moving us forward, but shame shame keeps us stuck. Its a paralyzing emotion.
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Im done being a good sport. I resent being a good sport. If I wasnt such a good sport to begin with, I wouldnt be in this predicament in the first place.
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He has no concept of loss. I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who dont. And whenever I encounter someone who doesnt, I disregard them
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Well, sweetheart, if you really want to know how to stay small, theres this secret thing you can do its called calorie restriction.
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Men, theyll hurt you without ever really knowing you, she often told me. But women women will know you deeply, intimately, and then hurt you. You tell me which is worse.
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My anxiety causes me to be a people pleaser. My anxiety causes me to take the picture and sign my autograph and say its a good one. But underneath that anxiety is a deep, unearthed combination of feelings that I fear to face. I fear that Im bitter. Im too young to be bitter. Especially as a result of a life that people supposedly envy. And I fear that I resent my mother. The person I have lived for. My idol. My role model. My one true love.
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Anyway, what was I saying? he asks while he keeps massaging me. My shoulders do have a lot of knots in them, but I dont want The Creator to be the one rubbing them out. I want to say something, to tell him to stop, but Im so scared of offending him. Oh, right, he says, remembering his train of thought without my help. Every kid out there would kill for an opportunity like the one youve got. Youre very lucky, Jennetter.
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He's a distant man with an emotional range of a potato
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So much of my life felt so out of control for so long. And Im done with that being my reality. I want my life to be in my hands. Not an eating disorders or a casting directors or an agents or my moms. Mine.
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What is my identity, even? What the fuck is that? How would I know? Ive pretended to be other people my whole life, my whole childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. The years that youre supposed to spend finding yourself, I was spending pretending to be other people. The years that youre supposed to spend building character, I was spending building characters.
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I want to give you the life I never had, Net. I want to give you the life I deserved. The life my parents wouldnt let me have.
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I proudly show my half-eaten portions to Mom after every meal. She beams. Each Sunday, she weighs me and measures my thighs with a measuring tape.
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Calorie restriction is wonderful!
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A little girl shouldnt have to worry about her entire family, Grandpa says to me one afternoon.What? I ask, not because I didnt hear what he said, but because Im confused. Of course a little girl should worry about her entire family. Thats what little girls do.I just He steps closer to me. I just thinkyou deserve to be a kid.
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I hate being known as Sam. I absolutely hate it.
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better? What a stupid idiot. How could I have not sensed what Mom needed? That she needed all of us to be serious, to be taking the situation as hard as we possibly could, to be devastated. She needed us to be nothing without her.
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This house is an embarrassment. This house is shameful. I hate this house. I hate how being inside it makes me feel tense and anxious.
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But that doesn't directly impact your main environment - your home. Which is the main environment that influences your mental health. So why don't we stay focused on the home?
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I'm trying every day to face myself. The results vary, but the attempts are consistent.
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I tried desperately to understand and know my motherwhat made her sad, what made her happy, and on and on and onat the expense of ever really knowing myself. Without Mom around, I dont know what I want. I dont know what I need. I dont know who I am. And I certainly dont know what to wish for.
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