So apparently even though I’m following the chore chart I’m still not doing any cleaning.

My morning started with listening to my father ranting VERY LOUDLY downstairs to my mother about this along with my poor parenting skills. Apparently I also do nothing about Little Bear’s behavior.

He’s only been grounded from EVERYTHING for the last two weeks and got grounded for another day for his mouthy attitude yesterday so I have no idea what he wants from me. The State and mental health hospital do NOT want me to lay a hand on this child so my father’s advice of “beat his ass” is really not helpful. At all.

Now bear in mind this is one of those conversations that’s not for me to butt into but meant for me to hear. If I had stepped in, I would have told “I’m not talking to you” and things would have exploded from there. This is what baiting is and what manipulation is because now I have to sit here and figure out what the hell he wants.

The best part of it all was hearing him say I haven’t changed at all since moving here.

And people wonder why I’m so fucking angry all the time. Two weeks ago he was telling me that they aren’t trying to control me, that it’s all in my head, and it’s because of my illness. But then fucking shit like this happens.

I go down stairs to feed the boys breakfast and there he is up my ass about Little Bear’s behavior. It seems that last night he had gotten up while I was sleeping and snuck out two sodas from the pantry. Twice.

So my questions are:

1. Why didn’t you wake me up to handle it?
2. Why did you let him just fucking do it if you knew about it?
3. Now that it’s been done, what the fuck do you expect me to do because he doesn’t care because as far as he’s concerned he’s already gotten away with it?
   1. We are dealing with the logic of mental illness here so consequences mean very little, especially with this child, unless they happen immediately.
   2. And I’m really tired of being treated like I don’t fucking care just because I don’t handle it the same way you did “back in the day” – believe me I reached a point where I stopped caring about the punishment.
   3. Yes, I can ground him longer – to make you happy – but we can see how well that shit is working.

And it brings me to another point that’s been rubbing me the wrong way. Many of you know that I write about characters with mental illness and brain disorders. Swearing is a fact of life for many of us. Not all, but many of us. Particularly the angriest of us. I see it in our blogs. I see it in the hospitals. In the clinics. I see it in myself. In my family. It’s normal to me. But I post my work up on Scribophile and suddenly people cry foul. So I start making a point to state that my work centers around mental illness and still people are crying foul about the language being used. Some are even saying it’s too harsh, not understanding the diagnosis – like not knowing what it means to be PTSD with aggressive presentation when I stated it in the About section for the piece. So there are two frustrations here for me.

One is the blatant censorship going on. I could see it if every character in the piece is swearing to tell me it’s too much. But I never do that. It’s always the angry, bitter, aggressive, vulgar, snarky character that swears. And only that character. Because that’s how my life is. It’s what I know. And it’s natural to me. Having more than one character like that in a story would be overwhelming and ugly for me – even if it is my life. So I stick to one. And it bothers me that so many people tell me not to do it. Not to use these words. Not to use so many. “It would have more power.” Or whatever. I’m not using them for power. I’m not using them for shock value. I use them where I use them because it feels natural to me and it feels right. Both Rhae and Clarissa are the angry voices in me – and maybe I shouldn’t have done that because it attaches my ego to the work – but I shouldn’t have to feel silenced by doing what is right and by being true to representing what mental illness really is. I’m not writing about PTSD through research. I’m writing it from personal experience under the guise of the fantasy genre.

The other frustration is seeing how little people understand mental illness. I used the phrase “lost his shit” and one critique told me to use “went crazy” instead. The two phrases mean two completely different things. I can understand not using profanity in the narrative and reserving it for dialogue only, unless using first person POV. I get it because it’s characterization. But people “lose their shit” all the time without ever going crazy. I’m crazy. I have the diagnoses to prove it. And I still lose my shit from time to time. Losing your shit is a loss of self control to an extreme degree. It has nothing to do with craziness. And once again because of the fantasy genre some of them misunderstood the diagnosis, but that part was okay with me. The piece that they were reading was The Demons That Bind Us and since it was the beginning of the series, it was completely fine to ask those types of questions. Good actually.

On the upside, I did get some good advice on how to polish the piece so hopefully before long I’ll be posting a better version of it on The Chaos Pen.

And a musical number for the current mood I’m in. Random bit of trivia: I’ve discovered that for some reason dubstep alleviates my particular brand of tinnitus. I don’t even need to have it set very loud. Interesting.