life on the cusp.

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ya knowwwww…somedays, when i’m on my period. i wish i could just lay naked, sprawled out on a giant cotton pad and bleed to my heart’s content. 

i love my friends, and i know they love me. but just like my family, i don’t think they could ever help me/support me in dealing with my body image issues. 

i haven’t been blogging about my dreams lately. a little bit because i’ve been lazy and a little bit ‘cause there’s nothing really that interesting to say about the content of my dreams lately. i mean, i’m kind of lying right now, but it is kind of true. i’d be looking up shit that i’ve looked up on dreammoods.com a million times, so in that sense it would really be nothing new. on the other hand, my dreams have been very emotionally vivid lately. 

for ejemplo, about a week ago i dreamt i was dating my junior high crush. i have no relationship with him now. we were tight in middle school, kinda friends in hs but that faded when he decided to act like a silly jock. i basically got over him once hs began. which is why this dream was so crazy. the most intense part about it was how vivid the emotion was. he and i were running away from class and we were so in love. it was really overwhelming actually. it was like my heart was full and my whole body was about to burst with hearts and rainbows and all i wanted to do was be with him. if that’s what being in love feels like, then that sounds kind of dope. 

in another dream, i had this really eerie feeling. i won’t get into the deets cause it’ll take too long and im lazy, but i really felt like there was this creepy lingering haunting feeling in my room. 

then today i napped for five hours (no me juzgues) and i had the most awful dream. this one i will also not go into detail about cause it was really awful. but the takeaway feeling from the dream was shame. i had never felt so disappointed in myself. i don’t know if this has happened to any of you, but when i experience something traumatic, like the last bridges meeting i went to, this sort of numbness washes over me. like i know im upset, but i can’t really feel myself being upset, i just feel like im in shock. but eventually i start to feel angry or upset, but it takes a while for me to start feeling my feelings. sometimes hours, sometimes a day or two. that’s how this dream was. i did something awful. and i couldn’t believe i had done it. because i had always sworn to myself i never would. and it was this incredible betrayal on my values and myself. and i was completely numb. but i knew that eventually the shame would overwhelm me. and then i woke up…thank god. i don’t think i could have handled that feeling. 

as most of you know, i’ve been on a bay area job hunt for almost two months now, remotely from sunny oxnard, california :) there is no disputing that i love my hometown (eight ooooo fiiive!) and obviously my family very much. but i don’t want to live in oxnard and i don’t want to live with them. i would never openly tell my mom that i don’t want to live with her and the fam because then i would be dead to her. but i have been heavily implying that i have every intention of staying in the bay after college for the last 4+ years. of course my mother’s will would never let something silly like my plans get in the way of her plans for me, which are to live in oxnard with my family until i get married.

towards the end of senior year my mom started talking to me about my post college plans. she had been very insistent on me moving back home until then, but the conversation she had with me that day was very different. she was very… flexible. she was like, “whatever you want to do is fine with me. if you decide to stay in the bay, that’s perfectly fine. but in case anything happens, don’t feel like you can’t come home. you’re more than welcome to stay here until you find a job. and if by chance you happen to decide to stay in oxnard, you and norma can go live in the condo. i won’t be breathing down your neck. you two are adults and you can make your own decisions. i just want you to know that you have options and whatever you choose i’ll support you.” sounds fabulous right? oh but my mother always has tricks up her sleeve. unfortunately that’s one trait i didn’t inherit from her (dammit!) which makes me especially vulnerable. ryan had said my mom was gunna try to “trick me into staying”. i wouldn’t call it tricking, ‘cause tricks are for kids and my mom is certified pro at making you think your idea sucks. 

well the rhetoric of “whatever you decide is fine with me” is long gone. on more than a few occasions my mom has had the talk with me of why i should stay (see the BUILD post) and why moving back to oakland is damn near impossible and will basically ruin my life. now, my tia’s on that tip too. on the way back from target today, my tia started telling me that she would really love it if i stayed. she reiterated all the reasons my mom has mentioned and added that she was thinking about moving in with her boyfriend, ‘cause he looked like he was finally going to stick with his current job. i love my tia but that’s bs. her bf’s a loser and he’s not going to pay rent. but even if that did happen, it wouldn’t make a difference. ‘cause i don’t wanna live here. even with my own room, even with half a condo. gosh, i feel like i’m getting bribed left and right. she even admitted that my mom has a “difficult personality”. but that my sisters and i should accept that and be thankful that she and her difficult personality raised us well.

i am thankful, but i still don’t want to live here. i wanna move back to the bay. and i wish they would just accept that. i wish they would just get off my back. 

my older sister norma is so unhelpful sometimes. i like to go on walks late at night. i used to do it a lot when i was in berkeley and i still love doing it now. i find it soothing, cause the night breeze is all nice and cool and there’s not too many people around so i can pretend im in a music video while im walking and there’s no one around to judge me. yes i know it’s dangerous for a womyn to be out by herself late at night. whatever. and i know my mom would flip if she knew i went for walks at 12am. so i have to “sneak out.” i used quotes cause i consider sneaking out to be what you do when you’re 16 and going to a party or something. im 21. it’s my hot body and i’ll do what i want. but leave it to norma to call me out and shit. she tells my tia tonight that she heard me come in last night. was that you i heard?! she asks. yes it was me. “That is really suspicious!” she says as my tia laughs. 

what i wanted to say: SHUT THE FUCK YOU STUPID IDIOT. YOU’RE SO UNHELPFUL! YOU ALWAYS DO THIS! YOU’RE ALWAYS TRYING TO THROW ME UNDER THE BUS CAUSE MOM ALWAYS SAID YOU WERE THE BAD ONE SO NOW YOU WANT GET REVENGE ON ME AND MONI. YOU SUCK AS A SISTER.

what i actually said: i go on late night walks all the time, it’s not a big deal. 

-_- i need a job. 

p.s. if she tells my mom im screwed. :/ <3 my late night walks. don’t take them away from me!

today i woke up to my little sister crying. i asked her why she was upset and she said it was because my mom made her get on the scale today and then told her she was going to have to eat whatever my mom made her for breakfast. 

here’s the context. 

about three years ago, my sister who was 13 at the time started watching her weight. she cut out junk food. started exercising daily and basically created her own diet in the sense that she stopped eating what my mom made for dinner and ate only what she felt was acceptable, which ranged from a sandwich and some fruit to leftovers from another day, but in smaller quantities than my mom would have served. she has lost a tremendous amount of weight in the process and she’s basically at her thinnest.

weight has always been as issue in our family, especially for me since i have always been the fattest of my three sisters. since i can remember my mom has always been asking me to lose weight. her advice to me whenever i’d go back to the bay after spending a weekend at home was always, “be safe, take care of yourself and lose some weight.” my older sister was never as fat as me but not really thin either. but she always had a very different attitude about her weight. i don’t she ever cared what my mom thought, at least it never seemed that way. if my sister felt she was getting too big she’d cut junk foods out here and there, but never made any major changes. she always said she wasn’t going to deprive herself of the things she wanted. my mom and my tia have always obsessed about weight. my tia gained a lot of weight when she came to the US 15 years ago and she’s always talking about how thin she used to be and how she needs to cut down on food. and my mom has been taking these herbal remedy pill thingies to help her lose weight for almost a year now and tried to get me to start taking them a while back.

since i was a little girl i literally can’t remember a time when i wasn’t dissatisfied with my weight and my body. my entire life has always been riddled with anxieties about weight loss and weight gain. and my mom has been a major part of that. if there was such a thing as the Body Police my mom would be the head of the Body Police Department. When my little sister started to lose weight my mom said, “great ‘cause you were getting pretty fat there.” —that’s not a direct quote obviously (or maybe not) but the main idea was that my mom was in favor of my sister losing weight. but i guess my mom and sister had different ideas about what an acceptable weight loss goal was. this doesn’t surprise me because body standards in mexican culture are not the same as american (white) body standards for womyn. so when my sister started getting “too thin”, my mom started watching her eating habits very closely. if my mom would come home after my little sister had eaten, she would make her eat again because she thought my sister was lying about having eaten. —-it’s getting kinda difficult to write “my sister” and “little sister” all over the place so im just write monica from now on since that is her name, lol, i don’t why i didn’t just start off with that, but whatever—- so now monica takes witnesses for all her meals. when she comes home from school, she’ll make herself a sandwich and eat it in front of me and say, “there, you saw me eat!” and when my mom comes home whoever her witness is has to vouch for her that she ate. my mom also took her to the doctor since she was worried monica might be anemic. but im pretty sure what my mom is really worried about is an eating disorder. if you’ve made it this far, you might be thinking, “but melissa, eating disorders are bad, its good that your mom is making sure your sister makes healthy choices.” but here’s the thing, i know that that is only partof the reason my mom is no longer happy with monica’s weight loss. the other reason is that my mom thinks monica esta seca.which translated literally means she is “dry” meaning there is no meat on her bones. “seca” is something you call someone you believe is unattractively thin. a few weeks ago my little sister told me that my older sister norma and my mom had upset her because they ganged up on her at one moment, and told her that she was gross looking because she had no boobs and no ass. i was so infuriated when she told me that. i seriously considered saying something to my mom but i decided not to because she doesn’t like it when her children try to tell her how to parent—which is a whole other frustrating thing that i’ll have to blog about later. Then last week monica had a doctor’s appointment where the doctor told her she was perfectly fine. Her blood work turned up normal and the doctor even congratulated her on her weight loss. For the record im not citing this doctor as being correct since most doctors are fat negative, im just building on to the story. I thought the doctor’s opinion was going to get my mom off monica’s back but it totally didn’t. So monica is basically stuck navigating this minefield that is body image and getting burned every step of the way because while she may be meeting american standards for beauty, she is failing them at home.

What’s frustrates me the most about this situation is that in a way it’s also a minefield for me in terms of helping my sister. Primarily because I have my own body image issues that have never been resolved. Sometimes im proud of my sister for losing weight because it’s something I have never been able to do. But then I check myself and remember that size ≠ health and that the reasons why my sister is counting calories are not so healthy either. So then I tell her to relax when she goes full throttle on the treadmill, but then I sound like my mom trying to tell her what to do. On some level I think she wants to have some sort of autonomy over her body, which I understand, but I feel so stuck because I know that deep down it’s her fear of being fat and ugly—not being healthy—that drives her exercise and calorie counting. And when it comes to my mom, I’m seriously at a loss. I have no idea how to even begin talking to her about this issue without it sounding like I’m defending her weight loss, which I guess I kind of am? I’m not really sure. But I do know that hurling insults at her for being too thin is so not the way to go. And all the while I know my mom is looking at me thinking, it should be you out there running like crazy.

There is just way too much fuckin body policing going on in this house and I can’t handle it.

I need to get a job.

and i got an interview! i was actually really surprised. i thought i was going to have to write another one of those hopelessly professional follow up letters that i knew would never get answered. hopefully they’ll let me do a phone interview but if not im not sure home im gunna get up the bay. anyhoo, onto the meat of this post. i told my mom that i got an interview and she was so not excited. it was one of those things that i totally should have seen coming and just didn’t think about it. she basically wrote me a laundry list of how incredibly difficult it would be for me to make it work in the bay. she was like, “where would you even live? you don’t have any money…” i decided i wasn’t going to be openly angry with her so all i said was, “mom, you make it sound like it’s ridiculously difficult, but i don’t feel like it is. sure it’ll be a little tough at first, but i really feel like i have the connections and the savvy to make it work.” all she said was that if i felt like i could do it then i should just do it, but she really felt like it was impossible. these conversations frustrate me, twofold. not only do i not get the support and vote of confidence im looking for, but then i feel guilty cause i know she’s doing everything in her power to keep me in oxnard. “you couldn’t get a job like that here?” she says. “i don’t mom, i haven’t looked.” since i’ve been at home my mom has brought the conversation of “why don’t i just stay here” a couple times. and it’s always the same. i used to tell her it was because i couldn’t find the kind of work i was looking for down here. low and behold, she comes home one day with the name of a domestic violence shelter that she wants me to apply to. the look on my face was probably the kind of look you give someone when they give you something totally hideous as a gift and you don’t have the heart to tell them you hate it, so you just smile and say thank you. that day, i thought to myself, one of these days im gunna have to tell her that i can’t stay here, because i just plain don’t want to. i <3 oxnard and i always will, cause this is where i grew up. and of course i love my family, but the bay nourished me in ways that my first home just can’t anymore. dramaaatic i know, but that’s how i feel. so im sitting there thinking, yeah i totally need to tell her the truth. and a few seconds later i’m like, are kidding me? hell naw, she’ll fucken flip and tell me that i don’t love my family, that i care more about my friends than i do about my family and that she didn’t send me to school to change my views on things and forget about her. and in case you’re wondering, yes, she has totally said all those things to me before. and i do not want to hear them again. so im just gunna play dumb and them move to the bay when i get the chance. sound good? ok great! 

i’ve been thinking about a career in social media. and i feel guilty. and ashamed.