I bought a box of chocolate covered fortune cookies at Costco, and have been slowly eating my way through them a couple at a time. Most of the fortunes haven't been anything exciting, even when doing the jokey add "...in bed." to them thing. One I got just now hits a little too hard for me though. I've always felt like I struggled with this, though for the longest time I didn't realize.

You should not have to rip yourself into pieces to keep others whole.

My dad had one hell of a temper. He was largely able to keep it in check in public and around strangers, so friends and acquaintances just knew him as a good guy. He volunteered with the local cub and boy scout troops even after my brother dropped out (because of issues with another scout leader, I found out later), he volunteered at church when he went regularly, he donated to outdoor causes, stuff like that. But at home? All that anger he bottled up and swallowed in public would come out over the stupidest things. He never hit me, never hit my mom that I was aware of, and he only got into a physical fight with my brother once my brother was big enough to actually defend himself. So looking back that told me he knew enough to keep some control. But he'd yell. He'd break things. And growing up in that sort of environment fucks with a person.

When I was little, I liked my dad though. He was usually the one that took me and my brother to do the fun things. When he was in a good mood, he was just fine to be around. He's the one who introduced me to Star Trek. He's the one who took me to baseball games. But when he lost his temper, you didn't want to be around. You didn't want to be the one who set him off. So you stayed away from him when he was trying (and failing) to do work around the house, when he was struggling with working on the cars — he usually got those fixed in the end, I think, but you sure could tell he was struggling with how much he swore while doing it. If he came home from work in a sour mood, you avoided him and let him watch TV undisturbed because you didn't want to be the one to drop the straw that made him blow.

When I finally moved out of his house, our relationship was pretty bad. I was starting to realize how scary he was to be around, that his behavior wasn't normal, but after a bit of time I tried to start repairing our relationship. Not living with him meant I wasn't subject to the anger outbursts anymore, because we'd see each other at someone else's house or in some public place. And in those places I was safe from his temper because whatever else was going on with him, he was very concerned about not airing that shit in public. I'm not really sure how to judge if we'd started to make any progress on fixing our shit, or if it was just the freedom from his temper by limiting my time with him without the "public" to keep it in check... but all progress stopped when he reunited with a woman he'd dated in high school.

My parents had divorced years before that, my mom had been in a relationship with someone else from the point she left my dad, but other than my dad pulling some petty shit over things that she hadn't taken with her when she left him when she asked for then back¹, the two of them seemed to mostly get along for the sake of me and my brother. So when Dad had reunited with and started dating this woman, my mom was actually excited for him. She remembered a bright and interesting woman, and Mom hoped she'd be a good influence on my dad. Apparently instead she'd found Jesus and been through a shitty marriage during the years she and my dad had been out of touch. She spouted the fucked up right wing talking points like "Obama is the anti-christ" and "slur took my job" and all those other hateful things that we're all so familiar with being regularly spouted because of the work of right wing mouth pieces working people into a frenzy.

That was the point that I gave up trying to fix my shit with my dad. Because any time I was around his girlfriend, we'd end up getting into a political fight. I'd say something that set off her ranting, she'd say something that caused me to snap back, hell, she'd sometimes make a point to bait me when conversation was otherwise fine. It drove me mad. So, since I didn't feel that it was okay to ask my dad to kick our his companion, especially since I wasn't around for him "enough" and in the ways she could be, I stopped hanging around much. I gave up on fixing our shit. Then he had his stroke.

To his girlfriend's credit, she was quick to act, got him to the hospital, and did the best she could to advocate for him before the rest of the family could arrive on scene and be able to speak for him officially. Unfortunately for him, he got assigned one of the bad doctors² when he was admitted into the ICU at Kaiser. Anyone who's familiar with strokes know that rapid diagnosis and treatment are critical for any chance good recovery. What happened with my dad is that his doctor kept scheduling him for tests, kept scratching his head, and said he had no idea what was wrong. He wouldn't wake up much, he couldn't stay awake, but those small periods of time he was awake, family reported the tell tale limpness in his face that was usually indicative of a stroke. We finally had a breakthrough in diagnosis after a week or two, when his assigned doctor was off on a day that he was scheduled for another test, and the doctor filling in spotted the signs of stroke in the scan they did, as well as signs that he'd had another stroke since being admitted to the hospital. It was a bilateral stroke, and it hit near the part of the brain that regulated the ability to wake up and stay awake.

All through this I was trying to figure out what the fuck I was feeling. Everyone around me was going on and on about how great my dad is, how tragic it was for this to happen to a good guy like him... and I just sat there quietly thanking people for their support, while biting back comments about his temper, about how very Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he was. Because while I felt for what he was going through like I would any stranger going through the same, the personal connection, the personal grief wasn't there. I struggled with feeling guilty about that, especially when my dad's trust, power of attorney, and all that paperwork was pulled up and had me named as the person in charge. I forced myself to do my best to ensure he was cared for, to try to manage his estate and his affairs, to not get into fights with his girlfriend while managing all this. The bonus round at the time is literally the Friday before my dad's stroke, my boyfriend at the time who I'd been living with broke up with me. So I was dealing with that on top of all this. I ended up moving back to Dad's house when I moved out of ex's apartment, and that was a struggle because it quadrupled my commute, forced me to live with his girlfriend who slowly started up with political fighting again on top of getting on my case about everything she felt I was managing wrong about my dad's care. I spent very little time at home during those days, outside of when I needed to be there to manage something for my dad.

Also, I should mention that at this time, I still hadn't had my ADHD diagnosed. I honestly didn't even suspect it at that point because I hadn't yet found the people talking about how differently it presents in people who aren't cishet white boys. So there I was, trying to pick up my own life, my dad's life, and had no clue that my own brain was literally sabotaging me the whole damn while. I absolutely burned out.

I ended up asking my cousin (who is a lawyer) for advice on how to pass the responsibility for my dad's care and estate management to someone else, and she ended up directing me to ask my uncle (her dad) to take over because it would just be a matter of me signing something with a notary giving up my position as power of attorney, because my uncle had been named as an alternative in case something had happened before I turned 18 or if I was otherwise unable to do it. The moment I did that, dad's girlfriend immediately started making demands of my uncle to push me out of the house, to get a dog (that she let harass my cat), and I ended up taking the first room rental my cousin helped me find and arrange to look at because I'd been told that if we couldn't find anywhere that would let me have my cat with me, I might have to give her up. The rest of my fucking world had fallen apart and I was being asked to possibly give up my cat too? I took that room despite a lot of red flags because it met the one requirement of allowing me to keep Carmen with me. I ended up totaling my car a week after I moved into that shitty room, and because of certain factors of the rental, I couldn't prove my address to get a new car loan to replace my car. So I ended up spending years trying to get to a place where I could get a replacement car. Suffering with the non-functional public transit that is a fact of life in the south end of Alameda county. I could go almost nowhere, because transit was so limited and I had so little time because all of it was spent walking or waiting for the next bus that only came every half hour or less frequent.

It was about then I started cutting off my family. At first it really was just supposed to be me taking some space to find myself and figure out how to handle all these people again. Not long before that, my uncle had pulled me aside at a family gathering and asked me to stop getting into political fights with my dad's girlfriend because we couldn't afford to hire someone to care for my dad, so we couldn't afford to scare her away. He even said that he didn't like what she was saying either, he understood why I'd get upset over it, but I needed to just bite it back when she'd try and bait me. Okay. I can't defend myself from her hateful bigoted bullshit, then I'll just not be around to get into those fights. I'm sure she was happy with that. People looking in on the situation, especially not knowing what I went through with my dad and his temper growing up, probably would judge me a heartless bitch to "abandon" my dad over something like this. Surely you could just bite your tongue for his sake, right? See, this was why the fortune that started this post hit me so hard. I've always been expected to be small, to shut up, to make others comfortable before I was allowed to be comfortable myself.

I've spent years since then trying to claw my way back out of the hole I ended up in as a result of all that. I didn't get a car again until the first year of this Covid mess, when I'd been car pooling to work with a coworker, and then there was a day I took a sick day (it was because of my period, but she couldn't take any chances for the sake of not infecting her family, so she told me we couldn't car pool anymore) and I was faced with either getting a car when I didn't think I was fiscally ready, or subjecting myself to public transit where I was sure to end up catching this shit because even when masking was mandatory here in the bay area, there were always people who just didn't give a fuck, and how the hell are the bus drivers supposed to enforce that and safely drive their bus? There was a reason a lot of them were catching this shit, they absolutely couldn't.

My dad caught covid and died before there was a vaccine available. I don't even really know much more than that, I didn't ask and my uncle didn't go into much detail. Honestly, he'd just lost his brother, he'd lost his father not too long before that, and his mother was finally starting to show signs of her advanced age (also, probably heartbreak over losing her son after losing her husband, and she ended up passing away not too long after). I'd been pretty much incommunicado with the family up to that point, and I still largely am. I don't know if my uncle even understands why. I recently caught up with my cousin a little bit, tried to explain some of what I've talked about here, and maybe she'll convey some of it to her dad. Who knows.

I'm still fighting to figure out how to manage my ADHD since I finally got it diagnosed. I had been on medication for a while, it had been helping some, but then the manufacturing limits had been lowered during covid and every time I tried to go in for a refill, they were out and it would sometimes be like a week before they could fill my Rx. I couldn't put in for refill early because ADHD meds are a controlled substance, they drastically limit how early you can get your refills, and you often have to talk to your doctor every month to get them filled. So the stress of jumping through all those hoops, jumping on and off my meds every month for up to a week, and the "solution" I was given was just skip my meds on the weekend? I deserve my executive function too, not just my employer. Fuck that. I figured it was better to figure out how to manage without the meds again than deal with that cluster fuck anymore. Given where I'm at now, maybe I'm wrong about that, but I'm honestly not sure what to do anymore, and while I have friends who can help with smaller support needs, I don't have anyone who can carry the heavily load of support I really need with my executive function pretty much non-existent between my personal struggles, and the larger trash fire this country is right now.

But at least I'm learning to not tear myself down for the benefits of others anymore.