A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Seventy-Six

I am really in need, at this moment, of something good.  I described things that were going on in my family recently, and they are continuing in ways that have been very upsetting to me all day.  My brother is acting as if he wants to make things better and my mother is acting as if she even resents me even more now.  I am certain more has happened that I do not know about.  It is also clear that, though I believe my brother wants to make things better, he does not really get a lot of what is wrong, and I felt very much that I was being ganged up on at many points in the evening, especially since it felt as if Melissa was being excluded.    It is rather difficult to determine what any of it will mean, really, as I am also aware that my mother and brother are very close, and he still has very upsetting and warped views about things.  I attempted to discuss certain traumatic experiences I had when I was a teenager that have had real ramifications for me as an adult, including an incident where a group of classmates cornered me so that one could pull out his penis and shove it into my face, calling me homophobic slurs.  My mother responded to my speaking about this by telling me to get over it and that it is not sexual "because you aren't gay."  I asked whether my being raped by a man would be sexual, and she acted as if it were a ridiculous comparison, but was in agreement with my brother when he said it was just the same as his need to stop thinking about whether he should have broken up with his ex-girlfriend.  This is in the context of a conversation that was partly about how my emotions and experiences are invalid.  In fact, when I said that the experience my brother was discussing was not the same thing as the kinds of foundational traumatic experiences I had, my mother told me I was invalidating my brother's experience.  I am feeling so much right now, and I do not know what any of it means in the end, but I fear so much it will not turn out well, for some reason.  It was just too conflicted, even in the context of an effort to make things better, and I have had too many experiences of things seeming to be getting better while actually getting worse.

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