I was male centered for a long time.

Mostly because I was self centered and I was born a man (with ovaries).

For a long time I thought I was the upper echelon of taste and it was an honest to god shock if others disagreed with me.

maybe this is too confessional. I’m scared I’m going to say something unsavory or something off putting.

I’m still quite worried about how I’ll be perceived. Mostly just because I want the control of perception, especially when it comes to me.

There are some thoughts I don’t share with my therapist, mostly out of the fear that I will be 5150’d.

I don’t want to harp too much on my trauma but long story short I was sent to a cult when i was 16. My mother and father thought it would save my life and maybe it did. That’s the fucked up thing about it kind of, it did save my life but it also at the same time changed it forever in a negative way.

They combined therapy with dark magical practices that often caused psychosis within the young girls that lived there. There was one girl who snapped the necks of some chickens we had in our garden. Anything to get out of that place.

Therapists aren’t necessarily a trustworthy group of people, they are human beings like the rest of us, and you never know someone’s intention especially when money is involved.

I think I am also biased because one of the worst people I know recently just told everyone on Facebook that they are going to be starting their own practice.

Trust me, if she can become a therapist, then so can a serial killer.

Another reason why I find Hannibal Lector to be an important literary figure.

There is a reason why a sociopathic cannibal was able to become a psychiatrist.

Anyways, I don’t tell my therapist about my mother mostly because I don't really know anything about my mother other than my own perception of her, and a curated selection of small anecdotes that she’d let slip when feeling vulnerable. Which was not that often.

My mom has this way of relating to people, she always has to have these personal stories that connect to whatever it is you are talking to her about. She’ll even interrupt you to tell you these stories. Maybe its the ADHD, maybe its something else.

So I only know what she has shared relative to myself if that makes sense.

There was also the shroom incident.

I took a shit ton of shrooms during the pandemic and had a visceral nightmare of my mother sexually assaulting me.

I couldn’t tell you if it was a memory or a figment of my subconscious and that’s what terrified me the most. In what I now know to be drug induced psychosis fully believed that it happened.

Which is too bad because now I look like I lied for attention.

Mostly because I have lied for attention before.

I am what I like to call a liar in recovery, because I have lied before and the only way to stop lying is to tell the truth. The truth is, I used to lie my fucking ass off.

It became a very real problem in my mid twenties much like cocaine became a problem for me. It was a titular control over my environment and a twisted way of protecting myself. I kicked the habit along with the blow and now I’m like a born again Christian or something, all virtuous and moral and all that bullshit.

Telling the truth like its a compulsion because with my OCD it kind of is.

Yeah I know, blah blah blah I have all the disorders and I have had blue hair and I have been a liberal yadda yadda yadda. Whatever. At least I have never licked a goddamn boot ya know?

But to tell you the truth I was diagnosed at 8 years old with OCD. It presented itself early and was quite malignant. I’m kind of like Lena Dunham in that way, but in that way only.

No I know my mother never physically assaulted me. But there was an enmeshment and emotional incest that perpetuated these subconscious depictions of what she emotionally did to me.

That and my body wasn’t my own.

Enough of all that, I just needed to get it out of the way I guess. Mostly because I wanted to talk about seeing my family during my little brother’s high-school graduation.

I cant really talk about estranged family members without explaining said estrangement, right?

Sitting at a family table at Rigatoni’s I’m sitting across from my siblings again at the dinner table and I am brought back to a simpler time and its nice, its a kind of bitter nostalgia because as much as they are my siblings, each year they become more and more foreign to me.

The middle child, Maddie and I being the most estranged. Maddie doesn’t talk to our father and that’s a whole thing in of itself, its not even really my thing so I feel weird trying to explain it.

I miss Maddie, I miss my mom but in a weird surreal way, like I miss an idealized version of them that only exists in my head. Maybe that’s even the way they feel about me.

Back to being male centered, or self centered, and how I got out of it. I guess I just mindfully started to try and center women, and queer people as best as I could. I realized that the world is male centered and I cant just naturally stop. Its a mindful choice that you actively have to make or you just get disgusted and tired of male bullshit.

I think that’s what it was, I became real tired of male bullshit. I got tired of passive white woman bullshit too and started paying attention to women of color, women with fat bodies, trans women, non binary people, and soon enough my taste started to change.

The more I centered women, the more and more I missed my mother and sibling, and today I listened to Class of 2013 and wept in my partners arms about missing my mother.

But I went low contact like two years ago and for good reason.

Two things can be true.

So there we were eating Italian food, and celebrating the last Clock child to graduate. Talking about films and telling stories of our youth to each other’s partners.

Maddie was reminiscing on how much they wanted to just join in on my scary movie sleepovers when we were little. I had a best friend her name was Ariel Kim and she would come over and we would binge watch scary movies. Maddie was sensitive and would get nightmares and rarely had the stomach for it.

Looking back now, I wish i had rented a movie or two that Maddie might have liked, and watched it with them.

Hindsight is always 20/20.