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Language Log

Monday, Dec. 31, 2018 - 8:54 p.m.

So here’s the thing. We have been eating out eating together. Eating. Talking about eating. Planning what will be prepared and eaten next.

Ok. I am at my limit and the thought of another forced communal meal

Ok not the thought. It’s New Year’s Eve. We’re eating the meal everyone planned up at lunch the other day before I got sick and then negotiated through texts. I didn’t have to do any of it. I cleared the table. So it’s not that.

For the past week every time they are all here I retreat to the bedroom, lay in bed shaking. Go back out as soon as I can. Going out is worse because it’s cold and my clothes are tight.

I feel tremendous guilt that I am supposed to be enjoying this and I don’t. From the moment someone mentions the holiday plans until the time everyone is gone and the last of the crap is packed away, I am filled with dread and apprehension. Even when everything is going fine.

“It’s my demand avoidance” I tell myself, but the thinking that doesn’t give me any power over it. It pulls me inexorably one way, and my desire to be a dutiful family member pulls me weakly in the other. I’m in the middle, shaking, tongue still.

Everyone is noticing that I’m fucked up this year. Sorry, folx! I remember when I had the will to grin and bear it too.

Okay also mil was saying she feels bad because Q doesn’t have any friends. She hopes she gets in school because “she needs a friend”. Now I don’t know how much of this is demand avoidance but I feel that Q’s social needs are to me what mine are to my mother in law’s. I had friends when I was a kid and I cherish them still. So yeah. But also no, people have different levels of social needs and don’t fucking feel sorry for her if that isn’t one of hers.


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