My mother says the worst part of having a stroke is that she might get better. If she knew she was going to be tired and dizzy forever, she could accept that this is her life now, but the prospect of recovery keeps her hopes up as she has bad day after bad day.

I gave in and requested to switch to part-time work. I hate this so much, but trying to put in a full day of work keeps making me sick, and pushing through that makes me even sicker.

I woke up in my bed. It was late morning, and I could see the sun through the blinds. I opened the blinds, and in the near distance, a volcano erupted. The lava washed over me before I had time to scream.

I woke up in my bed. I didn’t open the blinds. Instead, I walked out of my room, past my parents in the kitchen, and into the backyard. There was a ladder propped against the wall. As I walked past, the ground shook violently, and it came down on my head.

I woke up in my bed. I went into the kitchen, and I told my parents I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or hallucinating, and whether I was still in my bed or walking around blindly. I was afraid I might hurt myself or someone else. They made the call, and a white van arrived to take me away.

I woke up in my bed. There had to be a pattern to this! I went back into the backyard, and I walked past the ladder again. I wasn’t surprised when it fell on my head.

I woke up in my bed. I’d found three wrong paths. Was there a right one?

In the hallway, there was a door off to the side, one I’d never seen before. It was the only thing in the house that didn’t belong. On the other side was darkness, and a faintly visible being that I couldn’t comprehend.

I charged into the darkness, tackled it to the ground, and wrapped my hands around what passed for its neck. It tried to throw me off, but I held strong until it went limp. As it finally stopped moving, I woke up for real.

At the doctor’s office the other day. The man at the front desk said there was an issue with my insurance, and they needed my signature to confirm that I would pay if the insurance didn’t. Nothing to worry about; it was just that I’d changed insurance recently, so they didn’t have everything ironed out yet.

I asked him the likelihood that I would be told to pay twenty thousand dollars I didn’t have. He said it was fifty seven thousand dollars. He also said the odds were about zero percent that I’d actually have to pay.

Of course I fucking signed. If I don’t get my medicine, I bleed my guts out and die. And of course the insurance refused to pay, and the hospital wants its fifty seven thousand dollars.

Fuck this. Fuck everything. 

 1): My father's mother was an emotional black hole. She always needed more love and more attention. My uncle wound up with the worst case of learned helplessness I have ever seen, unable to do anything without her to do it for him. My father joined the Marines and built himself into someone who didn't rely on other people. He still has difficulty openly showing his emotions.

2): My father believes that Vietnam was a just war in which America achieved its primary objective. He gets angry when someone says the war was bad or unjustified.

3): My mother told me once that she thinks my father's health problems are because of Agent Orange. She told me he will never admit this, not even to himself, because he can't accept that his own government poisoned him.

Maybe the reason my father feels the way he does is because the Marines were his father and mother when no one else was.

I’ve been outlining the boundaries of my squick about mind control, trying to figure out exactly what makes me feel like someone threw up inside my soul. I don’t think mind control is the actual point at issue. In some way, it comes back to the idea of worship.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read A Wrinkle in Time, but I remember not being squicked at all by the fascists and the torture. I thought they were evil, sure, but they were evil in a way that seemed understandable to me. What made me feel wildly uncomfortable was a scene where a spirit-angel-thing reveals herself and one of the MCs bows down in awe of her magnificence. I tried to imagine something that would make me want to bow, and all I could think of is something that would make me run or scream or punch or anything to make the feeling stop. 

I’ve never had much use for the idea of charisma. Someone like Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t make me feel inspired; they make me go through their writing line by line, taking apart the gaps and inconsistencies in their statements and looking for ways to construct a more logical argument. (“The shape of the world today”? What on earth is “the shape of the world today”?) So when I think of something that would make me bow, that’s something that would reach inside my head and make me stop being me. It feels intensely violent in a way that goes beyond knives or pokers, creating a hollowed-out corpse without spilling so much as a drop of blood.

So maybe my problem with mind control is also my problem with religion. There are people who act like a god is not just a thing you kneel to, but a thing to which kneeling feels natural and right. For me, kneeling was never natural or right, and that makes me feel like their religion isn’t meant to include me.