I moved almost all of Old Journal. What I did was go through and move the entries that were actually substantial, since I did a lot of "bulletpoint entries" on occasion when I was too busy or uninspired to write full entries. I had second thoughts about it for a while, wondering if I was just being an attention whore or trying to get one back at the 'rents by doing so. But honestly I think it's a valuable thing only in its being shared by other people. I know random folk would email or IM me just to tell me that they appreciated my writing, because they had the same problems.

I changed the template of the former journal to display a link to Family Acceptance, because I figured if I was going to get the last word there I might as well be snarky with heart.

In the process of moving, I ended up rereading just about everything I wrote from midway through 2002 to midway through 2005. It was a definite headtrip. I think I might have even seen myself grow a little, and believe me that was a shocker. It was funny, the things I used to worry about. Some of it seems light-years away now. I was also an angry little bitch quite often along the way. Hell, I'm still an angry little bitch sometimes. I can't entirely blame my mom for being angry at some of what I wrote.

On the other hand, I'm disappointed that she skipped over the points I was trying to make sometimes and simply absorbed implicit (or, well, explicit) insults to her. She complained to me that she comes off as a hateful, ignorant bigot in the journal.

I can see that. Quite a lot of the time I did see her as willfully ignorant; she did (and does) refuse to learn about things that might upset her worldview. In retrospect I don't really blame her for that, because that's how she was raised and that's how she is. I mean, I spent from puberty to age 18 pretending to myself that I was a straight girl with a "problem" that would go away if I stopped thinking about it. I of all people know how comfortable that kind of certainty can be.

And as for hateful... when she spent three hours talking at me about how sick and filthy I am until I'm curled in a fetal ball on the bed, no, I didn't find that particularly loving. On the other hand, honestly, it was hard to take precisely because I knew she was only doing it because she loved me. She knew what was good for me, and by God she was going to help me if she had to kill me to do it.

That's sort of the crux of it, really. My mom thinks of this "lezz-bee-an life-style" that she's built up in her mind to be the paramount of all that is sick and evil and icky, and she wants to save me from that. She truly believes that once I'm where she thinks I should be, I'll be happy. She's happy doing her stay-at-home mother-and-wife thing, why wouldn't I be happy doing the same?

I sort of wish she put the same effort into understanding me that I have to put into understanding her.

Labels: blog, family, Teh Gay