Actually now that I think about it the child abuse was more of a secondary reason I cut them off. The main reason was that I accumulated a significant amount of PTSD from working as a nurse (and other, smaller roles during school) both in psychiatry in general and through the pandemic and spent a lot of time working with some very underprivileged populations and seeing how their care was handled during the crisis, and how my coworkers and I were treated while being some of the only people who were willing to stay and keep caring for them, and then they found my PTSD reactions amusing.
My parents always said I’d agree with them more the older I got but honestly I agreed with them much more the younger I was and the less I knew about any of this. The more I’ve seen the more their politics deeply upset me. As a fun side detail, based on what I know about my father’s work, I’m pretty sure those dead Palestinian kids are paying for my nursing degree. The final straw was when I realized the reason I felt the urge to drink every time I spoke to them was because I was medicating the flashbacks. My mother has always enjoyed “debating” and the realization that my mother found my PTSD flashbacks “fun” clarified a lot of emotions that had been very confusing for a long time.
It’s really hard to stay “rational” when someone brings up “was COVID even real” as a “joke” and the first thing that pops into your brain is the face of the guy you were desperately trying to keep breathing for a few hours who finally just started having a stroke too. Or the time you got called to sit suicide watch because the person kept trying to take off the mask of their ventilator off and wheezing out “just let me die” over and over. The only thing that helped was if I just kept talking and I ran out of things to say so I just started telling him the plots of the last five books I read. When my shift hit the 16 hour mark and I was falling asleep they didn’t have enough people to sit with all the patients and when they triaged he was deemed the lowest priority so I handed him off to his nurse but there’s no way she could’ve actually stayed with him continously. I never did find out what happened to that one. At least with the stroke guy I went down to CT with and got to see them infuse the tPA and watch him start to come back out of it before I handed him off to the neuro nurse.
I stopped drinking the day I cut them off and tbh it was actually really easy without them around. It’s been over a year now and I barely even felt any cravings when it was fresh. It turned out they were literally the reason I was drinking. Some people’s families just aren’t healthy. It also turns out that being really self-centered from a political standpoint translates really well to being really self-centered in person. And some parents are just self-centered enough that they’ll worsen their own child’s mental health for their own personal entertainment.
Actually now that I think about it the child abuse was more of a secondary reason I cut them off. The main reason was that I accumulated a significant amount of PTSD from working as a nurse (and other, smaller roles during school) both in psychiatry in general and through the pandemic and spent a lot of time working with some very underprivileged populations and seeing how their care was handled during the crisis, and how my coworkers and I were treated while being some of the only people who were willing to stay and keep caring for them, and then they found my PTSD reactions amusing.
My parents always said I’d agree with them more the older I got but honestly I agreed with them much more the younger I was and the less I knew about any of this. The more I’ve seen the more their politics deeply upset me. As a fun side detail, based on what I know about my father’s work, I’m pretty sure those dead Palestinian kids are paying for my nursing degree. The final straw was when I realized the reason I felt the urge to drink every time I spoke to them was because I was medicating the flashbacks. My mother has always enjoyed “debating” and the realization that my mother found my PTSD flashbacks “fun” clarified a lot of emotions that had been very confusing for a long time.
It’s really hard to stay “rational” when someone brings up “was COVID even real” as a “joke” and the first thing that pops into your brain is the face of the guy you were desperately trying to keep breathing for a few hours who finally just started having a stroke too. Or the time you got called to sit suicide watch because the person kept trying to take off the mask of their ventilator off and wheezing out “just let me die” over and over. The only thing that helped was if I just kept talking and I ran out of things to say so I just started telling him the plots of the last five books I read. When my shift hit the 16 hour mark and I was falling asleep they didn’t have enough people to sit with all the patients and when they triaged he was deemed the lowest priority so I handed him off to his nurse but there’s no way she could’ve actually stayed with him continously. I never did find out what happened to that one. At least with the stroke guy I went down to CT with and got to see them infuse the tPA and watch him start to come back out of it before I handed him off to the neuro nurse.
I stopped drinking the day I cut them off and tbh it was actually really easy without them around. It’s been over a year now and I barely even felt any cravings when it was fresh. It turned out they were literally the reason I was drinking. Some people’s families just aren’t healthy. It also turns out that being really self-centered from a political standpoint translates really well to being really self-centered in person. And some parents are just self-centered enough that they’ll worsen their own child’s mental health for their own personal entertainment.