Own It in Journal

I am sort of… grossed out?… disgusted at myself for some of my past behavior. Not the behavior itself, you see. Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect, blah blah. No, what I’m grossed out about is the excuses I made in order to justify my behavior.
I was blaming my mother and my childhood for everything. Everything! For why I didn’t want to go to school. For why I was jealous. For my failure to love. For my huge procrastination problem. For my loneliness. For my unhappiness. For my refusal to plan ahead.
To do that… to blame my mother and my childhood for all those things that I’ve done, that I chose to do is… disgusting. Like a little kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar that screams “brother told me to do it!” to try to avoid getting punished.
The stupid part is, my conscious doesn’t care what excuses I make. Sure, as a child, I didn’t know any better. And I never had self ownership modeled for me. I never witnessed my parents or really anyone take responsibility for themselves.

On a slightly related note. I have lately been thinking about how odd, or weird, or perhaps acceptable it would be to try and seek out an older female role model. You know, a mother figure. The-mother-that-I-never-had sort of thing.
My mom had given me some o-kay advice over the years. Nothing I couldn’t figure out myself, and nothing that I didn’t already know at the time. But I guess I’m repeating myself. What I wish my mom had done for me would have been to open my mind to problems I wasn’t even aware of.
I wish someone had taught me about raising children. About how to choose a man based on virtue and honesty and integrity rather than how well you get along on dates.
I wish someone had taught me the value of disagreements.
A relationship isn’t about getting along. People who agree just go along in the same direction, never have disputes and have no need for resolution- or even communication! Getting along is meaningless, mindless, boring, and uncreative.
A relationship is for disagreements. A relationship is fundamentally, I think, is about how to resolve disagreements. That’s what it’s for. That’s what it is. When 2 or more people disagree, there is conflict, there is a reason for creative problem solving, for communication, for respecting the other’s position, for everything that a relationship is.
That’s the only way they can exist.

What my parents had was not a relationship at all. It was a discomfort-avoidance mechanism. That’s all they taught me. How to manipulate, coerce, misrepresent, justify, whatever, in order to avoid discomfort.
I can’t think of anything more disgusting.