A place for Vase and Berry

Ok, so starting out with the positive for me again. I was able to do lots of laundry for a family who lost everything in their home in the last week. The clothes were heavy with water and smelled horribly. It was nice to make them somewhat clean again. It is hard when you are surrounded by so much despair to do nothing. So I am trying to do one kind thing a day.

It is okay that you pulled the hair and it is okay that your mom noticed. Focus on the fact that you had been doing well. It is just one day and tomorrow you can start again with not pulling. It takes a bit to get out of the habit of self harm, at least it did for me. I had to really focus on praising myself for how long I hadn't done it rather than focusing on the fact that I had fallen again. Yes, hair pulling is most definitely self harm. It feels good because your brain is wrongly telling you that you deserve pain. It is part of the cycle of depression. My self harm was only running my fingernails against my skin hard, but usually not hard enough to leave marks. It was still self harm. But it is best to think about daily victories rather than worrying about it too long into the future.

It is good for your mom to know because she is at least trying to care in her own way. She doesn't want you to be hurting. Yes, you won't be damaging your eyes even if you do it. It wasn't the smartest remark, but I think that she struggles to figure out what to say when she knows you are in pain. I think that she really doesn't know exactly what she is going to do which is why she said "it depends". It is more of an honest answer than "I will always respond with love and care", right? It totally depends actually on her own mood and what she is doing at the time. She would probably prefer that she was kind like she was trying to be today, but anger gets in her way much of the time. She probably knows this and part of her at least would like to change.

People do evolve. There is never an "always" way they are going to act. Yes, you are rightly traumatized, but you are going to grow in how you react to her too. I am not at all telling you to trust her right now with how you are feeling. I am saying that today was more of a good sign than a bad one. Do continue to focus on cups rather than your mom for support. But give her mini opportunities like you did today to prove herself. 

Today ultimately was a good one for you. May tomorrow be as well. 

i'm venting. again.

of all the things in my life that i hate, the one thing i hate the most is when i'm trying to get better and trying to get on track and people keep pulling me back down. sometimes it's my mother, other times, it's teachers.

today, it were the maths, french, chemistry and marathi teachers. but mainly the maths teacher. first off, everyone expected that he'd show us our papers today since the maths exam happened on 19th sept, especially given the fact that for the previous set of exams, the exam happened on 27th july and he showed the papers on 30th july. but he didn't show them, instead spent the entire 30 min period scolding us and giving us so much studying advice.

like how we should be practising and revising daily, how we should not waste a single minute, how we should not miss school thinking only timepass happens in school, how we should be planning everything, how we should be disciplined, etc etc. he believes that we people aren't serious enough and we aren't studying, that we arent even studying what's being done in class. and so much more stuff.

all these wont stop echoing in my head. it's so overwhelming. it overwhelmed me first thing in the morning and it's making me feel that way again every now and then. his expectations are simply too high. as a struggling person who also hates maths and sucks at it, i will never ever be able to do all this. he also fails to realise that we don't have only maths to do, we have 9 more subjects to do (english, french, physics, chemistry, biology, history, political science, geography and economics).

why does he expect this much out of us? it makes no sense. what kind of a life does he want us to have with so much studying? like only study study study and nothing else? i wonder, what kind of a life did he have as a student? did he spend all day just studying? and now as a teacher, a dedicated one at that, i believe he needs a lot of studying now too. isn't he bored of this? is studying the whole point of life for him?

i heard he has a 1-2 year old daughter. i feel sorry for that kid having to deal with these sort of expectations as soon as she's a little older. as a teacher, there's only so much he can do to us if we don't meet his expectations, as a parent, he can do a lot more to his own kid.

you know, our exams just got over yesterday. half yearly exams. the first term is over. today was the first day of school for the second term. and already he wants us to start studying. i mean, i need a break. i am sick and tired and i long for a break. i took one yesterday after the exam - the only thing i did was cleaning all day. and today i did some french but only for 25 minutes, i don't wanna do more. tomorrow i'll have to do a lot though, i need to catch up on missed work. tomorrow's a holiday.

it's 10:56 pm and i'm going to bed soon. i'm extremely tired and sleep deprived. got 5 hours of sleep last night, and 4 hours the night before. my body really hurts for this severe lack of sleep. my legs, shoulders, and arms are aching. and i have some weird lot of back pain and my right knee's been very painful at random times throughout the day. hopefully sleep will help. i know my body gets really messed up when i haven't slept much and been very stressed for too many days in a row.

ooh a disaster. yesterday my father clicked the needed photo at home. apparently we have some trouble with that about the background and lighting. so tomorrow we'll do it again. not at home though, but go to a studio. not looking forward to it. my skin is in a pretty bad state today. also, i pulled out some eyebrows to make them look symmetrical, and i think it looks good, but i wonder what'll happen if my parents notice this change in the photo. i hope they don't notice. i need to fix my hair for this though.

okay, i'll go now. i've been missing posting good moments but i'll do that tomorrow. i gotta sleep now.

I am going to admit not being in a particularly good spot myself this evening. This last week has been so, so brutal in terms of the level of suffering that I have seen. I now have to teach online until late October like we did during COVID because our school got hit very hard. My church has also been destroyed. I am trying very hard to do something kind every day for someone really impacted by the storm so that I don't feel hopeless or out of control of my own destiny. I know that only in controlling my own emotions rather than letting any other people or circumstances control them is the only way forward. But it is tiring and hard sometimes, just like it is for you. I really have to refuse to go down the depression spiral by actively doing things. My own activity is my saving grace.

I will read some of your stuff but I am not going to comment huge amounts tonight. One soul can only absorb so much of another person's pain. I am empathic so I hurt mentally and physically with people, just like I hurt with you. When others are suffering too much, I can easily get overwhelmed.

I am sorry that your teacher became too demanding and that your mom started yelling again. I do wish that she could get better control over her anger at you. You can see what it does to her and how it makes her irrational and really hurtful. To an outsider it is pretty clear that her own rough upbringing makes her get angry much more quickly than is necessary about lots of things. Watch that doesn't happen to you. 

You have been working really hard at exactly that. You see how getting angry at your mom or your teacher ultimately makes you start hating yourself. You become even more self-critical and then you end up spiraling. So keep working at managing that. You control you and you have the key to growing into a great person. It is too bad that your mom doesn't have that. 

Your teacher is also wrong to try to make you feel so guilty. But you have control here too. You know that you are doing all that you can with your depression and your work load. The fact that your teacher can't see that you have other subjects means that his opinion on the issue of how hard to work isn't to be trusted. So turn away from his voice and listen to your heart.

You are enough. You do enough. No one can take that from you.

You aren't causing me pain. I do want to be able to share some of your burden. You can continue to share here please. Just know that my comments may be shorter for a while. 

My own burden is indeed heavier at the moment. Right now we are due to get hit with another hurricane much more face to face rather than 100 miles away like the hurricane was a week and a half ago. That is pretty frightening because this time we are probably going to lose more. The challenge is that these things move very, very slowly. So now we are stuck waiting for another two days before anything really happens. So not knowing is pretty hard. 

So we try to have hope and distract ourselves. Tomorrow I am going to try to get more out of my office and my son's dorm room before the bigger rains come. 

Still waiting. It won't be bad until tomorrow night. I am very drained after two weeks of being either in pre-storm or post-storm mode. Over 10,000 houses damaged in the first one, my school and church so much so that they didn't know when they would reopen. Now they will all get hit again. I have spent the last few weeks helping friends gather their few remaining possessions, tossing valuable old books and other precious items that were completely soaked with water, washing laundry that stank with mold, walking door to door through a neighborhood where every house had all of their possessions on the curb as trash. Now we will do that all over again.

I am glad that you were able to share some. Vent as much as you need. I just won't be sharing all that much in return until my own situation is a little clearer in a few days. I may lose all electricity, internet, and phone tomorrow. 

You do have value and worth even if your childhood was less than secure. Sometimes essays are hard to write but they get us such thinking. Don't just let that thought be about putting you down. It can also be about imagining making other children's lives better in the future. Ensure that history doesn't repeat itself.

whatever on earth just happened with cups, we need to wait for it to be fixed because us both can talk normally again. i'm here waiting for it to get fixed and i hope you're able to manage things right now. i hope things aren't too bad for you.

@bestVase7265 are you okay? i haven't heard from you in a while and i just hope you're here somewhere and managing somehow. i'm wishing you all the best. ❤️

you've been telling me that i can still vent here, so i guess i will, because i don't know where else i can share this. so today is the fourth day of durga puja. since it's saturday and i'm home, my parents decided to go to this nearby ashram/temple to see the puja and have the bhog prasad (you can check here so see what it means because i have no energy to explain right now). so we went.

and you know what? i hate everything about that place. i don't know why, but the atmosphere is just so depressing for me. my parents love that place though, especially my mother. for me, every time i've gone there, i've gone because i don't have a choice, not because i want to go, because there's nothing i look forward to there. (for other places where the durga puja happens, i want to go because i want to see the decoration, and that's the only thing i like about it. but here their focus in on the puja and not the decoration, so my mother likes it, but i dont.) i've always gone there with a sort of irritation/frustration, and even if i've gone there feeling fine, i always start feeling awful after i get there. some sort of pain, physical or emotional, and i long to go back home, i feel like crying and everything. and after coming home, i just break down in tears, almost all the time. something is so wrong with that place.

we went there on thursday and i was fine when i went, but after i got there, my mood really came down and after coming home, i felt horrible. today i went there feeling really annoyed after all that happened this morning, i really didn't want to go, but i went anyway. and then there was some puja/arti whatever happening there and we were supposed to sit and watch it. i wasn't able to see a thing from where i sat and had to just listen to the mantra chanting, and it was so boring. i kept thinking of other things. something just hurt inside of me, i felt horrible. i thought of something that made me start tearing up. thank goodness i managed to tell myself "hold it back! you can cry all you want when you get home, just don't do it now in front of so many people." and yeah, i didn't really cry though i badly wanted to. but i did tear up on three separate occasions. i really hope nobody saw me like that, because we're supposed to be happy during festivals, right?

seeing the yog happening with that fire made me think of the day when i finally die and my body gets cremated. and then when they poured oil all over one saree and put it on the fire to burn, i hoped someone would pour oil all over me and burn me to death. but i'd need someone else to do what to me because i can't possibly do it myself. but why am i even thinking of all this? what the heck is wrong with me?

i asked my mother, "what's the purpose of all this puja and mantra chanting? and why do we need to see it?" she said that if it's done properly, it can create positive energy and by watching it, you'll get some on that energy. i asked it it was being done properly there, and she said yes.

now i'm like "wait, what?!" what 'positive energy' have i received from sitting there? feeling that kind of emotional pain, thinking of death is all very positive, right? i felt great seeing it, didn't i? now i'm left wondering what is so wrong with me because i'm just so depressed today, and i'm clearly not supposed to be. and honestly, i don't understand anything of why all these rituals and worship even happen and what god really is. the durga idol, isn't god, right? then why do we worship it? i will never understand.

i just hope i can make an excuse to not go to that place again. i hate it in there. i probably am disrespecting my religion and god when i say all this, but i really can't help it. i'm sorry.

I am okay but we have no internet, no electricity and no clean water. I am hoping to be back on soon and actually read messages but it may be a few days.