Just another day of feeling super-big feelings, after I upped my Wellbutrin dose (as directed) and the thoughts came flooding through my head, punctuated by a LOT of Fuck You’s.
A bicycle ride in the sunshine helped immensely to clear my head.
And since I no longer have much to lose, I’m enjoying my hard-won clarity and giving out fucks freely today.
— to my third grade math teacher Mrs. Merriweather (relax. She was already in her fifties when she was my teacher and is long dead by now), for not caring about my struggles with math and for mocking me loudly and repeatedly in front of the class, Fuck you. You sucked as a teacher. I should know, because I became one and it’s possible to teach without destroying kids.
— all the bullies in grade school, middle school and high school, for deciding it was easier to bully me physically and emotionally than to leave me alone and just get on with your pathetic lives. Fuck your parents for raising you to be so damned cruel and unfeeling. I hope you survived and got some help.
— The healthcare industry that has compelled doctors to no longer take Medicaid patients because you and the State of Oregon can’t work well together. And for discouraging doctors from being curious enough to offer more than stock diagnoses and de rigeur meds to women whose ADHD was constantly misdiagnosed as depression or anxiety, and for not funding research that might actually help women instead of sending them down the cattle chute of medical apathy. And as a result the doctors threw your stock drugs at them which did not serve them much or at all. Drugs that you wanted to produce because they were easy and profitable, regardless of who got them or why. All you did was make doctors throw spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick, and then limit their treatment choices to your menu of meds. As a result I took SSRIs that were inappropriate and unhelpful for ten years. It is no small wonder that there’s so much burnout among healthcare professionals today. Healthcare corporate leaders don’t trust doctors enough to respect their knowledge and skills. Fuck you and the corporate practices that made you rich. And fuck the governments that you’ve bought along the way. If I could commit tax fraud to cheat you all I would. But I couldn’t earn enough for it to make a difference, even when I worked full time. So fuck you super bigtime.
— The rabbi I’d worked for a decade ago who was cold, distant and formal, who admitted to me “we’ve watched you struggle for some time, so your outburst comes as no surprise,” when I’d had my nervous breakdown and behaved badly in a moment of terrible pain and rage. In the moment you told me that you had watched me struggle for some time, but didn’t say a word until after my struggling erupted into a mental health crisis and then you sat there looking superior while you knew it was coming. In that moment you chose to remain silent and watch me collapse, you utterly failed as a helping professional, and you failed abysmally as a rabbi. And you weren’t interested in any form of teshuvah — making amends on a personal and spiritual level — that I spent the year offering you. Instead, you tacitly encouraged my shame rather than reach out to work with me to understand what might be going on, and it took me the better part of those ten years to begin healing from it. A Little League coach with a slumping batter handles it better than this. So yeah, fuck you too.
— A society and values system based on cold, hard capitalism that favors men, that favors the young until it works them nearly to death and then tosses them aside when they get too old and infirm. And which has fucked women and girls over since infinity. To everyone who doesn’t stop to ask themselves why they benefit from their male privilege and doesn’t care about the women who get left behind, fuck you.
I am done educating all of you. I am done making excuses for myself, and I am done feeling shame for being weird and different for sixty years and not knowing why, or even if it was okay to trust myself. I’m in the midst of a seismic shift so profound that I can’t predict how it’s going to play out. But I can predict that I will get a lot better about accepting myself as I am and ignoring the people and institutions that treat me like a failure. And if I see something that’s completely wrong I will gladly hand out more fucks where appropriate.
I did not fail. I lived, and I’m still here, and I am so grateful for everything I have learned and am learning.
And I’m beyond grateful for my people who are reaching out to remind me they love me, in spite of all my fucks. SO grateful.
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