Personal Histories and more about Venting vs. Ruminating
So, I think I’ve made it clear, probably, that Mormons believe it’s important to write your own “personal history,” which is where I got in the habit of self-involved blah-blah-blah. There are also other reasons why I got into the habit, and some of those reasons are related to the long tangent I recently indulged in about how I don’t really like to argue, but I do like to write/deliver biglong diatribes about contextual reasons why you’re wrong and I’m right, so in other words, I actually do like to argue, it’s just that I like the arguments to occur exactly as though they were within like, a collegiate-level discussion group where everyone is being polite and listening to the entirety of each others’ biglong spew because they fucking respect each other, or something like that, and honestly I’d prefer for them to be in a conversation as opposed to written, however that never happens because people are barely capable of actually listening to each other,
But also—I just like to write. I don’t know why, I just do.
Whew. Okay but I’m not actually going to tangent about biglong arguments, I’m going to tangent about “personal histories,” and honesty.
I’m also going to write about stuff that I have written about lots of times, because it’s a thing that I think about a lot, and that thing is my grandparents on my mom’s side.
This is my grandma, who died when I was 14. This is her high school senior picture. She went to South High School, which doesn’t matter, except that for the approximate location of where that school used to be still sticks out in my brain as one of the focal points of my occasional Salt-Lake-City homesickness. This photo would have been taken shortly before she got pregnant with my mom and then “had to get married” to a rogue-ish looking guy who was about six years older than her.
She was cute, despite her overbite and big nose, (my sister inherited the former and I inherited a slightly less dramatic version of the latter); she was always really cute and really well-dressed, and my grandpa was good looking. He kinda looked like the actor who played Laura Palmer’s father in Twin Peaks.. So, while it’s true that she “had to get married,” they were an attractive couple and had three nice children.
Despite this age difference, she died about eight years before he died. She had bone cancer.
After she died, I read the “Personal History” she had written, which she probably only wrote because my mom made her write it, and it was one page long, and it said that she had grown up in the neighborhood near South High school, had a lot of siblings, a happy childhood, then she got married and had three wonderful children and eight amazing grandchildren and that she and her husband had gone on some nice vacations together.
The end.
Actually it might have even been less than one page long.
She wasn’t retired yet when she died. She worked as a meat packer for Albertson’s grocery stores. She worked up until she got too sick to work. She applied for disability but people with terminal cancer almost never get it; they almost always die before they get it. I mean like, if you have cancer and then you get better, sometimes you can get disability after the fact, but you rarely ever get it if the cancer is terminal. Social Security waits a long time to approve disability—I mean they always do this anyway—but they’ll wait a long time in part because then they won’t have to pay out if you like, you know, die first.
My grandma was never actively Mormon. So this is why I say that she probably only wrote the personal history because my mom made her write it. My mom got actively Mormon when she was in her early twenties, for reasons that I’ll get into in a minute, and then my aunt also got actively Mormon, for reasons that I don’t actually know, but my point is they weren’t really raised Mormon. Some of their cousins were Mormon, and their grandparents were Mormon, but their parents weren’t. My grandpa did get actively Mormon after my grandma died, and it kind of barely matters why in his case, because he had pretty profound dementia by that time.
My grandpa was pretty mentally ill for his entire adult life, actually. And then it got markedly worse. I mean, he was lobotomized in the 1960’s, which is unusual because there weren’t many lobotomies performed by that point—but as I understood it, he was lobotomized because they seriously didn’t know what the fuck to do with him anymore. He kept trying to kill himself, he kept having these really intense and problematic manic episodes, and the way I came to understand it was that he was lobotomized after his son came out as gay, and, uh, he did not handle that very well.
What I was told was that he was hospitalized for a while, and then they discharged him, and then he promptly attempted suicide again by walking out in front of a truck. And so then, yeah.
Now. Meanwhile, my grandma was 63 when she died, and my mom was utterly devastated. My mom is really super-not a person who shows a lot of emotion, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. My aunt, who was superclose to her mom, was even more devastated, and she is still reallyreallyreally not over it. I mean, that she had to suffer so much, and then die so young, after working so hard, and not even getting to retire or anything.
What my aunt is also not over is that my grandpa didn’t really treat my grandma very well. At all. And he also didn’t treat his kids so great, because he was super controlling and strict and also believed in corporal punishment, specifically he believed in whipping his kids with willow tree switches, among other things. He also was pretty mentally ill, as I mentioned above, which required periodic stints in the VA hospital, because technically he was a WWII veteran even though he never saw any combat, and the reason he never saw combat was because he had a major depressive episode in basic training and was given an honorable discharge, although in those days they called it a “nervous breakdown.” But whatever you want to call it, it’s the same fuckin thing.
I suspect part of the reason he was such an incredibly unpleasant and unhappy person is because he was ashamed that he never actually saw combat. Among other things. More on that in a minute.
My mom says that every time she gets together with my aunt to go to breakfast or something, the conversation is the same: my aunt angrily repeating and repeating that she just wishes she could have had a different father. She feels that he ruined her whole wide life, and he was terrible, and she’s so bitter about their mother dying so young given that their whole marriage was what it was, and it’s just not fair that their mother’s life was never truly happy even though she was such a good person, and he was such a bad person, and…etc.
It’s just not fair, is the gist of her rants.
I wish I could talk to my aunt about this, but she’s kinda become a recluse. She has terrible anxiety. She has always had pretty terrible anxiety, but it has gotten worse and worse over the years. The last time I was in Salt Lake I was supposed to see her, but then she bogued out at the last minute and didn’t show up. My mom says she almost always does that now.
Thinking about how things are just not fair is probably the main component of venting versus ruminating. I mean, well, there are various main components. I think in the case of my aunt’s ruminations, it’s one of two main components.
My mom says that she is over the bad childhood terrible-father-parenting stuff, and I believe her. She says she has moved past it. She acknowledges that he was horrible, and their childhoods were not easy, but—she’s okay with it now. My mom has delivered a lot of wisdom-nuggets to me over the years that I won’t ever forget, and one such nugget was in relation to how she felt about my grandpa: “Love can make up for a lot of bad parenting.” I have taken that to heart, and also I hope it is true because I have been a pretty bad parent at times.
Not as bad as my grandpa, but…
My mom doesn’t fixate on whether things are fair, you see. She will definitely talk about certain aspects of why her childhood and adolescence was hard, but she doesn’t ever say that it’s just not fair. She just doesn’t say that. I’ve never known my mom to say that.
My mom had to take care of my grandpa for a few years when I was a teenager, which she kinda resented. She would blow up at him all the time. She probably did feel like it just wasn’t fair, but she certainly never said so. But actually I’m not gonna write about those years, I’m gonna write about the year before he moved in with us, which was when I used to have to go to his house at least once a week to check on him and clean his house/do his laundry. Sometimes my mom would come with me, in fact at first she always did because I didn’t have my driver’s license yet. But often, she wasn’t there—I think because she would leave to go to the grocery store or something—so sometimes, I was there without her.
And he would follow me around while I cleaned his house, or stand behind me while I was folding his laundry, and tell me stories about his life. He was pretty far gone by this time, but not as bad as he got; he could still kind of take care of himself. And he remembered a lot of incidents from his life with a lot of very emotionally-charged details.
Like, for example, that story I told above, about how he walked out in front of a truck. Stuff like that.
I tried to make a graphic novel about this once. I think I was about 20 when I made it. I still have the drawings somewhere. They were not very good, and the graphic novel was not very good, but the whole thing, the tableau of talking to my grandpa; it had such an impact on me that—I actually followed through with finishing an entire graphic novel about it, which was kind of a big deal for me at the time; so that’s why I bring it up. I was thinking maybe I’d dig up some of those drawings and put them in here but I don’t wanna waste time looking for them, because they weren’t that good. Never mind!
Well here’s my point: my grandpa told me lots and lots of things about his life that I hadn’t known. And I’d typically ask my mom about these things, and sometimes she’d get a weird look on her face and say, “Did grandpa tell you that?” knowing full well that yes obviously grandpa told me that, and then she’d say, “Well…yes. It’s true. That did happen. But…”
In essence, what I took away from the stuff my grandpa told me could be summarized with two observations:
He was fixated on how life wasn’t fair, and
He was incredibly, incredibly ashamed of lots of things he had done or that had happened to him, some of which were completely beyond his control. But he wasn’t just ashamed, he was defensive, which is another major component of what turns venting into ruminating.
For example. He was incredibly ashamed, bitter and defensive about the fact that his only son, my mom’s brother, i.e. my uncle, was gay. And he would ruminate about it. Even though it was utterly beyond his control, and would obviously have been a thing that he might have done better with if he would have just accepted it, which is what my grandma did. But he could not accept it.
So, it was partly a defensive thing, and partly a “it’s just not fair!” thing. Which…as I’m thinking about this now, is probably the most toxic combination of ruminating. Maybe. I dunno. I’ll get back to you on it if I think of something more toxic.
My uncle died about 20-ish years ago. He was schizophrenic. He lived in San Francisco for most of his adult life. I think about him a lot, for various reasons. I might write about him someday, but not today.
I accidentally inherited a super-8 movie that my grandma shot in the early 70’s of my uncle with his longtime companion walking around together in some national park somewhere. I had no idea what was on the reel when I got it; I watched it on a projector that my friend Stefan gave me a few years ago and I got really kind of emotional, seeing that film of them, and imaging my grandma shooting the film. I wish I could have talked to my grandma about how it felt to have a gay son in the 1960’s because I imagine she would have had an extremely different take on the situation than my grandpa had, but I’ll never know, because she died when I was 14.
My grandpa was also ashamed, bitter and defensive that his wife, my grandma, “never loved him,” which was possibly partly true and partly exaggerated, but one doesn’t have to wonder too much why she never loved him, if in fact she didn’t.
I dunno, I think she probably did. On some level, at least. For many years, I stuck to the narrative that she didn’t love him and they were always unhappy and it made me sad, but I have recently revisited that; I think she was happy, sometimes. I think my grandma was probably a lot happier than my grandpa, and that’s just because she was better at processing things than he was.
Now, she did leave him one time, which was another example of a thing I learned when he would follow me around while I was cleaning his house, and then my mom got that weird look on her face when I asked her about it.
But she went back to him. I don’t know why. My grandpa said it was only because she felt guilty, but who knows why?
So, as soon as it would come to my mom’s attention that my grandpa had told me this stuff, she would talk to me about it, but she was always pretty…guarded about it. Over the years, though, she did let down her guard, and we would talk about these things pretty openly.
One time, when we were talking about it, she started to cry and said that she had been afraid that my dad would not want to marry her as soon as he found about some of this stuff, because he would think she was too trashy. I mean—that her dad was mentally ill, and her mom had left her dad once, and that her brother was gay.
My dad was sitting next to her as she was recounting this and he got this totally bewildered look on his face and said “WHat??” indicating that he was oblivious that she had ever been worried about it. He said, “Well I didn’t care about any of that!”
And I was stunned that I was witnessing this exchange between them, and thought…well, gosh, you know. Maybe if they’d had this conversation many years earlier, my mom wouldn’t have carried this little knot of grief about it that is causing her to break down right now!
Communication: I recommend it. But, you know. Some people just aren’t very good at it.
My mom wasn’t always super-great at it. My dad is still pretty bad at it. But my mom is a lot better at it now than she used to be.
So, here’s a thing about my mom: I used to have a horrible fucking relationship with her, and now she’s honestly one of my best friends, which is pretty bizarre, but I did realize this several years ago. The friendship-relationship began right around the time that I was cleaning my grandpa’s house, though it was a difficult and sometimes pretty awful road to get there. And I mean—at first, during the cleaning-grandpa’s-house time, our relationship was at probably the worst that it ever got. But I think it was the car rides over to his house and then the car rides back from his house that put us on the path that transformed that relationship—because it was a fairly long car ride, and we would talk about my grandpa on those car rides, which would expand into talking about her and her life.
Part of the problem was that I never knew my mom prior to that, because she was always careful and guarded about what she shared with me, or with anyone. She wanted to write a personal history that would look like my grandma’s personal history: less than one page long. And she wanted to raise me in a way that would guarantee I would have a “nice” and “simple” life so that my personal history would be less than one page long. And when I started to quote-unquote “Make Choices” that could lead me to a more complicated life, to a really long personal history with a lot of things that might make me look “trashy,” my mom had a real hard time with it.
This was happening about the same time that we were going to check on my grandpa all the time; I mean to say—I was “making choices” that were causing some “trashy” things to happen. That was in the aftermath of my first-boyfriend’s-suicide which I shall not recount, and during the timeperiod that I was first finding out about drugs; in fact, I recall that I was at my grandpa’s house the day after the first time I ever tried LSD and I fell asleep on his couch because I had been up all night the previous night, which actually happened just a few weeks before firstboyfriend died, so—yeah. Would’ve been directly in the middle of that. And then I got kicked out of school for truancy, and then, you know, I got pregnant, and my mom immediately made damn good and sure that I would put the baby up for adoption so that my life did not turn out anything like my grandparents’ lives, and
So, yes. My mom was real fuckin worried about all the choices I was making.
Cuz I mean—this is the thing about being a Mormon. If you do everything the “big guys” tell you to do, it can, theoretically, increase your chances of having a nice and uncomplicated life. All their “rules” are pretty much geared directly toward that outcome: nice, and uncomplicated. (Don’t drink or do drugs and only have sex with one person for your whole life! Don’t tell lies and in fact don’t do anything that might necessitate a situation where you’d even be tempted to lie! Keep your nose impeccably clean!)
And that is honestly the main reason my mom decided to become actively Mormon; because she decided that she wanted a nice and uncomplicated life, as opposed to the life that her own parents got. I don’t know if this is why my aunt also decided to become actively Mormon, but I suspect it probably is why.
And I suppose this is probably a large part of why my aunt is so bitter.
I should add that some real bad things have happened in my aunt’s life that have nothing to do with her crummy father or the early death of her mother. I don’t want to let all her dirty laundry hang out other than to say: the death of one of her children is probably the most difficult such example, then the early death of her husband after a long and horrible illness, and then…some other stuff, which is probably characterized as dirty laundry. Eh, just—I dunno, her children have all struggled in various ways, that’s the best I can do.
My mom has had some struggles also, but my mom’s ultimate outcome has been better than my aunt’s, in a variety of ways.
Yet, my aunt did follow all the Mormon rules just as my mom did. So I think that might be a big part of why my aunt can’t let go of things not being fair. But she doesn’t know how to easily scapegoat it, because the truth is usually—there is no easy scapegoat for messy circumstances; there are often lots of scapegoats. Her dad is just—a really convenient scapegoat. What else can it be? She has followed all the rules! This is all his fault.
But I mean—look. Like I say above, following all the rules can increase your chances of having a nice and uncomplicated life, but it sure as shit can’t guarantee it, because nothing can guarantee it.
But here’s another thing that’s sorta related to that: the verbiage I used above, about “making choices.” See, this is real big in Mormondom. I mean—the belief that everything that happens to us is because of choices we made.
I could get into the long-story doctrine reasons about this…trying to think of how to summarize…in essence, the belief is that Jesus wanted us to have “Free Will” on Earth, and yeah never mind I can’t summarize, other than to say that, cuz I’d have to get into the whole “War in Heaven” stuff and that’s too long so never mind. But ultimately, the idea that we get the life we had coming to us, based on our choices, is real big in the Mormon church. I mean, even despite the Book of Job, which Mormons do believe in, they still believe in the “we make our own luck” kind of tropes a lot more than the Book of Job, based on well it’s all because of the choices we make.
So, my mom had to kind of let go of that, a little bit. My mom had to embrace the Book of Job a little bit more; that is to say, she had to kind of learn and accept a little bit at least, that sometimes shit happens to people who utterly did not deserve it, and it has nothing to do with any choice they made. She’s still kinda struggling with this one, guys, she still says stuff all the time to indicate that she’s still mostly mired in the whole “It’s all about the choices we make” ideology, but…she’s coming along.
But I think my aunt is still stuck on it, in the sense that she doesn’t know where she went wrong, why she deserved a bad life, what bad choices did she make to cause her ultimate unhappiness, etc. etc. and it’s just easier to blame it all on my grandpa than make herself utterly crazy trying to figure out what she did to bring it upon herself when the obvious answer is:
Nothing. Some people just get dealt a shitty hand.
So, I think my aunt inherited more of my grandpa’s natural…propensities, and I think my mom inherited more of my grandma’s.
I know I’ve sold the idea of “Radical Acceptance” over and over, but this is another appropriate place to plug it. One of the biggest lessons of Radical Acceptance is that you don’t get fixated on things not being fair. You’re allowed to be sad and you’re allowed to grieve—in fact, you should grieve. But you should not get fixated on how the sad thing isn’t fair.
Because that’s where pain turns into suffering you see? I think the old Buddhist trope is something like, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” We don’t choose what happens to us, we don’t choose how to feel, but we do choose how to react to our feelings.
So this is yet another place where I get particularly critical of a lot of the “positive thinking” -type tropes that will never stop floating around like annoying little gnats and perpetually annoying me. (I need to learn a better way to react to it when I’m annoyed, I fully cop to this.)
See, if you feel bad because something bad has happened, but then if you just live in denial that you’re feeling bad, you will make it worse, unfortunately. That’s just kinda—biology. Trying to be “fake happy” when difficult things are happening will only get you so far. I mean—there is definitely power in a positive attitude, but denial is not the same as having a positive attitude.
In fact, when you are in denial about how you really feel—a lot of people around you pick up on it, and it makes them actually stressed out to be in your presence. There’s this idea that if you put on a happy face even when you feel like shit, it will somehow lead to better outcomes/success for you, but—this is only true in very limited situations. I mean to say, if you’re kind of down, but you fake-smile, it can actually make you feel better just to fake smile—there’s real research to back that up. But if you are going through something actually genuinely awful, horrible, and terrible and have a lot on your mind and are struggling, but then you fake smile and pretend to be fine when you are not fine…often, other people can fucking tell. And it makes you come off peculiar, in addition to all of this being very unhelpful for you, emotionally.
Now, there’s a lot of tangenting I could do here about empathy/women vs. men and quote-unquote “highly sensitive persons” and whether people can pick up on it when someone is fake-smiling—because not everyone can. But I’ll lay off. Ultimately, just—if you’re being “fake happy,” it often brings down the people around you. It often makes people feel uncomfortable.
It pretty much always makes me uncomfortable, is my point. I can pretty much always pick up on it when someone is being “fake” happy, and I don’t like being around it. Lots of people don’t.
And also, probably more importantly: it prevents you from actually working through the pain. It prolongs your pain, and it often turns the pain into suffering.
Another thing about “positive attitude” tropes—if you have an uncomplicated life, which might happen just cuz you’re fucking lucky, then it’s easy to have a positive attitude, and it’s easy to preach to others that they should have a more positive attitude. But this doesn’t always apply to others when their pain goes way beyond being “kinda down.” When people have extremely complex problems and they’re told to put on a fake smile…well yeah so that goes back to my many rants about what’s toxic about “Toxic Positivity.”
So, I think my mom sometimes makes the mistake of trying to preach to my aunt that she should have a more positive attitude, which is the exact reason I wish I could talk to my aunt. I want to tell her that she’s allowed to feel bad. In fact, given some of the stuff she’s gone through, it would be weird if she didn’t feel bad. My cousin, one of her daughters, died when she was six years old, for example. Just to start.
So, I mean…hopefully we all know this by now: stuffing down your negative feelings is incredibly bad for your health. It is also incredibly bad for your relationships and your overall well-being.
But it’s also not good for your health to fixate on how “it’s not fair!” because of course it’s not fair fucking nothing is fair the universe doesn’t work that way. Fixating on that is not gonna change anything.
Another thing, though, that’s not good for you is a thing I’m gonna touch on in a sec—which is holding on to anger at people who’ve fucked us over. It’s def similar to fixating on how “It’s not fair!” Fixating on how mad you are at them is also not gonna change a goddamn thing.
So actually, I’m going to circle back around to thing I said way above about my propensity to want to write biglong diatribe argument-style things that are usually pretty defensive. These can sometimes be unhealthy for me to do, and I fully admit it. But I do them in part because I’m a very verbal/writerly processor. I don’t do well trying to process feelings/situations just inside my brain, I have to cough it all out somehow, whether it’s by talking it or typing it.
So, doing this is fine, as long as it’s part of the process of—you know, processing. It’s not fine, as soon as it turns into rumination, i.e., those fuckin’ assholes who made me miserable for so long and treated me real bad and and I hate their goddamn dumbass dumb-asses! I’ve had to learn how to recognize when I’m starting to really do that, and then, uh, derail that train, so-to-speak. I’m not always good at it. I mean, a lot of times, I start with the venting because I’m trying to illustrate some important point or lesson, but then—yeah, if I’m not careful, I do start to ruminate.
But the thing is…in the years after I read my grandma’s “personal history,” and then slowly learned all the context about why it was—not very “complete,” and then listened to what my grandpa had to say about it and then witnessed the slow descent of my aunt over the years as she fixated on blaming her dad and/or fretting over why it wasn’t fair that things had turned out so bad for her, I decided—
I’m not going to let that happen to me. I remember having this huge epiphany about it when I was about 19, I was washing dishes during the big obnoxious lunch rush at the Soup Kitchen (that’s a restaurant with a stupid name and it often gets mistaken for a food bank because the name is so stupid, it’s a place I worked for two years, it’s really good you should go there if you’re ever in Salt Lake—)
I realized, while washing dishes and thinking in depth about my grandparents,
I want to tell the truth, in my own personal history-stories, for the sake of my own fucking mental health, but also
—largely because I can’t let go of the unfortunate self-important belief that I have something important to say to someone; that somebody, somewhere, will get something out of my messages, and my experiences.
Probably not. But that’s okay, because frankly, I just really like doing this. Writing, I mean.