My parents talked to me about having to pay import duties on a pack of pheromone soap bars because my delivery got messed up. Now, I’ve been a customer of these guys for 4 and a half years and I’ve never had to pay these import duties… until today. I had a couple of orders that went unfulfilled and that I had to get refunded for before this (which was taken care of easily), but never outright import duties until today. My parents basically told me for the price I’m paying, I’m getting ripped off, and to not only never use the soap again, but to send the company an email as to why I’m not using it, and scoffed at me when I stated why I’m using the soap (I thought it’d help me smell better to women, and I actually do feel like I smell better when I use the soap). Well, I’ve accepted the fact that I’m never going to buy from that company again, but it feels so heartbreaking. The soap was high-quality, way better than Old Spice or anything else I’ve used, and I started buying the soap off a recommendation from a masculine blogger site once I got out of being broke. In many ways, the soap was, at the time I started buying it, a signifier of a new era of hope. I feel weird… I know now that brief window of time was a mere mirage that crumbled under nervous system dysregulation and the lockdowns, but it’s still sad. It feels like I lost something. In addition, after an argument, I told my dad about the Defense Mode and HRV4Training stuff that I’ve learned. As someone with heart problems, my dad promptly shredded the ideas as bullpoop, especially polyvagal theory, despite me insisting that it’s been working really well for me (which it has). I’ve chosen to ignore my dad’s sayings on this matter, but it still kinda hurts knowing that I can’t bring my family out of their own dysregulation with me, especially because I believed that if they found out about this before me, they’d be the first ones to recommend it to me and keep nagging me to do it, as they always do with anything they recommend me to do (in a good way). It’s heartwrenching when I try to help them & they dismiss it as a scam. I’m now starting to question if everyone truly is out to scam me, and that I’m an especially vulnerable mark due to my Asperger’s and tendency to get easily dysregulated. If that’s the case, is there even a point to trying to be happy & follow my dreams in life? My parents always make it seem like I’m never going to get a job/woman outside of their advice and at the same time make it seem like if I just follow their simple steps that I’m going to magically get these things. I feel like my parents’ advice was awkward, & doesn’t work in this modern age, or for me (the fact that it seems to be working for 4 of my cousins is pure luck because they got the opportunities I didn’t, or wasn’t able to take advantage of due to complications of being in Defense Mode). They’re also third world immigrant Boomers, so yeah. As an example, mom tries to tell me to apply to government jobs in my field, but I’ve checked their websites multiple times & they don’t have any postings I could use. Mom & dad tell me “apply, apply, apply,” when the only 3 jobs I’ve ever gotten were through mom vouching for me & an agency for neurodiverse ppl getting jobs. They talk about doing the same thing repeatedly & expecting different results being insanity but never seem to grasp the concept themselves. It sucks because it feels like they’re in touch, in their own way, but their view of life is so limiting. And if I even fail at that… is that all I’m capable of? In a world where only the elite super-rich will own everything while the rest of us will own nothing & be “happy”? I feel like my parents are yelling at me that I’m going to be a eunuch slave & I’m going to like it, even though they’ve never said that directly and never would because I don’t think that’s something they’d do (well, my mom typically always cries that my brother & I will “know poverty” once she & dad die). It also sucks because I’ve also fallen for a few other grifts that promised me the world in terms of money, women, etc. as a consequence of being dysregulated, and I know if my parents find out about those other things, that they’re going to take away my autonomy to make decisions for myself. The last time I didn’t have that freedom, I was a middle-school-aged tween being bullied in both school, summer camp, and what amounted to an after-school daycare with very little recourse for either, getting in trouble all the time for trying to stand up to myself, and my parents believing the school over me and trying to keep me in those situations despite me repeatedly telling them what was wrong and begging them to get me out. I’m also frustrated because it seems like I’m trying to meet my parents where they’re at, but they’re not really doing the same for me. I know they care and want the best for me, but as they say about me, it’s like “they’ve got their own stuff in their head and they’re refusing to get it out and actually listen to me”. It’s like the entire world is telling me to bend over and take it up the you-know-where until I die and that there’s nothing I can do about it, and MAN, that sucks. I just wish I could relax, let go, & be sincere, but because I’m neurologically different in an uber-competitive world, I felt I couldn’t be that way ever since I was a child because I felt that being that way would get me crushed (in hindsight, the opposite might have been true, but with all the toxic behaviour I’ve seen on the Internet these days, I’m not sure). I wish I could be truly loved for being myself, as opposed to what everyone else wants me to be, or what I perceive everyone wants me to be. I wish I didn’t have to try so hard for everything. I wish the good things in life came naturally to me like they seem to do for so many of my peers. Overall, it feels like one flame of hope got snuffed out today, another barely survived a snuffing-out attempt, and another flame I tried to light died with a strong gust of wind. And when you’re in a position like mine… hope is all you have at times, so anything that snuffs out that hope is devastating. Phew, end of rant. Its also weird because typing out these long rants helps me process my feelings when I get overwhelmed, but it takes up a lot of time and it’s a sort of pause I don’t want to go through. I also feel EXTREMELY vulnerable right now and anxious about what y’all are going to say about all this.

Posted by marcopolo_96 at 2024-04-07 21:37:01 UTC