Letters to the Editor
Allie_
Published Letters: 1389 Editor's Choice: 112
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Correct, most other people are not waking up screaming
[Read the article: I'm so anxious I can't think straight]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Your letter strikes me as a big shout out: Do other people feel the same way I do?
Um. Mostly no. Most of us are not waking up screaming and spending every waking moment thinking about disaster. That's not the way life is supposed to be. See a therapist, not as a last resort, but as a first resort. You may need meds; it's hard to take advice, even good advice, if your system is out of whack. You definitely need more help than anyone can offer you in an advice column. (Nevertheless, I'm going to offer you some advice!)
It's no wonder you're using alcohol to give yourself a break from the anxiety; you must be exhausted. However, alcohol's probably not the best solution. Meditation can help... training your mind to be still for a time. Another thing that can help is forcing yourself to visualize positive outcomes, the way you now visualize negative ones. Every time you catch yourself imagining a bad possibility ('My father's 60, he may have cancer...') force yourself to think through a good one. ('My father will really enjoy reading his favorite book to his grandchild.') Bad things are likely to happen, but good things are also likely to happen, and right now, your worldview is skewed to see only the bad.
Finally: your guy sounds like a sweetie. Please tell yourself that the fates are not going to crush you just because you finally got a little bit of happiness, as often as necessary until you begin to believe it. In fact, when one thing in life starts to get good, often its only the beginning of many things getting better.
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re: thekiti
[Read the article: My husband read my journal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Somehow I manage to bring in my husband's mail from the mailbox without opening it.
No, the journal was not handed to him just because she loaned him the laptop. Yes, he was snooping.
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but why?
[Read the article: Jews on ice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why would any Yiddish speaker curse in English? Yiddish is so much richer than English when it comes to curse words!
I hate detective novels, but I'll be recommending this one to my mom, who loves them. Thanks!
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re: thekiti
[Read the article: My husband read my journal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think your analogy is a poor one, but that's unimportant, since I wouldn't read the mail in the suitcase either, unless I had some reason to believe it had been placed there specifically for me. If I had borrowed my husband's suitcase for a trip and found he had left some papers in it, I would most certainly not feel free to read them!
My husband and I both write, often, on various subjects, private, professional, fictional, and autobiographical. If he leaves a piece of paper flat open on his desk I do not read it. I can tell his handwriting from my own at a glance; if I find myself scanning it automatically, I turn the sheet over. He does the same for me. My journal is on the bedside table. I'm confident he has never read it. I know I have never read his, which is... let's see... at the moment it's on the back of the toilet in the bathroom, I believe.
The other day he was looking for an old file and thought it might be on my computer, which has a backup of the drive of the computer we used to share. He asked me if he could look for his file on my computer, told me why, and asked if anything was off limits for him to look through. Is this really so hard to imagine? It's the way I was raised, the way my husband was raised, and something I take for granted as basic courtesy. Speaking for myself, I'd move out rather than continue to share a house with someone who had violated my trust.
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re: mom's abortions
[Read the article: Should I tell my daughter about her mother's two abortions?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The only context in which I, as a mother, would tell my daughter about a past abortion is if I had a daughter who was stridently anti-abortion and anti-woman. Teenagers are naturally cruel and judgmental, and sometimes they need to be reminded that situations like this don't just happen to theoretical "other people," but to people they know and even respect.
I can't see this as having anything to do with the LW's reasoning. And in any case, as everyone has already pointed out, they weren't his abortions. He doesn't have the right to tell someone else's secrets.
What he DOES have the right to say to his daughter is, "I got a woman pregnant at a time when we weren't ready to have a child and she had an abortion. It happened twice, in fact, so clearly we didn't learn anything from the first time. Unwanted pregnancies do happen when you have sex. Even if you think you're too smart to let that happen to you, remember you're fighting millions of years of instincts telling you to reproduce. People do dumb things, even smart people, condoms break, the pill sometimes fails. It happened to me and it was painful to live through and painful to watch her living through and I don't want it happening to you."
If he can bring himself to say these things without introducing mom at all, maybe he can discuss this with his daughter. What he cannot do on any level is say, "I think your mom was a stupid slut and I don't want you growing up like her."
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Interesting!
[Read the article: Duck dongs]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks for the article.
Right now it's mallard mating season on our pond. I feel so sorry for the poor female ducks; their necks have been plucked bare and bloody by all the males raping them. I've seen female ducks die of exhaustion before, and in one case I watched several males hold a female underwater while mating for so long that she drowned. So the females don't usually conceive from these attacks, huh? Very interesting.