Weird Autumn wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 8:00 pm
ugggghhhh i hate this
I finally have a job interview coming up this week, and my mom is insisting that if I want to get the job I have to get my hair cut because they won't hire a "man" with long hair because she says so. And I really can't make a good argument for why I really don't want to do that and cutting my hair would make me deeply profoundly unhappy for a very long time, even though it's true and this actually
is a big deal to me no matter how much she thinks it shouldn't be. If I argue that it isn't necessary to get my hair cut short to have a better shot at the job she'll just say "you don't know that" and she's right, I don't know that, because it's always possible the interviewer will have the same bullshit prejudices as her. But I can't exactly argue that even if not cutting my hair does mean not getting the job I still wouldn't cut it, because I have to get a job and I'm not allowed to have my own happiness or well-being be more important than that. There's no winning and it sucks and I hate it and I just want to cry and she's going to take me to the hairdresser and I'm just going to cry and I hate it so much
She's always had a small-c conservative streak in her. She has a fairly narrow range of things she thinks are decent and acceptable and anything outside of that makes her uncomfortable, even if her big-L Liberal values tell her she should be more open-minded and less judgmental about it. And the way she reconciles those two things is by projecting her own hang-ups and prejudices onto everybody else. It's not that
she doesn't like you with long hair, it's that
the interviewer won't like you with long hair. She's done this for my entire life and I just fucking hate it and there's nothing I can do about it and I want to cry.
My parents are doing the same thing to me, so you’re not alone. Their idea of being supportive is to
say they’ll defend me, advocate for me, etc., but no matter how I dress or what I say to them, they won’t use anything but male pronouns and my birth name. My psychologist doesn’t believe me and my therapist keeps telling me that you can’t win everyone over, which, no shit, half the country hates people like me.
This is pretty much what I always expected to happen before I came out, and why I didn’t want to do it. I give up. This isn’t going to work, ever. And now I know people are going to tell me that I need to get out of there and get a job and all the other things I’ve failed at repeatedly in my life. The few times I have had a job, I always had to quit or get fired because I break shit, I crash shit, I manage to delete entire hard drives, and I call in sick all the time because I don't want to see anybody or talk to anybody. Once I broke about $10,000 worth of shit because I had two forklift crashes in one night. The center that’s supposed to help with job placements told me it would be hard to find anything because I’m not qualified to do much. And I’ve actually been getting worse lately, not better. I either just end up crying or staying in bed all day because I just don’t want to do anything anymore. I’m kind of tired of getting bullshit boilerplate responses from crisis counselors. If I was functional and able to take care of myself, I’d never talk to them in the first place.
People keep saying not to give up, but what choice do I have? I’m about to turn 42, my lifetime income amounts to less than $20,000, and I have no way to get out of this situation because I’ve already tried everything I could think of. I’m not young or thin or attractive enough to marry a person who could help me. I can’t write anything that could help me out of this because I’m too scared to try. I know people are going to tell me not to give up and not to lose hope, but I don’t have any hope left to lose. I’m never going to be what I wanted to be, and I’m never going to be what anybody here wanted me to be. I’m a failure at that, too.
I just want to stop hurting and crying all the time.