I just got really mad at my mom.

My brother was making fun of me, saying something like, “Sarah’s just going to sit in her room on the computer for the whole camping trip.” I normally wouldn’t have been offended. But this was coming from a little boy who spends hours each day playing on x-box, watching YouTube videos on his nook, playing games on his iPod, and watching TV. He is the one who actually never does anything when we go camping. I’m the one who has been a Girl Scout for eight years. I’m the one who knows what real camping is (which by the way is not what we are doing this weekend at all). So all I did was tell him to stop saying mean things like that. I didn’t say why, because I would get into trouble for accusing him of things that are completely true (even though he got into no trouble whatsoever for accusing me of something that will be the opposite of true).

My amazing mother then proceeded to tell me that I was too sensitive, and could never take a joke, and it was probably true anyway, and she bets that I’ve never laughed anything off, and I was totally overreacting, and no one else would get offended by that, and how she knows that because she knows everybody and all the people that she knows are way more significant than the people I know that I claim would take offense to such an innocent joke.

This made my brother say something along the lines of “Yeah, jeez, Sarah.” So, my mom, by having a problem with what I took offense to, has allowed my brother to disregard my wishes of to not be made fun of. So she has basically given him the go-ahead to insult me again.

The worst part is, that when I tried to stress the importance of the fact that while she has issues with what I am offended by, I was nevertheless offended by it, and since I asked for that kind of “joke” not to be repeated, I should be listened to, she totally changed topics and launched into the general “You are an irrational bratty ungrateful teenager who is stupid and dramatic and too uptight” speech.

I can honestly never get my point across in an argument, because every time we argue, and she can’t win because I am making sense, she goes into that whole rant and I eventually have to just stop talking to her because eventually one of us would go crazy.

She has the weirdest logic, too. She has literally admitted, on several occasions, that she won’t take anything I say seriously until I’m an adult. Like I’m going to just suddenly start being right when I turn 18? I think she has this idea that I’ll someday see how irrational I’m being, and thank her for constantly making fun of me, lowering my self-esteem, and ruining any respect anyone ever had for me. Ha!

But honestly, this all really hurts me. I’ll never be able to get my brothers to stop making fun of me because they’re “allowed to” now. I’ll never believe in myself because she always doubted me. I will never have good self-esteem because after she has been insulting me for years, I sometimes believe that what she says is true. It’s really weird. Even though she has never respected me, liked me, or cared about me, I still want to make her proud, and to show her that I’m not what she says I am. It’s sort of like a bully at school whose opinion you can’t stop caring about (girls will be familiar with this).

I try not to post stuff like this, but this whole thing really just grinds my gears. (Something my dad would say, but I won’t start talking about him, too.) I really just needed to write it all down, to get it out. I’m posting it because it’s a part of who I am, and I couldn’t just leave it without feeling like I was ignoring or avoiding a big issue.

Jusqu’à la fois prochaine.