jinian | a mixed bag

Last night, Cousin 4 was in town, so we went over for dinner. Found out at the last minute that WAY MORE PEOPLE were going to be there, which is always so great to be surprised by. At that house, everyone just jams into the dining room until they can't fit, and it gets really loud, so I retreated pretty quickly to another room. It's nice to live closer to family, I guess, but the ways that people have never understood me are much more obvious when I'm around them more often.

Eventually, I got drawn into a game, which was better. I will talk to humans! All I ask is that there not be ten people all talking at once! And a barky dog that people are aggravating! Please.

Playing a game that a very small cousin made up by himself was the best part of the evening. I was warned about his tendency to actually hurt you if his toy is fighting your toy, and I was not entirely safe even though we started with a board game. (Pencils are swords, and his pawn was an aggressive little thing.) But he was really creative about everything. He can't read yet, so answering the questions on the cards, which is how you normally move, was out. Instead he took the four pawns we weren't using and rubbed them in his hands until one fell out, and each of us was assigned two of their colors, so we got to move when our color fell out. Smart! And then of course we got into purely imaginative play, where the game board itself became a giant shark and the box was houses. (I was responsible for the timer being a cannon, though.)

On the way home, Mom got back into her "recommending things to the chronically ill person" mode. She claims not to be unhappy or disappointed with my introversion, but it's obviously not true -- she claimed I wasn't "my best self" because I wasn't up for full-on family game night (which is like 20 people including six children) less than 48 hours after my cross-country move. Fuck off with that. And I've told her that it's hurtful when people jump in with solutions. So when she mentioned acupressure, and I said I'd tried and it doesn't work any more because my sinuses have been inflamed FOR OVER A YEAR, she literally said "have you done it for long enough?"

How long is long enough to know something doesn't fucking work? If you start from the premise that it's going to work, then I should just sit here using my hands (which are arthritic btw, and this does hurt them) to apply pressure to my face all day every day, until something that isn't working decides to work. And clearly I should also spend all my time on every other thing that someone suggests. 100% effort times the number of suggestions, FOREVER, seems totally reasonable, especially when I'm debilitated, right?

At that point, I was just like, yep, guess I'm doing it wrong. I'm sure that's it. She eventually noticed that I was blowing her off and said "well, I haven't been dealing with this as long, I still have hope."

Really.

I said, "I am doing something, and it's working, it's just not working very fast. And I'm going to keep doing it, even if it involves drinking large amounts of Limonata." (Which she has teased me about before.) She hadn't realized that was a sinus management strategy, but jfc, I'm on a million decongestants and antihistamines, I'm dry as a bone all the time, which I need to not be or my sinuses will get worse, and even I get bored with THAT much water.

So I stood my ground, but it sucks that she didn't listen when we had this conversation before. Yes, it hurts when people jump in with suggestions all the time. You're telling me that you don't think I am trying hard enough. I know how much I can try, and I'm doing it. Just because you mean well doesn't mean you're not hurting chronically ill people with this behavior.