J. I'm not sure who equates potential with success? The only place you would hear this (I think) would be in high school from teachers whose job it is to constantly encourage students. Potential is just an estimation of the raw material we all start out with. I could have the genes of a super athlete (haha) and be told every day in gym class about my amazing potential but if I don't choose to make that my primary goal absolutely nothing will come of it and the same is true for smarts and academic prowess. Rereading your original post in this thread it seems that you made choices when you left school that weren't about your potential at all, but about your parent's needs. There were probably scholarships you could have applied for etc.. but unfortunately when we are teenagers we often need people steering us into filling out forms and making intelligent choices because all we know is the small world of high school and family. My dad still talks about how my sister and I were "smart" like this was some crowning achievement but as there was zero family direction, zero financial assistance and we were both jettisoned into unsupported adulthood by the time we were 16 neither of us did anything "smart". Big disconnect with dad still taking some weird pride in our being "smart" when it went nowhere.
I heard it growing up, from just about every corner of academia: "John's very smart," "John's highly intelligent," "John is highly adaptive at learning math/science/languages," "John's test scores are off the charts," "John's voice is exceptional, his musical ability is on a level I would call gifted," "John is going to go places," "John has the mind of a doctor," "John is going to do great things. He has so much potential."
The choices I made before I left school (I was already involved before I graduated high school), were supposed to be temporary. We had one scholarship available around the time I graduated, and it went to one of the wealthiest kids in the school.
I was offered a significant opportunity from a well known aeronautical engineering school, but I had to turn it down. I had no money to go to Florida, and even if I did, I had not a dime for tuition.
Anyway, you made choices not about your potential but about your family. I have read you talk about that with a familial pride many times over the years, it made you feel good that you were supporting them because supporting people is a good thing. But healthy adults want more than anything to see their kids leave, create their own lives and succeed at them. They don't want their young adults supporting them financially because they know the young adult needs to learn to save and spend wisely for their own life.
If I have one thing going for me, I'm excellent with money. My parents want me to succeed, but they're poor, so they have the poor mindset. To them, success will somehow happen magically. I call it lottery planning. They don't quite grasp that once I leave home, I am going to be very fucked. I haven't worked in 7 years, and the U.S. economy, while growing, is not conducive for people like me without a degree of any kind beyond a high school diploma.
So I am really asking here, what would you have done differently? This may seem like a pointless or intrusive question but I have found that it's very useful when I've asked myself this because it shines a light on what you could be doing now.
Assuming I didn't have to stay home? I would have moved out, and would have gone to our local community college and got my Associate of Science/Engineering degree, while working full time anywhere. As I said, I'm good with money, and can make it stretch quite far. I would have saved that money while still going to college, and then used that money, and the AA degree, to get into that university in Florida.
From there, it would simply be a matter of choosing what particular field interested me. Aeronautical Engineering has always fascinated me. Such a choice would lead to careers like becoming a pilot, if I so chose, or digging into the Engineering side of it and working for companies like Boeing, NASA, GE Aircraft Engines, SpaceX, and so on.
Universities are great places for experiencing newfound freedom, perhaps even finding someone to share it with. Who knows what could have been in that regard? I never had trouble meeting people, or making friends. At the very least, I'd sure as hell would have had sex.
Or, I could have been homeless, unemployed, and single.
The point is that I would have had the freedom to guide my life where I wanted it to go, for good or for bad. In this, where I am now, there is no freedom.
As to your immediate position as carer, if your mom is so disabled as to you being unable to even watch a film because you have to be listening at all times I think you should revisit the idea of nursing homes. Because that is where she is going to end up as a result of the crisis you feel is looming as far as a breakdown. In my experience people often have a total breakdown because that's the way out that doesn't involve hard choices, the choices are simply too awful and there is too much pushback from other people not wanting you to make them so you check out in such a way as to choices being out of your hands. Your body is literally crying for help and the only way you will get the help is the day you collapse and almost die. But you can still decide today that you are in a terrible position and the changes that would happen if you dropped dead of a heart attack can and should happen now while you are still here.
The nursing home will not happen. My father has already said as much, and my mother would die if she went in. That's not a worst case scenario. What I mean is she would absolutely, without question, lose the will to live. This isn't my casting personal opinion on her mood, it's exactly what would happen, because not only has she said as much, but that any time someone even mentions the notion of a nursing home, she gets
terrified and goes into an anxiety attack.
Don't feel bad about hounding your family, you said you told them how you feel and I would encourage you to email your wider family as many times as you need to and basically make your crisis their crisis. You have said your brother is a big church goer, I would suggest that if your and your mom's crisis was his crisis he would be asking for help from his church, people to come and stay with your mom a couple days a week. This is not a huge thing, communities do this to help out all the time. And I repeat if her medical care needs are so great that the average person could not do it then you need to look at getting her into whatever care she would end up in if you died. It seems looking from the outside that you are the only one in your family who is taking this as the crisis it is, and that's just wrong.
I am, and it is wrong, but the family does not care. I have poured out everything to them, and it has fallen on deaf ears. They do not care. They say they care, they offer help, I ask for it, they retract it over some excuse or another, so I know they do not care.
Tell your brother that you need him to help you get help and that if you drop dead your mom will end up moving in with him and that you are probably going to drop dead. Or whatever it takes to make this not just your crisis. Maybe if you think no one will believe you about the dropping dead part you should tell them you are thinking of walking out and they will have an unplanned crisis on their hands as opposed to getting together and working out a way of dealing with the situation. All of which is to say I hope you aren't being too nice to the extended family, there is no reason ALL the cost in care hours should be on one person.
It shouldn't, but it does. I'm the only one, and it's because I know that if I stop, she has no hope. Believe me, it's no sense of self delusion. I don't want to be here at all, but I am, and there's nothing I can do about it except to continue onward.
My brother has his family, and he works all of the time. I also watch his kids a number of times a month. He has an out, and that's it.
I fall between every crack in our system. I mean, it was bound to happen to somebody, and I guess I'm the somebody it happened to. As for familial pride, I don't have that anymore. My hope is that someday, I can get away and never return. I regret being born, I regret fighting for my life in that incubator, I regret knowing them. I don't want to be associated with any of them, I don't want to have to deal with any of them, I just want to go far away, change my name, and do something with what life I have left.
