hand-me-downs are a leash

maa doesn't like me drinking. she tells me, i thought looking at your dad's life you would stay away from it. it is a half melancholic response, and half disappointed. she never tells me no, and this isn't a no. it is something far more woeful. knowing doesn't prevent repeating & a want cannot be a fortune teller.

i understand her, of course i do. but how do i say witnessing a damage doesn't function as inoculation in odia? [i could write a whole essay about how i long for english words to stand my ground because i could never do it in my home growing up in odia, so that's for later.] on her part, it is a rather reasonable but totally wrong theory of how inheritance works. psychoanalysis tells me we don't repeat what we understand but what's unprocessed, trying to retroactively master something we had no control over the first time. am i talking about/to her or me?

my dad's recovery is his resolution. but a family's relationship to a substance rarely vanishes, i know it did not for us. what it can do is relocate. i am not accusing here, just observing a psychic pattern – alcohol was holding a structure in place, a stabilizing knot however painful. relocation made me a home.

i like being busy, my therapist tells me it is cope-core. it gives me a frame, schedule, an externally imposed [internally embraced] shape to days, weeks, months that doesn't ask anything of the parts you want managing. it's what holds and not what it's holding back. [master of defense.] the shapelessness of unstructured time, loose social interactions, mystical mismatched expectations. so structure isn't really discipline, it is just deferring what needs resolving.

containers aren't a standalone digression here. what it is a part of is larger: is what disappeared in his life [drinking & disappearance] and what disappears in mine [work & trigger] the same structurally? family symptom is alive, but its targets are different, and maa is caught in the crossfire.

medicated, self-medicated. ssris, mood stabilizers, soju n some rum. unsanctioned footnote. category not a habit.

i know maa is reading this, she will ask me what some paragraphs mean & i will refuse to answer.