Quick record before bed.

[hannah]

I told my therapist, there aren't any "but" statements with my parents. No "I love you but" sentences. It'd be an "and" sentence. I love you and don't expect anything else. Communication struggles, sharing personal information, like wanting to buy a fancy book for someone whom I've never seen in person or spoken to on the phone but consider a deep and intimate friend and with whom I've been in regular, almost daily interaction for years, or someone I've seen in person all of six or seven times. I know I need to want to be willing to bridge the gap. It's moving on that wanting which is difficult.

We talked about that, and we talked about the idea of personhood, and about how I pretty much only benefit from specialists instead of generalists. I told her about my poor experiences in high school with disability services, and the total inability to form relationships with the people on my Israeli Birthright trip. I nearly got close to crying a couple of times; there's a lot of resentment I don't think I'll ever be able to fully jettison.

Comments

[quarter_to_five]

I don't know if this is helpful in any way, but I almost worked for Birthright at one point, and it's been nagging at me since I read your post that anyone should feel the slightest bit bad about that nonsense. The whole intense bonding thing there is extremely deliberate, shamelessly manipulative and more than a little artificial, in many ways. If you don't particularly click with the various social/emotional tricks (and, frankly, logistical tricks - there's a reason you spend so much time deliriously on the edge of exhaustion, for example. It's not because of the huge distances you simply must cover across the vastness that is Israel) they use, well, some people feeling left out and unconnected is the price they're willing to pay for the rabid devotion of the rest.

[hannah]

I think my Birthright trip would have been better in some ways if it'd been a more typical experience like you've described here. Instead, I went with a special needs group that was significantly smaller than the typical one, with a greater proportion of aides and supervisors to participants. But, since pretty much everyone else within the group was of a lower level of functionality than I was, and the staff had to devote their attention to everyone else who couldn't function or even survive without help, I was pretty much lost to everyone.

It's slowly shifted into a feeling of dedicated ambivalence in the last five years, and I'm willing to think of that as an improvement over harsh resentment.

[quarter_to_five]

Oh, I see. Well, sort of - I couldn't read the link - but I'm fairly used to people being disappointed with the regular old Birthright trips because there are such high expectation of the experience of a lifetime, learning so much about yourself, transcendental bonding on a possibly atomic level, curing world hunger, etc, etc.

It's just all a bit overblown (deliberately so) and people shouldn't feel bad or that there's something wrong with them (something the program basically tacitly encourages) if it's all kind of ho-hum. If you had a bad experience, you're justified in feeling like you had a bad experience, and it might be a lot of people's fault, but it seems unfair that YOU should be the one carrying that around.

Again, sorry for rambling on here, I obviously don't know anything about the specifics of your trip or how you felt, but I have some moderately strong opinions on Taglit and some of it's ideological and sociological baggage. Anyway, if you ever want to complain about it, I'm always up for a little genial Birthright bashing.

[hannah]

I've since edited the link so you should be able to read it.

[quarter_to_five]

Thank you. It was an interesting read. I'm glad it wasn't all miserable and that you did enjoy the place, but I can see how it must have been utterly frustrating at the same time.

[hannah]

'Frustrating' is an apt, and polite, way to describe it.