DUE DILIGENCE

Lyssa: so what's up with Joey? What did he want?
Sarah: I don't know. But I'm a different person with much higher self-esteem now, so if he's trying, he's gotta really try. I'm not just an option.
Lyssa: we love a woman!!!!

(I'm guessing she didn't say strong woman because all women are strong and the adjective is therefore redundant.)

Honestly, I don't know if he has a girlfriend and he was just horny, he was smart enough not to have shown it. I really hope not though, because that would just mean he's still in the same spot and he hasn't grown and I want to give him all the benefit of the doubt but that's what all women have done for men for ages.

My family had a serious talk that had my mother, my sister Lyssa and I in tears tonight. Lyssa ran into some academic issues in school and I was trying to mediate between my mother and my sister. My mother has gotten slightly better with her hysterics but she still chose some unwise words to use, which just meant Lyssa reacted in the same manner because she and my mother are very similar so my stepdad and I had to keep doing damage control.

I tried to let my mom know that some things in Lyssa's and my lives happen due to our mental health issues and we can't really help it, especially for Lyssa 'cos she hasn't even really taken the initiative to seek professional help. I told my mom that she may not really understand it fully 'cos she hadn't been raised in an environment that encourages discussion of such issues, and she may only have learnt of such topics recently as an adult, but it doesn't mean it's untrue or that they don't exist.

My mom was slightly more receptive than she's been, she always needs more and more exposure, as people do, but she also said the alternative could be that we were "far from God" and she shudders to think about ever accepting my disbelief of her personal truth. I feel slightly bad for her, that she has this burden of what she thinks is going to happen to me, while I drift further from it and feel ever more chill and comfortable with not believing in an afterlife, or at least not believing in a deity that will pass hard-and-fast judgment based on some strange point-based system and whether we practise it now.