This is a personal post so if such things bother you you might not want to read.
I think I owe the forum a bit of an apology for the generally reactionary tone I've had ever since my return from WDW.
Aside from my very strong liking of SGE and hope that it will succeed....and utter dismay at seeing the Stitch character fall under so much criticism here (something that personally gets to me as a big stitch fan), I've had my own share of problems outside of WDW and this forum.
I'm going to be 20 here in just about a month. I've spent two years away from living with my parents, though I still live locally and they still are a big part of my life. For years the situation in my family has been not the most positive one could hope for. I left my parents home 2 years ago because of some rather personal but painful issues which I don't feel safe discussing here. But it wasn't a good situation.
In the time since we've all learned to get along and communicate better than before, but recently, that came crashing down and I now stand at a very, very difficult crossroads in life and I'm trying to figure out what my next move is going to be.
I went to WDW from July 29 of this year to August 10. When I returned, i spent a month searching for work after being relatively unemployed for the last 2 years. I'd tried to find work, mind you, but the search was frustrating and after a while I simply stopped trying. I had moved in with other family and they supported me during this time.
Finally, after that trip, I found my footing, found a job, got my car working again and was self-sufficient again for the first time in a long time. It was a wonderful feeling. I could take care of myself, and not depend on anyone else anymore. I love that feeling of independence.
And then problems occured. In mid-November, after two months of employment, I lost my job over a rather silly reason. I worked for the satellite company DirecTV, taking calls from customers, setting up packages. The day I was fired, I had forgotten my headphone covers, and this was right as I had gotten to work, hadn't even pulled up my systems yet for work, no one was on the line or anything. so I briefly went to Security, which is about, oh, a 30-second walk away from my cubicle, to borrow a pair, and came back. This took all of 3 minutes.
My supervisor was incredibly peeved at me for doing this, saying that I was "deliberately avoiding calls" because I'd taken 3 minutes of clock time to borrow headphone covers. How they came to that conclusion, I have no idea. I need those to comfortably answer calls, and I was doing activities pertinient to the job at hand, I wasn't goofing off for 3 minutes. but whatever, I offered to clock out for 3 minutes so that they wouldn't have wasted company money on that. I was turned down.
An hour later I was escorted out of the building with my things and terminated on the spot. After being told just a couple days earlier that I was one of their better agents.
This was a huge blow to me personally because I'd given my all and was very proud of the fact that I was finally doing something worthwhile, and I'd lost that.
My family was supportive. Came to the conclusion that they'd had a different reason they wanted to fire me (don't know what), and needed a reason, any reason, to terminate me. I'll never know why. but what's done is done.
Not long after that, my car began to have serious troubles requiring costly repairs that I didn't have money for.
And then, my family which had supported me briefly after losing my job began to start using it against me, my parents went to their friends and talked about what a failure and a disappointment I was...that I'd gone 2 years without work, then got a job and lost it within 2 months. when they themselves said the termination wasn't my fault. It seemed like nothing I was doing was good enough to satisfy anyone, and now they wanted me to cancel my WDW trip, after I'd already booked everything. Hotel, air, transportation, all of it, was booked and paid for. I was ready to go. Having lost my job, they wanted me to take a loss on all of that money, and stay home and search for work instead.
That just wasn't something I wanted to do. My trip was taken care of, paid for. Why shouldn't I then go on the trip and job-search afterward? To me that makes much more sense than eating a loss of over 1,000 dollars and then trying to earn that back by searching for work, which i likely wouldn't find a job in 12 days anyway, the way it is here.
Why not just go then?
I lamented to one of my friends about this issue, and he sided with me, seeing that it would be really silly to just lose all that money when I wouldn't find a job immediately anyway. Best to spend that time in WDW....what does it matter if it's fully paid for? That money is gone anyway, makes more sense to go and lose the money than stay home and lose it.
He also had some harsh things to say about the way my family was acting.
Well.....one of my family members, snooping around on my computer, managed to access my email and found that letter, and proceeded to tell everyone in the family what it said.
This caused an enourmous family fight and despite my best efforts to solve the situation, it wasn't getting any better, and then it was trip time. A couple days before leaving I sat down and had a real chat with the family, and took strides towards solving the problem. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that that would be the end of it.
Went to WDW, had a blast. In the 12 days I was there, I got my smile back. I became happy again. I had needed that trip so badly, and the rewards of meeting Stitch, riding SGE, and just escaping this real world for a while, recharged my soul.
I came back home, thinking everything was fine now, and I'd get back on my feet and find new work. Instead, I received a phone call from my father informing me that I was no longer his son, and that I was not allowed to come to christmas or to my sister's birthday party.
This tore me apart. And ever since my return home I've been in constant communication with my parents, trying to resolve this, but each time the answer is the same: Either you dump all your friends, or you leave.
I'm supposed to dump my friends because one of them had an honest opinion about my family's behavior. This is unfair, and i told them that, and said i wasn't going to dump my friends for actually expressing how they feel.
To make a long story shorter....we've been unable to fix the problem, and I'm now having to face the difficult decision of whether to leave, or stay.
I have deliberately left most details about what's going on out of this post because they really are personal and sensitive issues. But.....what I face now is the fact that if I say, I have to deal with a family that has nothing but disappointment when it comes to me, and has for years...and that will never change...or I can move out, and in with friends who do appreciate me and what I do.
The issue is, I love my family, warts and all. but this is the kind of thing that has gone on for years, and years, and years. Whatever I accomplish, is never good enough for my family. I'm feeling pretty useless right now.
If I move in with friends, I know full well that it will be a long time before my family and I can communicate again. I know that, for that time, there will be no more of this criticism and constant disapproval of who I am, and what I'm interested in. But, I'm worried....I'd be moving half a country away, and leaving people that, despite that, I care about.
I'm not asking for advice or opinions or anything really.......it's just that.....theres a lot going on here, that y'all don't know about.....and maybe that's why I'm being this way. Stitch always managed to bring me some sort of comfort.....i can hug a giant stitch plushie when I'm blue, or hug the real thing in WDW, and feel life come back into me.
He's very dear to me. WDW is always close to my heart because it seems like that's the only place I can ever really be happy. And the postings lately, have just helped to add to the amount of pain that's going on right now. And that's my fault i guess, for taking it personally. an attack on stitch is an attack on me. But, sometimes one can't help feeling that way.
Anyway, that's how it is.....I'm going through a rough patch, and it really depresses me to see all the stitch criticism. He's my alter-ego of sorts...the other side of me....the connection with his character is very deep and personal. I can't help but be sad, and hurt, by the criticism sometimes. I just can't. He is me. And like him, I'm on the run again.....I can't be accepted where I am. As much as I want to be. and have to find a new start and a new 'ohana that might care about me.
My journey is just beginning.
I think I owe the forum a bit of an apology for the generally reactionary tone I've had ever since my return from WDW.
Aside from my very strong liking of SGE and hope that it will succeed....and utter dismay at seeing the Stitch character fall under so much criticism here (something that personally gets to me as a big stitch fan), I've had my own share of problems outside of WDW and this forum.
I'm going to be 20 here in just about a month. I've spent two years away from living with my parents, though I still live locally and they still are a big part of my life. For years the situation in my family has been not the most positive one could hope for. I left my parents home 2 years ago because of some rather personal but painful issues which I don't feel safe discussing here. But it wasn't a good situation.
In the time since we've all learned to get along and communicate better than before, but recently, that came crashing down and I now stand at a very, very difficult crossroads in life and I'm trying to figure out what my next move is going to be.
I went to WDW from July 29 of this year to August 10. When I returned, i spent a month searching for work after being relatively unemployed for the last 2 years. I'd tried to find work, mind you, but the search was frustrating and after a while I simply stopped trying. I had moved in with other family and they supported me during this time.
Finally, after that trip, I found my footing, found a job, got my car working again and was self-sufficient again for the first time in a long time. It was a wonderful feeling. I could take care of myself, and not depend on anyone else anymore. I love that feeling of independence.
And then problems occured. In mid-November, after two months of employment, I lost my job over a rather silly reason. I worked for the satellite company DirecTV, taking calls from customers, setting up packages. The day I was fired, I had forgotten my headphone covers, and this was right as I had gotten to work, hadn't even pulled up my systems yet for work, no one was on the line or anything. so I briefly went to Security, which is about, oh, a 30-second walk away from my cubicle, to borrow a pair, and came back. This took all of 3 minutes.
My supervisor was incredibly peeved at me for doing this, saying that I was "deliberately avoiding calls" because I'd taken 3 minutes of clock time to borrow headphone covers. How they came to that conclusion, I have no idea. I need those to comfortably answer calls, and I was doing activities pertinient to the job at hand, I wasn't goofing off for 3 minutes. but whatever, I offered to clock out for 3 minutes so that they wouldn't have wasted company money on that. I was turned down.
An hour later I was escorted out of the building with my things and terminated on the spot. After being told just a couple days earlier that I was one of their better agents.
This was a huge blow to me personally because I'd given my all and was very proud of the fact that I was finally doing something worthwhile, and I'd lost that.
My family was supportive. Came to the conclusion that they'd had a different reason they wanted to fire me (don't know what), and needed a reason, any reason, to terminate me. I'll never know why. but what's done is done.
Not long after that, my car began to have serious troubles requiring costly repairs that I didn't have money for.
And then, my family which had supported me briefly after losing my job began to start using it against me, my parents went to their friends and talked about what a failure and a disappointment I was...that I'd gone 2 years without work, then got a job and lost it within 2 months. when they themselves said the termination wasn't my fault. It seemed like nothing I was doing was good enough to satisfy anyone, and now they wanted me to cancel my WDW trip, after I'd already booked everything. Hotel, air, transportation, all of it, was booked and paid for. I was ready to go. Having lost my job, they wanted me to take a loss on all of that money, and stay home and search for work instead.
That just wasn't something I wanted to do. My trip was taken care of, paid for. Why shouldn't I then go on the trip and job-search afterward? To me that makes much more sense than eating a loss of over 1,000 dollars and then trying to earn that back by searching for work, which i likely wouldn't find a job in 12 days anyway, the way it is here.
Why not just go then?
I lamented to one of my friends about this issue, and he sided with me, seeing that it would be really silly to just lose all that money when I wouldn't find a job immediately anyway. Best to spend that time in WDW....what does it matter if it's fully paid for? That money is gone anyway, makes more sense to go and lose the money than stay home and lose it.
He also had some harsh things to say about the way my family was acting.
Well.....one of my family members, snooping around on my computer, managed to access my email and found that letter, and proceeded to tell everyone in the family what it said.
This caused an enourmous family fight and despite my best efforts to solve the situation, it wasn't getting any better, and then it was trip time. A couple days before leaving I sat down and had a real chat with the family, and took strides towards solving the problem. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that that would be the end of it.
Went to WDW, had a blast. In the 12 days I was there, I got my smile back. I became happy again. I had needed that trip so badly, and the rewards of meeting Stitch, riding SGE, and just escaping this real world for a while, recharged my soul.
I came back home, thinking everything was fine now, and I'd get back on my feet and find new work. Instead, I received a phone call from my father informing me that I was no longer his son, and that I was not allowed to come to christmas or to my sister's birthday party.
This tore me apart. And ever since my return home I've been in constant communication with my parents, trying to resolve this, but each time the answer is the same: Either you dump all your friends, or you leave.
I'm supposed to dump my friends because one of them had an honest opinion about my family's behavior. This is unfair, and i told them that, and said i wasn't going to dump my friends for actually expressing how they feel.
To make a long story shorter....we've been unable to fix the problem, and I'm now having to face the difficult decision of whether to leave, or stay.
I have deliberately left most details about what's going on out of this post because they really are personal and sensitive issues. But.....what I face now is the fact that if I say, I have to deal with a family that has nothing but disappointment when it comes to me, and has for years...and that will never change...or I can move out, and in with friends who do appreciate me and what I do.
The issue is, I love my family, warts and all. but this is the kind of thing that has gone on for years, and years, and years. Whatever I accomplish, is never good enough for my family. I'm feeling pretty useless right now.
If I move in with friends, I know full well that it will be a long time before my family and I can communicate again. I know that, for that time, there will be no more of this criticism and constant disapproval of who I am, and what I'm interested in. But, I'm worried....I'd be moving half a country away, and leaving people that, despite that, I care about.
I'm not asking for advice or opinions or anything really.......it's just that.....theres a lot going on here, that y'all don't know about.....and maybe that's why I'm being this way. Stitch always managed to bring me some sort of comfort.....i can hug a giant stitch plushie when I'm blue, or hug the real thing in WDW, and feel life come back into me.
He's very dear to me. WDW is always close to my heart because it seems like that's the only place I can ever really be happy. And the postings lately, have just helped to add to the amount of pain that's going on right now. And that's my fault i guess, for taking it personally. an attack on stitch is an attack on me. But, sometimes one can't help feeling that way.
Anyway, that's how it is.....I'm going through a rough patch, and it really depresses me to see all the stitch criticism. He's my alter-ego of sorts...the other side of me....the connection with his character is very deep and personal. I can't help but be sad, and hurt, by the criticism sometimes. I just can't. He is me. And like him, I'm on the run again.....I can't be accepted where I am. As much as I want to be. and have to find a new start and a new 'ohana that might care about me.
My journey is just beginning.
