Dear Anita

I tend to go to bed at around 1am at times because I sometimes spend time talking with LGBTQ friends who like to stay up late. But on most days I go to bed around 11 pm. I have been meditating a bit on healing my body and lessening the anxiety and I find that meditation helps me increase my mental focus. I am thinking of learning yoga poses or dance poses for fun and as a good way to exercise and release tension in my body. I like your idea of hugging myself using my arms because I have been doing that currently before falling asleep and I find it helpful. My parents restaurant has been quite busy lately because other restaurants have been closing due to coronavirus and there are lots of orders each day. The orders often start from 1pm- 7:30pm and there’s not much of a break between them. That is why I tend to make sure that everything is stocked up with all the supplies so that when the orders come in there is still supplies there to use. Because of coronavirus, my parents restaurant has been opening six days a week from 11 am- 9pm and on Mondays from 4pm-9pm. The normal hours used to be 10 pm for closing time, but currently the coronavirus curfew from the Governor Phil Murphy says that all businesses should close down by 9pm at the latest so the restaurant is also observing that. Since the restaurant is open every day including holidays, it has been quite busy currently from 1pm-7:30pm because a lot of the people have been coming to the restaurant after finding that ours is the only one that is nearby that is open. The stores in Lakewood, NJ which has the most cases of coronavirus are mostly closed but there are still some places in Brick, NJ that are still open. My parents never close the restaurant because they feel afraid that if they close for even a day, they will lose customers and money. Sometimes during the really busy hours of the restaurant usually from 4pm-6pm, there isn’t really much time for anything but just to take orders and stock up on supplies. Since there is a lot of running around the kitchen during that time, I tend to drink a lot of water to stay hydrated. But there’s usually not enough time to eat anything or go to the bathroom because the customers keep coming in. I sometimes wonder if it would be better if my parents hired other people to help out with the restaurant, but they don’t want to because they think that hiring people is a process and having to pay them is tough when they are working on keeping enough income to pay things. Also during the times that are quite busy, my mom gets quite angry at times when an order gets wrong and she yells at my dad which is sad. My mom tends to yell a lot when she gets mad and she often gets irritated about the little things. She can’t stand it when other people make mistakes or when others criticize her for things because then she’ll yell and complain for hours. Like if someone accidentally forgets to put the sauce in the box, she will yell at them saying “I can’t believe you forgot that. One thing wrong messes everything up! Why can’t you get things right?! I hate you when that happens!” And sometimes it goes on for hours. Also when someone else criticizes her, she will talk about them a lot and complain “That person is a really mean and rude person. I’ve never met anyone like that.” And she’ll go on for a day and sometimes for another and sometimes she brings up past events as well and complains about them. She tends to compound things to the extreme at times I feel like.

Like when I decided to take time off to talk with the counselors at college for my mental health, she said “Well this happened before when you had to take time off at community college. When are you going to grow up and face your problems because it’s going to be the same loop again and you keep choosing to be this way?!” Or she’ll say “You can’t be that way because that makes you too different from society and you’ll only be a disappointment, how can you expect yourself to do well if you are like this?”

My parents aren’t really good at handling their emotions, my mom often yells while my dad just ignores the situation. When I tell my dad about mental health things, he doesn’t really listen and just tells me that there are other people in the world who are worse off and it’s like he isn’t even acknowledging that I have anxiety and I struggle with gender dysphoria like I’m not really being heard by him. That is why I am grateful to the LGBTQ community and the tinybuddha.com blog where I can talk about my feelings and work on healing.