My mom is truly terrible, but one of the pettiest things she did was after I opted to not tell her about an important milestone in my life as a young adult. (I had already decided to slowly cut ties with her and was pushing a limit I hadn’t explored yet.) She didn’t take kindly to learning about it through Facebook, and acted as if I owed her the privilege of hearing something before anyone else. She made the situation all about her, detracting from the good thing I had accomplished, painted herself as the victim as she often did, and then started to retaliate.

The first thing she did was delete my Netflix profile on her account. Specifically so I would log in and see that it was gone. Specifically to be cruel to me. She did other things to cut me out of her life, and I just rolled with it since I had become fairly independent by that point and she was doing the heavy lifting for me.

Anyway, now she reaches out occasionally to say she doesn’t understand why I won’t talk to her. Typical narcissist.

I recommend reading this blog about estranged parents forums. The writer analyzes the logical fallacies of narcissistic parents, and it’s very enlightening to get a peek of that world without having to interact with it directly.

Historically women’s colleges are generally very empowering environments. I live in the southeast, and the ones nearby that come to mind are Salem College, Meredith College, and Hollins University. I think all of these are liberal arts, but Salem has a health leadership focus and is developing a strong STEM program to complement that. From personal experience, Salem provided an excellent experience for me and the other people I know who went there.

I know the SE probably isn’t the location you’re thinking of, but North Carolina has had democratic governors for years and years who are supportive of women’s and lgbtq rights. Larger cities are generally more pleasant than the rural areas. Also the tech, science, and health fields in NC are vibrant and still growing.

Private colleges do come with a higher tuition, but scholarships are available if the students excel in academics and extra-curriculars. If they end up going out of state, the private school tuition wouldn’t be that different than a state school charging out of state tuition. And to note, the private schools I mentioned are nonprofits, so they’re not taking that money and pocketing it. They are held to a specific standard set by the IRS for nonprofits in general, as well as by the accreditation bodies for higher education.

I used Language Transfer to get started on Spanish, and it was incredibly effective. He connects concepts between English and the target languages that help build vocabulary more quickly. He also explains verb forms in a way that makes more sense to me than the actual Spanish classes I took in school. Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and others like those never cut it for me for some reason.

I’m now reading webcomics and listening to other podcasts in Spanish to get a feel for more natural conversations. I practice speaking Spanish at work with bilingual coworkers, with the goal to be bilingual myself, too!

(A similar teaching style that I found enjoyable and enlightening is the American Sign Language course by Bill Vicars on YouTube and lifeprint.com.)

I started the music theory course and it is very math-heavy at the beginning. It turned me off, but if that’s an interest of yours, it might be a good fit for you! It’s a course that is still in the works, so I’m waiting to see the next edition of it to see if I can connect to it more easily later.