A family who never loved you

[Glides]

Since the very beginning of time, my family, with a few exceptions, have gone out of their way to show me in as many ways as they can that if I ever wanted their approval, then i'd have to fulfill some retrospectively ridiculous expectations.

and that's one of the many reasons i'm posting here seven years later. the only people i still regularly talk to are a few of my cousins that i'm particularly close to, who are themselves absolutely furious at older family members for similar reasons. all of us experienced emotional abuse at the hands of our parents to some degree (though only two of my cousins had relatively cool parents). that's been the only silver lining is all of the cousins in my immediate family recognizing that our family is old and conservative and racist as all hell and this means we didn't have to be around them unless we had to. that's been nice. i'll feel bad for them later. for everyone else, they can go fuck themselves.

parents shouldn't have children with strings attached. they had my entire life planned out for me. i would go to the same school as my father, get the same degree he did, earlier than he did (therefore why they forced me to take dual enrollment and controlled what hobbies i did, ensuring that i had no real social life till college). they wanted me to get his degree earlier than he did and then work in his business with him. and then i just do that until i die. when your whole life was built out as an infant, well you don't start being alive till much later. to top it off, i spent part of my childhood living with my grandmother instead of them, and they'd only show up whenever there was some afterschool activity they signed me up for on a whim without telling me. so when my grandma died when i was 11, i barely knew them and they barely knew me except as the small child they'd occasionally parade out to business events so they could pretend we were a functional family, where i was expected to smile and look a lot more competent than i actually was.

so of course, i deviated, and nearly failed out of the college they sent me to, which was the same college my dad went to, and as a legacy, i much more easily got a full ride (it wasn't anywhere near an ivy league school, this is a privilege but less impressive than it sounds), and around the time i started posting here is right around the time i began taking classes there and realized almost immediately that i was horrible at maths and sciences and had no business acumen whatsoever. so i declared myself as a business major and nearly failed out of it. at the last second, i switched to a "general studies major" because i'd accidentally fulfilled the requirements and so i wanted to leave ASAP. that was the degree most of the athletes chose, so imagine graduation day and a bunch of really big buff dudes and then tiny shrimpy me. i had gotten dean's list in high school, and graduated with honors from high school, and was pretty much told i'd have my choice of schools (pretending i could afford most of them), and by the time i left undergrad, i'd been pegged as the biggest goddamn burnout the world had ever seen.

then, because i'd always wanted to be a filmmaker, they agreed to provide partial support for film school if i went to the one they chose. i went there, attempted suicide several times, nearly failed out of that but did graduate, with the lowest possible GPA. i was a burnout, i was a failure, i was described by professors as the worst student they'd ever had (other than two teachers who actually, you know, encouraged me, and so a series of Cs had a few As because of them). entered into the trademark deeply abusive relationship around the same time, took a bunch of shitty jobs that treated me awfully, definitely was taken advantage of professionally several times, can count the amount of consensual sexual experiences i've had on one hand, and almost certainly almost developed a drinking problem.

but that doesn't matter, because i better goddamn perform, and today, my inability to move out BECAUSE OF THE PANDEMIC must be my fault as opposed to the highest unemployment rate in recorded history. It is always my fault for not being the person they designed in 1995. They would literally go to my chess matches and my fencing matches and my bowling matches and my hockey games and whatever other phase they were in, and they didn't allow me to be a child, and i barely interacted with other children as a child if i wasn't getting beaten by them. but no, since they did not starve me or hit me, they couldn't possibly be abusive. they never diddled my ding-dong, though they did helpfully threaten to put me in an institution every time i'd have a panic attack in front of them till i learned to bottle it up, for their comfort!

remember in Gone Girl where the main character's parents got famous writing a series of books about a fictional version of her where the fictional her did correctly what the real one did wrong? That kind of happened with me! Except the difference is that my dad tried writing a series of medical thrillers, and I was a supporting character in that, using the name they were originally going to name me if I was a girl. My father, in spite of all his bluster, perpetually gives up at everything that doesn't immediately work for him (I inherited that trait from the spineless coward). He only wrote two novels out of the series, both barely 200 pages. He would get in contact with literary agents at publishers, he'd be a good enough salesman to get through the door, but then they'd try to make corrections and he'd lash out and say that either the book was published as is, or he would refuse the deal. So they refused the deal. Anyway, I'm in those two books. It's sort of damning that real me has very Jewish features with brown hair and hazel eyes with pale skin and book me (having re-read these monstrosities) is tan with blond hair and blue eyes. It's very telling that my father's perfect child was the least Jewish looking person possible despite both my parents being Jews (but deeply deeply proud of neither of them not looking very Jewish, as opposed to me). And even little kid me, and present me, can see how my dad wanted me to be, since Book Me was the same age as Real Me when the book was written. We even had the exact same birthday. Book Me never talked back, Book Me didn't have any of the clear developmental issues I had, learning how to walk at almost 2 years old and learning how to talk at 3 and a half. Book Me adored my dad and liked all the boring dumb shit he liked. Book Me was a perfect little angel who never had temper tantrums and never had panic attacks and had lots and lots of friends. I internalized very early on how fucking furious they were.

Book Me appears for maybe a fourth of both book's length, not doing much other than enthusiastically agreeing with everything my dad (a very thin version of him, with his IRL middle name as the first name, and the main character) says and generally being told by everyone else around him (he's also VERY masculine for a boy, unlike somewhat androgynous me, who would be confused for a girl a lot pre-puberty) how precious he is. Granted, this is a series of books where the main villains are a group of robots and my dad's character is the guest of honor at a Bruce Springsteen concert. I swear to god I'm not making any of that up.

i'd always love how they'd say things like "other parents would send their children to hospitals for much less than what you do, so you should be so thankful we tolerate you." "other parents wash their children's mouths with soap. other parents beat their children, you don't have the right to be mad." they didn't get their wind-up toy. i was never good at any of the things they wanted me to be good at, and all the things i was good at were things they didn't want me to be good at.

so of course, more recently they'd make some line like "of course you'd date someone who abused you, you never were good at picking things." even as they're only just beginning to process just how much trauma they inflicted on me, knowingly or not. and they've tried to get off the hook by telling me about how my grandmother beat my dad bloody as a kid and how my mother was neglected by her parents and sexually abused by a family member (i suspect one of my uncles). fucked up people raising fucked up people who refuse to go to therapy. As a kid, my parents had humongous social groups, but they've burned so many bridges and pissed so many people off with their entitlement and narcissism that it's now a Grey Gardens skit I don't even want to be a part of. They literally have less friends than I do now. They have no friends. Their only social interaction comes from their work. And with the pandemic eliminating in person work, only my father goes into work. And they're barely sleeping now, and they refuse to get help, and they're putting the onus of their eventual defiant deaths onto me.