#this art reminds me of the lalala song for some reason

[sleepis4theweak]

DTIYS for @diona-98 !!!

Had a lot of fun with this one :)

[kendrixtermina]

My Abuser’s been convicted

He’s not going to jail, though he did get a sentence on probation. But he’ll have to spent years working on a remore Island to pay off the fines & debts. It’s as if he were going to jail. 

If weren’t if it was just this, like, he didn’t get convicted for the actual abuse but more a peripheral consequence thereof that came back to bite him. 

My emotions are kind of in a twist over this & how this fits into the moving on with my life. 

TRIGGER WARNING

The Backstory

He’s not being convicted for abuse - indeed, the best thing I can say about him is that he never broke a law. Never left any bruises, never did outright improper touching, kept me fed & provided with material possesions adequate to our overall living standards... and treated all this like it was something he deserved a badge for, or a horrible undue burden I had imposed on him. 

He had so little of a personal connection to him, most of what I know about his life I puzzled together from his few non-horrible relatives and what my mom was told. I never knew he played chess though I took an interest in it in third grade which came to an end over a soul-crushing experience. I didn’t know where he was in the birth order ( Second Born - Which makes some things about how my brother and I were treated and even named very creepy) I only recently found out that his father cheated with & eventually remarried a woman my father’s own age. There’s another thing I can’t disclose for ethical reasons, but, he kept humiliating me in situations related to my mathematics grades till he squeezed all joy out of the subject for me and in the context of what I know it proves that he just never had the slightest shred of empathy for me. 

Well, a parent is supposed to protect their children from their own bad experiences. Not recreate them out of sadism and jealousy. Heck, Im pretty sure he only f***d my mother to breed smart children that would perform well academically, never stopping about how his family is all academics, alternating between calling me stupid & inept, a lazy waste of talent or a person who was “smart but heartless”. I’m nothin but an object to him. He has: 

Threatened that my mom would kill herself if I don’t do his bidding. 

He’s forcibly grabbed me and showed his hand into the cleavage of my dress to supposedly show off to my mother how innapropriate the dress was. 

Expected me to hug & comfort him after spats with my mother. What am I his girlfriend?   

He’s reacted to me being bullied (and once even coerced into undressing by bullies!) by blaming and mocking me. I can still hear him calling me a clown, an embarassment and a “Make-Me-Laugh-Thing” and going on on how I basically couldn’t expect anything else

He called me a “rotten pile of nazi entrails” at age 11 for being unhappy enough to consider running away

He pushed me toward hobbies he liked & then tried to push the same ones onto one of my sisters, essentially “replacing” me post puberty. 

He’s continued to threaten to leave us & replace us with adopted children because we’re supposedly such “ingrates”

. If you cry in front of him, he’d accuse you of “threatre”.

 I’ve heard my mother cry about how his eyes would never sparkle as much for anything related to his family as they did for his job, how she knew he didn’t love her, was afraid he’d leave her without money & only valued her as a baby factory. He tried to push her into adoption & terrorized her children to pressure her.  I’ve come home to constant arguments and objects being thrown around. 

When I graduate from highschool a year ahead, he say there was “nothing to celebrate” because it wasn’t all As & proceeded to humiliate me in front of my siblings. 

He would frequently tell lies about me to my family (Sometimes I have nightmares about this)

He’s been known to throw me me into walls  as a teenager

Once, while he did that, my head very narrowly missed a hard metal radiator. that night, I crept into bed with my mother at the age of 14 because I was so terrified he’d KILL me. Now I know that he never would have, but he kept going on about how everything was dangerous & filled our heads with fear & how we’d kill our siblings if they as much as bumped into hard objects and he said that exact same thing over and over again, “Careful with hitting your heads”. 

I was kept locked & isolated from other children & forbidden from leaving the house or going on school trips/ sllepovers until age 11

Blame me for everything that went wrong in the family (including one time one of  my sisters - then a toddler! -  gave herself a second degree burn. )

Destroyed my favorite toys to terrorize me, repeatedly threatened to kick me out or destroy my computer with all my writing on it

Never read anything I wrote, called it “satanic” and that it was “all lies” because I “knew nothing about people”. Repeatedly shamed me for my introversion & used it against me

called me ugly, crazy, fat, selfish, inept, stupid, a tool, immoral... anything in the book. After a while he noticed that “inept”, “selfish”, “pointlessly rebellious” and “easy to provoke”, as well as terrorizing my mom & siblings hurt the most & weaponized the shit out of it. 

Said I would never get laid & how ugly and unfuckable I am. Yes my own father. 

Once I DID get laid, of course... well, he didn’t use the word slut but he basically called me a slut.

Bisexuality is a phase, liberalism is a phase, atheism is a phase... I am a phase, because apparently, he gets to decide what the real me is that he supposedly “loves” despite repeatedly equating queer people with pedophiles atheists with nazis and sex out of wedlock with degeneracy. 

Tried to have me institutionalized/removed from the family over bogus claims. They ran all possible tests & didn’t find anything, not that I found this out until years later... years that I basically spent resigned that I was some kind of defective mutant freak incapable of bonding with other humans and basically hating myself from ages 9 to 13. (As to how I survived and what happened at age 13, I’ll just say “Art, Sarah and the Internet” and “Neon Genesis Evangelion”, respectively)

The constant condescension, dismissiveness, mockery,  and twisting of my words

Et cetera et cetera; That’s only what I’ve been unable to forget.

Think Humbert Humbert if he liked adult women & had his creepy obsession with procreation instead of youth. The exact same self-serving pretentiousness. That’s him. That’s exactly him. It’s like his throat spits acid instead of words; I used to say that if the happiert person in the room listened to him long enough, they’d end up suicidal. Or, if we go for maximum hipster, this hits the nail on the head:

But very later I have learned

To accept some friends of ridicule

My whole existance is for your amusement

And that is why I’m here with you

To  take me with your eyes

Given how tumblr’s full of  terrible stories of families where sibling bonds were poisoned & people wound up with depression, anxiety or CPTSD I got off pretty fucking lightly with my damn procrastination/self-motivation problem  (by the way a very common result of controlling or stage parents.) that I might be kinda sorta getting a grip on. Helps that I had at least one decent Parent.  

20 years I constantly felt like I was totally replaceable. The man definitely wanted his money back on me, or whatever stepford robot daughter he expected to get when he first put his filthy dick into my mom. 

Every single frustration is his life (that still ended with him being a wealthy, respected Doctor, mind you) he took out on me and the others. But he hated me the most (Though he was pretty shitty to mom and Isabel, too. The others, he simply neglected. Both sucked in its own ways.)

When I was younger, all I wanted with all the inrresponsibe childish stuff I did at times was just for him to get that he HURT me, not for his sake, but my own, to prove that I EXIST have FEELINGs as more than an object basically.

I never wanted his approval or love (I rather had the opposite problem that I felt gross doing thins he might approve of) in fact I felt uneasy around him early on and my first memories of him are of him treating me capriciously and pushing me to be his mini-me. (By contrast my earliest memory of my mom involves songs and  funtime in a garden and her explaining to me what a tulip is), but I guess I thought I had to “win” and prove my reality to him.

 I read up on narcissistic abuse on the web, I saw an university councellor who implored me to move out, but the decision was mine, when I ascertaind my theories so to speak. I realized that it was not that I was explaining badly or failing to be stoic enough, but that he was provoking & playing sadistic games with me. I was talking to someone who was going “lalala” and using everything I said or revealed as a weapon against me. I was just exhausting my energy there, and making my feeling catharsis & justified depending on his fucking aknowledgement. Thee’s no convincing someone who’s actively refusing to hear. 

When I realized that he would rearrange reality to fit is view of being alwys right, saw in full awareness how uch he bent and warped his story to suit his whims no matter what I said, that my revenge fantasies had value of catharsis without having to be implemented in real life, that they were, in fact, wasted on him, I left.

I realized that he was the only one who treated me as worthless and how much my other relatives loved me. I found out that I am perfectly typical specimen of a somewhat uncommon but not altogether outlandish personality type. 

On the occasions that we met, I did my best to ignore and avoid him, and he’d try to force me into interacting with him on the pretense of “politeness” and did the usual “Your bad for not forgiving me” shtick. 

After a while, I reached the point where I could mostly forget about him and not spiral into this blood vessel popping rage every time something reminded me of him. It was nice to not be mocked or yelled at or have new things I liked spoiled by him. I actually lost a bunch of weight just from all the frustration-induced-comfort-food-binging and family-dinner-avoiding-late-night-snacking i was no longer doing. Getting rid of him must have added years to my life.I’m sure moving out added years to my life But I didn’t want to give up on the things he already spoiled & posoned with impossible expectations, so  I was still living with the consequences of what he did to me every day while he wasn’t. 

Sometimes he came up as a logical cause - and nothing will change that not even this new developement - even though I tried & reached a point where im bored of discussing him and just want to forget he exist/ not think about him

So what happened

Well, what happened is really fucking poetic. 

You can’t come up with this shit. 

Sometimes RL writes the best stories and outdoes all fiction, or perhaps fiction authors understand the human condition well enough.

Tax fraud. He’s in trouble for tax fraud. Exept, he frauded no taxes. He pushes all his paperwork, organization and finances off to his wife and has been doing so for years. Can’t even make a bank transaction, never bothered, never lived on his own. Used to call it “traditional family” and “archieving more as an unit” but what it actually is is, he does his job (which he enjoys way more than wife or children) and mom does everything else, including part of his job - not the actual doctorring, but, he ouht to have paid a secretary for everything she’d do. He’d monopolize her for hours to talk job. We had only one parent, except when he came home, then we had zero parents. 

Finances, Parenting, Housekeeping, her own job... all this was done by mom. Lazy bastard never lift a finger, and everyone thinks he’s such a hard worker. He sure does he’d never shut up. 

So, my mom’s sister got struck with horrible disease, going from a hard working single mother to complete invalid in a matter of months. Terrible injustice, because she was a really good person. So, at the same time, the financial crisis hits spain - no jobs or future for her daughters. no help from their father cause he was a serial deadbeat. So, what my mom did was, reevacuate them all to Germany. They have their own place now, one of my cousins is now a nurse & earning her own cash for the family, but, at first, his meant having four extra people living in our house one of which was running up huge medical bills, two girls, my aunt and my grandma, all eating, showering, needing everyday commodities... 

My mom says in hindsight she should have taken a loan but what she ended up doing, perhaps carelessly, was give false numbers on her tax returns. To feed & care for her sick sister and unemployed family members/ now functionally parentless nieces, get the good education and stuff. 

She blames herself a lot more than I blame her; It was kind of a “chaotic good” act IMHO, if there’s a price there’s a price I see they can’t have everybody not paying taxes, but, she did it to FEED HER FAMILY, like, people are more important than money. I believe she was justified there (or I guess that’s my chaotic neutral showing). 

But - She was beating herself up over this & possibly risking the house loans & getting her husband into trouble - it was his money after all, police came & pretty much raided their house for the money, it’s a wealthy Doctor so they think he pocketed the cash for simple ol’ greed and blew it on gold chains or cocaine or something. Nope. He had no clue. (does he ever? He doesn’t know basic shit about any of us.) 

That alone didn’t do it - Instead, I suspect he rather enjoyed his favorite game of playing martyr and my mom, having a conscience, was gonna take full responsibility and accept jail. 

But here’s the kicker: They didn’t buy it. No one would believe that he wasn’t in on it, that he didn’t know what he was doing with his own money. They thought he was blaming his wife to save himself. That he pushed everything onto his wife to the point that he has no clue about his own finances seemed so silly they didn’t buy it. Like many times when I complained about him, his level of jerkass was believed to be too ridiculous to be true - It seemed more likely to them that my mom was simply taking one for the team. Personable, humbly pudgy lady, hardhearted slimey smartass who get lawsuits for being callous to patients before? Who’d you suspect of tax fraud? All the times I heard “Well he’s a doctor and you’re just a crazy little girl” turned upon their head. 

Irony is he’d never do it. And I say that as someone who hates his guts. Same reason he’ll brag about how women dig him and the children he makes but would never actually cheat - He’s too in love with the idea of his own rightheousness. He’s too proud. It’s what his ego is built on. In contrast to his wife, he’s all about them rules wether they’re moral or not. 

And, this is my suspicion because I didn’t wanna pry here, but, I guess he acted like not dumping her over this meant she’d sold him her soul, the usual “ingrate” shtick he pulls whenever he’s displeased- He must have said something outrageous and kellyanne conway levels of reality-bending - 

And mom flipped. At least, she says things happened to make her spill things she’d held back long. I’m not sure if she said this or if he arrived at this on its own, but, he seemed to arrive at the conclusion that this would not have happened if he hadn’t pushed everything onto his wife & actually been there for her. 

As my mom puts it, lots of stuff came together - an ex-co worker conspiring to run out of an old job, me not talking to him, the tax problem... and he couldn’t find a rationalization other than “You’re an animal and there’s a point to what everyone is saying”, and perhaps for the first time, he saw reality. She says it got through to him what he did not me, and by extension what he did wrong with everyone else.  Apparently, things have been rather different since that day.

He’s actually staying out of my way. I don’t have to worry about him inviting himself to my wedding. He’ll be working at the new job he took to collect the money he owes the ministry of finance, but isn’t insisting that my family comes along. So often, he dragged us across the country for his career & took us all away from our friends, but it seems that this time, my sisters get to keep their friends & mom gets to get the new job where she holds a leading position & is well respected. She even said he’d understand if he’s missed that particular train for good. 

Also when little Jana came to visit him, he seemed to actually spend time with her & organize a great & eventful holliday for her. 

  At least, that’s what my mom says. I’m so use to his fake promises of change, his false remorse, and his flashy gestures of ingratiating behavior - How would anyone ever know the difference for sure?

Especially the vacation for the child, he’d dne things like that before (regardless of wether the children actually enjoyed what he’d planned for them), flashy gestures to prove his “goodness”. flimsy words that “everything will be different”. 

I just don’t want to engage with it personally. 

But you know what makes me believe something changed? Because the person telling me this was my mom, speaking in her own voice - It’s not the dictated Voice Of God(TM), his majesty demanding that everyone accept his version of reality or accept the label of a selfish terrible person. 

It’s her own perspective that I’d sometimes hear when she was angry, a perspective that’s more optimistic than mine & wants to see the good in people; She doesn’t agree with me on everything, she still thinks his deeds were the product of ineptitude rather than malice, entitlement and objectification, but, it’s not like I need her to agree with me. 

The difference is still startling. That wasn’t his Paradigm or what I had experienced so far at all, looking at me leaving as a selfih capriciousthing I did to hurt them or he helping my fuckup self out and i better be grateful. 

She told me instead to convey her utmost thanks to the therapist lady and that moving out was one of the best things that ever happened (!!!), that this was super strong, mature & unexpected of me(aparently she and grandma had written me off as the family spinster and liable to set myself on fire besides XD ...Fair enough, actually, there were quite some misadventures ^^°) That she thought I even looked different since then when my facial muscles weren’t all contorted in anger & more of a glow  beingthere (which she attributed largely to my fiancé so far - and sure, he helped. I cannot stress the awesome enough.)

There was a total aknowledgement that I didn’t owe him shit and that the shit of the past justifies my not talking to him, no pressure, no judgement, no hope or expectation that we would ever get along, just - there were more gushy positive things that I can remember right now. I don’t wanna toot my own horn, it’s just what happened. 

And I’m not sure what to do about/with it. 

What now

It’s a strange feeling and I’m still processing it. I’m only now writing  post though I’ve known about it for a few days. I’ve just been doing things, talking to peeps etc....

In true 5 fashion I couldn’t interact with my BF after that and took a long nighttime walk for cooling/processing (I talked to him right after that tho)

It might seem callous - but, I’m unable to feel anything other than callousness towards this person, because else I could not have survived his constant guilt tripping. The dude just activates my eight, if you pardon the typology speak. 

All I feel is “Serves you right.” Serves you right for being two-faced, bit ya in the ass didn’t it?

Because, he spent all this time convincing the world he was this perfect person, and now they all believed him, and there’s no way Mr. Perfect don’t do his own taxes. 

I understand that it is objectively wrong for someone to be convicted of something he didn’t do. Maybe this is a childish idea of vindictiveness or justice, but, at its heart, that’s not what it’s about. It’s just that in a way it’s a validation of my reality and that I wasn’t making him up, things I kept saying... “If you don’t wanna leave him, then let him do his own laundry for a few weeks” 

It’s that it was for years like everyone thought he was perfect and I was the only one who could see his filthy side and now it’s out in the open. I hit him back. I made him understand. I got him to ignore me back/ leave me in peace. I helped my family be treated better - as a child, I had a hard time accepting that I couldn’t do that, that it wasn’t my place and that the last thing my mom needs is someone else asking her to pick sides or telling her what to do. It was a hard, humbling maturation process with ongoing slipups there to, like, detach, and leave it t me siblings & mom what was their business & none of mine and respect their choices. 

I stopped caring about the other things, too, at least, when I left. I didn’t want or expect him to ever aknowledge my world, my perception or feelings. It’s kind of some of the things I wanted once but didn’t want to want anymore and even if I did, it’s all burned & charred and I’ll never be able to show that person the trust necessary for an intimate relation, not after all the lies, fake apologies that couldn’t be bought without accepting that he was right bout everything after all, and all the emotional expressions so far being used as tools to hurt & control me. I still have nothing in common with him nor any reason.

After the conversation, I felt... purged, the awknowledgement that I somehow do have power, but at the other hand, this doesn’t really change anything for me. 

If he changes - great for him. Great for the family members still attached to him. But I don’t care about HIM, I have to care about me because he never did and nothing changed for me. 

The scary shadow that’s embedded itself in my consciousness so much I still hear it after 2 years of avoiding the man (half of which has been spent happily engaged) may no longer have any sort of physical counterpart in reality. 

So what does that mean for me? theres not a real enemy to push against. or there may or may not be it shouldn’t depend on tht. its not like i believe or need to believe in automatic karma

All in all, I have a feeling like World War II just ended and the Americans just arrived. On the one hand the bad guy were punished... not perfectly, but enough, hard enough to make them look pitiful, I’ve survived, but everything is still in ruins and irretriavably decimated. 

I never want to say never because I aknowledge that it is always possible for me to learn - I thought it was unlikely I’d ever get married and even less to a man, but I said it might be possible, and now ive come across this situation and this person where it makes perfect sense and is totally worth it. If I had said “cia, doesn’t fit my profile” the moment he suggested it, I would have missed this. 

Then again, I also hold that conflating  0% sure and 99% sure is one of the great errors of humanity - there is such a thing like reasonable doubt but that does not mean knowing nothing. Knowing almost everything is not knowing nothing. its just a fact of how our universe works sometimes - what is the position & impulse of an electron at any given moment? Can’t say, it’s uncertain to a measurable degree. 

We can’t disprove that there isn’t a big pink sucker on the backside of pluto but we have no reason to suppose it either.

And at that level of certainty,have to say  I would be unable to forgive the man or even feel anything other than hatred toward him if he wore the crown of thorns

I can’t ever trust him & emotionally reveal myself to him, too often has he twisted my words. It’s not about being obsessed with him either - there’s 7 billion peeps on this planet he’s welcome to make friends with im just not one of them. I’m generally not friends with people just for the heck of it. 

I mean, I get it. Mom says she may have been too hesitant to let me go, the counselling lady said something in that direction, I might be biased as her daughter, but, actually, I think she was right in her estimate/ justified in that reluctance, like, I get it, I’m a vaguely shizoid hyperdweeb and peopling is hard for me. Even if this high grade quality snowflake relationship there’s work - as hthere always seems to be, realistically - and don’t have this natural sense for what people expect. 

But though I reserve the right to declare this some premature epiphyny just in case and for personal effort, I’m... and a spent a while debating & deliberately decising the word choice here.... beginning to dare think that I might be able to like, handle that & make peace with it like I’ve made peace with my inner unapologetic  snowflakey emo child back in my teens.