#what would venting even accomplish? what would revealing myself prove? whats the point

[liinos]

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[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER PRE-GAME 9/30/2020: 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE/CONFESSIONAL (2019)

Spoiler alert. Or whatever. It’s not going to matter, you don’t care.

So, I've been away for a minute. Just about any reason to be away from Tumblr is probably a good reason, but I have an especially good one. I'm finally working on a "real" writing project, which demands, and deserves, all of my attention. My social media abstinence isn't just a matter of time management, though. Once I had a long term obligation on my plate, I became very aware of how the short term satisfaction I get from posting mindless rants was eating away at the fuel I have available for sustained efforts. When I wind myself up with a 500-1000 word blog post, it generates a lot of electricity, but I blow it all as soon as I experience the catharsis of posting it, and I'm further pacified by ego-stroking likes and reblogs. Not to sound like a sanctimonious luddite--I mean, I'm still here, after all!--but it turns out that the staying focused on the long haul has been surprisingly revivifying. In fact, I haven't been talking about my big fancy project for the same reason; I don't want to lose any of the juice I've been storing up by wasting it on the shallow pleasure of describing it. Also such things should probably be somewhat confidential until they're approaching the publishing stage, but I digress! There is an actual reason I'm saying all this, that has more to do with this blog.

(Don’t get all excited, I’m not doing EVIL ED right now, I just need a relatable image.)

As I got deeper into my experience of "real" film writing, I started to reflect on the meaning of my personal writing. Like, the point of it. I tend to write in a sweaty, compulsive, sadomasochistic haze, in which I'm sometimes hyperbolically generous, and sometimes--perhaps more often, unfortunately--as nasty as humanly possible. Sometimes the movies deserve it, when they're lazy, pretentious, or otherwise demonstrate an open contempt for the audience aka ME. Often, though, I'm just creating an opportunity to vent my generalized rage and frustration. That can be very entertaining for myself and (hopefully) my teensy-but-devoted readership, but lately I've asked myself whether there isn't some negative tradeoff for all this amusement. In this phase of my life, it's reasonable to assume I'll make more and more friends and acquaintances who create things I don't always care for, but I don't necessarily think they deserve to be abused for it. As much as I have a right to say whatever I want, technically, I'd be embarrassed if I were caught just jacking myself off by making fun of their work in public. And more to the point, I don't necessarily want to contribute to the growing atmosphere in which people feel more afraid to try and fail, because the public so commonly misidentifies sarcasm and mean-spiritedness as intelligence and superiority, and that form of petty darkness spreads across the internet a lot faster than a movie can reach a wider audience. After all, I'm in the process of potentially turning myself into one of those well-meaning failures right now. I could stand to be a little more deliberate about how I speak, and about what, in general.

My father is an art critic, and once in an extra petulant moment, teenage-me asked him in an accusative tone what he thought the point of his profession was. He replied calmly that he wouldn't publish any comment that he didn't think the artist could make use of somehow. I don't know if he always stuck to that policy, but the thought sure stuck with me.

So anyway, over the last few months I've been giving myself a bit of an attitude adjustment, through a combination of personal reflection, and hard work on something meaningful/not for the internet. I've been feeling all proud of myself and shit, but today reminded me that any path to enlightenment is always marked by setbacks, doubt, and temptation. For today, in complete innocence (or at least a melange of innocence and ignorance, as I very much invite this type of problem), I managed to watch TWO (2) movies about an academic film-cum-psychology project, focused on a gang of college buddies who inevitably reveal what bad people they are under the unique conditions of the project, and then the project turns out to be run NOT by its presumed-dead originator, but by the originator's even-crazier lover. It's amazing how particular something can be, and still be utterly obvious and cliche. In my defense, I really tried to turn the second movie off, because it was...just instantly terrible, but the seed of suspicion had taken root--is this randomly selected movie ACTUALLY EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE PREVIOUS MOVIE?--and I just had to find out if this could be true. I suffered, deliberately, for another hour and a half, to confirm my awful hunch. I don't know how I would have felt if I had turned out to be wrong (better? worse?), but I don't have to worry about that now. Now I just have to worry about my overpowering impulse to be as ugly as possible about what I have personally subjected myself to.

(The completely deceptive poster for our not at all witchy or eerie opening feature.) 

In need of a passable time-waster this afternoon, I put on 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE. Released in March of 2019, Caitlin Koller's claustrophobic black comedy feels oddly like a product of 2020. A group of estranged, middle-aged college pals of the BIG CHILL ilk--which one of the characters calls out, out loud, just so ya know--come together for a fallen comrade's funeral, only to find themselves trapped in his widow's increasingly creepy cabin in the woods. Said comrade was driven to suicide by the failure of a psychological experiment he conducted that plunged its subject into madness, and if you don't realize right away that the obnoxious and unstable cast are the new subjects of their not-quite-dead friend's renewed project, then you're firing a lot slower than 24 frames per second. The dialog is often decent, aiding a handful of funny, natural performances...but it's hard to forget that you're just waiting for the conspicuously crazy widow to reveal that the "unexplained events" in and around the cabin are part of a controlled attempt to get the guests to devolve into their worst selves, which isn't such a difficult task considering the undesirable state they all arrive in.

It just made me ask myself, what was the point of this? Why do people make movies that are entirely predicated on the shock of the twist, knowing that if the twist isn't so shocking--or is baldly obvious from the start--then the whole experience just falls apart? Why not hedge your bets with a little more depth, or purpose, or style, or really anything more reliable than a smug attempt to prove that your script is smarter than your audience? Even if you do manage to pull off this dubious accomplishment, it reduces your movie to something like the experience of having somebody jump out of a closet and scream in your ear to "get" you. I've always felt concerned that if somebody ever tries to "get" me like that, I might just automatically punch them in the face. But anyway, whatever shred of good will this movie could have accrued with its plucky performances is blown away by the final insult, when the cops arrive to clean up the inevitable bloody mess. The responding officers are hilariously unimpressed and unsurprised by the byzantine scheme that has resulted in a shocking act of violence, because the cabin's "guest book", which our heroes all filled out, was actually the signatory page of a complicated waiver form granting full permission to the hosts to, like, do whatever the hell they want to everybody. Presumably this shit just goes on all the time, leading the local law to shrug off anything that happens to or because of the dumbassed lab rats who frequent the cabin? I dunno. I mean, what can I say? ACAB, I guess!

At the time, I managed to resist the urge to take to the internet and decry the crimes of this lame-o party joke. I really don't like the sensation that a movie is just trying to trick me into thinking something that isn't true. But, this isn't, like, an affront to cinema. People make annoying, below average movies all the time, and maybe you kinda have to, if you eventually want to make better movies. I imagine myself in the shoes of the people who actually put some elbow grease into this production, having to wade through the rantings of internet ghouls like myself while they're trying to see how their efforts are paying off. Making a movie is probably a lot harder than I think it is.

But that's part of the point I'm heading toward. I'm always amazed by people's willingness to pour huge amounts of energy and capital into something to which there is ultimately very little point. I mean, I have bad, unoriginal, boring ideas every single day of my life. But I almost never DO any of them. I have a hard enough time convincing myself to just get out of bed in the morning, let alone devote blood, sweat, and money to deliver unto the world material evidence of my personal mediocrity. I can't imagine thinking it would be worth it, for myself or the unfortunate people who are subjected to my project, to actually execute on my bad ideas. I'm being judgmental, but honestly, I don't even know if my attitude makes me better or worse than someone who accomplishes the task of completing and selling a movie that's mainly a waste of time. Movies are so complicated, and realizing them requires the consensus of so many people, that it's sort of incredible that there are people capable of making one that doesn't have a powerfully compelling motivation behind it. People who are able to do such a thing obviously have something that I don't, and it isn't just "consideration for the audience."

So, I could probably stand to be more forgiving--or just, less eager to absolutely flay someone alive on my dumb little blog because they so opened themselves up to my arsenal of elaborate insults. But like...not all the time. Sometimes, a movie really fucking asks for it, and in revealing itself to me, it has effectively signed a waiver giving me patent freedom to do whatever I want to it. CONFESSIONAL is the latest movie to give me such a gift. After the final credit rolled in 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE, I looked for a little palate cleanser. As little as I like movies that put their single egg in the motheaten basket of a "shocking twist", I also have a problem with what I identify as canned theater. Not that I think all movies have to be lavish productions, but I think they should try to do something that is natively cinematic. It's very rare that I'm impressed by anything that is literally all talk. So, I went in search of some more familiar form of trash to help me recallibrate, and trash is definitely what I got.

(Me crying over my own bad decisions.)

To be fair, I kind of should have known that I was in for a challenging experience. The 2019 found footage thriller CONFESSIONAL is more or less based on the "confessional" part of sleazy reality TV shows, isolating each cast member in a soundproof stall so they can spill the rotten contents of their guts. Unfortunately, I spotted a review suggesting that the movie succeeded, against all odds, at remaining visually dynamic despite the unchanging scenery, and I was intrigued. The reviewer was correct, impressively; the monotony of the coffin-like environment with its dark foam walls was the least of my concerns. Other problems superseded that threat, immediately. The plot concerns a group of college pals who come together to remember a recently deceased friend--a filmmaker who expired mysteriously while completing a psychology-tinged project in which she recorded all of her friends' most shameful personal secrets. Now, somebody else has taken over the project...someone who "has never been identified", according to an early title card in this movie-within-a-movie (EVEN THOUGH THIS PERSON WILL BE EXPLICITLY IDENTIFIED AT THE END OF THE MOVIE SO LIKE WHY), but who seems likely to be the decedent's ex-lover...who continues to expose their subjects' most shameful secrets on film. I mean, what the fuck? Did I somehow manage to pick a second movie with almost the exact same plot??? I couldn't believe it. I didn't know if I could take it. My prospects only got worse when the cast showed up and started talking. I tried to turn the movie off. I backed out and walked away from it, twice. But I couldn't leave it alone. I had to know if it was really the same movie.

CONFESSIONAL concerns characters who are contemporaneously in college, which actually goes a long way to making everything worse. Each of these walking cliches is connected in some way to Amelia, a film student whose mysterious death has created a campus scandal, leaving shattered hearts and lives in its wake. The living have each received a blackmail-flavored invitation to speak about the deceased in a tiny "confessional booth" somewhere on campus, where, predictably, they find themselves locked in until they confess whatever they know about Amelia, and their classmates. I don't know why practically every single movie about young people has to be so miserable, but this is one of those. I assume that it has something to do with the fact that youth is simultaneously so desired and so ignored. People in their teens and early 20s are so sexually coveted, yet so easily dismissed as individuals, that we wind up with all this media that panders to them relentlessly (or at least, panders to the legions of ticket-buying perverts who enjoy watching them prance around), without almost any consideration of how they actually think and act, and look. Movies like FAT GIRL and  WELCOME TO THE DOLL HOUSE may be accused of their own form of pandering, a venal form of voyeuristic schadenfreude, but at least they reflect something of the awkwardness, isolation, and incompleteness of adolescence; something more than the dissociated, pornographic fantasies of adults who have long since forgotten what it was like to be powerless and ignored, or desired by people who don't even like you.

Not that CONFESSIONAL is supposed to be a work of grim realism, but it is most definitely rooted in a fantasy about college life that makes its contrived, message-y plot a lot harder to take. With almost the sole exception of "the nerdy one", every single character looks like a Bratz doll, oozing an exaggerated indecency that belies the movie's pretentious insistence on addressing the sex & gender Issues of the Day. What you get is a really good example of what happens when millennial characters are modeled, not on any actual millennials, but on other forms of marketing that are aimed at millennials, which are themselves just based on other preexisting youth-targeted commercials, et al ad nauseam. Even setting aside the deliriously slutty wardrobe choices, makeup appears to have been laid on with a trowel, coating each actor in a thick creamy layer of spackle that only makes any scars, pits, or other evidence of individuality look utterly bizarre. Accordingly, everybody preens, pouts, and generally behaves as if they're about to take off their clothes, which might be a huge relief given the profusion of chafing, cheapo mesh and straps they're laboring under.

So, ok, not every movie can have a great costume department, but the dialog here is a perfect match for the disastrous aesthetic decisions. Actually, this is the real reason I almost walked out on CONFESSIONAL. If I may ramble briefly, without substantiating any of my broad-ranging claims: Sometime in the late 90s/early 00s, horror cinema seemed to suffer a degenerative slide away from genuine thrills and chills, and into a version of the genre that is best characterized as the Slutty Halloween Costume approach. Any sense of existential dread, revulsion, or bodily vulnerability was widely replaced by a cutesy, Hot Topic-y preference for fast fashion and sex appeal, in which bloodshed more facilitated an informal wet teeshirt contest than any real fear induction. Horror's new mall goth look came with an equally shallow, boring verbal affectation: a sullen, sleazy, tooth-sucking sarcasm, that ushered in a new era in which, instead of making fun of the scummy coked-out dialog in porno movies, we now expect everybody to just talk like that, because it's hot. There's probably a line to be drawn between this unfortunate development, and the boneheaded real-world trend of identifying "sarcasm" as an important personal selling point on dating sites, but I won't try to prove that here. For now, I will just say that as soon as I heard the CONFESSIONAL characters start to speak, with their sneering, insinuating tones, with the vocal fry, with the head wagging, the jutting jaws, the smoldering gazes, the juvenile dragging-out of horny grownup words like de-bauch-er-y...I almost lost my nerve. Listening to these little creeps hissing and spitting for 84 minutes is a lot like being hit on by some barfly who continues to bludgeon you with his hot breath and corny lines without ever noticing that you've thrown up into your pint.

Uh, anyway. So what actually happens in the movie. Why would anyone ever allow someone to record video of them revealing the ugliest, most embarrassing parts of themselves? Especially a kid, for whom popularity and reputation are often a matter of life or death--literally and specifically, in the case of this story. The flimsy reason is that the late filmmaker, Amelia, was the most awesomest girl ever. Everybody loved her, because she was so sweet, and so smart, and so cool, and so nice, and so deep, and so original, and so talented, and so sexy, and just like, the bestest most perfectest girl in the whole wide world. N.B. "The greatest of all time" is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a really bad quality that makes for really shitty, boring characters. For better or worse, Amelia is rarely on screen (and when she is, she's no Laura Palmer, frankly), so it's up to the viewer to just sort of imagine a type of person who could make you act against your best interests on account of you just like them so much. After all, so many of the characters were obsessed with her in some way, that it's like they're here to help you clap your hands and believe in this seductive, compelling part of the movie, that just isn't actually there on the screen. The anonymous antihero behind the confessional booth scheme slowly extracts from each character the selfish, destructive behavior that in some way contributed to the tragic loss of the most amazing person of all time--and part of the result is, if not a very interesting excuse for Amelia's death, then a story so wacky that I really wish they had centered the movie on it, instead of on the tawdry soap opera we're locked into. Even if that imaginary movie had been really bad, and it probably would have been, at it would at least have been entertaining.

Part of what leads up to the death of Amelia is the existence of a secret school fight club, led by a stereotypically sleazy gender studies major, named Major, who is out to prove men's inherent superiority. The club is called CFB, or Cock Fights Back, which is somehow a garbled pun relating to cock fights, and Trump's famous line of "locker room talk": "grab'em by the pussy" > "pussy grabs back" > "cock fights back". CFB is different from your ordinary fight club in that the fights are always between girls and boys, and the boys are always blindfolded, in order to prove that a fully-abled female is no match for even a handicapped male. To complicate things, a new designer amphetamine is gaining popularity on campus, called "odds-on", meaning that it makes you the odds-on favorite in your CFB fight. As awkward as that is, it also seems that men are never the guaranteed winners of these fights, which makes you wonder why Major insists on continuing to host them. As much as I would have preferred to watch a stupid movie about this stupid idea, I'm stuck instead with a movie in which Major is such an aggressive MRA because he's secretly gay, and he thinks that hating women is a great way to hide that...as if that isn't what we all openly suspect about aggro MRAs. Secret gayness is a big part of this movie, involving multiple characters, although it amounts to very little other than the perpetuation of some stale, harmful cliches about how unfulfilled homosexual urges lead to suicide, sexual abuse, and murder. CONFESSIONAL is just as reliant on this grim vision of gay life, as it is on its weirdly obtuse discussion of drug addiction, for the suffocating sense of self-importance that it uses to try to elevate itself above its porn-y trappings. None of the movie's hot button issues are given any real thought, but are only dragged through the mud to create the illusion that there's a point to all this, thus relieving the film of any sense of innocence that could have made its condescending sleaziness forgivable.

Admittedly, I can't really remember all the details of the film's tortured intrigue anymore, even though I basically just saw it. A lot of its meandering revelations just left me thinking, "Why did I need to know that? Why should I care?" I do know that about half way through this ordeal, I became really anxious about whether it would turn out that CONFESSIONAL did NOT have exactly the same plot as 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE after all, and I put myself through all this for nothing. But no, I was right to begin with. The wonderful Amelia's ethically dubious film project has been picked up by the unhinged lesbian character who loved her so much she wanted to become her, and killing Amelia and usurping her confessional project was apparently the best way of doing that. I guess exposing all the dark, violent secrets of all these tangentially involved characters was just an added bonus, or whatever. Ultimately, this ugly, ignorant PSA about something-or-other only deals itself further damage by relying so heavily on the potential of its clumsy twist to blow your mind, which it does not at all.

So that was it, that's how I burned a whole afternoon allowing my mind to implode-not-explode under the ponderous force of TWO (2) movies about exactly the same exhausted cliche that is still being peddled by certain pretentious assholes as fresh and exciting, and beyond the capacity of the audience to anticipate. There's probably a whole slew of other movies that employ this overly familiar "surprise", but I don't have it in me to dig them out of my long-suffering brain. Feel free to contribute in the comments. For now, I must prepare myself for the ordeal of Blogtober, during which I will *hopefully* choose my screening selections and words more thoughtfully than I have in previous years, when this blog was motivated by just as much abject misanthropy as these movies, which do nothing but willfully insult the audience's intelligence. Maybe today's detour into degradation will help me go forth toward more additive experiences, having purged several lungfuls of meaningless venom from my system, and this season will bring with it more interesting, provocative posts than the last. Or maybe not! In any case, I promise to keep trying my hardest to make it funny.

PS I actually love both FAT GIRL and WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. I’m “just saying”. 

[localsadghoul]

vent post

This is full of abuse and drug triggers. I’ve tagged them all, but I really want to put that warning up first just in case. This is a really long, bleak, and overly complicated post. If you stick with me, thanks. If not, I understand. I just need to put this out on paper. I’ve been gaslit about my abuse my entire life, and if I don’t start putting it in words, eventually my abusers’ will win and these terrible memories will be erased and I will never feel valid in my suffering because of it. That’s somehow worse than the suffering itself.

I had a panic attack at school today. Nevermind this is my first semester back after five years, nevermind this brand new city i’m still adjusting to, nevermind my 50+ hour weeks at my new job; the point is I set expectations for myself that I wasn’t meeting, and it was killing me, and I had to leave before a mandatory attendance class. Often, when people post about their mental illnesses, specifically anxiety and depression, someone will comment on their thread “call your mother!” Call your mother. One of those go-to, “drink water” “exercise” “feel the sunshine” type pieces of advice to self-medicate. I know these are legitimate to some and that’s awesome. But to people like me, it’s bullshit.

And not because I’m some expert or elitist when it comes with medicating mental illnesses. I’m self-diagnosed, uninsured, and self-medicating. But, I do know my brain is not well, serotonin is missing, and my chemical balances would probably resemble the layout to a winning rollercoaster attraction if you mapped it out. Anyway, the reason is why it’s bullshit is because I can’t call my mother. Not because she’s dead, not because she doesn’t love me, but because I have to choose to not have a relationship with my mother.

There’s an entire history of emotional, mental, and on rare occasions physical abuse I could go into to describe what my mom, and her branch of family, has put me through. For a long time, I excused it. I really did. She was also not mentally well, dozens of doctors and series of medications had proved that to me. She’d spend days in her bedroom with all the lights off some weeks, others her abuse would intensify and it somehow always fell on me (or at least that’s how it felt). I was the youngest, which means as her mental illness progressed, I was the one receiving the worst of it.

A short background to my family; I have no full blooded brothers or sisters. I was raised in a nice, new house with five brothers and sisters from a few different combinations of parents. Despite us all coming from broken households, we had the recipe for a happy childhood. We were “housepoor”, and I later in life learned a lot of christmases happened thanks to various loan companies, but we were still happy. We all benefited from appearing middle class, white privilege, and regardless of blood, we had two parents. Kind of. My step dad is one of the greatest people on the planet. I call him Jerry and he’s just as much my dad as my biological dad is. So, further on, I won’t refer to him as my step dad, only as Jerry, because that’s who he is.

So, anyway, times passes, my siblings get older and start moving in and out of the house, my mom’s mental illnesses are winning as a result of her changing her medications, or doctors when hers wouldn’t prescribe the drugs she really wanted, or when she’d start a job and decide she didn’t like it and had a mental breakdown that would put her out of work or on disability or whatever; this caused inevitable unemployment and Jerry’s salary as a GM of a restaurant to support all six kids, my mother’s lifestyle, my siblings’ various unplanned babies, stints in rehab, evictions, divorces, incarcerations, etc. We were losing the house. Our house. I was the only kid left, and the only home my memory could remember was disappearing before my eyes. My aunt’s boyfriend was a realtor and by the time I was 13, my house was on the market and we were looking for two or three bedroom houses for rent for my mom, Jerry, and me.

At 13, I had been removed from all gifted programs as a result of my ADHD (which, to a 13 year old with no understanding of mental illnesses translated into me being too stupid to continue these programs I had loved and held pride in since I was 7, my only real accomplishment in my life at this point), I recently had come back to a trip from my home state, where my late father got arrested for a DUI, forcing my step mom to make the seven hour drive to get her kids’ (but because I was not biologically hers she felt no need to include me; i had to be transported to the Columbus airport to fly on a plane for the first time alone back home to Tennessee), and I was also losing my home; something I didn’t even really understand at the time was a monumental thing. 

At this point our house had been on the market for months, which caused a lot of conflict between Jerry and my mom and my aunt and her boyfriend, all of which put my grandparents, the only members of our family with any “money” (mostly just credit card debt) in a weird position. (Again, later in life I learned that a lot of my mother’s mental illnesses and abuse was passed down from her parents, my grandmother who is also addicted to all sorts of fun pills and my grandfather, who I never really learned much about but I think it has been alluded that he was a serial cheater and abusive towards my grandmother. Just a big cycle of poverty and abuse that stemmed from rural Ohio). My grandparents were at the house, everyone was really stressed out and tensions were high, and I was mad. I can’t remember why. At the time, and consistently my entire life into adulthood, I couldn’t keep a clean room. Ever. It’s a pretty common symptom of attention deficit disorders, but it infuriated my mother who was a very appearance based person. While we had store brand everything, she had a beautiful wardrobe, hundreds of dollars worth of makeup, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d assume she was the wife of a wealthy man and her only job in life was to look approachably beautiful. So, if I had to guess why I was mad at them and they were mad at me, it’s probably because while we were trying to stage the house in order to sell it, my room was probably a mess and they wouldn’t let me leave the house until it looked as nice as we pretended our family was. 

Jerry wasn’t home at the time. I think my sister, Devin, was, because she recalled some of this. Anyway, we got into a fight, I was a mad 13 year old who was dealing with hormones, feeling stupid, with the thought process that my beloved father was a deadbeat alcoholic, etc rinse repeat, right? I stormed upstairs to my room, but God, did I know better than to slam my door. I closed it behind me (also knowing better than to lock it behind me), but I was mad, and I felt it in my fingertips, and I wanted to slam that door but it was already closed and impulsive thoughts took over and I did the only thing my brain wanted me to do; which was simply to grunt and push my door with enough force to make a small thud sound. Imagine throwing a shoe at a closed door; enough to rattle it against the frame, but not enough to cause any actual damage to the structure itself. I was mad and my body wouldn’t hold it. I wanted to respect my mom and grandparents enough to not let the anger slip from my body but it did and it came out as a 120 pound teenager pushing her hands against a door.

But, a part of me knew better. Before the sounds of their feet racing up the stairs to my room even began, I curled into a defensive position on the floor. I knew what was going to happen. I challenged their egos, in whatever small way I did, I challenged them and they were going to win. A family of narcissists, and I dared demonstrate any amount of teenage angst. Within a matter of seconds, my bedroom door flung open, and before their swinging hands and legs (all three of them, my grandfather, grandmother, and mother) made contact with my body, I was already yelping and screaming for them to stop.

I don’t remember if the occurrence lasted five seconds or five minutes. I don’t remember if any of it left bruises. I don’t remember what was yelled at me, I think a combination of “don’t you ever disrespect us again” or something along those lines. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. Probably apologies, but whatever happened, it was enough for me to still love, adore, and look up to these people, my family, for almost another decade. 

Of course it didn’t stop there, and the older I got and the wider sense I had revealed a lot of my mother and her parents’ manipulation, drug addictions (including pill trading with my oldest sister and second oldest brother, who were both addicts as well). My mother threatened me with suicide, her self inflictions were rubbed into my face because it was “my fault”. Her relationship with Jerry declined and by the time I was seventeen, they were separated, and I was signing a lease on an apartment with no experience or knowledge of how to support myself.

Still, I tried. My mom got worse. She started dating men she met on the internet, including an ex-boyfriend of my oldest sister. She moved back to Ohio for a bit, back in with my grandparents. Social media was alive and well in my family, so anytime I would show signs of resentment towards my mom, I would get an instant message from my grandmother calling me a selfish, ungrateful brat, or sometimes she’d approach it with more kindness than that, more of a “it would really help your mom if you would just call her and tell her you love her.” My grandmother is not a cruel woman. Yeah, it occasionally reared its head out, but she saw herself as a provider, and wanted to mother us when our own mom couldn’t do it. Or that’s what I told myself at the time. She also threatened to shoot Jerry with a shotgun she claimed she was going to buy just for the occasion, but still I had to believe my grandmother at least was good. (She did profusely apologize for her threats, which doesn’t excuse it).

 God, if you looked at my family, you would never guess any of this. We look like a normal, middle class, diverse family. (Just a random observation, not really important to any of this.)

Between the ages of 17-21, it was a cycle of trying to love my mother, trying to grow our relationship, her disappointing me, me trying to care for myself and remove her from my life, and my grandparents forcing me back in. They’d occasionally send me $20 here and there for groceries, so out of survival I’d almost always did what they’d tell me.

It wasn’t until my dad died and my mother selfishly made it about her that I finally, FINALLY, drew the line. (Laughing at myself that it was protecting my dead dad, not caring for myself, that finally cut the cord.) In a rage, I finally typed out the longest, most brutal message I could really laying out all the damage she had done to me, including pleads to never contact me again, and hit send. Of course, what did we learn when I got my ass beat at thirteen for pushing a closed door? You never challenge narcissists. This is when the gaslighting really comes into play. She claimed all of the abuse never happened, my grandmother and grandfather start messaging me with “how dare you”s etc. Except, I wasn’t a dependent teenager anymore, I was a twenty two year old woman with a job, a purpose, and my own doors to slam and my own house to scream and yell in. The only thing I had to do to silence them was block all of them. And I did.

And it’s been nearly two years. Sure, they try and contact me occasionally, still gaslighting me that I was never actually abused, but also with apologies for having to experience /some/ level of unpleasantry because of the way they handled their mental illnesses. My life since then has been all about self-preservation in the biggest way. Of course, I am not free of their tendancies or behaviors, but I am conscious of them and I have a level of self control and education to stop myself before it causes the amount of pain they caused me and my siblings (I’m not the only one who faced the abuse, I’m just the only one willing to admit it because I don’t get my drugs from my mom or I choose to remain willfully ignorant with evil my family is capable of). But I’m struggling. I’m struggling through gen eds at a community college. I’m struggling to be a good partner, a good fried, a good ally. I’m struggling to exist with myself. I know mental illness is hereditary, but I also can’t stop myself from wondering nearly daily if I could be the kind of person I want to be without ever experiencing their fucked up version of “love”. Isn’t that what every kid of abuse ponders? Would I even hold myself up to the often unreachable standards that I do had I not endured them? 

I don’t know. All I know is, I’m an anxious, manic depressive “spaz” (as my family referred to me for years), and I won’t call my mother. It won’t make me feel better. The only love I need to learn to receive is self-love, because I’ve spent a lifetime neglecting it.

And if you can’t call your mom, if you can’t call your dad, if you can’t call a single family member because of their abuse; it’s not because you failed as a child. They failed you. I’ve got to remember that. We all do.