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[twinkletoes-rp]

July art

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November Art

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Being the oldest sibling in a dysfunctional family dynamic is it's own experience not gonna lie.

Like imagine being 9 years old and you're trying to comfort your little siblings, so you start repeating all the "he loves you he just has a bad temper" "you just need to behave better because you know how he gets" lines you been told all your life, but you realise in that moment that it is utter bullshit.

That you're looking at a kid who doesn't even know how to spell their name yet, and you're telling them that they need to be responsible for the behaviour of a grown adult man.

And you realise that every other person who has had this conversation with you was an adult who was totally comfortable to do that.

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"I did my best."

We've all heard it. Usually as adults, usually when we've started to understand the fog we've been living in and want to discuss it with our parents.

It's very "I'm sorry" it's never "I wish I was different." It's always "I did my best." And at first we believe it, afterall, we were there too. We know it was hard. We know they had their own issues, we are mature now, we understand that sometimes your best isn't good enough.

But then they don't try to be better. The kids are adults. We give them the benefit of the doubt and we choose to believe them when they say that the absolute shitshow they made out of our formative years was "their best", but we can also see they're not trying to do better now.

They're still petulant. They're still angry. They're still biting and cruel. They won't say sorry. They won't accept blame. They try to tell us we were asking for it as children. They try to make us feel crazy.

We realise they're not trying their best now to be good to us, and in that we start to wonder if they ever tried their best at all.

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adhd will get you thinking "i should make this doctors appointment" every day for 7 months and counting

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Guy in front of me has spent the past hour creating our professor in Monster Hunter Wilds

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There was one time I naively pulled my mother aside, and very gently explained to her: 'When you call me stupid and incapable, tell me I'll never get a job or make anything out of myself, tell me how shameful my appearance is and ridicule my mental health struggles, that really gets to me. It hurts me and it makes me feel hopeless and devastated.'

She stared at me with suspended laughter and responded 'Well to who else can I say those things but you? They're all true!' And she laughed at me.

And that was the last time I attempted communication of my boundaries. You're the person I am allowed to treat worse than everyone else on the planet, was not what I needed to hear from my mother that day. Communication does not get you anywhere with abusers.

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There will be good days. They seem so far away right now, but they will come and they will be wonderful.

Will they make it all worth it? Probably not, but they don't have to. All that matters is that they will be there. That at first they'll be a break, and eventually, they'll come two in a row.

Once you get two in a row, it won't be too long till there's three in a row, four in a row, a whole week, two weeks and then, one day, there will be mostly good days.

One day you'll be able to have a bad day, and it just be a bad day. It doesn't make it worth it, but that's okay, it doesn't have to.

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Sometimes I feel like there's this sadness inside of me that other people can't relate to. Like since I was a child there wasn't a single person who could understand me. I was different before all the abuse started, sure, but nothing separated me from everyone else like having an experience they could never relate to.

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There was a time, when as a young adult, I'd be reading self-help books, in order to see if I can do something to make my life livable. Sometimes, these books would go very deep into victim blaming, and making a person believe that they can just 'manifest anything', or 'make things happen', and later I trashed all of that nonsense, but as an inexperienced person, I was all up for magical thinking, and taking advice from people who enjoyed making everything a vague concept that one can control with their mind.

Some of these books indeed, touched on parenting, and their philosophy was that parents who are bad, are simply bad because their parents were bad, which is something they love to use as their favourite excuse (i had it worse). But as a young person, how was I to know this was stupid, I believed this. The book went on to encourage the child, to try and be the parent's replacement parent, and to offer them caretaking and parenting they never had in their youth. Now, if you know how child abuse works, you'd recognize this immediately as the encouragement of parentification, making the child responsible for the parent's well being, being the caretaker instead of being taken care of, taking responsibility for the parent's actions and behaviours when the child has absolutely no control or power over it - basically bad. But, how was I to know, right. So I decided to try and take this advice, and try to see; what are my parents lacking, in the form of having their own parents?

This is where things got funny; I analyzed my parents behaviour, and realized very quickly, that what they lack is moral compass, correction of intensely selfish, irresponsible, ignorant and shallow behaviour, and if these were my children I would simply not tolerate that level of malice. My parents weren't lacking in care, they were lacking in discipline. So at that point, I, who had no income, shelter, social power, access to resources, finances, or anything else, thought I was responsible for disciplining my parents and teaching them how to 'not be evil', if I wanted to change them in normal and good people. (Completely normal and possible thing to do.)

And it's not like I had any guidance in how to offer proper 'discipline', all I knew was violence, which I couldn't do for obvious reasons, and the next thing would be scolding, yelling, guilt-tripping, criticism, making them 'feel bad' for 'doing bad things'. And that's exactly what I had decided to do. Next time my father was acting selfish, malicious, shallow and self-obsessed, I dropped him a 'This is why you don't have any friends.' line.

Now I have no idea why, but this actually got to him. He was shocked for a moment, and then started acting defensive. 'I have friends!' he insisted, and then he started listing all of the coworkers he used for his gain in the last week. 'Those are not real friends.' I decided. That had actually gotten him upset. He started listing all the things he did with those people, which were just random work transactions, and it didn't convince me at all.

Looking back, it's funny because I was so low on his hierarchy of people whose opinion mattered, he tried to kill me multiple times, he screamed inhumane slurs and insults at me constantly, he considered me less than a person, less than a thing even, but he was still so offended that anyone in the world could think he had no friends. What I had done is made him worried that his facade and public image of being well-connected and liked wasn't strong enough, and convincing me that he was all those things, was how he thought he'd fix it. He didn't even think for a second that maybe he should fix his malicious and exploitative behaviour, it was all about maintaining an image of being something else.

Obviously he didn't have any friends, because he's a narcissist, and narcissists don't make friends, they keep prisoners. I was a constant thorn in his eye because I could see trough his delusions and would regularly call him out on that, which of course then brought on violence to make me terrified of contradicting him. Because that's how they think reality is generated, if they say something is true, and nobody contradicts them, then that must be the new reality.

Anyway, I didn't try to argue with him on friends again, because it got boring and did nothing to fix his inhumane behaviour, and I didn't like interacting with him anyway. But I still find it very funny that a book that was trying to push abused children into caretaking for their parents, pushed me into trying to punish them for abuse, it was almost Matilda-like in fashion. If I had magic powers I would have changed these people (into people too scared to be evil in front of me).

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You can't heal in the same environment that made you sick to begin with.

Sometimes you just need to cut the toxic people off. It doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you a person who doesn't want to be sick anymore.

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The thing about being raised by emotionally immature parents is it's like constantly living with a pair of petulant teenagers who never grow up.

So many people have stories of mums who are catty and mean like middle schoolers to them when they were barely out of nappies. Or dad's who have no concept of responsibility leaving them to take on the parental role. Now imagine being 17, 18, 19 years old and realising you have matured past your own parents.

I know I felt like I couldn't go to my parents when I needed support. They were so caught up in their own childish drama I really didn't want to involve them in mine. When things went badly for me and I needed a responsible adult to show up and take me out of it, I knew my parents weren't a viable option. By the time I was 15 I was having complex issues that were just beyond the preview of their emotional intelligence.

I was literally more mature than my own parents at 17. And I was not a very mature 17 year old.

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When I was 13 my parents didn't pick me up from school. They picked up my brother but I was in the bathroom so instead of waiting 30 seconds, they left without me.

I wasn't allowed to walk home. I'd done that once when the nanny forgot about me and I had my hands slammed into a cupboard as punishment.

I wasn't allowed to use the school bus. I'd done it once with permission but had got lost and was kicked through the landing when I got home.

I had had my phone taken off me months before because I'd answered it while it was ringing in front of my father.

I was not allowed to use someone else's phone, or ask them to use theirs on my behalf. I'd done it soon after I'd had my phone taken to let my parents know I'd be home soon, and I was hit in the living room during a "we need to talk about your behaviour" chats, as this was considered circumventing my punishment.

I was not allowed to get into a car with anyone other than my parents. I'd done it 2 years before and was grounded for weeks because I let a friends parent take me home when my driver was 40 minutes late.

I was not allowed off school grounds. One day my mum had parked her car in a corner and watched me walk with my friend to the edge of the school property, then berated me over it till I cried.

Basically my parents intentionally put me in a situation where I had to break the rules because they were salty i used the toilet and they wanted to express that anger in punishing me. And I didn't feel like breaking the rules and getting punished in a situation that was absolutely not my fault.

So I sat where I was supposed to wait for them, and I waited for them.

I waited for them as all the detention and club kids left. I waited till the cleaners came and cleaned around me. I waited for them while all the lights got turned out in the building. I was fully prepared to sleep where I sat and attend class the next day if I needed to. I was not going to give them a reason to punish me.

Eventually my teacher sees me sitting there in the dark at 4 hours past pick up.

He offered me a lift home in his car and I had to decline. He offered to call my parents for me and I had to decline. He looks at me really strangely and just doesn't understand why I'm declining help and I just don't know how to explain that my parents aren't normal, and if I do anything but sit here and wait I'll be in trouble.

So I just sit there and wait and eventually 5 hours after they were supposed to pick me up they showed for me. Absolutely pissed I didn't use "common sense" and break the rules, telling me that I should have broken into the office to use the phone to call them or something. It was bullshit. They knew it was bullshit, I was a kid and even I knew it was bullshit. They knew where to find me when they realised I wasn't going to play the game because they knew where I was the whole time. They didn't just magically realise I was still exactly where they'd agreed to pick me up 5 hours later. They could have picked me up at any point in those 5 hours if they wanted to. They didn't want to because I used the toilet and inconvenienced them and they were looking for a reason to punish me for that.

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When you went no contact, did your parents lose their shit?

Yep mine did. It was a heavy 6 months of threats, gaslighting and smear campaigns. It was horrible to go through as an 18 year old who just wanted to build a normal life out of the nothing I'd been handed.

I went no contact at 17 and a year later my entire family had fallen apart. My siblings went no contact, my parents had divorced and sold the houses and the vibe was absolutely rancid.

It's because the scapegoat is the most important person in the dynamic. When you go no contact they either need to find someone else to blame for their own actions or the whole thing goes to shit.

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People who stress you out/cause chaos in your life literally cause inflammation in your body and enough abuse over time will cause damage to your nervous and immune systems + brain.... This is not a game. And remember, sadistic people take pleasure in your pain, and feel a sense of pride at how much destruction they cause.

Likewise people who treat you gently bring healing to your nervous system. People can be medicine or poison.

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If you were the scapegoat in your narcissistic family dynamic I want you to know you have the power to burn that entire circus down.

They need you. They need you because without someone else to blame their conniving, manipulative, abusive behavior has nobody to hide behind. Without someone else to deflect blame onto, everyone else can get wise fast.

Sure, they could nominate a new scapegoat. It's theoretically possible. But have they raised that person to take shit since birth like they did to you? Can they guarantee this person will act their role, the way you did for years? Have they manipulated the perception of that person for years and decades, so everyone likely to look in would believe that they're the problem no questions asked? Maybe. Probably not though.

You have all the power in the family. All you need to do to put a stop to it right now, is ghost. Go no contact with your abuser and their enablers. Cut them off entirely. Block their socials. Change your number. Move to Thailand. Never speak to them again.

Watch from afar as the vaccum caused by your sudden departure sucks that entire abusive mess in and spits the assholes who benefitted from your pain into absolute chaos.

I'm a self confessed bitter hag, and there was nothing sweeter than watching my abusers lives go to hell, simply because they couldn't put me through it anymore.

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"Like there are some days when all the memories are flowing back to me and I wonder who I'd have been if none of it had happened and all I want to do is scream."

How do you guys deal with the anger? Like there are some days when all the memories are flowing back to me and I wonder who I'd have been if none of it had happened and all I want to do is scream.

I have this urge to use my public Facebook to "out" my parents as abusers because I feel so angry at how unfair it is that they got to cause all that lasting harm to me, and now I'm no contact they just live their lives like they didn't spend 20 years of them abusing their own children. I'm scared sometimes I'm going to do it and hurt my reputation.