Dinkaltranen

Anger is a difficult emotion, because it is excessive, and any emotion in excess is unacceptable socially. It builds up inside over time, and eventually it feels like it is impossible to not be angry.

“Why aren’t you speaking?” My family asked me as we reunited after a year over dinner.

At the time I answered that I was tired, but now I realise that I was afraid that if I spoke, I would explode. Family is something you are not really allowed to be angry with either, given that they give you so much in the beginning of your life. As though by having a child they are not responsible for its wellbeing and it is only out of the goodness of their hearts that they took you to school.

Objectively my family have done many good things for me. Unfortunately, emotion cares little about objectivity. It does very much care about captivity, like what I was doing to my emotions at the table. I realise that even though my family mosstly treats me very well now, that I cannot forgive them for all the ways they hurt me before.

My sister asks me how my degree is going. I tell her it’s the most boring thing I’ve ever done, and she makes an expression that says “Why aren't you playing along?” In this moment, I want to scream at her. I am not here to play happy family, like I’ve been forced to my whole life. If you ask me a question, why are you upset that I am being honest? Of course, honesty has always been a sin in the household. Honesty is why they tried to have me committed.

I can make the argument that they were attempting to get me help. But they never asked me what I needed for help. As usual, they decided what was best for me. They looked at their son, who was sobbing, confessing he’d been raped, talking about how it had destroyed them and made them want to die, and their first thought was not comfort, it was not to ask them what they needed, it was to pass the job on to someone else.

As my sister makes that pointed expression at my honesty, as though I had said a racial slur in the middle of a wedding toast, a memory reignites in my mind of her telling me that I wasn’t a girl, so I didn’t need to worry about being raped. I then get angry at myself for being angry at her, for she was just probably 11 or 12 in that memory and was an idiot child just like I was. But again, we’re trying to apply logic to emotion. While they talk amongst themselves my mind spins with everything I’ve ever wanted to say to them, to challenge their beyond ignorant views, their hypocritical and disgusting behaviour, and then spins more when I know it’d do nothing.

They are interested in consensus, and unity, even if what they’re unified in and its principles are wrong. They are not interested in the truth or genuine connection. They are interested in making a family reunion photo, where we are all together and nothing bad ever happens and Dad doesn’t try to fuck everything with a pulse and Mum doesn’t start breaking all the plates and screaming and B doesn’t run away from that all and I’m not a failed waste of space that fucked up his life and got groomed probably because of stuff like that.

Just one big happy family.

That night after dinner we came home and the family suggested we watch a movie. It of course, isn’t an actual movie at all, but whatever B-Movie Netflix slop that catches their eye.

“Just give it five minutes.” Dad says.

I try not to laugh.

Dad always made watching movies unbearable, especially good movies. He had to be a contrarian, a pessimist, and let everybody know that he was a little above a standard deviation of normal intelligence.

“Oh, this is plot number 3.” He’d say, when even the mildest trope would show up. This from the man who unironically watches the plot parts of high production pornography.

It made me hate watching movies. When I first lived on my own, I probably watched 2 or 3 movies a week for a year. When it came to Christmas time, we started a tradition of each bringing movies we liked and watching a bunch of them. You can guess how that went.

Again, the message for almost anything when it came to my family, and especially my father, is that I was not allowed to enjoy anything. And they wonder why the hobbies I ended up choosing were the ones that let me avoid them for as long as possible.

Of course, the film is terrible, though I stayed in the living room reading my kindle until Dad fell asleep about an hour in. I realise again the image he wants, and I feel a pang of guilt denying it. One last image of a happy family enjoying a movie together after a night out. He is reminiscing for a time that never existed, or at least not for me.

Someone told me that the first step to making your parents proud is to stop caring about what they want from you, or think of you. But despite everything, despite how I am so angry in their presence that I am unable to speak, I still love them. On the one hand I think they are simply too far gone, too old, too set in their ways, and that I should pretend to be the son they want, not just to satiate them, but also to prevent me having to deal with the knowledge that they died thinking I was a failure. On the other, I think “Fuck these people, they tyrannised me for half my life, I am not giving them another second and if I do it is on my terms.”

I am doing a mix of both. I am not fully honest with what I tell them, but I am not outright lying. I speak as little as possible. Their presence is mostly all I can tolerate. I feel like a terrible person for responding to their love and kindness with polite manners and a short hug. But I know that if I do anything else, I will regret it. I will be burned again as I always have by them. This is all I can manage, and though they might gossip among themselves about how I seem distant or cold, I think I will have to live with that for now.

I am doing what I can.