Dinkaltranen

“Nobody was ever nice to me growing up and I decided to make it my entire personality to project that onto the entire worldview.” – There you go, this blog in a nutshell. A lot of the times it’s right, a lot of the time, well, it’s projection.

I always feel a little ill talking poorly of family. They are one of the only things I think we shouldn’t talk ill of. They are all we have at the end of the day, before everything, or at least, that’s what I think they’re meant to be. When you have nothing, at least you have family, and if you are trash talking them for ills of childhood online, even anonymously, well, you veto that. After the original Part 1 of discussing my home life, I deleted it, and wrote the rest in private. These are the rewrites.

We’ve covered my father, my mother, and now, the logical end. The only one that’s left.

Most people like my sister, despite her being far from a social butterfly. If you think of the stereotype of the “girlboss” that settled down, that’s my sister. She went into a hyper-male dominated field as a 5ft and change girl with freckles. If I refer to myself as developmentally a faggot, she was developmentally a dyke. The worst part was, we were into all of the same things. We were achievement wise equals, despite the fact that she was a year older. Music, physical activity, academics, we shared activities not just because of our enjoyment but because of convenience. We started a business together when we were teenagers, made with adjacent jobs we took up of our own accord.

A lifetime later, and I am still bitter about the way everyone addressed her. She absolutely deserved the praise she got. But so did I. The reason I am still bitter was because it was never “Oh, E and D, you guys started a business? That’s really cool, what do you sell, how’d you start off?”

It was “WOW D YOU STARTED A BUSINESS ALL BY YOURSELF AS A GIRL?!?!?! HOW DID YOU MANAGE THAT?!?”

As though it was the 1920s, and women somehow still lived under the tyrannical boot of the men in our lives. Our father may have been a drunk, horny depressive, but he wasn’t precisely authoritarian when it came to our ambitions – that was our mother’s job.

Any idiot, in this case, two teenage idiots, can buy bulk goods, process them, and sell them. Hell this is practically the idea of child labour, except you export the middle part to the Middle-east.

We were close. We were so close. Then of course, the GFC happened, and everything else had been happening, like Mum, and she began to hate me more than a teenage sister hates her teenage brother. She not my Mum, not my Dad, was the one that hit me the most. She hit me all the time, in front of our parents even, and they did absolutely nothing. And it hurt, because I physically had the body of a tiny little prepubescent girl, and her, in all her smallness, was still about the same size as me. Because she was special, because she was successful, and, I say, pessimistically, and back in Mum and Dad’s day girls weren’t successful unless they were really special. Every achievement she had was rewarded. Every achievement I had was ignored. Note to future parents, people looking to keep friends, people looking to keep people in general – if you see a behaviour you like, encourage it, even if it’s just by appreciation, because if you don’t, the behaviour will go extinct.

So, I gave up. No matter what I did, even if it was better, it was ignored. She still hit me, hated me, blamed me for everything, Mum still screamed at me and worse, and Dad was nowhere to be seen.

That may seem petty to you. But children aren’t like adults. They need nurturing, encouraging, and potentially even to be able to experience the sense that they are loved.

People always see my sister as the inheritor of one of my older relative’s titles, a female Indiana Jones who went across the world and defied the odds. But really, she was just the person who I should have been, or been a part of. She’s who I might have been if my parents, in all their faux egalitarianism, had actually gotten over themselves and got with the times, that she wasn’t special, even if she was their first child, even if she was a girl. Maybe that’s why I had so many “girlish” hobbies. Sewing, dance, music, maybe it wasn’t just the fact that I looked like one, maybe I thought the problem was, in some sense, my sex, and not in a transgender way, I mean in the way that children will look to answer a question and the question in this case is “What do I have to do to be loved?” and in this way, maybe the answer was: “Be a girl.”

The first time I was raped by my teacher she told me I moaned like a little girl. Don’t worry, she said it was cute. And hey, to me, I thought my rapist loved me, I thought that this was what love was, in some fucked up, dying child sort of way, that this was what love was. It’s honestly amazing considering I didn’t turn out to be gay, or transsexual. I’m lost. I thought this one would be easy. But maybe it’s the hardest. Because even now, my family travel across the world to see her. They don’t even invite me. I’m not a part of the family reunion. I’m not worth the effort of a trip.

I realise I don’t so much as hate my sister out of what she did to me, but more out of resentment, out of bitterness. But then I wonder how things would’ve been if the roles were reversed. If I was the cherished child, and she was the one who was so unloved she’d rather get raped than go home. And in that moment, I feel a little glad that it was me. Because despite how much everyone praised her, flattered her, paraded her, I know that it probably would have destroyed her just as much as it destroyed me. Maybe it might have even been worse. I wonder what our lives would have looked like. Where would we be?

I would like to think that if the roles were reversed, we would be family, instead of whatever we are now.

Back when my sister was in her hyper-masculine™ field, she came home suddenly, and asked me to take her to a pub. This happened twice. The first time, we made smalltalk for an hour, at which point she asked me how I was going. I answered honestly, gave a brief rundown of each aspect of my life. She burst into tears, said I never asked her anything about herself, and left. The second time, I was more conservative. I answered shortly, and redirected questions to her, which she then redirected back to me.

“But what you think is obviously wrong, you know that, right?” she asked, again, teary eyed.

“Of course I know it’s wrong, how I feel isn’t reflective of what is really going on.”

“Then if you know it’s wrong, why do you still feel that way?”

The first retort was to ask her if she honestly thought that all the evil and wrong in the world could be simply solved with education, and to ask her in the same, condescending tone as she asked me, that if she was really naive enough to believe that if we put all the evil and ill-doers in the world with a 90 minute presentation on why being evil is bad, that the world would be fixed.

No. People do evil and wrong because it benefits them, and because they like it. They benefit solely off of two groups of people: those who believe that they can be ‘educated’ out of their wrongness, and people who think that laws, rules, will somehow prevent them from their wrongness, or protect them from it. Take a look at history as recent as the housing collapse to understand that there are many people whose lives and wellbeing are oriented around you believing that there will be justice or that evil is simply an educational problem. No, they’re doing it again, because you are a sheep who believes people only do evil under poor ethical and moral frameworks when actually the framework is working exactly as intended, in fact, you are unwittingly part of their framework, which is why they are amassing assets and Basically You Are Fucking Stupid and Working At Amazon.

But no. I didn’t say any of that. Instead I simply said that this was part of how mental illness worked. I could know something to not be true, an emotionally feel it to be true. At which point, again, she got up, sobbing, and left. Both times I got a stern talking to from my Father.

I hate that I don’t love my sister, or my mother, or my father, and I hate my sister, that most of this is because of her, even though she didn’t choose it, she didn’t choose to be the first child, she didn’t choose to not be abused by mum or her teacher, she just happened upon this as much as I happened upon it. And because of that, I am a resentful bastard on the internet trying to figure out how to make 750k in 4 years, and she is settling down in Europe after spending 5 years working as a glorified lab assistant.

Fuck you, D. You couldn’t tolerate what my life sounded like for even a few minutes, and you want to talk down to me? Pretend you know me? Act as though I am some poor, precious creature that is just misunderstood, that doesn’t know how or why their life went wrong? What do you think I’ve been doing all this time? If you think for a moment I haven’t fantasised about you somehow dying in some tragic accident as a child, what my life might have been like, then you are insanely wrong, because I know for a fact you fantasised about precisely the same of me. There’s no amount of education that will fix that. Teenage you knew that. How did you as an adult forget? I can only think it must be because your life has lacked hardship to the point where, really, education has been the problem, where you have somehow been protected from hardships and cruelty to the point where you have not seen any kind of evil since our parent’s in childhood.

So I don’t know. Maybe I love you. Maybe I don’t. You were just a kid and so was I, and neither of us really got to choose. I don’t think I can hate you for that. But I can hate you for who you are now at the end of it.

I love you.

Part two is here.