This is a memory, or perhaps many memories braided into one

October 22, 2023 5:52 PM

In these years, you are never able to sleep, developing an addiction to Ambien that you’ll still be fighting twenty years later. Your thoughts circle around and around and around and around, taunting you with your deepest anxieties, turning your own mind against itself. In your early twenties, you’ll be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. But now, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, you take the thoughts at their word, experience them only as evidence that something is irrevocably broken within you. from The Protagonist Is Never in Control [CW: abusive relationships, dysfunctional families, gaslighting]
posted by chavenet (13 comments total)

FUCK
posted by kandinski at 6:15 PM on October 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yowza.
posted by inexorably_forward at 6:33 PM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

There are times that I'm really glad that I don't remember my childhood.
posted by MrVisible at 6:55 PM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

You don’t like the horror series that are popular with your classmates, written in a second person much too visceral for comfort, where the protagonist is never in control. In those stories, the worst things always happen off the page, leaving you to fill in the most terrifying details.

Oy.
posted by flabdablet at 7:27 PM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Well that was relatable. I, too, grew up to be a writer, though I never bothered putting the Bad Men down on paper. They don't deserve to be remembered, not even for their crimes. Let them fall into nothingness. Let them stay there and stay forever.
posted by foxtongue at 9:42 PM on October 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

What an absolutely incredible piece of writing, holy shit. And super-effective (and meta) usage of the second person.
posted by joyceanmachine at 4:03 AM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Oh my god.

This is….really impactful for me, as someone who has been struggling with a different level of realizing that my relationship with my ex was abusive, in a non-physical way. “She has to learn that we are the adults and she is the child” may be an exact quote. Fuck.
posted by corb at 4:55 AM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

I, too, grew up to be a writer, though I never bothered putting the Bad Men down on paper.

Me neither. I want there to be plenty of light in my writing. I want to write worlds where it's structurally impossible for abusive fuckwits to prosper. There's no space for my dad in a fictional world filled with lights where abusive fuckwits cannot prosper.
posted by terretu at 4:57 AM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Ow. Just… ow.
posted by mephron at 6:51 AM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Found a lot that I could relate to in this... maybe too much.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:30 AM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

When I read this earlier this morning, I just had to end up sitting with it for a while. Thought about writing a comment.

But, yeah. Verbal and emotional abuse that is used to condition your behavior, undermine your self-esteem, gaslight you into not believing your own eyes and reasoning, occasional metaphorical stiletto jabs to a kidney to remind you how vulnerable you are to being hurt and that it can happen when you least expect it and for no real reason at all, your attempts to talk about the abuse with other relatives and teachers and you find that everyone without exception won't talk about it and won't validate your feelings and experiences even when you know they were one of the few non-immediate family members to witness abuse that they visibly reacted to, how goddam exhausting it is managing every second of every minute you're in his presence to closely monitor his behavior and probable state of mind while you mentally peruse the 635-item list of things that Might Piss Him Off; and, finally, realizing that at the age of 59, 16 years after he has died, you are sadly aware that your whole life of interacting with other people has been and still is damaged you as even now you live in a constant state of hyper-vigilance because pretty much the first hard lesson you ever learned as a young child was that the people closest to you are the ones who are the most dangerous.

So, yeah. Was my dad the full-blown coldly manipulative, moderately cruel and sadistic supremely smug narcissist that her stepfather was? No, he was that variety of abuser just about half the time, not all the time.

The other half was just sudden intense rage that can come of nowhere, for no apparent reason.

It's like you don't know whether you're going to get mindless vicious cruelty or more of the methodical and smug cruelty.

So, yeah. Was my mother actively abusive of me as part of the way he had thoroughly terrorized her? No, she was very passive and cowed and willfully blind and, worst, made me an active partner in her excusing and enabling his bad behavior instead of, you know, saying this is really fucked-up and we're getting out of here. Then after 28 years she finally breaks free and suddenly wants to talk on the phone for hours and hours and hours about how awful he is and you're thinking to yourself funny how you now expect me to validate your experiences when you spent my entire childhood denying (much of) the validity of mine.

The one I thing know is that not a single fucking adult ever really listened to me about him. Not one. The very occasional — like, four — times that I saw anyone witness his abuse of me and they stood up for me in response are like bright, shining glorious moments of my entire life.

One of those people was my six-year old sister, when I was sixteen. She marched out of her bedroom (where she usually retreated when the yelling started) and stepped in between me and our father, shook her finger at him and demanded, "Stop yelling at my brother." In that moment, that little girl became my lifelong hero.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:14 PM on October 23, 2023 [17 favorites]

damn, I don't have a history of abuse and I found it really difficult to get through. for those of you triggered, I offer whatever hugs or sympathy you might want.
posted by supermedusa at 1:55 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Honestly I suspect that's this kind of narrative is tougher for people without abuse histories to get through than it is for, well so as not to speak for everyone, me. Part of that is that I don't read such things when I'm fragile. A much larger part is that pieces like this feel like recognition to me, like validation to me.

The details are different. My main monster was the mother, and worst monsters were members of her extended family. I'm not Jewish. I'm not a writer, except to get the demons out of my head sometimes, though I think I'm pretty good with words. I just don't have much to write that's uplifting, so I don't inflict it on people. But reading stuff like this makes me feel a little less like a freak, a little less like it was a flaw in me that caused it all. (I know I didn't cause it. But feelings are not rational)

And Ivan Fyodorovich, I feel you about your mom. Once I got Dad out of there, it was hard to listen to him when he never lifted a finger to protect me, but I was expected to help him heal. Well, he did keep her from actually killing me that one time, but... Yeah. That's why I rarely talk about this stuff. And why it's so important to be able to read it.

For those for whom this kind of thing wasn't just a Tuesday, reading such can be shockingly painful. But it's important to do, I think, because it makes it that much more likely that some other kid, some other place, will find an adult to hear and fucking believe them.
posted by Vigilant at 7:05 PM on October 23, 2023 [10 favorites]