I just published another memoir: Brattleboro Stories
Reading through it, I am sad, scared. Scared for my self at the time of that writing (10 years ago). Sad for the family that surrounds me. The AI that wrote the summary said it right: "family dysfunction at industrial scale." My family who thinks they're healthy—are dead wrong. Our family is dysfunctional enough that I've come to believe that no self actualized person can live within it. I have struggled my whole life to feel love from those people and I don't feel it. I have been lucky that my mom has a half foot outside this dysfunction—her material help has made my life easier than it might have been otherwise. The additional time I've spent in her and her family's presence because of it has been profoundly educational—and brutally hard. I repeatedly encountered individuals there who weren't able to face their own mortality, who hadn't meticulously grappled with serious issues in their own lives—such that their company was little comfort to me. My dad is a narcissist. My mom is a narcissist, too. Neither one accepts reality. Neither one will have a serious conversation with me. My mom, when I texted her recently with some things I thought needed discussion, responded by dismissing the content of my text and suggesting I get a good night's sleep to fix things. I didn't text her back and I don't plan to. I don't need a good night's sleep—I need parents who are willing and able to have a post mortem discussion about my childhood. I would take as a consolation prize parents who had some interest in what I've been doing my whole life
But I'm not going to get that
Guess I'll settle for being one person from my family who came out the other side of all that abuse truly free
I wanted parents who love me. Sisters and aunts and uncles. I'll say this: I don't think any one of you knows how to love—not any one or any thing. I don't talk to any of my origin family now. I never thought it would be like this, but this is necessary: none of you are safe enough to speak to. None of you can be trusted with honest talk. I wish you the best with your lives. I hope you learn to risk. But I am not sad about you anymore. I have said goodbye to your weakness and poor treatment of me. We haven't seen each other in years—I hope we never see each other again. I had a little sadness in me while I was getting this book ready to publish, but I am done being sad about it. I escaped. I flourished. I tried to converse with you all the while, but from your end came confusion, silence. I'm sick of being insulted by you, sick of my invitations to talk being turned down. You weren't ready, you weren't willing, to have a relationship with me. I found that sad for a while. But I don't anymore. Even my birth parents don't get to fuck with my emotions my whole life