Once again, the political stage is mirroring things I went through on a personal level 5 years ago. This article was particularly poignant, the way certain sentences read to my eyes.
Anger is a useful emotion for people who are in unbearable pain.
“… it is painful to try to convince someone that you matter. “Please care about me,” is a hard argument to make without shame, because the fact that you’re making it means two things are true: they don’t care about you, and you do care about them.
“It’s safer to say, “Fuck you,” than “Please don’t hurt me anymore.”
“…know how it feels to be the smallest voice in a crowd that fucking hates you and will scream you into silence, or turn their backs on you as if you could not make any impact whatsoever on their day.”
“Who do we think we are, asking questions? Who in the hell do we think we are, wanting answers?”
“We are grieving. We are discovering how many people we love won’t stand next to us.”
On another note, a good friend just had HER BROTHER ASK HER TO GO FOR A WALK SO HE COULD YELL AT HER about family issues.
It was kind of hilarious, although not really, because she is the one I had lunch with after that lousy reunion in 2012 and the first person I told what had happened to me and from her reactions I got my first inkling that THIS WAS NOT NORMAL.
She said when he asked her to go for a walk, her immediate thought was of my experience, and she thought, “Oh, I know what this is about!”
Sure enough, his wife is mad at her — probably jealous — and so the one-sided “discussion” was all about what my friend is doing wrong, and was probably meant to pick a fight so the brother would have some justification for the choice he was being forced into making, between his wife and his sister.
Did I mention the wife is a raging alcoholic? She lived for a year with my friend while the brother continued working in CA, before they moved up here. My friend saw first hand how bad it was, but put it down to the stress of the life changes, and helped her cover up her drinking from the brother.
So yeah, the wife is triangulating, trying to separate the brother from the sister, because the unhealthy wife feels threatened by the healthy sister and oh, how familiar the dysfunctional pattern. The brother is appealing to my friend, “the reasonable one“, to please, PLEASE put up with this bullshit dysfunction so the wife doesn’t have to do any real work on her personal issues, and can go on being the missing stair that everyone will agree to work around.
Because, of course, that’s the easy way out for everyone — except my friend.
Being a brother, he knew what buttons to push, but I am proud of my friend for doing a better job than I did — she is literally 20 years older and wiser than I was, and she had my example to learn from — and she didn’t let it become a fight.
We discussed her next steps and she is going to talk to her brother and say something like, “Look, there’s clearly a conflict between her and me. I didn’t create it, and I don’t know exactly what it is. You’ve been put in the middle and you’re supposed to “take a side” [literally the way he put it] and it sounds like you don’t want to do that, so you came to me to try to find a way out of this mess.
“I just want to make it clear that you’re talking to the wrong person. You’re in a tough position and I understand that, but I’m not the one who put you there, and I’m not the one who can get you out of it. She’s the one who put you there, and if you’re unwilling to make that choice, she’s the one you need to talk to about it.”
I wish her luck.