Dysfunctional Family - Blog Posts

vent post bc im tired and feel alone in this

TW; dysfunctional families, implied abuse kinda I'm not really being abused

I fucking hate being "perfect." Stupid, I know, I feel like I should be grateful.

Have you heard about golden child and scapegoat dynamics in dysfunctional households? Because me and my brother are living examples of that. I'm the golden child and I loathe it.

I have it so much better then my brother, I know. But being the golden child, I am my mother's trophy, and it's exhausting. I am a doll, not a person. A bragging right. An award. I have to always do what I'm told, be smart, achieve high things, always have to look pretty, have perfect manners, tons of impossible expectations, be the perfect little girl. Or she starts yelling. I hate it so much. I'm tired, I'm really tired. I stress myself out to be enough for her. I'm the definition of a burnt out gifted kid. Yet i feel like i'm supposed to be grateful because the one above made me smart and pretty. I can only be who I really am online, with my s/o, or with my friends. And I loathe it.

And I just feel alone. I see posts about how golden children will become the abuser and it scares me. I don't feel like anyone understands that both the golden child and the scapegoat suffer. I don't want to be my mother, I swore I'd be better. I don't want to be her. I don't know how to break this cycle.

Fuck.

Canon Events for children with broken families

• heart rate going up, ears listening carefully, at any sudden loud sounds that sound like objects being thrown, yelling or drunk wailing

• hating the scent of grape juice because it reminds you of wine (and of broken objects, of pools of vomit)

• swearing to never drink alcohol when you grow up (you will never be like her)

• studying really hard and excelling in school to escape your home life (school is one thing you can control)

• being told by parents to never tell friends about your family situation or they would backstab you (and thus feeling terrible whenever you confide in others now)

• parents going months without talking to each other and using you as their messenger (leading to more misunderstandings and arguments)

• “you are just like your father/mother”, in a bad way (it’s not your fault you have your father’s eyes)

What I Can’t Say To My Brother

You are fundamentally a bad person. You are furious. You are selfish. You are a liar. You are a gaslighter. You are a thief. You are misogynistic. You are queerphobic. You are racist. You are intolerant. You are abusive.

Everything has been handed to you. You do not have to try to succeed in anything. You’re athletic, charismatic, talented, pretty enough to look like every leading man in an action flick , and every body wants you to succeed. I grew up hearing and watching everyone fawn over you. Kids at school would make friends with me just so they could come over to the house to hangout with you.

“Deven’s so smart, you know when he was little he spoke Russian and Spainish?”

“Deven’s so handsome he should be a model!”

“Deven’s so good at fixing computers!”

Your life could’ve been astronomically better than mine. But you couldn’t even do the bare minimum of effort or pretense of it to even coats on by. You’ve pissed every opportunity away. Every ounce of goodwill people have given you, you’ve sucked it dry.

The money you stole to party with your rich kid friends (who you also mooched off of to the point they stopped talking to you) almost made our family homeless. Every girlfriend you’ve ever had would sheepishly admit that you bragged about stealing money from me to pay for the date and would slip me a twenty from their purse as an apology.

Every girlfriend you’ve had you also drove to have an emotional breakdown. You purposely went after women with emotional problems and no support structure so you could bully them. These were women who wouldn’t know what a real healthy normal relationship is supposed to be. You did that on purpose.

You claim our mother is the person you love the most in the world (after yourself). You take money from her (you steal from her on occasion).The few times she tried making boundaries you guilted her and blamed. Our mother, the one parent we share in our blood, the one parent who actually stuck around for you.

My poor mother had to give up her dreams of travel and further education, of making beautiful art, all so she could give birth to a pitiful man like you. She was sixteen and scared out of her mind. She was hurting from a father that abondomded her as well, and you fucking play on that with your POS dad’s behavior. You use your fear of abondomenr as a fucking excuse.

You dare try to lecture me. You dare try and take some sort of moral authority and intellectual stance. I only speak to you at family functions out of the bare necessity to not hurt our poor grandmother’s feelings.

How fucking dare you try to explain the origins of storytelling and myth. I’m a fucking English Major with a concentration in creative writing my thesis is based around archetypes. I’m not taking intellectual or academic sources from a man who got a full ride to college but flunked our his first semester because he didn’t show up to class and didn’t do homework.

You only showed up to take tests. (College students who do this have the brains to check the professor’s attendance policy and grading system to see if they can pass and get away with it.) You also didn’t have the spine to tell our parents what you were actually doing, you would drive up to college and sleep in your car, like the jellyfish you are.

It took everything I had in me not to tear you down with a few sentences. You have to feel like the smartest person around. You dared to say you were, “The Muhammad Ali of Knowledge.”

Every memory of you cornering me and screaming at me to agree with you and your shitty pints. You would t let me leave til I said you were right in between choking back sobs burned in me. You and your need to control every body around you.

I could’ve destroyed you. Just a few flippant words, because let’s be real, what we say causally is usually what devastates others the most.

“Relax, you’re only my half-brother.”

“So, how smart do you have to be for your dad to finally give a shit about you?”

“What’s it like to have a dad that doesn’t love you?”

But I didn’t, you know why? Because I’m not you. That would’ve been a Deven move.

Specifically, Tim is for the kids who had parents with undiagnosed trauma and mental illnesses. The ones who had to gentle parent their own parents. The ones that have to remain stable even when they can't because they are needed.

Dick is for the eldest children that feel constant guilt for how their actions affect the rest of the family. In success, you set a standard too high for them and in failure you're taking away resources(time, emotional energy, money) that should have been theirs.

Somewhere in between, relating to them both, is the youngest that has to be happy all the time for the family to function. The one that gets made fun of when you need a joke. But also the one that knows everyone's triggers and is always paying attention to everyone's mood. The one whose work is never recognized because no one else has to be home as much as them, everyone else gets a break but them.

Dick is for the eldest sibling while Tim is for the parentified children and I think that's the most important difference between them

me when: