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Book Review: Among Others

Book Review: Among Others

Book Review: Among Others by Jo Walton

It is 1979, and Morwenna Phelps is no longer blessed with a living twin. The same accident shattered her hip and leg so that she cannot run or dance, or even exist without pain. Her beloved grandfather had a stroke, and cannot care for her, and her mother is broken in…other ways. So she ran away and Child Services got involved. Which is why she’s now in the…


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✨✨Things I was told✨✨


You’re too sensitive

You have no idea what a c*nt you actually are

You should feel privileged that I want you and no one else

You keep using your anxiety as an excuse

You keep playing on your anxiety

You need to man up and stop being such a pu**y

I’m not interested in hearing what you have to say

Shut the f*ck up I don’t want to hear it

Shut the f*ck up before I punch you in the face

Shut the f*ck up before I f*cking k*ll you

Shut the f*ck up or I’ll give you something to cry about

You deserve to have your f*cking head ki*ked in

You need help you are f*cked in the head

I want to st*b you in the f*cking neck

Good, go sleep in the park, I hope you get r*ped and k*lled

You keep saying you have anxiety but it’s all an act

If I end up hitting you it’s your own fault


Not to mention having things thrown at me. Telling her mum she would she doing me a favour by ending my life because no one cares about me….


If you notice red flags in the early stages that is your sign to leave and don’t ever look back

anon: My parents are both from India, and they constantly say that the way they parent me is “the Indian way”. Does this justify my abuse? Am I taking this the wrong way, and just over reacting?

This is an argument that some parents of non-white-Western ethnicities make, be it Indian or Chinese or Latino or African American or other. Something like, “This white Western parenting style is permissive and leads to disrespectful kids, I’m certainly not going to do that. We parent the traditional way.”
It’s also an argument that e.g. traditional, authoritarian Christian parents might make, believing that “spare the rod and spoil the child” has to be part of good Christian parenting.

Yes, certain groups of people might have a certain traditional view of children and a certain way of raising them, but just because something is the norm that doesn’t mean it can’t be abusive.

And.
For any group, you will always also people within the group who do it differently, who parent gently while still maintaining a strong sense of connection with their culture/religion, and you will find advocates who take a critical look at the traditional views of child rearing and point out abusive patterns and show alternatives. I’m adding a list of such advocates below.
(’Keep reading’ added so I can add more resources as I find them.)

Indian:
Shefaly Tsabary* (WebsiteTed-Talk)

Chinese:
Untigering (Website,Facebook)

African American:
Stacey Patton* (Website,Article)
Asadah Kirkland*

Latino:
Dulce de Leche

Christian:
Dulce de Leche
Little Hearts Books
The Path Less Taken

* Note: I don’t fully agree with the parenting advice given (check my stance on parenting) but it’s still a very good start. 

See also: Is it normal that…

I am 16 living in Ohio. I am adopted. My brother raped me, he continues to say he wants to and will do it again. He punched me in the face. He throws things. I am in extreme danger. I need out of this house now. I have a friend I could stay with, who’s parents already know my situation. If I leave to go stay with them could me, my friend, or their parents get into trouble? I need to know this before going any further into our plan of me moving in with them. My adoptive parents don’t know that I want to leave. They always say they don’t want me here and wish I would just leave. Then when I try they say they are going to call the police. My adoptive parents are fully aware of what goes on in this house they just don’t care. I scream that my brother is doing something and they yell. They yell at me. They yell at me all the time, constantly. I have told them I was going to kill myself, I don’t feel that depressed anymore but when I did they would say “go ahead! I don’t care! You would be doing everyone a favor” There is no other family I could go to because they are all involved with drugs. I can’t be here anymore. I need out. The only place I can go is my friends house.

Hi!

I don’t live in the states and only did a quick internet research so if anyone knows more, feel free to reply.

In Ohio you can’t move out without your parent’s consent until 18. So yes, your friend and their parents will get into legal trouble. If they can, have them contact a local attorney who can explain the laws in your state and help determine the best course of conduct to avoid breaking the law. 

CPS will have to get involved. Sadly, it’s hard for minors to escape abusive homes if Child Protective Services aren’t good in your area. Given that you have experienced rape, look for services for sexual abuse victims in your area, they can give you advice and you might be able to go to a shelter

If you haven’t yet, check my post on Leaving an abusive home and my tag escaping, there might be other useful things for you there.

I wish you a lot of strength and I really wish that I had better news.

abusedkidproblems:

When your parents constantly steal every cent you earn/receive and when you ask them about it, they scream at you and deny that you ever had it

butterflyinthewell:

Growing up with emotional abuse makes you want to avoid people when you feel bad instead of seeking someone out.

Because your abuser always told you you weren’t really upset.

Or that what you’re upset about is trivial.

Or that you’re overreacting again.

Or that your being upset is ruining everyone else’s mood.

Or that you’re being a baby.

Or that you need a thicker skin.

Or you’re told to go away until you can be a decent person again.

You believe your feelings don’t matter unless you express the “right” ones the “right” way at the “right” time, and you can never do it “right.”

You believe everybody has it worse, so there’s no point in talking about it when you feel bad.

It’s easier to isolate yourself when you’re sad, angry or hurt because it feels easier than “inflicting” yourself on somebody else.

Even when there are beautiful people in your life who say you can always come to them, you still don’t because you’re scared.


That is what sits at the center of who I am. It’s like an abscess that won’t pop or drain. And when it hurts, it hurts.

furiousgoldfish:

If you lived with abusive parents, it meant that the rules changed for you any moment. You could have been praised for something most of the time, then suddenly one day it brings a punishment instead. You could have been allowed to do certain things until one day you got tortured for doing it, and afterwards you couldn’t even know if it was alright to ever do it again. Some things were only allowed when parents were in forgiving mood, sometimes things you absolutely had to do, you knew you’d be punished if anyone saw you doing it, or if they found out. 

You never knew what the consequences would be. You could be wildly overpunished for something as simple as failing to close a door, saying the wrong word, having a certain face expression. You would get blamed and punished for things you didn’t do. You would get punished for someone’s bad mood. You would get punished for existing next to someone who was angry and wanted a punching bag. 

There was no consistency in your life, you had to live tiptoeing and hoping you would somehow do the right thing and avoid torture, the rules would change and twist and turn against you no matter what you would do, you developed a sixth sense to figure out when someone was irritated or upset, and you would still end up hurt and abused. 

And you got told this is normal, this is just how life is, everyone has it like this. You don’t doubt it or see it as abuse, it’s just your every day, you can’t imagine living a life where you’re safe, where you don’t have to expect thousand horrible things to happen if you make a tiny mistake that you initially had no idea would even be a mistake.

Now think about that and tell me where your anxiety came from. What living like this continually would do to a person. Because once you lived like this, this mindset doesn’t go away, it’s what you’ve learned to live with, what you’ve been forced to live with if you didn’t want to be in pain every second of your life. How would you not panic and over analyze your every word? How would you not try to predict just what kind of horror could come from most mundane and common action? How would you not at least try to brace yourself for the next torture someone might have ready for you? Your senses are not wrong, they’re trained to do this, they’re experienced in trying to help you survive life in abuse. 

furiousgoldfish:

Abusive parents will trauma-condition you to obey them, they will punish your every healthy instinct, every independent thought and every resistance to their authority to the point where they fuck with your survival instincts and force you to fear for your life if you don’t do as you’re told.

Then when you come down with ptsd they have the nerve to say “You got too affected by it.”

They made sure you were extremely affected by it when they were doing it. They were the ones who wouldn’t stop until you were unable to do anything but to be controlled by them if you wanted to survive. Do you know what kind of extreme torture will get a person to obey you unconditionally? It means keeping a person in death fear.

You being affected by it so much that you couldn’t be a human being but their property was the point of it. They’re perpetrators of a torture crime. They do not get to have a say in what your reaction to it means. You’re a human being and they had no right to hurt you whatsoever. They do not get to turn around and say “Oh, actually, we wanted to get different things from torturing you, and being held responsible for it is not one of them.” 

[TW Suicide]

I once had a guy tell me if I stop being his girlfriend he would kill himself. He constantly verbally abused me and made me feel worthless, i ended up breaking down and telling my mum about it. She had to get the police involved just to get him to leave me alone, this all happened when I was 14.

(submitted by anonymous)

It’s not okay to tell a child who is telling you about their abusive parent, or abusive relative or sibling, to tell them in return ‘oh they care about you deep inside, they just don’t show it’.

That is not what the kid needs to hear. That kid put faith in you that you’re going to be on their side, understand they’re hurt, they’re scared, they feel hated, they’re starting to doubt the goodness of the person who hurt them, they need a safe space to express their pain, a confidant to hear and understand their part of the story, and they need help in order to not become a victim of this person’s abuse again.

And instead, you tell them, ‘Disregard your feelings, and conclude that this person, who hurt you and turned against you and used their power to abuse you, trust that this person actually deeply loves you, and what this situation needs is you having more understanding and tolerance because this, is actually love’. Nobody needs to hear this. No body, ever, needs to hear this.

Because this will, in fact, move the kid to consider that maybe there’s still love in this relationship, and yes maybe their abuser isn’t so bad, and maybe they should give the abuser another chance, and see deeper into their actions to find love they so desperately need in order to feel safe and accepted. And inevitably, they’ll fall victims to the abuse, again, and again, and again.

What you taught them, is to accept abuse as love. You told them it’s acceptable for the people in their life, to abuse them as a ‘misunderstood’ expression of love. You told them to treat abuse as one would treat love. You discouraged them from getting away from the harm, you failed to protect them, you failed to even validate their situation and their feelings, you failed to recognize that this is unacceptable, that they don’t deserve to be harmed, that it is not okay for someone who is supposed to love them, to abuse them. You taught them to accept anyone who hurts them, as a person who secretly cares. You gave them a push to tolerate this in their future friendship, relationship, marriage. Because how wouldn’t they forgive and understand it from their friend or spouse, if they did with a family member?

You put a situation of abuse in the context where the abuser doesn’t have to stop, but the vulnerable victim needs to put their feelings of hurt away, and ‘understand better’ that this is a form of love. That means the victim is the one who needs to take responsibility for the abuse, bear it, forgive it, and assume this is okay. You didn’t even explain to this child that they don’t deserve to be harmed. That hurting them is unacceptable. You went on as if suffering harm is normal and expected for this child’s life. You told them to endure it and failed to put them out of the harm’s way.

This is what enabling looks like. This is what siding with the abuser looks like. This is grooming, neglect, emotional abandonment, investment in abuse to continue. Nobody needs to hear that. Nobody needs to be reassured that the abuse is okay because their abusers love them.

What we need to hear is that this is unacceptable. That it was wrong to do this to you. Someone checking if we’re hurt, if we’re alright. Someone telling us they’re going to make sure we never suffer this abuse again. Taking our words seriously and making sure we’re protected, and we no longer need to worry about it happening again. We need a moment of grief for what we went thru, and to be asked for forgiveness because we weren’t protected, we were left to the mercy of a person who went on to hurt us. We need to know that people will be on our side, and find abuse as horrible and harmful as we do. We should hear that the person who loves us wouldn’t do this. That even the person who hates us doesn’t have the right to do it. Our feelings should matter. Our pain should be addressed.

That’s how you’d raise a person who understands their experiences matter and their feelings and safety have value in the society. To do it any differently is neglect and invitation of more abuse into a child’s life, as if that life is the least important one and reserved for taking damage. We do not exist to be sacrificed for families to stay together. The moment we’re put into harm’s way for the family’s sake, it’s no longer our family.

psychabuse101:

When an abusive person discovers that you have a “safe place”, they will try to take it from you, prevent you from accessing it, or try to use it against you.
If this “safe place” is something like a private blog, or physical diary you use to journal all your thoughts and feelings and process them, they will go out of their way to find and read the information in them.
If this “safe place” is a group of friends, or social event you spend time at, they will prevent you from being able to see them or go there, or even insist they accompany you in an attempt to infiltrate it.

Preventing the victim from seeing friends, attending events, or using social medias can also be a form of deliberate isolation, which is an abusive tactic in it’s own right.

They will also usually feign innocence, and claim that they’re only trying to help you, or “understand you better”, and then try to guilt trip you into feeling like the bad guy for not wanting your privacy violated. They may even try to turn the roles on you, claiming “you’re so distant” or “you don’t talk to me” and the like, to try and make it look like they are the victim in the scenario.

In the case of blogs, if it has a completely different name and use picture to your known online name, then a manipulator who has found it and read it has taken time and effort to do so.
In the case of a diary, that you keep private, hidden away, or carry on your person, you know that the person who found it and read it has gone to effort and trouble to do so.

With both blogs and physical diaries, they will often claim to have found them by accident.
This is hard to dis-prove, and may even be true in some cases. However, it is important to remember that just because someone -found- a private blog or diary, does not give them the right to read it. Especially if they know who it belongs to, and are aware that the contents are somewhat private. This is willful breaking of boundaries and privacy violation.

It is important to note that even if you leave your diary out on a table in a family room, that is still not an invitation to read it!

Some manipulators may claim to have read parts of it by accident. Either they saw you typing, or saw you writing, and read what you were writing before realizing what it was. Or they claim to have found and read the journal, before realizing who it belonged to and what it was.
This is almost always a lie, but again, is hard to dis-prove because it is completely possible.
However, it is important to remember that when faced with sensitive personal information about someone else, the healthy, normal thing to do is to keep the information private.
            These things happen sometimes, people learn private details about others lives sometimes. But they keep quiet about it until the person involved comes forward about it themselves.
           (Of course this applies only to social and personal matters, if the information pertains to a crime, the appropriate thing to do is go to the police).

If the manipulator does not realize that what they have done is wrong, now having found and read the victim’s personal thought-processing, will often confront the victim about it. They will say “how dare you say this about me”, and “how dare you say that about them”, guilt tripping and blaming the victim for having negative thoughts, and not at all addressing their boundary-breaking to have gotten this information!
Whether the abuser themselves was actually mentioned in the private journal does not matter, often they assume things to be about them, to facilitate their victim complex.
If the abuser was named personally in the private journal, it still was not their place to look for and read that information.People have to process negative thoughts all the time, even about people they love and care for, that is a normal, healthy, human trait.

Alternatively, if they know that what they have done is not okay, they may not confront the victim at all, and will instead simply start giving them the cold shoulder, or being passive-aggressive towards them publicly. Or, if they read some private information about the victim, they will start talking about issues affecting the victim, and will feign ignorance about knowing that it affects the victim.
This is particularly toxic, because it is so hard to prove. The manipulator will always deny doing these things, because they know they are in the wrong, and they know that admitting they are punishing the victim for something they said privately means admitting that they violated the victim’s privacy.
This can lead to a gaslighting effect on the victim, because they don’t know what is wrong, and they may start to suspect that the manipulator has read their journal. But they can’t prove it, and the manipulator will not admit to any of it, so they have to start questioning themselves. They start telling themselves that they’re being over-suspicious, and that they are being “crazy” for suspecting something.
All of this plays nicely into the manipulators hands.

People who have been subjected to this kind of abuse often take to having “decoy” journals. Whether they’re online blogs or physical diaries, they keep semi-private, for the abuser to read, and have their true thoughts documented elsewhere, under tighter security.
This behavior is absolutely indicative of being psychologically abused by having their privacy violated, either currently or in the past.

In the case of the “safe place” being a group or event, the tactics employed by a manipulator to prevent the victim attending can, again, range from covert to overt.

This one is also complicated by the ages of the people involved, especially if the abuser is a care-giver and the victim is a minor in their care. It can also be influenced by the child rights laws per country.
If the abuser and victim are both legally adults (even if they are parent and their adult child), then it is less complicated and more obviously outright abuse.

The manipulator will usually start trying to prevent their victim gaining access to their safe place because they have noticed that the victim is pulling away from them in some way. Either the victim no longer obeys them without question, the victim is more confident in their body or hobbies, or the victim is simply not as scared anymore when the abuser tries to scare them.The abuser will notice that they are losing control. They may read it as a slight, or as abandonment.        (many manipulative people site a fear of abandonment as their driving force for their restricting and isolating behaviors. This is not an excuse and does not make it okay. They need help for their abandonment issues, not to be allowed to abuse others).

They will try and pull the victim back under thumb, and prevent them accessing this outside influence. Overt tactics involve the manipulator explicitly telling the victim they are no longer allowed to see particular friends or go to particular events. No reasoning will be given for this, often no discussion of the subject will be allowed, they will simply forbid it.
If discussion is attempted, they may shut it down by saying that “you don’t respect me if you want to disobey me”, or may even manufacture a sob-story to guilt-trip the victim into doing as they are told.
Or, they may be more covert, and simply always have other plans come up when the victim is due to go out. They may suddenly say “no, you cant go out until you’ve finished this long list of chores!” or “oh, but I need you to stay home tonight to do xyz”. This will be something that has not been discussed previously, and is suddenly put upon the victim forcing them to cancel last-minute.
      A truly intelligent, toxic, abuser may even pretend that they did tell the victim before hand about this task on this day, they will tell the victim that they must have forgotten, and gaslight the victim into believing that they simply forgot.

Some manipulators may try to come with the victim to the events or to see the friends.
This is more obvious as a sign something is wrong when the abuser is a parent accompanying child (even if the “child” is an adult themselves now). It can be very hard to spot as a manipulation tactic if both parties are either partners or friends. Because it is normal for a partner to want to meet their significant others friends, and it is normal for a friend to want to be introduced to your other friends.
However, if they start to prevent you seeing them alone, especially if they give a sob-story about why you cannot see your other friends without their presence, then something is deeply wrong.

It is important here to note that many victims who start to notice that their abuser is giving them the cold shoulder, are often accused by that abuser of engaging in this isolation tactic!

Fortunately, the simple way to tell the difference is to ask about how they behave otherwise. Often, the victim who is being cold-shouldered will be able to point to other manipulative behaviors shows by the abuser, and will mention that they have been cold and standoffish at home, as well as no longer inviting them out.
A manipulator who is trying to isolate their victim will often resort to claiming that the friends or event are “bad” in some way and that they are protecting the victim.

It is also important to establish the connection each party has with the event or group of friends. If the victim introduced the abuser to the other friends, and the abuser is now seeing those friends while excluding the victim, they may accuse the victim of “trying to prevent them seeing ‘their’ friends”, but in truth the manipulator is deliberately isolating the victim from their own support network, and painting it as abuse, trying to gaslight the victim in to believing they are in the wrong. 

WHEN I WANT TO BE UGLY


I sit in the shower when I want to be ugly,

Slouched and round.

I let my ankles

dig into the plastic floor of the tub

Until I can feel pain in the bone.

I let the water run

Too hot and too cold,

Stinging that disgusting back

and shoulders

I am crumpled beneath.

what’s become of me?

insta- thejournalingrat

a bit lonely

insta- thejournalingrat

Emi: IchimatsuAmi: OsomatsuOsomatsu venting out his anger at Ichimatsu when everyone else left the hEmi: IchimatsuAmi: OsomatsuOsomatsu venting out his anger at Ichimatsu when everyone else left the h

Emi: Ichimatsu
Ami: Osomatsu

Osomatsu venting out his anger at Ichimatsu
when everyone else left the house. ( episode 24 inspired )

Bonus: Ichimatsu his fetish kicking in and osomatsu getting weirded out.
We are so sorry….

——–
Drawing is made by Emi and Ami,
please do not use without permission :)


Post link

furiousgoldfish:

you don’t have to prove that someone is abusive in order to cut them out of your life, if they’re wasting your time and energy, draining you, making you feel miserable, putting way less effort in communicating than you are, blocking your thoughts and opinions, triggering you, making you cry, causing you pain, making you feel awful about yourself - you can cut them off with no further reason needed “I need different things in life right now” is a reason enough.

closet-keys:Sign that you’re in an abusive relationship. If you find yourself thinking the above t

closet-keys:

Sign that you’re in an abusive relationship.

If you find yourself thinking the above thought, please be careful of emotional abuse. 

Remember: 

  • You are worth more than your use to them.
  • You deserve more than being a sacrifice. 
  • Anyone who makes you feel like the best thing you can offer is being destroyed is encouraging you to feel worthless and justifying harm against you. 
  • They are not worth your destruction. 
  • You cannot fix them. 
  • You cannot fix them. 
  • You cannot fix them. 

Post link

pilkloaf:

No autistic person deservesto be bullied. No autistic person brings bullying upon themselves by being too “weak”, “socially inept”, “awkward”, “weird”, “stupid”; etc ad infini blah blah yadda. Neurotypicals/allistics who use that as an excuse to harass and make fun of us are the weak ones. You have a piece of cooked spaghetti for a backbone if you think it’s appropriate to set upon someone who, for whatever reason, isn’t, or may not be, equipped to fight back.  

Anyway

When dad calls from prison, it is mostly just to hear himself talk.

Sometimes I have these moments of clarity and I recognize that I know my dad far better than he has or will ever know me.

I am not a person to him, I am a symbol.

Something he has done in his life. A marker of time and he believes an investment he has made.

If I were his investment, though, there would have been little growth - even over a 23 year period.

It is not that stocks are down, it’s that the one time contribution was too small and the withdrawals, however microscopic each one was, added up to something almost equal to the deposit.

He is willing to see the fault in others but will not admit the flaws in himself. 

My sister shares this facet of his personality but she puts my mother’s name on that deed of ownership and while my mother is a smart woman and she does not claim that responsibility, she has the good sense to see the choices she made that went awry.

“What’s done is done. We’ve all made mistakes we have to move on from,” I tell him when he argues for his presence as our father.

My favorite photo of my he, my sister and myself is one where we are sitting on him - shaking him as he sleeps under the covers of the hide-a-bed in the living space of the trailer we called home.

“Go wake up dad,” Mom directed us toward her husband one early afternoon as he slept off a long night of Coors, presumably. 

What’s done is done. We all make mistakes.

“Your mom exaggerates.”

“I love you, anyway,” I say.

“I’ll call you next week,” he says. “I love you.”

Sometimes I feel as though you are not so much taught morals from your parents as much as you are raised according to their trauma responses

furiousgoldfish:

abusive family activities:

  • inventing new things to criticize and humiliate the scapegoat for
  • planning events without ever telling the scapegoat
  • yelling at scapegoat for not working on these events
  • preforming to be a ‘nice happy family’ for guests and neighbours
  • putting more energy in entertaining others than caring for family members
  • talking about all the people who are ‘worse’ than them and how good they are in comparison
  • asking scapegoat for favours
  • criticizing scapegoat for never being good enough
  • bonding over mutual joy of humiliating and putting down the scapegoat
  • rejoicing in how much better they all are than the scapegoat
  • joining to have family fun while excluding the scapegoat to show they’re all happy without them
  • lashing out at the scapegoat as soon as anything goes wrong
  • directly blaming the scapegoat for any other family member’s abusive behaviour
  • emotionally manipulating the scapegoat so they don’t leave, convincing them the more abusive members 'care down deep inside’ and 'show it when scapegoat isn’t around’
  • rejoicing in traditions of abuse to point out how things have been worse for people in the past so the scapegoat should just get over it and get over themselves
  • joined gaslighting to drive the scapegoat insane
  • passive-aggressive remarks to provoke and aggravate the scapegoat, only to play victim few seconds later, knowing other family members will side with them
  • telling the scapegoat 'you are abusing us, actually’
  • taking out their frustrations with each other on the scapegoat
  • using scapegoat as emotional support then turning their back as soon as family bullying gig is up again
  • aggressively downplaying, ignoring or downright trashing the scapegoat’s success to feel safer in their own lack of accomplishments, putting scapegoat 'back into place’ to convince them they’re worthless still and it was mere luck or a mistake or 'not that hard to do’
  • playing their own accomplishments up and expecting scapegoat’s admiration and support
  • acting 'holier than thou’ and throwing 'you see? This is how I…’ speeches at the scapegoat to affirm their superiority and capability
  • making fun of the scapegoat for not knowing a piece of information that was never available to them
  • catastrophizing on what would happen to the scapegoat without the family, trying to terrify them into staying out of fear for survival
  • arguing and yelling, causing drama, nastily attacking each other and fighting to be the 'main authority’ or 'getting their way’ or to be prioritized in every case
  • only ever agreeing on one thing: that the scapegoat is incompetent, a burden, undeserving of attention or support, irredeemable, fair to bully, and guilty for all of this

Finally wrote another FFF! This one’s for my Masks: A New Generation OC Ashton Lovelock (art by Chealinks on Twitter) - all that matters is that he’s a magical prettyboy with an emotionally abusive family/legacy.

@flashfictionfridayofficial


tw: implied emotional abuse, anxiety/hypervigilance

FFF: Asking For Permission


He is always so very careful in how he asks for things.

He has to be- because in this house, every word is a knife. Everything is vivisected, picked apart and analyzed and if it’s found to be improper, lacking grace, lacking respect then it’s just another reason for a talk in front of the family hearth with Great Grandmother.

(they call it a talk, but he never speaks)

So he’s careful. He sits with perfect posture, his face impartial but his heart slamming against his ribs and his muscles one twitch away from spasms, and he rehearses how he’s going to ask them. He looks at the dark, ornate walls and he thinks-

May I-

no

If I may-

no

There’s this boy-

no

Fuck.

Try again.

He takes a breath. Holds it for a ten count. Then he exhales, his eyes fluttering shut, and he tries again.

I finished my schoolwork. And I was invited to an event tomorrow evening. May I attend?

Don’t mention the schoolwork. She’ll just tell you to do next week’s work too.

Try again.

I was invited to an event tomorrow evening. May I attend?

What event? With who?

(and he knows what he wants to say, he wants to say it’s a boy, it’s a really cute boy and a really nice boy and one of the only fucking people to treat me like i’m worth something but he can’t say that so instead he thinks)

A classmate invited me. It’s a small get-together. Social.

Don’t bore her with details. Just the facts. Just the facts and just leave out that “small” means “the two of us” and that “get-together” means “date”. Because if he says that then he knows she’ll look at him with those dead eyes, flat and unfeeling and she’ll say

Ashton. You know better.

(because the family comes first, the family and the legacy and every single ounce of responsibility that comes with being a lovelock and it doesn’t matter if he’s suffocating because they’re all suffocating together)

Put it all together.

Event. Tomorrow evening. May I. Classmate. Social.

He takes a breath. Composes himself. And as he stands up, walking evenly down the winding staircase, he prays that he doesn’t have to try again.

rue-cimon-deactivated20220509:

complicated relationships with parents be like

you sacrificed so much for me but i sacrificed so much for you and i wish you’d just go away and leave me alone. don’t leave me; i’m scared when you’re not there with me. can you give me this? i don’t want anything from you. i can never forgive you. do you forgive me? i don’t care for what you have to say to me or what you think of me. are you proud of me? i am free. let me in. i’m not your therapist. it’s ok, i’m here to listen. did you ever love me? i love you so much that it hurts and i hate you so much that it might just make me bleed. give me a hug? i can never not love you. do you feel the same way? do you even know i feel this way? do even know what i feel? did you ever care?

And they’re also paying for your college tuition

Trigger warnings apply. Requested by anon.
(Disclaimer: not all of these sentences are manipulative in a different context, and some can be used jokingly as well.)

“If you really cared about me, you’d do what I’m asking.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I wish I never met you, honestly.”
“You’re the reason I’m upset.”
“It’s all your fault.”
“I guess you just don’t love me enough.”
“You have to keep it a secret. I’ll find out if you tell anyone.”
“Whatever. It’s not like I care.”
“I could just leave, you know.”
“Do you like them more than me?”
“Who have you been talking to?”
“I would do anything to make you happy, I just want you to do the same for me.”
“You have to tell me. Not telling me is just as bad as lying.”
“It would be so easy for me to find someone else.”
“If you loved me, you’d tell me.”
“It’s like you don’t even care about me.”
“One day I’ll be dead and you’ll regret not being there when I needed it.”
“Nobody really cares about me, not even you.”
“No one will ever love you the way I do.”
“If you leave me, I don’t want to even think about what I’ll do.”
“I’ll just tell everyone you were abusing me.”
“You have to. You owe me.”
“I’ve made sacrifices for you, now you have to do the same.”
“I’ll never forgive you.”
“No, it’s fine. Just do whatever you want, I guess.”
“Am I upset? Why, should I be?”
“If you don’t come over tonight, I’m going to hurt myself.”
“I never said that. You’re trying to confuse me.”
“I think you hate me.”
“I would do anything for you, so why wouldn’t you do the same?”
“If you don’t do this, it’s because you don’t love me.”
“You were there for them, but not me?”
“Yes, if you love me, you would change for me.”
“I’m wasting my time with you.”
“Well, I guess I’m just useless, aren’t I?”
“I know you didn’t say it, but you were thinking it.”
“You hate me. I know you do.”
“You can’t convince me I’m not just a burden to you.”

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