Down in the dark... in Like No One Is Reading

Every little thing agitates me. Every social media post triggers something inside me, some long-lost memory or emotion, some outrage or some pain.

The most recent, just minutes ago, was something someone overheard in a check-out line, a woman saying to her husband, “We can give your cousin a pile of dog shit for all I care.” My first thought was, “People buy gifts for their cousins?” And then, “Of course they do. The fact that you don’t know any of your cousins and haven’t had contact with any of them in like half your life isn’t normal. Other people actually love and are loved by their family members.”

And then I wallow a little bit over the fact that I don’t have any family left and how that’s all my fault because it was my choice to cut myself off from them and it’s not like I’ve tried to reach out… Oh, wait a minute. That’s right, I haven’t tried to reach out to any of them because none of them have tried to reach out to me, either. Because, some years ago, when I couldn’t stay silent any longer about my hateful, bigoted, racist sister and an aunt who was the same, they made sure that everyone (and boy, do I mean everyone and their mother and their brother and their cousins and their neighbors) knew what a “terrible person” I am for not being a hateful, bigoted, racist piece of trash like the rest of them. I do not exaggerate this. They smeared me all over Facebook and at family gatherings that no longer included me (but still included my mother, who would relay information I didn’t want or need because she was a gossiper), and they still do - as recently as 2 years ago. People I haven’t had any contact with in over 10 years still bring me up in conversation like they know me.

I’ve held up a front of being okay with all of this because, for the most part, I am. I mean, I don’t want people like that in my life or my kids’ lives. I cannot abide certain things in my presence and a room full of white people dropping the n-word like it’s confetti and they’re at a wedding is one of them. Also, born again Christians, and my sister is one of those, too, and made sure I knew that she believed with all her heart and soul that every bad thing that ever happened to me in my entire life was my own fault, I brought it on myself, by not believing in a fairy sky person. Her and her husband showed up at my front door one day, out of the blue, like fucking Jehovah’s Witnesses, to save my soul. They just knew if I would just listen, and if I would just give their church a try, I would feel differently. I said, “We shouldn’t have this conversation, I will only hurt your feelings and make you angry.” No, no, they insisted, they wouldn’t get angry.

Until I started talking, that was.

That little meeting ended with them literally storming out of my home, red-faced and raging, and that was the end of my relationship with my sister.

And all of this… well.

Well, well, well.

It’s not my fault after all. None of it.

But, you know… sometimes, it hurts. I wish it didn’t. But I also wish I had a family that wasn’t trash.