[iliftmylids]

Here’s what I fantasize about: they finally hit me. I’m dragged or beaten or slapped and for once I can actually run to someone else and say, “Help me, please, I’ve been hurt.” I’m told it’s okay, I won’t get hurt again. That what they did was wrong.

But they’d never do that. I won’t be hearing that. They’re fundamentally good people, my parents. One has saved a entire family from the house fire. The other has helped numbers of people with grief counselling. My stepfather, my mother. Why do I feel so strongly?
When we’re home it’s different. He’s not cracking jokes or speaking loudly anymore. She’s not an icon of peace and positive energy. When we get back inside, when we’re in the car out of earshot, when nobody’s there to see it, I’m nobody. I’m there to see it.

He’s tense. Stressed. He hates his job. He hates distractions. He hates his hours. He hates that I’m still afraid of him. I shouldn’t be, he says. He gave me everything. He pays for everything. He raised me from five and up. I should be grateful. Why am I not grateful?

She’s tired. Happier, possessing a better relationship with me. But fatigued. Strained.
There’s a considerable difference now than there was then. I’m not sure when it became the past. When I was a much smaller child, there was sickness in my head. I think they were sick too.
I remember hissing through clenched teeth. I remember being grounded for 6 months when I ended up saying no. I remember being scared to go home, scared to walk back into a place where I was walking on eggshells, trying not to add a week to my sentence, trying not to have my door taken off its hinges again, trying not to get snapped at.

I remember a lot of words. “Mistakes can always be prevented” was one thing that stuck. I heard it many times, but the most distinct was his yelling and my crying over what was quite literally a spilled glass of milk.
His apologies, briberies, points to bring up in disagreements now, they’re made of plastic. He buys obligatory “thank you”s with three dollars for a packet of gummies. Speaking with him makes me feel bad about myself. There’s always something from the past he brings up. “Remember when you ate the truffle I was saving?” (two years ago). “Remember when you cried on Christmas?” (mind you, I was eight).
He wears really nice dress shoes. He smiles at his customers. His coworkers are in good hands with him as their manager.

“Oh yeah, I’m sooooo mean, go tell everybody how horrible and cruel I am. Obviously I’m just the worst person alive for pointing it out when you’re wrong.”
He’s said that after bringing up a time I lied about my grades. Five years ago.
“Why are you eating right now? Didn’t you have some of the fruit I was saving yesterday? You’re acting like a pig.” accompanied by pig noises.
His later reasoning to me was the following: “I said you were acting like a pig, not that you were one.”

He used to have cameras in the kitchen and dining room. He’d go over feeds and later on call me out on leaving something amiss or being up late. As of the past few years they are defunct, but the audio recording still works for the living room setup.
He used the front door camera to grill me about things I brought home, like a few cartons of cafeteria milk I was given from surplus, or a few pinecones to put on my shelf. He still does.

He doesn’t seem to think I’m all that smart. I’m talked down to, given constant lectures. I feel the condescension so often.
What’s painful is my little sister’s role in the family.
My little sister (G), one of my favorite people and at the age of seven is in my eyes certainly on the road to being a smart, well-functioning person I’ll be proud of, has never experienced any of this. She’s biologically the child of him and my mother. I’m biologically the child of my mother and a man long dead from the time I was three months in age. I was a byproduct of loving my mother. She was a firsthand result of loving my mother.
I don’t wish any of this would happen to her. I want her to grow with assurance, with confidence. But damn, if the question isn’t always there. Why not me?

My grandfather is the only person to have noticed. I’ve heard it from him a few times. He’s the adult in my family who truly sees me. The only one I need. I’m not the password child for my parents. I’m not the phone background unless I’m in the same picture with my sister. But with my grandfather? I’m his computer password, I’ve been his lockscreen for my whole life. He has documents full of funny things I said as a small child, things I’ve said now. His daily journals, his letters to me. They’re full of love for me. His reprimands aren’t hot anger, but cool sternness that’s far easier to understand. He raised me more than anybody else did. I’m afraid of what I could have been if my only influence had been the fear I felt.
He said to me, “I just can’t fathom how he can be like that to you and cherish her, sometimes in the same breath.”
He saw something.
Just a week ago, my little sister said to me, smiling, not understanding it hurt my feelings, “It’s so funny how dad always yells at you and not me.”
She saw something.

It took so long for me to see something. I was bullied to tears on a daily basis as a young child at school, and at home. I lived afraid of going from point A to point B, and had the same fear of going from point B to point A.
I grew up with that fear.
And fear of just being somewhere, fear that everybody and everything is going to hurt you, that’s a traumatic experience, I’ve been told. By therapists, by counselors, by all the people who give me the little seeds to keep the sicknesses at bay.

I’m diagnosed with chronic depression, comorbid with mood swings. I used to have OCD that quite literally prevented me from leaving my room, lasting for a three year period that agitated everyone and sent me spiraling into panic attacks if I left.

Nonsuicidal self-injury disorder. Atypical anorexia, comorbid with remaining ARFID.
I developed masochism as a self-regulatory disorder in young childhood. I’ve laid awake at night as young as age five, thinking about awful things happening to me and not understanding why it made me happy to imagine being hurt.
If you haven’t caught the drift, there’s some crazy things going on up there at the same time.

My parents are convinced that when I mention, when anybody mentions, that I have some sort of trauma, it’s an attack on their parenting skills.
I’m losing my mind every moment I’m in this house. I’m still on the eggshells.

But nobody believes me. They’ve met my parents and they see the people they are in public.
My aunt, living thousands of miles away and only meeting with my parents a few times a year, called me about it when my mother urged her to. When she said what she thought was happening, I was in shock. Because she was projecting. My grandfather was her stepfather. What she had to say was so obviously personal. “Is it maybe because you feel like your stepfather is replacing your real dad, so you make up all this stuff to justify resentment?” No, ma’am. That’s you. I didn’t know my father. He was dead before I was sentient.

Therapist on therapist has uttered the words: “I just don’t think they’d do that.”
Family member on family member has suggested subtly (not at all subtly) that I’m disturbed, may need help, when I point out anything.

I’ve learned to keep quiet. I’ve been quiet for years. Because nobody, no matter how unbearable it gets for me, is going to believe me. No matter how agitated, how outwardly ill I become. They played no part in my development when it comes to the bad parts. In the eyes of all outsiders, they only ever influenced the best parts of me.

I’m afraid of being in this house for three more years of my life.
I want to be hit.
I want to be hit so I can get out.
And since that won’t happen, I’ll find someone else to hit me. I'll pay someone, I'll convince someone, I'll purposely find a relationship with someone. Just so I can feel the comfort of surefire, non-theoretical hate. Not to pin blame.
Just so I can feel it.