beneath the saccharine ‘family’ surface.
The pressure has been mounting for years to re-integrate into the world as it was and as it is for our families. Their stance is like a thinly veiled threat; a hatred toward our audacity to go against their wishes, expectations, desires, demands and fantasies. To be true to ourselves.
Their saccharine smiles fail to cover their deep sense of disdain and repulsion toward all that is true, all that is straight-forward. They would rather we all lived a lie; happy in our monotony, with dead eyes and dirty tricks up our sleeves. They’d rather we used them for their money, their prestige, their power.
The fact that we don’t enrages them. Belittles them. Makes them feel powerless. Powerless over their children. For all they really want is power over. To coerce. To blackmail. To corner. That, they call sanity, “normal life”. That, they worship, on both knees, they’re bowing to this God.
“Love me or else, motherfucker!“
The God they worship is a God they use to guilt-trip, to manipulate, to instill fear. To get what they want without having to do it themselves. Believe it themselves. Their words are empty. Their indifference – ghastly. Their persistence something akin to a nightmare.
“We miss you”, they say, but what they “miss” is their ability to have control over. To get you to fall in line, be an extension of their agendas, pristine masks, glittery cars and socially mummified personas.
Scratch a little beneath the surface and the real deviousness reveals itself. Say “no” a few times and you’ll see a whole other side, a whole other face. You’ll see a plethora of strategies unfold before your eyes. Love-bombing, gaslighting, bombarding, blackmailing, guilt-tripping, silent-treatment, hostility, re-writing history, outright threatening, competing, flying monkeys, sabotaging – all of it.
There is something to be said about keeping your eyes open for all of it. Not turning away. Not denying what you see. But seeing all of it, in it’s nasty, shitty, fucked up, nauseating, repulsive, soul-irking, heart-breaking, messy, vile truth of it. That’s a feat.
They’d rather you died than be real. They’d rather you fake for the rest of your god forsaken life than say a word of truth. God forbid any truth slips out into the room, you’ll see fucking 80 year old’s doing jumping jacks, handstands and cartwheels just to divert the attention and cover whatever truth managed to leak into their dense bomb shelter lives. A real wild performance.
God forbid any truth slips out into the room, you’ll see fucking 80 year old’s doing jumping jacks, handstands and cartwheels just to divert the attention and cover whatever truth managed to leak into their dense bomb shelter lives. A real wild performance.
If you want to see respectable, ‘by the book’ people turn into circus freaks in the blink of an eye, just breathe truth.