My journey is, of course, extremely complicated and bogged down by the fact that I’m chronically ill and disabled. I moved back in with my parents in 2015 because holding down a “normal” job, even a part-time one, was no longer on the table.
As such, there are many “extremely obvious things” someone else might be able to do that I cannot consider as real options.
Things like moving out. I left my entire social circle and relationship of 11 years back in Boston to move back in with my parents in a country I hadn’t lived in since I was 12, for Reasons.
I say “mentally moving away” and not “healing”, because “healing” is obscured to me for now. Because living with my parents, particularly my mother, feels like living in the midst of a tornado-ridden minefield. I’m not certain true healing can happen without sufficient distance from the minefield, not when it’s either stepping on mines or being scoured by debris whipped along by gale-force winds.
And that’s progress, of a sort, if strange and sad progress.
Not expecting miracles from a mortal body and mind is a good foundation for building what I need.
The first step, I think, is being able to look at something and be capable of pinpointing it to be Not Good.
My upbringing and general-media-at-large makes me extremely wary of labeling things as “abusive”. In similar fashion to how general culture has made people overly touchy about being told their actions or words are racist.
That’s a problem, but one for later. I’m still thinking about what the very first steps are.
Setting aside the word “abusive” because that brings up ghosts of people shouting about filial piety and about how wonderful mothers (all mothers) are and that lamentable saying of how if you’re wounded by something it’s because you were too soft to begin with…
Setting it aside; the first and hardest thing is and was getting to a point where I can look at a thing and objectively label it as Not Good For Me.
In a masterstroke of irony, the chronic illness has helped with that.
I start doing poorly when temperatures rise above 25C (77F). If I sweat, which I start to do at about 26 C, I begin a slow slide towards exhaustion and dizziness. Once I get heat exhaustion, which is lamentably easy (once happened in the shade, at a piddling 32C (about 89F), it takes a few days to a week to recover.
That is fact. Unfortunate fact, because I live in the subtropics and electricity is expensive and limited here sometimes during the summer, but fact.
So knowing that to be fact, it is a decent touchstone for gauging someone’s behaviour.
Insisting the a/c remain off while also insisting on a “properly cooked meal” twice daily is Not Good. Particularly as we have a gas range and standing in front of an open flame can get…interesting.
Knowing that I get light-headed and dizzy when I start sweating profusely and insisting that I turn off the a/c for a while every day so I can visibly sweat because “sweating is good for detoxing and therefore good for my health” is Not Good.
Constantly using the reason of “electricity is expensive” to keep the a/c off while also refusing to take my offer to help pay for my portion of the a/c bill because I have no reliable income is Not Good.
It reminds me of learning to eat a whole fish.
Nothing objectively wrong with fish bones — they just stick in your throat sometimes and in extremely rare and unfortunate cases can do very bad things to your intestines.
And if you can get your nutrition elsewhere, then perhaps you don’t need to eat a whole fish.
But if that’s the only food around…then it’s best to learn how to tell bones from meat and figure out how to spit out the undesirable bits.
Once something has been correctly identified as Not Good, and that’s a whole process on its own, deciding if something has been correctly labeled or not…
Then it makes certain aspects of dealing with a certain person easier.
If someone who claims to care for you insists on shoving fish bones down your throat — that’s something to think about.
If they do it while claiming it’s For Your Own Good, that’s something else to think about.
And if they get extremely agitated and angry when you try to tell them that you don’t actually like fish bones and that fish bones are not good for you… well then.
Why is all this fuss necessary?
As mentioned earlier, there’s a reflex reaction when “abusive” is broached, particularly when intersecting with ableism and fatmisia and the whole mess of our cultural baggage around filial piety. Not to mention the “mothers are great, always” brainwashing.
But also because too much of the world doesn’t want us to be aware of our discomfort.
Doesn’t want us to be aware when someone is less than kind and considerate to us.
Doesn’t want to deal with the inevitable consequences of when people vulnerable to those in power become aware and start to think of unleashing reasonable consequences to having Not Good shoved down their throats.
I used to think my relatives were only oblivious.
Then, one day, I talked about thinking of going into debt and using my credit card to rent a place so I could get away from my mother and my parents’ endless fighting.
And the two people I used to love most in my extended family and who I thought loved me back, my godmother and grandmother both told me they didn’t want me to move out because it would be bad for my mother.
Because my mother needed a keeper and who better to do it than a daughter.
Very Like Water For Chocolate where the youngest daughter must remain single to take care of her mother in her old age, but in their eyes less evil on their parts because I was single anyway and chronically ill and living at home for free.
It was then I realized that so much of their minimizing, their endless repetitions of how my mother really truly loved me, their refusals to even vaguely condemn my mother’s worst irrationalities… how much of it was because they didn’t want to deal with reality, and they didn’t need to so long as I was conveniently a plug in the dyke.
Perhaps some part of it was and is because they also grew up abused and “that’s simply how life is”.
There was that stunning conversation one day a few years back where some aunties were trying to convince me to find someone to get married, no matter if it would be a worse life than being single, because “that is just how life is”.
But no.
Life doesn’t have to be filled with fish bones, shoved down your throat in the name of calcium and testing your character and other such balderdash.
And Doing The Right Thing doesn’t have involve refusing fish forever, particularly when it’s pragmatic to keep eating the fish.