Today, for the first time, it struck me that I come off as being very nonchalant and comfortable writing about the mistreatment I suffered growing up. Most of the time I'm not especially bothered or triggered or anything from writing them. By and large, singular memories--even the bad ones--don't really upset me to talk about. To a lot of people, this seems to suggest that they haven't had the negative ramifications on my life that I claim. Because, if that were the case, wouldn't talking about it be uncomfortable?
Well, no, it's not. Not usually. A few of them are uncomfortable to think about, but for the most part I haven't written about them and they're some of the more extreme cases. This does not, however, invalidate the fact that I still bear the psychological scars. I'm not exaggerating or faking. They are very much there and very much a real force in my life.
Just because abuse isn't extreme doesn't mean it doesn't count as abuse. My parents didn't chain me up in the garage or anything; I wasn't sold into prostitution; I wasn't beaten with cooking implements except for wooden spoons, which break. A lot of people had--and continue to have--much worse done to them. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would have seen my situation and dreamed of having a life that good. A lot of people, upon hearing that I consider the treatment I experienced at my parent's hands abusive, are quick to snap at me and point out that there are people who have so much worse and I have no right to complain.
But someone always has it worse. Almost no matter what happens to you, someone somewhere at some point is experiencing something even worse.
We don't tell people who are upset over a breakup that they shouldn't be crying because someone else's partner cheated with that person's sister and then married her and moved to Brazil but not before selling the family business and clearing out their bank accounts into private offshore accounts, leaving the dumped party alone and penniless with a bad case of herpes.
We don't tell people who've lost their job that they can't be upset about it because other people have been fired from their jobs and been jobless longer and have no money and their jobs are being made obsolete anyway so it's not like they're likely to get hired for anything more than minimum wage ever again.
We don't tell people diagnosed with cancer that they don't have a right to be devastated because it's only very early colon cancer, for goodness sake, they can usually nip that in the bud and you go on to live a normal life--there are people who have cancer in their hearts or their brains, so you with your pathetic teensy tush tumours don't have anything to bitch about.
Someone, somewhere, has it worse than you. But it doesn't invalidate your own negative experiences. It doesn't deny you the right to be upset. Going by the 'you-can't-be-sad-other-people-have-it-worse' mentality, nobody has a right to be depressed unless they're the most unfortunate person in the world. Which is dumb.
Abuse needn't have been extreme in order to be abuse. It's taken me a very long time to come to grips with the fact that what I experienced was abuse. It wasn't something I considered until recently, in part because I knew that other people were treated way worse than I was. Feeling all depressed about it was silly because it wasn't so bad.
As far as the negative experiences in my life that I have no trouble talking about go, they're not anything serious or horrifying enough to have been especially upsetting on their own. No one of them--again, apart from a few--would have, alone, caused the lasting emotional damage I'm stuck dealing with. But when they all combine, they're greater than their parts--a behemoth of bad experiences from which I have never recovered.
Yes, I survived. No, nothing seriously terrible happened.
But just because it wasn't that bad doesn't mean any of it was okay.
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