Lucaland - Huh

“I wasn’t an easy child”/“I was a bad child and hard to love” is such an upsetting thing to hear people say. I used to believe it about myself before I got my autism diagnosis and reevaluated my childhood behavior and realized most of it wasn’t born out of a desire to be a difficult little monster. but even if you were an evil child on purpose 24/7, it’s fucked up that your parents/caregivers made you feel that that was just an innate part of you, a literal actual child.

friends asked me to draw a bee with a binky here you guys can have it too

I finally cracked down on the whole ‘why don’t you know this by now’ and ‘you’re too stupid to be independent’ issue with abusive parents so I’m going to break it down.

So lets make two things clear; first: Parents ARE responsible for TEACHING you basics of life, which includes survival, your rights, and basic knowledge that you don’t get in school, and second: Yelling at you for not knowing these things already, is not teaching, and they’re aware of that.

Abusive parents don’t care for their responsibility towards the children at all, but they are very interested in making you useful and appearing as great parents to everyone outside the family. So, if they’re teaching you anything, it’s only for the sake of you doing things for them. Hell, sometimes they’ll just tell you to 'pick it up by watching’ or 'figure it out on your own’ and give you dozens of responsibilities without even asking if you know how, or offering an explanation. Maybe they want you to do menial jobs, maybe you’re responsible for raising your siblings, or restocking groceries and cooking, maybe cleaning or cutting grass or carrying wood or caring for animals; it will be allowed for you to know these things but nothing outside of it, so you wouldn’t start thinking you’re actually competent. You will do all these things correctly and still be called stupid, lazy, worthless, and be reminded that you are nothing without them; all the things you don’t know or can’t do will be thrown into your face, you’re told you are incapable of learning them.

That’s how they get that nice balance of keeping you working for them but still completely in the dark about how to survive without them. The less you know the easier to keep you from leaving; they will sometimes even devalue things you learn at school, just to get your confidence down.

But then, in their infinite masterplan to keep you uninformed, they will forget that it must appear to other people as if you know things, or it will be suspicious; why didn’t they teach their child anything? They’re all pretty paranoid about being found out, so they have to make some counter-measures just in case. So then they gotta paint this picture of 'oh I did teach my child everything! But the child doesn’t listen! If they still don’t know something it’s their own fault!’ And they pre-emptively act as if they have already taught you everything, but you, dumb slob, retained nothing of it. And they need you to act guilty of this in front of other people too, so they’ll often yell at you 'How old are you? How do you already not know this?’ in front of others, as a display of their narrative. They’re saying 'oh we did teach the child and we say it constantly but the kid doesn’t listen even at this age!“

But what it does to you is actually gaslighting. Because you know you never heard this information from them before. They never even came close to comprehensively explaining anything to you. But the scenario playing out in front of you suggests they not only did, but you forgot, and if you try to defend yourself how will you convince anyone that you didn’t forget? It’s a not such a big deal to go fight them on it, but as it happens again and again, you start doubting your memory. Sometimes they even act surprised when you don’t know something, as if they spent days teaching it to you? You start getting worried that you’re missing out on all this vital info, but watch how even when they’re fake surprised you don’t know, they still don’t give you the info! They shame you for not paying attention and what you’re supposed to take from this is to pay attention in the future where they still just never fucking tell you anything relevant ever.

Because it’s just a show of charades to keep all the useful information that would help you to freedom safely hidden away from you, while having you look forgetful and guilty for any witnesses. It’s more likely you’ll learn something asking your neighbour who doesn’t have any stakes in keeping you uninformed.

Being treated like this for long term can make you doubt your own ability to learn, will make you worried that everyone knows more than you and ashamed for being stupid. It will not only discourage you from learning but make sure you have way less context for new knowledge you acquire; you will struggle to place new concepts without the basics and new information will feel arbitrary and irrelevant.

If you want to test if your parents are doing this, try telling them you’re reading resources for abuse; see how quick they are to either devalue or forbid it as a 'wrong and manipulative’, and likely throw a tantrum for good measure to make sure you don’t do it again. Now don’t really do it. If you could have imagined them reacting like this, then yes, they’re definitely aware they’re abusing you and ready to cover it up and isolate you from the information that would have helped you escape.

What you can do is slowly come to terms with the fact that no, you’re not stupid; nobody took the time to actually teach you. The information denied to you, is not actually intimidating and impossible to retain, it’s simply threatening to abusers, but you are capable of learning it. Once you do learn it, it will make sense they wanted to keep it away from you, in fact you will find out among the things they did tell you, there was a lot of guilt-inducing lies. You are not stupid for not knowing. You have had knowledge withheld from you, and then got gaslit into accepting responsibility for it.

There’s this really specific experience in growing up with abusive parents, because they act so emotionally immature at all times. And when you’re a kid, it just feels normal, right? You’re emotionally immature, they’re immature, you’re on the same level, you don’t know any better, you think that’s how humans are. 

But then later, you actually develop some empathy, awareness of other people’s feelings and their inner worlds and thoughts and situations, and you outgrow your parent’s maturity. And at that point you’re just so used to tolerating their shit you don’t even think twice, you’re the adult now, you let them have their way, you forgive and forget, clean their messes, take care of their feelings and make it all okay for them.

But then at one point, you realize you have adults acting like literal spoiled children, when you’ve outgrown this a while ago, and you ask yourself, when they gonna grow? When they gonna develop some self awareness? And then you go and assume they just never had a mature presence in their life so they had no way to learn (which isn’t true because then how did you learn it?), and you go and try to teach them by showing them a good example. You become extra nice, patient, explain things to them, cater to their inner worlds, try to explain to them that there’s people other than them on this world, who have feelings and hearts and deep inner world and this is significant and needs to be respected. But all they ever respond with is “yes I am those people now cater to me”. 

It is impossible to teach abusive parents by showing them a good example. They will insist you do it over and over again, and then exploit your kindness to the max. Literally the kinder you get, the worse they get. They soon expect you to run after their every need, to jump at their every whim, and in return they insult you for a good measure, call you worthless and lazy, then they go to sleep without a care in the world. 

Do not do this. They’re not growing up because they benefit so strongly from acting like a kid. Once all of their immaturity privileges and tolerations are suspended, and they’re forced to act like a proper human being in order to keep gettinng what they want, suddenly they’ll know exactly how to do it. 

Your parents are not immature, they’re abusive. They’re not childish, they’re manipulative. They’re not silly, they’re self obsessed, selfish and forceful. You gave them enough benefit of the doubt, you do not have to wait all your life for them to grow up. Their due for that was long time ago and they have no business expecting you to be their parent.

Nosferatu is so blatant and unsubtle in its depiction of a vampire attack as being analogous to sexual assault, and there will still be people saying ‘you guys are intellectually lazy and Weird for saying so’. alright well he attacks his victim in the night, in bed or summoned from their beds against their will, and they wake up bloody with their clothes torn off, feeling violated. Nosferatu climbs on top of Thomas in bed and assaults him. even later, when they know they’re dealing with a monster or demon, he tries to tell Ellen and can’t, because it’s ‘too foul’. and people claiming Ellen summoned Orlok ‘accidentally on purpose’ is borderline offensive to be honest. she was a child - praying - and she said ‘God, an angel, a spirit, please, anything, comfort me’ - she obviously wasn’t thinking to the dark end of what ‘anything’ could encompass, and the film definitely isn’t about her taking ‘responsibility’ for a problem she ‘created’. in what world is Eternal Evil this girl’s fault in the first place.

i'm such a slut for when a character is morally evil, but worshipped by another character as a deity of some sort. like i love me an absolute freak who doesn't really see the value in human life at all, and there's another, more masochistic freak, jerking off to their aura of inhumanity. a real two-hit combo of "whatever's wrong with this guy is clearly incredibly appealing to this other guy"

Causing distress and pain to another person and then focusing on how that person reacts to it, and criticizing the reaction, as if the reaction and not the abuse is wrong, is in fact, evil. It’s not helping anyone but the abuser divert attention from themselves and abuse they’ve just committed. Abusers have no business criticizing anyone and least of all their victims. Your reactions to abuse were never wrong.

thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.