One of the really cool things about the skull smashing machine that is my life is that my mother will have these evident lapses in awareness where she does shit she doesn't remember, or she loses significant portions of conversations that she can't recall minutes later. Which is an awesome gesture to have when your father likes to gaslight both you and just as likely your mother. Plus his number one move is to pick a fight with me, I tell him to not treat me that way, he does a bunch of crazymaking shit on me to make me as angry as he can, and then tells my mom that I just came into the room, like, screaming at him over nothing. My mother will just reflexively take his side.
The house is just straight up making me sick. In the upstairs bathroom, we have a rotting floor joist. There's bad mold in the shower that nobody will do anything about, because my dad now doesn't want to spend a bunch of money fixing up the house, because he wants to sell it at some point. But in the past, he just wouldn't do anything about it. The rotting floor joist is a serious issue. A couple years ago, I tried getting him to acknowledge it. He told me it was my fault, because I'm too tall, and the water was splashing off of my chest, over the shower door, and onto the floor. This is a pretty succinct metaphor for my relationship with him. Today he came to me, said he was going to the grocery store, asked if I needed anything. I asked him what was in the order he was picking up. He then became belligerent and exasperated. I told him not to treat me that way. Then he started crazy making and shit, kept escalating, kept being like "no I didn't" when I told him literally exactly what he just did that was bothering me, that I needed him to stop doing. All this was to make sure we had the ingredients for a dinner I was planning on making. Literally nothing I say is able to make him stop treating me in ways that I find hurtful. I'd happily not interact with him if he hadn't made the house such a complete mess that I have to go through him to do basically anything. I keep telling him that the stress from how he treats me and the environment is making me sick, and he just ignores me. I tell him i won't let him ignore me, and he says "I'm not" and then doesn't say anything. Then he gets all "there's nothing I can say" because I won't let him belittle me, condescend me, or try to gaslight me. Made a realization with my mom earlier tonight; he keeps acting like this because he faces no consequences. She makes up reasons to justify his behavior. She assumes he just doesn't understand what I say to him. Sometimes he pretends not to understand to make me explain myself over and over and over, and then he just bickers with me. She's called him "retarded" more than once. But he does it because he gets away with it. He used to be very physical with me, as a kid. He gets angry at me when I bring it up now, and tells me it didn't happen, but if it did, I deserved it, because I was "defiant." The way Jack Torrance calls Danny "willful" sends a slug up my spine. He generally stopped getting physical with me when I was 15, and I got bigger than him, and I pinned him to a door by the neck when he tried to get on me. He faced a consequence. He stopped. But now, basically any time I open my mouth, he'll likely just start being abusive in one way or another. Because he knows I won't hit him. Though he has picked about four physical fights with me in the last year and a half. The worst one had him threaten to beat me over the head with a coffee mug, which turned into a little grapple, and then he tried grabbing a pan to hit me with, and I just got him in a hold until he dropped it.
The stress from all this makes me almost pass out sometimes. Makes my head hurt a lot. Makes things worse. But he just keeps doing it. Dude needs me to be his fucking punching bag. He's basically sabotaged my whole life to stay in control. It's kept me sick, stuck in place, and emotionally mangled. To get out from under it, I need to be able to get better. To get better, I need him to stop doing this all the time, and for the house to be improved. He wants to maintain control over everything, and he wants to treat everyone however he wants, so I can do literally nothing to make anything change. My mom says she doesn't know what to do, but she won't set any boundaries. Even after my dad starts arguments over nothing and then makes them physical. She just keeps excusing the behavior.
This, on top of my illness. On top of my harassment, and getting darvo'd by the Washington culties, and getting dropped by a bunch of friends. My whole life is just being on edge and getting treated like shit.
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