strap in for Unwell About Charles Rowland hours!
been thinking about charles and the fundamental feeling of betrayal and loneliness that can come with not having the type of family situation or childhood that society expects. the sense of not being able to talk about a part of himself and his experiences that’s too heavy for most people, so couching it in humor, and then the humor not landing. that ever-present sense that there are things others are not going to understand, that he doesn’t want them to understand, that they shouldn’t have to, because it just should have been different.
the self-raising and re-parenting that could have come later on, if he had gotten to grow up, but he didn’t, and so he’s just got the intervening years of his afterlife - distancing him from it but not really taking away that void that’s always a little bit there.
the complex grief over the idea of what a relationship with his dad could have been or should have been but wasn’t - because the reality wasn’t something missable, but maybe there are moments, of wishing to be whatever different sort of person he would be, if things had been different, and not even knowing what that looks like but wishing for it anyway.
the grief over the way it changed his relationship with his mum - how much he still loves and misses her, and checks on her for decades. how he couldn’t protect her or himself, and how he should never have had to think about doing either.
the idea of forgiveness - as something that society expects as much as the individual - the way forgiveness is good for personal healing, but is so often presented as more of an obligation or a foregone conclusion - because parents are automatically forgivable for being parents, right? and bullies grow up, and mature, and change, and and and. but what if he doesn’t feel ready to forgive his father, or his bullies? what if he doesn’t feel ready ever?
and even if he does practice forgiveness - it might bring him peace of mind, but it still doesn’t give him back the things that were missing that should have been there, doesn’t go back in time and undo the things that were wrong, doesn’t fix the fact that it just shouldn’t have been like that to begin with. and understanding *why* it happened doesn’t make it better really. it doesn’t fix how it all just never really goes away in the end.
and of course the anger, which is so futile because it has nowhere really to be directed any more, now that he’s a ghost, now that the worst possible thing to have happened has happened to him and he died. anger that maybe none of the people who hurt him will ever truly understand how they hurt him. and the fact that dying has taken him out of his father’s reach - but charles can watch him grow old, and see the very absence of himself in his life.
charles feeling an unfairness in that. an unfairness in the idea that his father got to live, and charles didn’t - and his bullies got to live, and charles didn’t - and how there was no accountability, for his dad or for the boys who killed him. and how accountability still wouldn’t take away the things that hurt him, but maybe it would help. or maybe it wouldn’t. and there’s a helplessness to that. to the idea that maybe there’s nothing that would help - nothing that would really fix it in a way that matters.
and then, of course, the hollowness that comes from disenfranchising himself from his own emotions - the fear that in carrying the anger, the frustration, he’s becoming more like his dad, or like his bullies, because those emotions have brought him nothing but pain. being afraid of how simple and purposeful anger feels, because it feels like a trap he ran from all his life and couldn’t outrun. being afraid to accept that feelings like that could ever be justified, because those emotions hurt him - they aren’t feelings he’s allowed to feel without it meaning that he’s turning into the sort of person he fears most - or worse, maybe has been that person all along, inside.
the idea of wishing for a different sort of connection with his dad, one he isn’t even sure the shape of; but the surest connection he can feel out between them is anger. anger as the thread that binds them together, the thing that makes him “just like his dad,” when he wants to be his own person so badly. and not even knowing what that looks like, when he’s been constructing himself around a void.
and - yeah - don’t know how to sum all of this up better than Unwell Over Charles!!!
