a letter to my brother
a person whose default is to tear down in order to validate himself fights an internal struggle you can’t understand. i hope one day we can talk about what that struggle looked like for you. i'll never understand how easily, how mindlessly, a hurt person will hurt… incessantly… for years and years… becoming so normalized… ignored by our parents… deemed your personality trait.
i only have a few vivid memories from Bartlett Hill. in one that i’ll never forget, we were probably six and eight. i cannot remember the context of the situation. we sat on the floor, mom bustled in the kitchen, who knows where Peter was. you looked me square in the eyes and told me that i was stupid. kids call each other names all the time, big whoop. what i'm trying to figure out is... why you did it repeatedly… systematically… remorselessly… directly… indirectly… for a decade straight. from my first recollection of consciousness up until we could legally share a drink together. i never had a bully at school, i had you at home.
i’m not sure what compelled you to spend 18 years convincing me that i was lesser than you. and convincing me that, no matter what any woman accomplishes or demonstrates, she will never compare to the comparable male in her field… to you? i got straight A’s, i started at center midfield, i had relationships (unlike you), i went to a better college. by all accounts of objective reality, i was doing alright. i excelled. but inside my head, i couldn’t breathe i felt so inferior to you.
invasive weeds suffocated my brain, constricting my reasoning and distorting my objective worth. you must have begun planting these weeds before i reached kindergarten. and you were diligent. you watered the weeds every day… as I moved from Mrs. Mortenson to Mrs. Porter, from flip phone to iPhone, from pre-algebra to trig, from To Kill a Mockingbird to Pride and Prejudice, from JV to Varsity, from pretending Pete was okay to visiting him in Minnesota. you barely missed a day of watering.
you took such great care of the weeds in my brain that each spring their fruits fell and took hold, sewing more seeds of self-prescribed inferiority, resentment for my gender and all it entailed, unfounded reverence for any/all older men, an identity-defining need for the validation of male peers. by the time you left for college, the weeds were self-sufficient, you’d trained me to doubt myself all on my own. every interaction, every person i met, i assumed they felt about me how you did. i assumed i’d never be anything unless i worked twice as hard. i assumed no one wanted to hear me open my mouth. i assumed i’d been born lacking something you had.
for a decade and a half, i took your harmful words for objective truth instead of what they really were: projections. each jab was a negation of what i had every indication to believe about myself. and so i’d get out of the bed in the morning to prove these negations false. each of your remarks are tattoos on my brain. i knew you were wrong, but your words, your unimpressed glance, your lack of interest in my existence at all and simultaneous determined interest to assert yourself over me… convinced me otherwise. the way i felt in your presence is a feeling so potently diminishing that it will never leave me until i die.
i'm not sure when we started to excuse hurt men for hurting others. or when our parents stopped wondering if your behavior was normal. or when they should have realized that my brain chemistry was being altered by the bully living in my own home. or when Americans will learn how to raise young men to care about others, to see people different than them as human beings, to treat themselves with loving kindness.
by high school i was pretty worn out. you guys wondered why i would act out… why i would burst… why one joke would open the flood gates… why i gave up trying to enter the conversation… why i waited silently for the end of dinner… why i didn't trust mom, who never protected me from it… why i was quiet at my own 21st birthday dinner when my career path was dad’s punch line… because he knew you'd think it was funny.
i'll never understand how you managed to turn our family into a battle ground, wherein each interaction is every man for himself. a battle for the top of the totem pole, weaponizing our words to bring down the man above us. Sunapee… Orleans… Joshua Tree… King Ferry… Delray… Thanksgiving… Christmas… dinner… dinner… dinner. every dinner. he continued and none of you stopped it, so i learned to shut down. none of you wanted to laugh with me, none of you wanted to get to know me, to hear what i thought. my whole life, the loneliest moments of my childhood i spent with you four.
your cruel humor, your cool and collected misogyny, your superiority complex… it has taken me years to understand the full impact. why do genuine care and kindness make me cringe? why is intelligence the only trait i find important? why can’t i look you in the eyes? why do i make punchlines at my friends' expenses? why can't i shake the feeling that I'm annoying him [boyfriend, guy friend, cousin, teacher, coach] all the time? why can't i ask for what i want in bed? why can't i raise my hand when i know the answer? why do i assume my male coworkers underestimate my abilities? why do i default to overestimating theirs?
i want there to have been a reason. i wish you'd gone through something horrible, something i could point to, for my therapists' sake. i wish you were unpopular and isolated… or low-achieving and un-athletic… or cursed with, like, Napoleon’s height or Hitler’s IBS. but you weren’t. there is no logical explanation, no clarity in retrospect. and, so, why? why did i undergo years of irreversible conditioning to hate myself? why did you got through all that effort? the only answer i’ve been able to conjure1 and genuinely believe is that— cut from the same cloth of an emotionally unavailable mother— one of us drew the internalizer2 card and the other the externalizer3.
i used to imagine the feat which would one day liberate me from your cruelty. some item i’d accomplish that would definitively prove you were wrong about me all along. that i was just as smart, as capable, as valuable. i must have been just 10 years old when i began to yearn for the day i’d free myself, unequivocally, from your ridicule… your autocratic rule over the conversation… the way you influence our father… the way you reduce me to irrelevancy… the way you pretend not to notice me on periphery of the conversation… the way you pretend not to notice how badly i want your approval… the way you can disparage so nonchalantly… the way you conditionalized my worth… the way you made me resent our mother for her inability to provide me a shred of evidence against your misogynistic arguments.
in my line of thinking, when i accomplished this imaginary feat (some athletic or academic or career achievement) then finally you, along with the rest of our family— strangers to my true personality— would finally see who i am. you'd realize your mistake in underestimating me. maybe you'd even respect me. maybe you'd even look up to me. maybe you'd realize some form of an apology was in order.
but now i see that there is no redeeming event, nothing i can do to prove my worthiness to you. i now understand that the day of reckoning was never going to come; i see so vehemently, so clearly, that it was never about me. it was always about you. likely some internal battle stemming from immense pain and neglect from our mother, the same one who failed to protect me from you.
time after time, i proved you wrong. i kept outdoing myself, i kept achieving. but it never mattered, you wouldn’t have granted me the respect i deserved no matter what i accomplished. i endured years of projections because i was close by, i was your easy target. now, knowing that there is no goal post to reach, no singular feat to strive for in the pursuit of your respect, is the greatest freedom. i no longer care what you think of me, i just have to figure out— for the first time in my entire life— what’s actually important to me, beyond the approval of this family.
as we enter our mid-20’s, you’ve thankfully grown out of actively provoking me. sickeningly, you’re happy to pretend like none of it ever happened… to just quietly transition from your role as in-home bully to that of detached, across-the-country brother we won’t see until Thanksgiving. you’ll disappear, without an apology, probably ever. but i am moving on with grace, with gratitude to be inside of my mind instead of trapped in yours, with gratitude that your doubt motivated me, in some fucked-up way, to become my most bold, proud, diligent, humble, driven self.
in fact, i thank you twofold. not ONLY, in my life’s purpose of vying for your respect, did i forced myself out of my comfort zone, into male-dominated spheres and environments, to long nights in the library and hill sprints each summer, to an intensive major and a bright future… but ALSO, coming out on the other side, i’ve gained an understanding of the true impact of my words on others, a learned radical empathy for men who hurt, an unwavering confidence in my ability to chop down the weeds which grow back overnight, and a passion for helping other women see what’s possible for their future, beyond the thorny brush sewn by our fathers, brothers, boyfriends, the people who other us, our culture.
i don't need to keep trying to hurt you back for everything you've done to me… because i see you did it out of hurt all along. i’ve healed from you, and, again, i hope one day we can talk about what your hurt was. because you deserve to heal too.
i love you
with the help of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
“Internalizers are highly perceptive and extremely sensitive to other people. Because of their strong need to connect, growing up with an emotionally immature parent is especially painful for them. Internalizers have strong emotions but shrink from bothering other people, making them easy for emotionally immature parents to neglect. They develop a role-self that’s overly focused on other people, along with a healing fantasy that they can change others’ feelings and behaviors toward them. They get by on very little support from others and end up doing too much emotional work in their relationships, which can lead to resentment and exhaustion.”
https://naswwv.socialworkers.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=EceKGROgW2Y%3D&portalid=13