Multiple Maniacs

Not acting was failure. And not doing enough was worse. But how do you explain that kind of guilt at the confessional stand?

The guilt of standing on the shore while everyone you’ve ever loved keeps walking into the sea. The guilt of surviving people who are still alive, but drowning. The guilt that no matter what you do, you are not enough to keep someone from choosing oblivion over tomorrow, and yet, that was your role.

My stepdad drank until his body finally gave out on him. He told me that he wanted to die and the night he went out to the bar I weakly told him not to go. That he didn’t look well. But it wasn’t enough.

A year before he died, he fell down the stairs.

A year later, my mother fell down those same stairs. Two empty vodka bottles on the table and Christmas lights still shimmering. She survived with a brain injury. If I wasn’t there she would have died, and yet she kept going back to the thing that killed her husband and that almost killed her.

Everyone expected me to save her.

All it earned me was being screamed at, blamed, and hit. I became responsible for a woman who refused to save herself. She lies to herself saying that she doesn’t drink, with a glass of whiskey half full waiting for another kiss of her lips. Her loyalty never lied with family, and yet I was expected to uphold that value.

And then there was my brother.

He was always searching for another exit. Marijuana. Shrooms. Fentanyl. Whippets. It never mattered what it was as long as he could escape his reality. He stopped trying to escape his own world and started trying to control mine instead. Holes in walls and destroyed doors turned to bruises and cutting me off from friends. He reached for power the same way our parents reached for bottles. But yet just as our mother couldn’t blame herself, he blamed me for everything. He couldn’t face himself.

No one knows how to stay.

They leave through alcohol.

Through drugs.

Through rage.

Through violence.

Through denial.

Everyone is forever searching for a door out of themselves.

I was the only one who ran in the opposite direction.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Because I left.

I escaped.

An entire family so desperate not to feel alive that they’d rather poison themselves than change. Bottle after bottle. Drug after drug. Lie after lie. Hurting everyone around them because looking inward was somehow more terrifying than death itself.

And somehow I was supposed to fix it.

I was supposed to stop grown adults from walking willingly into their own graves.

Their escape just happened to come in bottles, bibles, or bongs.

Mine came with a packed bag and memory loss.

I’m supposed to feel happy that I escaped. That I’m not like them. But am I truly not like them? I inherited it.

Not the addiction, not the anger, not the denial or helplessness.

But the grief. The misery, that was passed down to me instead of any heirloom. And the guilt.

Based on our experience and the experience of friends we've listened to; after the cut

System communities need to get normal about littles who have other “adult” roles

System communities need to get normal about abuser introjects

System communities need to get normal about RAMCOA/OEA survivors

System communities need to get normal about systems who’s trauma wasn’t parental abuse and/or sa (this is not me saying that people who did go through that are invalid, but that theres a lack of resources or support for different types of trauma)