okay i know i said i was going to bed but instead of falling asleep i was just laying awake thinking of this so
plus the whole “my mom’s boyfriend hit me but he was also nice” is straight up enabling psychological abuse.
do you not see how fucking insensitive that is?
is in response to me saying this:
my mother’s boyfriend used to hit me on top of just being an asshole
he taught me how to know the perfect time to flip a pancake and after the first snow of the year when i was seven he built a snowman with me that was just as tall as i was.
i don’t really talk about about my mom’s boyfriend abusing me because … why the fuck would i? honestly i don’t think i’ve ever mentioned it on tumblr before, but in that post it was really important to me that people understand that, hey - i get it. sometimes life is shit, but you can find goodness despite that, even when your circumstances are terrible
clearly that fucking failed because of shit like this
it is absolutely wild to me that anyone thought that it was acceptable to tell me that talking about things i’d found to bring me happiness as a literal child while i was being physically abused meant i was enabling psychological abuse (who’s, exactly? my own?) and that it was insensitive of me to talk about that
let me be clear: i hated that guy
when my mother died i didn’t have to keep it a secret anymore and i was like. hey. this guy’s been hitting me and i don’t want him coming to the funeral. i don’t care that my mom loved him. she’s dead and i’m not and i won’t be in the same room as him again. he went to the wake because i wasn’t there, because i didn’t really want to see my mother’s corpse again because i was, you know
nine years old at the time
did the fact that he taught me when to flip a pancake or how to roast a marshmallow make up for all my bloody noses? did him rolling out of bed in the middle of the night and building a snowman with me cancel out the time he came after me with a metal baseball bat?
of course it fucking didn’t. even when i was happy around him, i still hated him. it’s just that people are complicated
i still think of him every time i flip a pancake, make a marshmallow, or build a snowman. and it’s not a terrible memory. sometimes bad people do nice things. i needed nice things as a child. so what am i supposed to do with them? throw them out because they’re dirty? because they’re bad and don’t belong in my nice clean life?
holding onto good things in bad circumstances is how you make it through the bad circumstances
sometimes you have to take kindness how you can get it. sometimes the good things in your life are not easy, or fair, or the type of things other people would ever categorize as good at all. sometimes your good things are terrible
but they still save your life
if you are in a terrible situation and the only kindness you can find to hold onto is hard and prickly and difficult, that’s okay. if the only kindness you can find is what you’re giving to other people, that’s still more kindness in the world than it would have had otherwise, and i think it’s still worthwhile
if you have to sort through garbage to find two day old bagels to feed yourself, that doesn’t make you a bad person
if you have a make the best of a bad situation, because your only other option is making the worst of a bad situation, you are not somehow responsible or enabling your terrible circumstances
you are surviving, in whatever way you can, until you’re in a place where you don’t need to do that anymore
dumpster diving for kindness isn’t pretty but it will feed you when nothing else will
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