Chapter 8: Toxic Masculinity

Toxic Masculinity and the Cycle of Abuse

There is this unspoken toxic trait that most men seem to internalize at least for a time. One of these would be the whole peeing standing up thing. I stopped doing this when I lived with my college roommate because it was just considerate if I wasn’t going to be focused enough to clean the bathroom regularly. Piss splashes. Yes, yours too.

Now I did not know that one of my uncles had taken up this habit ages ago. It finally clicked when I was with my Fresno uncle for a short time when I first got back to California. He likes to pee standing up, drunken, and with the aim of making others uncomfortable. When I first got there, there was a hard crust of minerals from his urine that had caked the bowl at the waterline, additionally, there was orange yellow dried piss all over the rim and the counter to the sink. I decided to give my uncle a talk about my choice and why I decided to do it.

1. Uncle: “Your other uncle does that,”

Me: “I guess that makes sense, he would do so for the sake of my aunt.

Seems considerate,”

1. Uncle: “He’s a no dick bitch who squats when he pees.”

That was about as far as I wanted to go in the interaction. I dropped the suggestion and decided that I would not bring it up again. Old dog, new tricks, kind of thing.

That interaction keeps running in my head though. I have heard F. Uncle say that line to the Bay Area Uncle many times in the past. The two have a strange relationship. When he said it I had no idea that it was in regards to this decision, but I understood it was an expression that would happen pretty regularly.

Looking back on this now, I can see some things that are truly concerning. I have heard stories of the same uncle smacking his siblings with wrenches, bits of wood, etc. I remember that his son was really not well cared for with any empathy. There is a pattern here of the desire to shock, irritate, and invade the comfort anyone around him had found.

That part of my family is very “sink or swim.”

When my cousin was having a hard time in class and was failing, this uncle decided that he would sit in on his son’s classes all day. This was obviously part of a humiliation of his son, not about the benefit of helping him get better grades. This was about domination and control.

Domination and control.

When someone feels insecure about their place and anxiety is a factor, lashing out at others becomes a way of regaining a measure of control that they don’t feel that they have. Small dogs bark and everything nervously, right? They have reason, they are tiny and vulnerable towards other larger creatures. It’s mainly a lot of bark, but when they feel cornered, there is also biting.

For a man that was raised by a toxic male the impression is that the toxic male is considered a role model. They are the form of man that their son or daughter will grow up to emulate. If the toxic male is abusive, odds are the son is going to be as well. I know I saw my toxic males in the family as role models. They were men that didn’t take nonsense from others, they were steady in their beliefs, they are not afraid to tell someone a hard truth, they are ready to fight for what they believe in, aren’t they?

Not likely.

Stunted Maturity.

Today I am forty-three and I still feel twenty in my mind. I was not allowed to think about what my future was going to be.

“It’s my job to take care of myself.”

“Who am I?”

“What do I want?”

None of these were in my head for myself. I had no idea who I wanted to be, besides what I didn’t want to be. The most mature thing I did once becoming an adult was deciding not to have children until I was sure that I would be a dad that wouldn’t inflict my trauma on the next generation.

Most of the men in my family don’t seem to really understand that either, as I look back. My step dad was a mechanic, but if he had the support from his family and the desire to return to school, I believe he would have made a great engineer. My F. Uncle has always been a laborer, until the cancer. He owned a tow truck, worked on cars, and had his favorite brand of vehicle manufacturer. He loves his Harley Davidson’s and even went to school to understand their construction and repair to a greater degree.

The short list is; Mechanic, landscaping and maintenance, gun smithing, truck driver, construction, and butcher.

All of these are labor jobs, each one is something that requires constant use of hands and muscle. Only two of my uncles had graduated high school and that was as far as they even considered going. They were sons of laborers. They didn’t see any other path for them, because they didn’t have anyone within higher roles to emulate.

When you deal with labor constantly, you are going to be damaged. Our grandfathers likely all drank to numb that pain, if they were a laborer. I had labor jobs in my past and my back is shot over it. Walking around with fifty pound boxes of apples for ten hours a day isn’t going to do you body any favors.

Now. I see the effects of that self medicating throughout my family. Weed use, alcohol uses, meth, cocaine, and likely others that I am not aware of. When you self medicate, you believe there is no problem. The “medication” is just helping me relax, and it does, but it also does a lot more.

Many of the people I see that self medicate have pretty obvious mental health issues if you know what to look for and can find evidence of your assumptions. Seeing my step dad through the lens of my own growth, he is a bully. Like most bullies, he picks on people smaller or perceivably weaker than him. Now, I outweigh my step dad by at least forty pounds. I am not fat. I have a large build. Wide shoulders and a pretty thick build altogether. If it were my desire, I could likely easily beat the man in a fight. There is likely a reason that he was no longer abusive once I filled out, which I couldn’t do until I left home, because I was malnourished, constantly under stress, and under threat. Food was also a bit of a trigger as I would get thrown from the dinner table at times that I couldn’t eat my vegetables and then thrown towards my room, often into the stone archway wall that separated the dining room from the living room.

I see now, that when I was in junior high school, those that I picked fights with were generally smaller than me, or equal in size. I was thin. I didn’t reach one-hundred and fifty pounds until I was about sixteen, then it stayed exactly that until I could afford food regularly.

My step dad was the junior high me, but with more malice and regularity. As the middle child, my step dad had a brother, older sister, and father all likely to physically dominate him when he was young. The grandfather on that side would chase them around with large branches when he was drunk and they had that as a model. His older brother likely had a similar issue, with his dad being abusive.

Oh! This reminds me. Here is an event that I remember that will show you exactly how much I thought of myself and wanting to be given attention.

One night, my two uncles on my step dad’s side were with me alone at home. I think it was a date night thing, maybe something more distant. I know I was the only other one at home at the moment.

I was often fidgety. I had a lot of questions. I wanted to know more about everything around me. I was also excited to be around my uncles. They were people I cared about as a model for male behavior. My step dad was one way, but they were similar without the pain involved. I was rocking in one of the easy chairs in the living room. There was a second easy chair that the oldest uncle was in (more of this need to hold position, because he was the only one to sit in that chair, even my step dad would get up for him), and the other uncle was on the couch. They were both drinking and smoking (self medicating). I was rocking in the easy chair too much and both of my uncles were getting annoyed.

At some point my eldest uncle said something like, “if you do that any more I will, [something]”

and as a kid of about seven I obviously did it again. The next thing I know my two uncles have lifted me from the chair laughing, and I was laughing as well, and then one of them pulled out duct-tape and they taped me like a mummy. After this, they picked me up and put me into the linen closet on top of all the spare blankets.

This was funny, for about five minutes. After five minutes I started kind of freaking out. I was trying to get out of my bonds and I failed to do so. Now I was in a small space that was musty. I could hear them talking about other things in the living room, only a dozen feet away or so. They seemed to have forgotten me, is what I thought and then I started to panic. I thrashed around and yelled enough that they came and got me out. Of course they were “just playing,” and I just had to know I was okay. Once I calmed down I went into my room and drew until I went to bed.

Looking back, that upsets me a bit. My eldest uncle did apologize for not helping me against his younger brother, when I visited him in Hawai’i, but he didn’t mention that. He likely doesn’t remember it in the same way I do. It wasn’t impactful for him. It was just another night he and his brother were drinking and I happened to be around. It is one of hundreds of interactions to him. It was just white noise.

Here is why this connects. If I were seven, that made my Hawai’i uncle about thirty-two there. The other was younger by about eight years making him all of twenty-four. I am a forty-three year old man and I cannot say that I was mature enough to have reacted differently to a seven year old. It would have likely been playing, it would likely be something that got giggles until it didn’t.

A Personal Reflection on Toxic Masculinity and its Impact on Relationships

I had my sister and nephew up here about two months ago. I love my nephew. He is a great kid. I hope that he has big plans and remains a good kid to become a good man. All that being said. Children kick up my anxiety through the roof. My nephew gets excited, as kids do. I am told I am his favorite uncle and apparently my brothers have heard this too. When my sister and I were talking, my nephew kept trying to interrupt my sister and I as we spoke. I eventually snapped with a little bark of, “stop talking over us.”

Look. I get this is at once not a big deal and a big deal. My sister said, “You can’t do that,” and my natural reply was, “Well I did. He needs to get that isn’t okay.”

The longer I allowed that to sit with me, the worse I felt. After a few minutes my sister decided it was time to go, I don’t blame her at all. As she was gathering up for the drive back home, I went to my nephew and apologized.

“Buddy. You know I love you, right? I am sorry for barking at you, that wasn’t okay. Your uncle has some problems with his anxiety and it just kind of got out. I don’t want you to think that is okay to do. I will do better.”

That is a huge issue in my family. Not owning your issues and your actions.

Back in chapter six I talk about my anxiety getting the better of me with an old man and an old woman. I also discuss how I should have handled it. How I handled it with my nephew was also not acceptable, he too had triggered me, but he is a little kid. He has no idea that I have this poison in my head. That moment with my nephew I owned my mistake. I apologized because over-all, he did nothing wrong. He was just being a ten year old, and inquisitive ten year old that is excited to interact with his favorite uncle.

“You are their favorite uncle.”

I hear this a great deal.

I am always confused by this. Adopted family kids say this all the time and I have many. They tell their parents, I suppose, and it eventually gets back to me. When I feel like I am a terrible person around them, I misstep, I do something where I am not my best, I try to remind myself of this. I must be doing something right if I am hearing this all the time. What the hell am I doing that makes them say this?

I have qualities. I do. I know I do. I just can’t always see them myself. When these kids say this, it is likely because I am working on all of my mental health issues and ridding myself of the toxic elements of my behavior. I apologized to my nephew. I apologized because I was in the wrong. Admitting fault is not something toxic males do.

When I was living with my long-time girlfriend, I was not a good partner at all. I was not a good partner for a lot of the reasons that I was taught when I was growing up. I didn’t apologize when I was wrong, and I was wrong a lot. I didn’t have empathy for most people and she was included as well as her brother who had come to live with us.

There is this need to take up space in a lot of aspects when it comes to toxic men. We want to be spread out within our environment. Man spreading is one of these aspects. We want to make you uncomfortable; standing while peeing, peeing in the backyard, peeing just off to the side, these are all about making others uncomfortable and us more secure through your discomfort. The biggest common action from a toxic male is asking for anal sex with a woman. There is almost no other reason. There isn’t a marked difference in the sensation, the woman is very likely not going to enjoy it, and the entire reason is about dominance from everything that I have experienced from action and word of mouth between other men.

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We are pushing our internal insecurities onto someone else. By making ourselves invasive, we achieve a kind of value to our character. “She let me do X, man, I have so much control over this other person.” With that discomfort we have pushed a boundary. Each boundary we expand makes us feel better about ourselves. It is fucking bizarre.

Looking back, had I been more focused on finding a way to make us both happy, and not so focused on trying to make myself feel valued through this toxic shit I was raised in, everything would have been so much better. I would likely have married that woman, had children, and did the work I now have been doing to get better and see my real value.

Exploring Toxic Relationships and Their Impact on Self-Sabotage.

Our relationship was doomed from the beginning because I was not yet aware of how much damage had been done to me mentally and behaviorally. I didn’t know that my step dad was a broken man who came from an abusive family, I just thought he was tough in punishment, maybe a hair excessive but overall not abusive, surely. Because I saw his tough punishment unappealing, I waited on having children. I was starting to address the surface of the problem, but I was failing to see the other damage.

My step dad's mother had told me once, while I was tending to her many birds, she said, “I think women are like female birds. A lot of them are drab and rather dumb and need to be told what to do.” This was the matriarch of the family. She took up the role of head of family when her husband became disabled. She was dispensing things like this to her grandsons.

She was very likely saying the same to her sons. How do you know this is toxic if you are in a clannish family that distrusts others and has little to do with people who are not like you?

If you hear stupid shit like that and you are dealing with a very messy break-up between your parents, where the wife cheated on the husband, what is your programming? You are likely to be a person that will never trust others and likely deals in transactional relationships where one partner has a dramatic power difference than the other.

Do you see a relationship built on these terms being successful?

You have sabotaged your relationship before it even began with a twisted view of how a relationship functions. I have a friend who went through a really messy divorce. She cheated on him and everything fell to pieces.

Now. Here is additional information that likely informs a lot more on the relationship's demise.

When they were married his wife proudly declared she was using “love, honor, and obey.” Once they were married she only really laid around watching TV and smoking pot. Everything was a mess. The dishes would sit dirty on the counter surfaces, pans would sit with hamburger fat that had gone rancid, the floors were all cluttered. It was a mess.

I remember when he would get home, he needed to pop into the bedroom with his wife for a little while before anything else. I later discovered this was part of an agreement wherein, she doesn’t work, cook, clean, etc. because she blows him daily, after work.

I started to see where that would eventually lead to a bad end, unless this was a mutual kink thing. She would tell me that he would stick his thumb in her asshole when they screwed as well, and that she didn’t like it, had told him, and he won’t stop. See the pattern here?

This was all a recipe for failure long-term. One could understand if this woman is unhappy with such an obvious transactional relationship, she would start looking for a way out. If the situation is one where things are only supposed to be in his favor, she would likely take drastic actions to make the tie unretrievable, hence the cheating.

Add to that, he stopped working for a while and suddenly she needed to be employed for the family, something that she had lived in agreement with for a time at least. Now, she is the breadwinner and she still has all the mother and wife agreements. The invisible labor of women.

Once the tie was broken the foul play from her had been pretty much from the beginning. She was unhappy and likely looking for a way out, or to be seen as desirable beyond the given accolades of the day, “I love you.”

Exploration of Toxic Relationships and Their Impact on Individuals.

Personally I cannot see myself asking or insisting on anything that would make my partner uncomfortable, but at this moment I am single, so how well is that working late in the game? The lip-service “I love you” loses more and more meaning when you are not in an equal partnership. The transactional relationships aren’t going to work.

I love beating up on this clown so I am going to talk about the giant orange baby that used to be president. That sad pathetic excuse for a man is all transactional relationships. He marries women who are young and desirable, he uses them as though they are things and not people, then he cheats on, divorces, and does everything in his power to get a younger model. This is just a contract that he signs with these women. They see who had come before, they were okay with spending the time as his arm candy or the mother to his kids, etc., but they were likely aware of the shelf life of the marriage. They were going to see that they are taken care of financially and then when they had to move on, they could salvage what is felt of their life and move on to someone of better quality, who may actually see them as a person and not an asset or commodity.

In such a situation you likely begin feeling like you don’t deserve better, so hopefully they get out before that happens.

There is a reason some women like older men, some older men have figured out how to see them as a partner and not as a lesser in some way.

Going into a relationship with the wrong attitude will poison every single aspect of the relationship and someone is going to break and leave in some way or another. Thinking about going into a relationship for the wrong reason is toxic as well.

In the case of my step dad, his wife sees their relationship in toxic ways as well. We covered most of that earlier in the book. As I said there, my step dad is giving his estate to the woman when he passes, however the kids will get the house when his wife passes as long as they pay all taxes, utilities, etc. for her. When he told me this, I replied directly that I would not do that. I see how she uses him and I will not be taken advantage of, as he has been, that woman has children of her own that all hate her. Why would anyone help her once he is gone? They are helping him because they love him, they tolerate her because he lives with her.

I bring this up to accent the examples of toxic upbringing that turns into self-sabotaging.

My step dad does not believe that he deserves anything better than what he has, and considering his past, there is ample reason to have that belief. Because he settled for a woman that sees everything between them as transactional, when your value to them begins to wane, your position within their life wanes. This happened with his father. When he became disabled, he also became tolerale and no longer had the power in the family he once had.

Having chosen a woman who was a pot stirrer, a troublemaker, and someone who had enough indignation to rob him of much of what he was once. Once step dad’s father was disabled he was very much a background character in the family. From what I remember, once he was disabled he became the grandkid chauffeur, the cook, and the one who took care of much of the cleaning.

Now I feel the need to say that none of that is something only a subordinate in the house should be doing. I don’t think that when two people work, one is always also in charge of cooking, cleaning, and the overall invisible labor of women. That is bullshit. However, in my family this was seen as not a real job or something that should be seen as a given for the woman of the house.

My mom was a housewife for the entirety of the marriage, withholding a short job at K-mart and going back to get her GED. This was my step dad’s choice, not hers. This was about control, once more. If his wife doesn’t leave the house very often, she won’t have much time to consider another person as a better partner. The insecurity was rooted in his inadequacy and low self-esteem. This is also part of the clannish family type. The woman stays home and tends to the house needs, the man has the job and brings in the money for the family.

I see nothing wrong with a partner staying home and tending the household needs, but I also believe that the work that is done at home needs to be more highly valued. I say this now as a person who has been disabled and surviving on the generosity of others. My people pleasing reflex demands I remove some of the burden I am placing on others through a kind of employment within the house. My energy is limited, but I do everything that I can each and every day.

When I was living with my classmate, she kept telling me that I didn’t need to do that, but I couldn’t not do it. I needed to show that I have value. I spent three years on a couch and doing everything that I could each day. Here with my mother, I am told that my efforts are unnecessary and that the real desire is to see me leave, so figure that out.

I am going to parallel the toxic masculinity programming my step dad forced onto my mom, with the prior toxic relationship she had with her friends that housed her after her mom threw her out at twelve years old, was obviously toxic, and toxic masculinity to his greatest height. Who feels entitled to rape a young girl with their friend? Someone whose entire identity ends at the tip of their dick.

Toxic Programming and Family Dysfunction: The Sabotage of Next Generations

This is something I cannot talk about enough. I went out into the world seeing things in the focus of my step dad and mom, and their priorities and knowledge of the world was misguided and tainted. How could they program their children with values and priorities that they never really had exposure to? Their understanding of the world was what their parents' understanding was, primarily because they didn’t know better, and in the example of my step dad’s family, clannish echochamber knowledge. Because trust in outsiders is rare, there is no reason to think that what they are exhibiting from their experience should be questioned, beyond the obvious.

One of my uncles on that side was physically abusive to his girlfriends. She would show up with a black eye, bruises, etc. We knew that wasn’t okay, but back to the clannish shit, they wouldn’t tell the police or any other authority just because he is family.

All of that is sabotaging, and worse, it is sabotaging the next generation in ways that the children have no real understanding of.

Because my step dad was abusive to me, my siblings picked up on that behavior as an option. My youngest brother has choked my sister and his current girlfriend, both while tweaking. Why would he think that that is okay? When my sister called the police, the family was appalled about her actions. My mom blamed my sister for his attack on her and all of this happened while all three were present, as well as my sister’s son.

My nephew is not going to grow up thinking that is acceptable.

While talking about sabotage within the family I have a big list. Step dad is insecure, terrible at making new friends, a social outcast, etc. He is almost ashamed to leave his home. Now, after the divorce, shit got weird. My mom left him for his brother. In fact it was the abusive asshole brother we just talked about. Why did she cheat? Because my step dad was abusive. Why go to the brother of your husband? As she explained it, it was to ensure there was never going to be a chance to have him come back. Her affair with the brother continued for about a year and a half I think.

My step dad did not handle this at all well. At some point he suggested that his brother let him screw his wife and then we can all be friends again. That is really juvenile. He went into a drugs binge, one time that brother and his then wife (yeah he was married and sleeping with his brother’s wife), went to his RV parked at his work, and they came in and did a bunch of his drugs with him to prevent him overdosing. The logic from these people is bizarre.

Just within that, we have a lot to unpack about family dysfunction. The highlight I would like to point out, was the transactional sex with the women being referred to like objects that are to be traded by their respective men. Then we get to the drugs. This whole “we saved him” bullshit is basically just that, they were all addicts, they all got fucked up.

Even before the divorce, drugs played a big role within his family. Both brothers were heavy drinkers and smoked pot, they all had been since they were rather young. Step dad proudly showed his twelve year old self within a forest of plants that his family had grown. Now the biggest impact of his drug use was his desire to make it acceptable within his children, not me. I was actually never invited to their drug use, likely because I was an outsider and couldn’t be trusted.

By twelve my younger brother was being given meth and pot from his dad. He had also taken that brother to a friend's house and instructed my brother to have sex with the friend's daughter. I suspect there was a hidden video that was also involved, but that is just a feeling because my step dad is always thinking transactional and I cannot see him doing that without a financial aspect.

His actions did not stop there. He later got his older brother’s son into meth, and his own first born son (my marriage step brother) into drugs as well. When my cousin started getting arrested and the family knew exactly who was the person who got him into the drugs that caused those arrests, my uncle was furious. Now living in Hawai’i, having not seen his brother in decades, he declares, “he is a piece of shit. I won’t have anything to do with him.”

He likely got my sister into smoking weed and his toxic household led my sister to a point of low self-esteem that led to her making some bad decisions in her young adult years. One of the pearls of wisdom my step dad had given my sister was, “If I were a woman I would get everything I want. I mean, having a pussy is like minting gold.”

Yeah. That is who she had to be raised in part by. Thankfully the divorce got him out of the house pretty fast after she was born or those pearls of wisdom might have had a greater impact on her life.

My step dad also has the major flaw of, he doesn’t want his children to surpass him. This might have been a factor in my physical and emotional abuse I suffered under him, as I was clearly bright and I would very likely surpass who he ultimately becomes. Because of this, he was all too happy to sabotage my siblings' development for the goal of having someone to hang out with. He really wanted some friends. On the other side, my mom loves having children and pets, because she loves having someone dependent upon her. This might have also been a reason for my abuse under my step dad and other men before and a few that were edging toward those actions when she began dating and working again.

“You were a really difficult kid.”

I had been a difficult kid because I wasn’t conforming to their belief of who I was supposed to be. I have been told, “When I was growing up, it was agreed that you were supposed to break a kid to mold them into a person.” Yeah. The person that they wanted me to be, not who I was supposed to be.

Exploring the Elusive Concept of Love

That is an excellent question. I have no idea. I have said those words thousands of times and chose to start saying it only when I truly feel like I love someone. The lip service “I love you” is about as common as, “high how are you?” The value is cheap. I have been told by a lot of people that my mom just doesn’t know what love is, she has never really experienced a true love of someone else. Examples would be how I am currently being charged rent within a room of the house that would have remained empty had I not been given it. She does not have the means to really pay for my additional costs to the utilities, so that is largely what is taking the burden of those increases, however, she does not see this as the case and there is an indignation that she is not gaining a profit for doing this.

My mother has told me, “I didn’t know what love was until you were born.” She used to ask this a lot when I was a kid, but in my later life she has refrained from saying it, because I am pretty sure she knows it’s as untrue as I expect it is. My mom kept having kids to feel loved. That is exactly how I see it. My brother has an extremely disabled son that my mom would love to take care of, this is because he will never get better. He has extreme brain damage that cannot be reversed with our current technological cap, maybe in the future, but for now he is not going to get better. That would be a person who would have to come to her for all needs. It is power. She has never really had power in her life, as she sees it. Each child was dependent upon her for their existence, but there were early signs that I was not going to be what she needed.

We covered the reason my mom and I didn’t really bond early. I had to stay in the hospital for a month after being born. Because of that lack of a bond, I stressed her abilities to make the decisions necessary for a healthy upbringing. Because she likely saw me as a person that had robbed her from living her best life because I was born, that likely reflected in the house in the ways we have covered. Because I didn’t fill that need to be constantly needed for her, she had my first half brother. She had a small fix of power over another with me, but I was a difficult kid.

I potty trained myself early. I just stopped one day and said “No, I am a big boy.” as reported by mom. When I was to sleep beside her for a nap, I would wait for her to go to sleep then I would get up, climb over the babygate (after tossing pillows over to brace my fall) and then I would explore the house, including turning on the stove. I had once torn apart her cigarettes and told her they were bad. She admits she beat me over that. I also once covered her in cleaning products and eggs while she slept. These were before my memory started locking into place at two.

I believe that much of what I was going through was out of adult insecurity, anxiety, and poverty.

I started feeling loved and as though I loved others who were not within my family. I have hundreds of friends online. They all make me feel cared for in one way or another. They would make me feel special and also loved, kinda. I had dear friends that I made in the bay area while I went to college that I am sure cared a great deal about me, and I for them. I was adopted into a family in San Jose and they make me feel loved and valued in ways I never felt before. They expect nothing from me. If I do something kind for them, or they for me, there is no transactional debt. There is no emotional debt. I am not expected to do anything in the relationship and they still care about me deeply.

I think that was one of the first times that I felt unconditional love, I was in my mid-thirties. One of my writing partners does the same. I love them without condition, they love me without condition. In fact, they are part of my support system against my condition. If I am struggling to do anything at all on a random day, they tell me that it is okay to accept that for today. They remind me of what I have been doing throughout the week that was exceptional. They understand my spell slot limitations each day and they make note of days that I exceed them with encouragement.

One of the main things that I love about the people who care about me, is how much they are unlike my family. When I lived with my aunt and uncle, I got to see a much more functional relationship than I had within my own parents' home. In junior high I also got a nice sample of that at my friends home, where I practically lived for a time.

The love that I have in my life was always away from my immediate family. My sister and my nephew are likely an exception.

Once I started dating, I was more often than not only half into the relationship because I have so many trust issues. When my partners and I began dating there was an obvious expiration date on my side. I already saw the relationship as going south the minute I was in it. Without knowing any healthy way to express love, I became harmful towards others in this way. I was not being fair to either of us coming into these relationships with toxic traits that I didn’t really know were wrong.. Part of this was the thought that they will eventually find someone better and move on, or the biggest issue, I had no idea who I was and what I actually wanted and who I really was.

I worked to exist. There was no long-term goal within the jobs that I was working in. My parents never talked to me about a career path, the most I got was “You are not a laborer so you are going to need to work with computers.” This wasn’t a path, it was just a suggestion, especially because they have no idea how to put me on that path.

Because I was moving without a path forward, I was desperate to find a path once I realized that my jobs are all dead ends. While apologizing to an ex about some shitty things I had done while we were dating, that was basically all that she remembered of me, that I didn’t know what my path was and I was unsure about pretty much all aspects of that path.

I was just existing because I didn’t know what else to do. My identity was worrying about and serving my family. That was it. That isn’t love. That is indentured servitude. When I was a kid, “earn your keep” was a pretty regular statement in the house. I was not loved in the family, because these people do not know what love is.