/pt/ – Petrarchan

There’s a reflexive, albeit understandable, hesitation to go No-Contact with one’s family within this post-alt e-scene. I sympathize; the neoliberal counter-revolution’s victory means that one’s life is now totally forgettable outside of their immediate family, there are very few if any safety nets available anymore, people have only begun the great inward retreat. Not to mention, it’s Reddit (eww) and millennial (double eww) to discuss such a thing. We’re good contrarians here. I’m aware that I’m posting this on a clone of a Burmese Parcheesi imageboard which is itself an offshoot of a subreddit of a podcast that I haven’t listened to since 2018. My family is extremely tight-knit, Catholic, exurban, insular. My siblings and I stayed home after, or in my brother and I’s case, during, college. I didn’t move out until I moved across the country with my now-ex. My other siblings only moved out to marry or be with certain marriages (my older brother’s also failed). I, my older brother, and my younger sister all live in the same household with our parents in our late 20’s to mid-30’s. I never had anyone over in high school or college, beyond girlfriends I met at college. My married older sister is over every day with her kids. We’re exactly the kind of family that nu-trads fetishize. My wool had started to be painted black when I was roughly 14. By that point, my older brother by this point had failed out of his first college, and to protect his feelings, my father began to punish me socially to ensure my brother had someone. We went back to sharing a room. He began making passes at me sexually. Quipping about how incest is hot. Undressing in front of me. Calling my dick “cute.” That kind of thing. He was always and still is an anime, gamer, proto-incel, gooner. Showed me 4chan’s yaoi board when I was about 11, outright propositioned me multiple times when he was in high school. Back to form again post-first college My father in particular was always very strange about my maturation into adolescence and young adulthood. I could never have anyone over to hang if they weren’t also friends with my brother. I had a work girlfriend in high school, which prompted him to begin reading my text messages via an option AT&T used to offer to family plans. Fights were constant, my then-gf didn’t like the idea of never being able to text me, and I can’t say I blame her. If I was ever late coming home, he’d call the police and report the car I had stolen. He picked me up early from her senior prom, embarrassing the shit out of her in front of her friends. Same deal with my next high school fling. To “put his foot down,” he refused to let me go on my German IV class trip to Berlin. When college application time came around, he refused to send financial aid paperwork to two of the best CS universities in the country which admitted me. “I’m putting my foot down, anon! You’re staying where we can find you, you’re studying what we want, you’re living where we say, or you’re cut off.” And like a good little oy who obeys his mother and father, I complied. I committed to go to my state’s flagship university. Big mistake, they didn’t want me going to a large university at all. My mother, incensed, begins calling me a loser for the decision. Only idiots and losers go to state schools so that they can have access to women. You’re a loser. I’m choosing your dorm, and I’m getting you a phone with regular check-ins. You’re living in an engineering dorm, and that’s final! They found out the engineering dorm was co-ed on move-in day, and threatened to take me home and unenroll me in front of my roommate and his parents. I went to a few football and basketball games, and they accused me of being an alcoholic. I got a text within the first two weeks of classes from my mom. It read “He’s under the knife now, so far so good.” My dad was scheduled for an aorta replacement that neither my parents nor any of my siblings had told me about. They all knew about it. I panic, scramble to get some shit from the university’s bookstore, take the train down to Philly to see him. All was fine. I walk in, and he asked how I found out. My parents found my first college girlfriend’s Tumblr, sweet girl I met at the Catholic Students’ Assn, where she talked in detail about me taking her virginity. They were less than impressed, and demanded that I commute for the rest of college. Fine, whatever. I did briefly live with two guys I met there, and then commuted again. I’d often sneak out to go to house shows, see my friends, order drugs off the darknet, stuff like that. Every time I met a girl, she’d of course hang at my house, and every time my dad would say something insulting about me to them. I could never really keep up with internships because I lived an hour away from campus. I ended up with a humanities BA, with research and journal credits under my belt. My mother’s stark face on my graduation day still haunts me. I got a job at a small electronics importer, they had me buy a car that I couldn’t afford in response. They drove me to the dealership and argued with the saleswoman against me. I lost that job, then got one at an indie bookstore. “Loser” was the refrain I heard every day. My new girlfriend and I broke up and got back together. She started a barfight with me in front of my brother on my birthday. He said nothing. She tried pushing me in front of a subway in front of some college friends, they said nothing. She got into a graduate program, we signed a lease without telling my parents. During a family dinner, my dad tells me to get a real job, calls me a bum, loser, closet case, in front of her. We moved across the country the next week. She started drinking, heavily. Fights were a near-daily occurrence. She tried stabbing me, shooting me, she took my phone and scrolled through it daily. She would text co-workers of mine and call them “sluts” or “losers.” She fought my parents from my phone, they cut me off for “back talk,” something I wouldn’t learn until years later. Covid hit, and my family started a Jackbox Discord that I was excluded from. I kept inviting my then-single brother to hang with us in our non-lockdown state, he refused. She invited a college friend, and fought her the whole time. I got into a PhD program, and her abuse got worse. She started to try to sabotage every aspect of my life. She started arguments with my bosses at union get-togethers. She started physical fights with people in my graduate program. She ran up all of my credit cards and opened multiple lines. She justified all of this as “getting back at white colonizers.” I ran away to the ghetto of the city my program was in, then moved back in with her. I attempted suicide in 2022, after I moved out, and after I learned that my parents were blowing off my MA commencement that I had invited them to. I moved back in with my ex. We were no longer together, but we were fucking nightly. I lived like this until mid-2023, when I was diagnosed with cancer. I got treatment, which left me permanently disfigured, cried on the phone to my family. “Can you please come out here?” to my parents, brother, and sisters. All were too busy. I drove home, and have been mostly underemployed since. I can’t even look at my parents and family now without feeling so much anger. I’ll never understand why they had to treat me like this. I’ve tried my whole life to stay in touch, to my detriment. I’m simply too old to do so now. I'm simply too old to be crying about my family on a post-Chaposphere clone of a Thai Greeting Card forum. I told them about everything that happened with my live-in ex, and they didn’t believe me. I told them about what the treatment entailed: a life of TRT and sterility. They told me that I’m the luckiest person they’ve ever met.