I don't think having my parents read my books is enough - the reaction so far just seems to be "are you sure you meant to write that?" type comments, or "you didn't phrase that very nicely", or "why didn't you put in all the nice stuff we do instead?" as if I had to write a book to flatter their wretched egos, or indeed just refusing to read certain lines at all saying "is this all the book's about? Yes, yes, I get the gist".
My Dad is very old and sick these days. I think he'll take all the hurt he's caused into the ground with him. As I said before, I genuinely don't think he accepts that he's done anything wrong (and neither does my mother regarding him - or any of the professional community, or any of my friends, or my parents friends). I've been gaslit in totality.
It certainly doesn't play on him. Any time ever in the past that I've spoken to him about wounding me, and I've confronted him with everything from tortured words to physical fists, it's never resonated. They always put the problem back onto me "oh he's just playing up", "oh, he's fantasising distress", "yes, he has an illness". If my parents see themselves at all, which is debateable, then they love themselves.
I'd love to have them both locked in a room like Cesar Tort recommended in his gedankenexperiment until they processed it - but it wouldn't (couldn't) be by choice and realisation and gradual soul growth. You'd need a North Korean prison camp level of change-or-else brutality. That why I sense it wouldn't work for them - you'd have to brainwash them under threat of applied physical pain, and even then they'd fight the entire way. And then the result wouldn't be genuine. It wrecks me to know you'd have to actually ego break them to a physical violence concentration camp prisoner of war level to get them to change.
I love my father indeed. Very much. Boundlessly perhaps. And I hate that I love him. I certainly don't like him. I have never forgiven him (although it manifests as wounded hurt, still shocked; taken aback - "why does he so effortlessly hurt me so much?" type thoughts, unable myself to acknowledge too easily that I don't like him). As I say, it feels futile. I cannot really say I love my mother, as I don't really. I'm 100% aloof and indifferent to her these days. And she doesn't even notice. The most my parents could acknowledge (and it never lasts long) is "he is annoyed at us"... but to truly understand why, and the validity of that 'why' is what is ultimately completely beyond them. I wish it was otherwise.
As it goes Dad insulted me on New Year's Eve when I phoned up to wish him a happy new year. I'd lent out General Relativity by Albert Einstein to a friend, and he said to me "why do you even own that, so you understand Einstein's tensor equations, do you?" He does, and I don't fully yet, but I bought the book to read out of general interest a few years ago, and because large parts of it are not mathematical as much as theoretically descriptive. It hurt me that he said that, to take a throwaway 'of interest' comment by me and immediately try to niggle out of it the only thing that could make me seem an idiot, as if that was the most important response he could have made, out of all the conversation options available, to ascertain my duncehood. He is his mother in attitude. Nothing I do will ever be good enough, and there's always some loophole that allows him to torment me with perceived stupidity.
As anyone who reads Consumption further will notice, his very favourite regular comment/observation (insult) is that I am an "idiot", a "moron", "stupid", and he means that academically as much as socially. Then he carried on as normal, and said he was tired, and asked if I needed any money. He is the primary gatekeeper long term to my academic success, as anything I have ever wanted to go for he shoots my confidence down in, to the point where I no longer really have any confidence in myself, sabotaging my future plans instead of encouraging me. And then he wonders angrily why I am jobless, and penniless, and a beggar before him. I try to speak to him as little as possible.
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