Apparently, none of my other writing is going to cooperate until I write out the rant I desperately wish to deliver to Jazmin's sister. I won't (probably), because it wouldn't fix her behavior (probably). People like this tend to be immune to social correction. On the other hand, the therapist lady advises me not to be too hard on myself if I do snap and start shouting at her in the hallway, because goddamn sometimes people are in urgent medical need of a good hard pimp slap, and shouting is the closest thing to it that's still legal.

[Jazmin, I know you read this turkey sometimes, so if you want to stop now, I've put the rant under a cut. It's nothing I haven't told you already, but it's cool if you don't want to go through it again. Or if you do and want to pretend you didn't, that's fine, too.]

Arright, listen up, you little piker.

I know you think you're good at emotional blackmail, but clearly you have never met my mother. Two minutes in a room alone with her and you would be snot-bubble sobbing on the floor. I dealt with that woman for thirty fucking years. Don't kid yourself. You're not going to win. You're just going to piss me off.

I do sincerely apologize for assuming the trouble was that you were twenty-one and had no idea what the fuck you were doing. This was clearly far too charitable. Your real problem is that you're a petty, controlling narcissist, and you have your head jammed so far up your own ass that you cannot or do not comprehend why this behavior is unacceptable.

You seem to think this is a communication problem. Let me assure you that you have done a brilliant job of communicating the fact that you think what you want is absolutely paramount, and that other people's volition is totally irrelevant. I salute the masterful way you refuse to let either reality or logic stand between you and total dominion of every living thing. It was especially noteworthy when you cornered me in the kitchen and tried to get me to agree that your sister was a dirty rotten liar and wholly responsible for everything that is making you grumpy. When I didn't, you turned around and, in the very next sentence, tried to make me feel guilty by telling me that I totally could have fixed something you just said someone else had sole responsibility for, if I'd just come to you privately and cut Jazmin out of the loop. You adroitly avoided letting any responsibility whatsoever fall onto you. Not a dribble! That takes talent.

You have made it perfectly clear that you are willing to make everyone else miserable in order to get what you want. It's not even really wrong or anything, it's not like other people really have feelings. So it makes perfect sense to threaten to move out on the basis that you think it'll make Jazmin so upset that it'll force her to force me to force reality to conform to your expectations. The world will not reshape itself to match your vision just because you reallyreallyreally think it should. This is a form of 'magical thinking', and most people get over it when they're about six. It has evidently not occurred to you that other people are not you, do not think the same way, and might be perfectly fucking okay with you living somewhere else.

I for one wish you'd hurry up and follow through. I have no idea why you consider vowing to go away and behave badly somewhere else to be some kind of punishment for the people you are intentionally torturing. Oh, Bre'er Fox! Please don't throw me into that briar patch over there!

After cornering me alone didn't get you what you wanted, you cornered both of us in the kitchen -- that was a nice touch, by the way, standing right in the only door so that the only way either Jazmin or I could leave the room would be literally going down the goddamn fire escape -- and delivered a positively textbook torrent of emotional abuse.

Do you know why I kept glancing over at Jazmin? You probably think I was looking for backup. I wasn't. I was trying to make sure she was okay. She was standing with her shoulders up and her head down and her back to the wall and trying desperately to be invisible and you know what you insufferable twat? I know exactly what that expression means. I hope you're proud of that. Surely you've practiced on others -- that's a difficult skill to learn entirely from domestic violence pamphlets, especially since they're generally written on behalf of the people trying to get the fuck away. I really appreciated the way you stared right at your own sister, as she backed into a corner like an oft-beaten wife, and gave both of us a sanctimonious lecture on how risky it would be to sublet to a stranger, because a stranger just ~wouldn't care~ the way you do.

Just a note for the future: I assume it was meant to be insulting when you said you were glad I wasn't your sister. The feeling is mutual. As it happens, I have a sister like you, which is exactly the reason I stopped talking to her years ago.

The infinitesimal amount of patience I had left for this shit has completely evaporated after you dragged me out of bed, heavily medicated, in the middle of a migraine, to "help" in the kitchen. I assumed you did it out of callous ignorance, but no, Jazmin apparently tried to tell you why I was already in bed at eight in the evening. You just ignored her. You told me to do one thing that would have taken you four seconds, ignored me when I asked what else you wanted, and then swanned off to eat your dinner. You didn't fucking need my fucking help in the fucking kitchen; you just wanted to prove that I wasn't allowed to do anything without your permission, including be in pain.

And no, I am not free to sit down for a "house dinner". I can pencil you in between three and five pm on the 12th of Never. This is not a dorm, and you are not the hall monitor. You may declare as many meetings as you want, but I will not be attending. I have nothing to say to you that you will even remotely want to hear. So far everything I've heard you say has been derisive, self-absorbed, a thinly-veiled attempt at triangulation, or all three. My life is none of your business, and I have no interest in yours. Nothing the maintenance crew does is of split-second, life-or-death urgency, so unless the apartment is on fucking fire, you can leave a note.

I'm sure that with enough time and practice, you too can be just as unhappy, self-destructive, and detrimental to human society as my mother is. You are well on your way. In the meantime, kindly go fuck yourself, sideways, with a dry cactus that has been lovingly encrusted with rock salt.

Comments

  1. Fun read!

    I just wish I had a bit more context. Who are these people?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jazmin is my roommate. We were internet-friends before I moved to Boston, and she ended up in the last apartment with me when one of the other roommates lit out without finding a replacement, and she needed a place to live. We moved to this apartment as a unit specifically because we run a household well together, and we like each other.

      Her sister just came back from overseas and needed a place to live. She didn't want to live in their mother's house until she found a place, so their mother sort of shoved her into an apartment with us. Sis has Ideas about how adulting is supposed to work, of the sort that people only get when they have never actually adulted for any length of time. She does not understand that not only does she not have the right to dictate how Jazmin and I handle our private lives, but that most of what she is trying to force us to do is somewhere between untenable and impossible.

      In short, reality is not living up to her expectations, and she's taking it out on us because she thinks it'll force us to fix it. She likes to pull a lot of passive-aggressive shit. When that doesn't work, she corners people and harangues them. The one where she trapped me and Jazmin in the kitchen was a wonder of emotionally-abusive insanity. There were a lot of random words in it, but the actual *content* was 100% "you are not doing what I told you to do, so I am going to do everything in my power to make your life suck until you obey".

      When she finally fucked off to go drinking with her friends after that one, the first thing I did was make sure Jazmin was OK. I have rarely if ever seen psychological abuse that blatant outside of crappy made-for-Lifetime movies.

      Delete

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