I've been thinking a lot about my childhood the past few days. My brother's role in it, in particular.
I was reading something online which stated that child abuse could be perpetrated by a juvenile as well. This...never really occurred to me before. I mean, yes, it did. But he's my little brother. He was smaller and weaker than me. Meaner, yes. And I was eternally passive: well-trained. But it never occurred to me that the concept of a younger brother physically abusing an older sister could be anything but a joke. And perhaps it can't.
But I did take beatings daily, sometimes several times a day, from that boy. My body was perpetually covered in bruises and cuts of his design, though he wasn't strong enough to do any more damage than that. And I would lie back and take the beatings, the twisted limbs, everything. Because I don't fight back. Ever. I just detach. I say, 'This body isn't mine. And it isn't yours. And this hurts. But it doesn't matter.'
This is one of the reasons that I think the Republican justification for war: If people punch you, you will punch back eventually is bullshit. There are people who don't ever fight back. I did not fight back for twelve years. When I did it was a simple display of strength, and the willingness to use it if absolutely forced. I held him still for about ten minutes. He hasn't done anything since. I'm not quite sure what that proves. Perhaps that he's grown up some.
And like anything else in my life, none of this bothers me. I'm just always interested to find out when things I thought weren't applicable to me are. Tends to explain some of my habits and irrational fears more easily.
I think my childhood was quite good, still. My mind was always clear, and that meant everything to me. Still means everything to me.
When you live with things, you assume they're widespread. They're normal. Incest, violence, unequal treatment (at one point I lived in a room that was technically a storage closet). If you grow up with it, and it's the norm for you, a person tends to think it's the norm for the rest of the world. At least until they learn more about the world. And that makes the existence easy to bear, at least in my experience.
Wow, I'm talking about thoughts I had as a tenyearold now. Nothing revolutionary here, move right along...
revoless.
12:33 a.m.
August 31, 2003.
Listening to: Garbage, Motoi Sakuraba.
Yay! I have weak tendons! or The tale of the meandering point