Thread by @sethanikeem

I’m going to share a really hard thing that happened to me in 1996 or so. Not because I want sympathy or anything. But because it is viscerally illustrative of something I fear will happen over the next couple of days on a broader collective level.

Story time.

I often talk about how my grandmother raised me, and how she taught me a lot of valuable lessons about both psychic abilities and skepticism. What I don’t talk about is how incredibly dysfunctional she also was both as a human being and a parent.

Most of my experiences with her are not important. At least, not for this example. But there was one final confrontation that we had when I was in my early 20s that was my ultimate line in the sand.

It also taught me how the family had overlooked her issues for decades.

My grandmother lived with her older sister and her younger brother. Collectively, the three of them raised me.

Her older sister, my Aunt Rita, was a social worker. She almost became a psychiatrist but stopped her schooling to take care of her ailing mother.

Given that Aunt Rita was a social worker with a strong background in psychiatry, you would expect that she would recognize mental illness in one of her own family members. She worked at Cleveland Psychiatric Institute, after all.

But we often cannot see what is closest to us.

One afternoon, my grandmother started a verbal fight with me. It was about mowing the lawn. I had been in the shower. She demanded that I come out of the shower to have this discussion with her.

She did not give me the time or the dignity to put on clothes.

The verbal fight played out at the top of the basement stairs and kept escalating. I will not give a blow by blow of the argument because, like most of her arguments with me, it made little sense. Mowing the lawn was an excuse to belittle me about everything.

Aunt Rita and Uncle Jim both came to watch this argument. Rita was sort of trying to keep the peace. Uncle Jim was there to egg things on. He was always my grandmother’s follower and during this argument he was making regular threats to beat me up because I was talking back.

There came a point in this argument – a turning point in my entire life - where I’d simply had enough of the abuse. My grandmother reached out and slapped at me & I wanted with every fiber of my being to punch her back. Instead, I spat on her.

And this is where it gets weird.

My grandmother’s whole demeanor changed at this expression of defiance.

Keep in mind that at this point both her brother and sister are watching. They are both within arm’s reach.

Gram got calm. Quiet. Venomous.

She wipes the spit off and says, “what did you do?“

She repeats that. “What did you do?”

And then - incomprehensibly - She hooks her arthritic fingers and begins digging at the side of her face where I spat.

She yells, “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!!!”

My grandmother continues to dig at the side of her face until blood runs. All the while she demands, “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!!!”

I, naked (I had long ago lost my towel), still slightly damp from my interrupted shower, stand at the top of the stairs, aghast.

As they watch this, Uncle Jim begins to pick up the chant and demand why I had hurt my grandmother like that. He points to the wound that she is still in process of giving to herself.

Aunt Rita is making a noise I can’t reproduce. She is both speechless and horrified. Frozen.

I need to reiterate. Aunt Rita was a social worker who worked regularly with institutionalized schizophrenics and the criminally insane. She had initially pursued psychiatry.

She knew mental illness when she saw it. She knew how the brain worked, how it could lie to us.

23 year old me is simply overwhelmed by this. Finally, I simply walk away. It is far too off the rails for me to even try to make this whole interaction make sense.

Aunt Rita, ever the peacemaker, tries to calm Gram and Jim down. She at least keeps them from following me.

And here is where this is an object lesson: immediately after this, Uncle Jim denied it even happening. Never mind that Gram still have the scratch marks on her face.

Aunt Rita & I talked about it that night. It was a lot to process. We debated dementia, other explanations.

The next morning, Aunt Rita was already losing elements of the fight. The most extreme behaviors were fuzzy for her and I had to remind her that they’d actually happened.

A week later, she remembered only there was an argument.

Two weeks & she’d blocked the whole thing out.

And here is why I have aired this incredibly fucked up and difficult element of my young adulthood: humans have an incredible capacity to edit their memories, especially when the things they have witnessed are well beyond their comfort zone.

If we don’t want to believe something happened, we can simply forget that it did.

It’s not even a choice. I don’t believe that Rita willfully edited her memory. There was a point where I thought maybe she was denying it because it would be easier. But it was GONE.

And tomorrow morning, when we wake up and look around here in the US a day after an armed mob of insurrectionists stormed and looted our Capitol building ... they are going to be many people for whom that event is already growing fuzzy.

In a week, it will be gone.

(and I’m kind of proud that I got that whole thing out with only one or two typos)

I feel I should follow this up with a statement that I know my situation was by no means a unique one.

There are a lot of us who survived some intense, unbelievable, and frankly horrible circumstances.

We didn’t survive unscathed or unscarred, but still, we survived.

(also, apologies to my one cousin who follows me on here & might be hearing for the first time the full extent of fucked up in that house)

For those concerned about the impact this had on me: This was the last time I ever spoke to my grandmother. I refused to let her around me. I held to that boundary until she died.

Lots of family told me to “be the bigger person.” That I must “forgive blood.”

Nope.