(Note: I keep trying to re-read and polish this up for
publishing, but my brain keeps getting all soupy from the content; as far as it
making any sense, you're on your own)
My dad was a sadist. He loved to hurt people in innovative
ways. Actually, he loved to imagine hurting people in innovative ways. Once the
actual act of hurting someone became a part of the real world, during the time
he was doing the hurting, his mind retreated. Any part of him that was human
shrank back into an almost-oblivion as his body inflicted the pain.
And then he would come back, and see and think about he had
done, and he would be horrified - but only for a second, maybe less. Once he
came back into his mind, the knowledge that he had hurt someone in such a
brutal way was the worst pain he had ever felt. It devastated him. So he only
kept it in his brain fleetingly, and would not have felt it at all, but he
didn't have a choice, because he was not completely dead inside.
The part of him that was not dead lived in a nightmare. It was
stuffed down so deeply inside of him, and coated all around with thick layers
of apathy. Most of the time he couldn't feel it, or have to think about it, but
it was still there.
He hated it. He hated the part of him that would not die. I
don't think he started out hurting people so that he could kill what was alive
in himself, but that is what it eventually became. Each time he did something horrific,
the alive part of him would scream, and he would remember what it felt like to
feel. He would remember that he was not completely evil - there still resided a
bit of innocence in him.
So he would try harder to prove to himself that he really
was completely evil. This is how things escalated, how his methods of torture
evolved. Initially, he simply loved how it felt to hurt someone (or something).
He had been hurt so much by people and places bigger than him, and the
realization that he could hurt things smaller than himself made him feel
strong. Like cocaine. It made him feel like he could take on everyone in the
world, and he truly believed that it would happen someday, and that he would not
be afraid of anyone, and everyone would be afraid of him.
I can relate to this. My big problem, though, is that I have not been able to kill nearly as much of my alive self as my dad. As a child, he had much more time left alone to harm other things - when he was a kid, from a very young age, he would wander
around, and to get the pain of isolation and rejection out of his mind and
body, he would search out creatures he could hurt. And then he would hurt them,
and he would feel better - or at least feel less, because he was killing a tiny
bit of his alive self with every act of pain inflicted on another being.
When he was young, he loved the thrill of it, and how the
thrill would completely shut out his own pain. But he began to get indifferent
to it - he was gaining a tolerance to the pain he inflicted on others, and it
wasn't working for him after a while, and he had to inflict more and more pain
on others in order to get rid of only a drop of his own pain. Like cocaine.
By the time I came around, he was still able to cancel out some
of his pain by hurting others, but when I was born, he gained a completely
defenseless being, completely within his power, to hurt. Game ON.
My dad, I believe, felt that he was abused because it was
part of the process of becoming "better than." I know he hated his
dad, and his brother, but could not comprehend that they would hurt him simply
for their own sadistic pleasures. I used to be very sure that my grandfather
thought he was god, too, or a prophet or something, and that he passed this on
to my dad. I think my grandfather was actually just completely nuts, but his indoctrination
in a religious cult is where he got his god-superiority from.
I have tried to tie my grandfather's and father's failed
attempt to castrate me to something that makes some sort of sense, even if it
is a crazy sort of logic. But it's not logical at all. I thought of it as a
ritual, again part of the process to make me the next generation of
superiority. Maybe I have not been able to comprehend that my father and
grandfather would just do that to me simply for their own sadistic pleasure.
My abuse has always been so heavily shrouded in religion
that I am only just now realizing that it may have all been just madness, that
religion and superiority may have been superficial normalizations for such
horrendous behavior, but that none of it ever actually clicked together.
Maybe I have been seeing the generational "superiority"
as my dad's motivation to hurt me because I can't comprehend that he was a
straight-up crazy dude who liked to do incredibly sick and damning things to
me.
My dad really did eventually come to believe he was god. I don't
think it was all aimless madness - he definitely had a linear frame of mind,
albeit outside the realm of reality. But it was real to him - that's where his
shitty childhood and his being a cowardly little bitch drove him to. Being god
was the only conclusion that he found appropriate as an answer to all of the
shit he suffered, and to all of the shit he did to other people. I mean, only
non-human types of beings could have been the victim and predator of what my
dad experienced, and the only non-human beings he was taught existed were god
and satan.
He saw everyone who tried to "get in his way" or
to "destroy" him as satan, so the only thing left for him to be was
god.
I don’t know.
I really do think my dad's brainwashing me to think I was
some sort of godling is what ended up holding my mind together; it gave me
strength to not give in to killing myself, literally and figuratively.
Part of my parents' façade was the use of religion to hide
their evil. They had to do enough for me to appear as good parents. Except that
the good in my life was not a ruse to me; to me, it was real. Maybe that's why the
part of me that is alive hasn't been quieted.
Regardless, my dad very gradually glided from the pain of
loss and rejection to the appearance of complete apathy. I don't know if he
succeeded in killing his alive self completely before his physical self died,
but if there was any of him left alive the last couple of times I saw him, I could
not see it. If there was any life left in him, it was the root of misery and
despair - he simply had no access to it, though he had no way of completely
extinguishing it. Just KNOWING, somewhere deep in his body and mind, that he
did have an element of recognizing that what he was doing was horrifically
evil, and any glimpse of the evil in himself was the embodiment of suffering.
I don't know how I know
these things about my dad. I just know that I do. I have had a very difficult
time resolving that my knowledge of evil is different from being evil. But as I
get more familiar with the person I really am, the more I am able to use my
knowledge of evil as a tool to make the world a better place. Or at least a
safer place.
That knowledge of evil, though, has come from hurting others
- the things I have done to other people (granted, primarily at the behest and coercion
of my dad), are tremendously difficult to live with. I guess I am fortunate
that I have figured out a way to live with it without indulging myself in it as
a means of becoming numb to my own pain.
I guess I'm just lucky that way.
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