em_poc

My long term relationship that we both thought was for life is imploding right now, and it’s not even because of anything new and recent, it’s because we finally figured out some unhealthy dynamics got set years ago when we were in worse situations in life and dealing with crises and now that we’re looking at it it’s just unbearable. A lot is my fault, some is their's, but in another way it's neither of our faults, it's just an unavoidable tragedy. It's so depressing to confront how we both were utterly set up to fail in this (or any) relationship by the combined forces of capitalism, systemic racism, and systemic patriarchy. I don't want this to sound like a cop-out, I don't want to say "oh my difficulties with emotions and relationships are not my fault because the systems did this to me and I bear no blame," I can see clearly (now, when it’s too late to prevent them) the mistakes I made. But it's incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking that when they were happening I couldn't have done anything else because of how I was malformed by all the trauma of living in the belly of a racist, murderous empire surrounded by toxic hateful racist monsters. At every step of the way we've been trying our very best (I've been doing therapy for years, and they tried but they just couldn't find a therapist who wasn’t a capitalist radfem shitlib that would gaslight them and do more harm than good), but at every step for years and years and years the traumas carved into us from early childhood through adulthood sabotaged our efforts. They ask, "why did you do X horrible thing when we needed you to do Z?" and when I examine it it's genuinely just because of how the racist fabric of America destroyed my family and destroyed me to the point that X was all I was capable of doing in those times of stress. I didn't get to have a safe environment in which to grow up healthily -- I had a fucking nightmare forced upon me when I was just a little kid and it broke me, just more subtly than it broke my other family members. But it broke me nonetheless. I ask them "why did you do Y when we needed you to do Z?" and when they examine it it's because of how abuse at the hands of the toxic patriarchical fabric of America starting from a very young age carved such deep liabilities and weaknesses into them that they couldn't be healthier. And then our traumas intersected in bad ways. If just one of us hadn't had our fatal weaknesses, we could have maybe helped the other. But with both of us having them, our attempts to help each other actually led us to fall into unhealthy dynamics instead and now the traumatic memories of those dynamics make it -- I think -- impossible to move forward and heal together.

Even with this understanding, even with these big breakthroughs, it may be too late. I think it very likely is even though we desperately want it to not be too late. They said "I don't want us to have to split up. It would be a horrible tragedy. It should be a simple choice: We love each other and didn't mean to do harm, now that we understand what went wrong and how the systems did this to us it should be obvious that we just stay together and fix things together. The reason it's not simple for me is that everything's been so traumatic I don't know if it's possible, healthy, or even ethical for us to try to stay together and fix things together."
And I get that, I really do. It’s not a cop-out, it’s true. So much traumatic shit has happened that I can't humanely and ethically ask them to stay. Asking is pointless anyway -- they already want to stay and make it better, it's just a question of whether that's even possible or healthy for them to try to do, or if too much harm has been done. It's not a decision to be made, it's a yes/no fact that has to be uncovered and then whatever that fact is, we’ll have to deal with it even if we hate it.

I envy white people here, at least the ones with semi-healthy families (unlike my poor, traumatized partner). For all that there's something so fucked up and fundamentally wrong with many of those white folks, they seem happier. They have their own traumas to be sure, but they don’t have the trauma that comes from being nonwhite in this KKK society and right now, looking at how that racial trauma has destroyed my life, I envy them for not having been brutalized that way.