WHAT EXACTLY ARE HUMANS DOING?

I've loved to read ever since I was a child; I wasn't allowed to have friends and being raised by my grandparents means I had my mother's siblings around me and even the youngest of them was much older than I was and couldn't really relate to or play with me.

And so I escaped my realities, my especially poverty stricken realities, by delving into books.

There have been a lot of books that made me really sober, even so emotional and depressed but some of them stood out than the rest.

The first was FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC.

I read and finished it overnight and my 11th birthday was spent moping all around the house. That book was like an initiation into adulthood and it's right in a way, the first ten years of my life were so perfect and cocooned inside that safe space where you are young and naive and starry eyed.

The next would be Richard Wright's NATIVE SON. I read it in 2018.

That book not only made me sad, it made me hopeless, empty and with an understanding that humans have crossed a certain threshold and there's really no salvaging of our salvation. We're headed in a direction that there's no going back. I really do hope that other surviving organisms do way better than us long after we go extinct, we can't escape the extinction.

And today, just now, I finished NINETEEN MINUTES written by Jodi Picoult.

It is easy to ask for that rapist’s head on a plate, it is easy to ask that they be remanded in prison with the prison key thrown into the abyss. It is easy to demand for chemical castration, it is easy to point fingers so we can quickly move on with our lives and lie to ourselves that we are safe until we start believing our own lies.

That is lazier and faster than delving into root causes, than analysing social structures, than being obsessed with human behaviours, than looking at ourselves in the mirror.

It is easier to find a scapegoat, isolate the scapegoat from the rest of the world and probably kill it.

We have been jailing rapists, yet rape has not stopped.

It is easier to castigate the rapist and call them a monster, then we go back to sexualising and objectifying women.

We go back to religion that says women are inferior while demonizing women’s bodies.

We go back to eulogizing the education structures that teach us that a man is the woman's head whose body belongs to him.

We bully the ones who want to treat women as people and call them simps.

We mystify sex and say sex is something "given" by women and "taken" by men from women.

We control what others want to wear and mystify the human bodies that are JUST bodies in the objective sense of the word.

But omg, how can this one just rape?

Scapegoat scapegoat scapegoat.

Continue the cycle all over again.

Rinse and repeat.

In NINETEEN minutes, Peter murdered some of his classmates.

It is easier to scapegoat him and throw him behind bars while the bullying continues.

Humans have the natural tendency to always side with the bully, the oppressor, while harassing the victim to forgive and forget, while harassing the victim to shut up! While harassing the underdog to just take it, that’s how it’s always been.

Why are you fucking resisting?!

My mother bullied me a lot.

And to this day, I am the one being harassed, being shamed, being stigmatized. I am the one being scapegoated by deciding to protect myself and stay away from my mother and the entire family who thinks I am the one in the wrong for deciding I’m not going to be bullied anymore.

Just like Peter, I just want it to stop.

By unlike Peter, I have not resorted to violence. I could have, I was just one second away from murdering my own mother but somehow, I escaped doing that.

If I had, y’all would come for my head. The years of bullying, of the abuse, of being told over and over that I’m worthless, of so much trauma and helplessness, of absolutely nobody coming to my aid and if I snapped for just one second or nineteen minutes, I must have been a horrible child. And I would be "cursed" that my child would do the same to me (joke’s on you I’m child-free) or I would be handed the death sentence.

Even without being violent, even with ALL I’d done being just running away, I am still the one being blamed, I am the one being scapegoated. I am still the one in the wrong. I am the one who isn’t patient enough, or loving enough or forgiving enough. I am the one that must be damaged, how could anyone run from their own mother?

It is easier for you to scapegoat me than it is for you to challenge the family system that normalises parents bullying their kids and give it a fancy name like "love" and "discipline."

It is easier to scapegoat me than challenge the religious go ahead to abuse kids with the empty slavery-sanctioning "spare the rod and spoil the child."

It is easier to scapegoat me than to confront your own abuse and generational trauma because now, through my life and bravery to stand up to the family institution, you're forced to remove your head out of the sand into which you have buried your head.

It is easier to scapegoat the one person who is saying enough! And has veered off course from the status quo than deal with the systemic issues creating so much chaos that's threatening to burst out from under the carpets we've been sweeping them under.

At this point, I am not resisting because I have hope in humanity anymore. I am, because I genuinely don't know how else to live.