Day 3 - My Family, My Cult, My Design

I am a slave to my family, this is how I have set it up within me - everything I do, I do for family.

The use of fear as a tool to manipulate me was used extensively when growing up, whenever I would not listen to my mother for instance, when not desiring to do something like eat, pray, go to mosque, she would become visibly stressed, saying to me ‘do you want me to die?!’ This whole concept of death as emotional blackmail is somewhat amusing now, but back then it was very serious, it put me in a life or death mode. In those moments I would internally say something along the lines of ‘holy shit, she is right! Who will cook for me? Who will clothe me? I’ll die without these people around me, paying the bills, doing this and that for me - I don’t know how to do any of that for myself!’.

And so the situation now is that I am the one paying the bills, ‘being the man’...’looking after shit’...’sorting shit out’. And this is because I feel I owe them, owe them for all those years of ‘hard work’ that they ‘put in’.

Within my family structure there was also a strong tendency towards competition in immediate and mostly extended family, as children we were always being compared to each other in terms of who got the best results in their exams and studies. It was like ‘who could show off their kids the most?!’ This made me very angry when I was younger, when my parents would show disappointment in me for not standing up to another member of the family, how they would pretend like they ‘still loved me all the same’ when in fact their faces and their words were showing incredible disappointment at ‘not making the grade’ (this all happened at a time when I was not able to verbalise exactly what it was happening, and so I just became more angry). For a time I kept up, and then I gave up, seeing the other cousins surpass me is something that depressed me and made me very jealous. So this was part of my rebellion; ‘If I cannot beat them in studies, I will beat them by going completely the other way, I will be everything that they cannot be outside of religion, I will drink and smoke and do drugs and have experiences that they will not be able too’. This was my revenge clause that I stated to myself throughout the years and that I still state now when I am reminded of their now successful positions in life. I quietly utter to myself ‘but I am still better’.

So as is stands currently within my family I see myself as taking the bench on most things, I try my utmost to not become involved in their matters and am only concerned with things of a financial and practical nature. For the most part I do not really communicate with any of them on a real level and my words are all just surface level expressions, like ‘how are you? … What are you doing today?’ Never really meaning anything I say.

I see that I am very fearful for my parents now, fearing soon that they will not be able to provide for themselves, and that I will have to be some sort of sole provider. Everything within my family structure as it stands is based on fear. Everything. It is like there has never been a moment where I am not in some way fearing for the existence of my family, whether is was money fears, family interpersonal relationship fears, cultural fears, fears of not living up to the ‘standard’.

I am beginning to see and understand the extent to which fear has played developmental role in my unfolding as a being, and how this was passed down from my parents (and subsequently cycled within myself), from one generation to the next, from one family member to the next, ad nauseum.