breaking off contact with my family when this is done

[Glides]

so anyway, both my parents, both of whom are pushing 60, just physically attacked one another yesterday.

I often feel like I'm both of their babysitters. Before the quarantine, I was the one getting the groceries, taking up the garbage and the mail, and so on, and their own inability to use anything more advanced than a paperback novel has been a crutch to their existence. When you're explaining how to use the basic functions of Microsoft Word for the umpteenth time, it becomes aggravating.

I know they're directly responsible for my emotional immaturity. I suspect now that one or both of them has a severe personality disorder or some kind of cognitive issue. They've spent several days almost non-stop arguing but today is the first time I heard them both screaming out in pain at the exact same time and things being smashed.

My father has only tried to hit me one time and that was when I was a teenager. He hasn't since. I'm concerned for my emotional health but not my physical health. I am physically bigger and stronger than both of them as it is.

Anyway, I know leaving them is not an option while the quarantine is going on. I'm employed "at zero hours", meaning I'm still employed but I am being given nothing to do. I am now "zero hours" at both of my positions. I have no idea how to find employment after the pandemic is over, whenever that is over. But I also understand that the moment I stop living with them (and I pay rent), that's the moment where at best, I am holding them very much at arm's length. I will not be responsible for their end of life care, I will not be responsible watching them grow older and more demented. They're declining very rapidly and not taking the virus seriously at all. I suspect they will both be dead within the next ten years considering their health. They are miserable disgusting crones. I love them, in spite of myself, but I also hate them, and recognize their indirect responsibility for my lower quality of life. I recognize how their choice to largely separate me and keep me isolated for a huge portion of my childhood except where they wanted me to be, in concern for my safety, has stunted my emotional growth.

It's funny because they still look back fondly on the Orthodox synagogue we went to for over half a decade, or the MLM scheme involving supplements that my father spent several thousand dollars of savings on, or god knows how many New Age/homeopathic BS fads and trends they spent so much money on over the years. They have utterly wasted their lives and I think they're beginning to realize it. They are completely socially isolated, even more so than me, and have no one to talk to anymore except each other. They've burned every possible bridge they could burn, and our entire family hates them and only tolerates me because it's clear i don't act very much like them. For starters, I don't sink low five figures a year into whatever bullshit supplement they're obsessing over this season.

They're very controlling people, though I've gotten better at maneuvering around them. Part of their justification for all of the bizarre choices they've made is that they wanted to raise me specifically to run my father's small business (key word: small) when I was fully grown. I, of course, didn't do that, and definitely make less than either of them now, but I don't regret that. They also have such distorted views of the world that it leads them to make highly impulsive and irrational choices. I went to film school only because they had gotten the notion in their head that every single film school graduate is instantly given a 200 million dollar film as soon as they graduate. That is, of course, not the case, and it's caused them no end of aggravation that their "investment" (meaning me) did not pay off with the 200 million dollar movie. Part of the promise for them providing financial assistance for going to school (not all of it, but definitely some) was that I would help my dad make his self-published novel into a feature film after I graduated. That was the actual agreement, and I agreed to it knowing it would never happen. I know that sounds absolutely ludicrous, but they also in part saw this in their bizarro fantasy universe as a guaranteed way to never have to work again.

I mean, this explains me, right? All my own mental bullshit stems in part from having two mentally ill boomer parents too thoroughly up their own asses and so isolated they literally don't know how reality works. They are just charismatic and savvy enough to continue making a living doing what they do (my mom is, ironically, a shrink, master's degree and all that). Even now I have people at gatherings telling me how their relationship is the most loving and caring they've ever seen. As much as they despise each other, they enjoy being perceived that way so much that they'll endure the constant arguments and their own explosive tempers to be told that over and over. They're very good at publicly coming off as sane.

A friend, upon being pressured into talking to my mother over a conference call, stated that "talking to them is like being interviewed for a job you never applied for."

So basically, the younger a person is, the more they dislike my parents.

My parents are, of course, not all bad. They correctly surmised I was being abused in my only serious relationship and were the first people to warn me about it. They have their good moments. All of those types have their good moments, and moments where they'll do something genuinely nice and not expect anything in return. Granted, minus my biological cousins, my family is full of similar bruised egos and explosive tempers, and emotional abuse is our love language. It's not like they're the only assholes in my family. Ironically, compared to some of my distant relatives, my parents are saints. I have one of those families. They don't cheat on each other (as far as I know), and they sure as hell aren't the numerous family members who have stolen money from each other or gotten into fights over inheritances. Financially, there's some members of my family that are multimillionaires and others that are destitute and we're definitely not starving or worrying about shelter but we also don't have country club memberships or any of that shit. If that doesn't make any sense, I don't know how to explain it better. We're in the middle of the spectrum.

They don't deserve all of the blame. But they deserve some of it. I'm never feeling unsafe for my own life. I worry that one of them is going to have an aneurysm or a stroke in the middle of an argument and then one will drop dead. And because they're so obsessively codependent, the other would die shortly thereafter, and I'd have to make all the funeral arrangements. I don't think I'm giving either of them funerals, if I have to plan them. They both want to be cremated. And when they're both dead, and I know it's sooner rather than later, and it gives me no joy to say that, then I'm going to put their urns somewhere and figure out what the fuck I'm supposed to do with the time they didn't take from me.

I hate them so much, but I love them. It's weird. I don't want to hurt them, I don't want them in pain, but I resent them for not being who I needed when I needed them. They were content to spend my childhood foisting me off to any grandparent who was nearby. I was primarily raised by grandparents for the first decade or so of my life, so I was always bouncing between homes. If not for my grandparents, I don't think I'd be even remotely functional or able to type this now. They were the type of parents to threaten to have me arrested every time I had a panic attack in front of them. They absolutely despised having to take care of my emotional needs. They seriously assumed parenting was easy. It's the reason why I'm so terrified of the notion of having my own child. It's why I'm so militantly child-free now. I see what happens when parents fuck up.

I mean, why did I obsess over relationships so much? The biggest relationship, the one I was supposed to learn from, were always fighting so bad and expecting a little kid to break up two middle-aged people trying to hit each other as hard as they could. They'd never lay a finger on me but they'd eagerly try to attack one another. They'd always tout that as a big accomplishment, that they went my whole childhood without ever hitting me, which only implies that they really wanted to hit me, but didn't. So I dated a person who didn't know the meaning of the word "consent" and bashed my head into a car door and faked suicide attempts and force-fed me food I was allergic to. I blame them in part for almost goddamn getting engaged to this person and moving halfway across the country with them. That would be WAY more dangerous than my current situation. i can barely sleep but my 60 year old parents can't lay a finger on me now even if they wanted to. I know I am physically strong enough to take both of them in case they ever tried to take a swing at me now. They're both incredibly short and scrawny as is, and I'm chubby and built with my uncles' physiques. Ironically, the very features that gives me dysphoria so bad that I want to die (took me 22 years to recognize it, natch) are the very same that proves I could take them both in a fight. Not that I want to, but if they try swinging again, I'm going to have to break them up again, and this time, I will be strong enough to do it.

I'm not calling the police, the worst of the fights never left more than bruising on them they'd both have to hide. I can't even frame it as one of them being the abuser of the other, they both dish it out in equal measure. Don't have to take sides.

The other problem is the concern of what I would do if I actually lived on my own or with roommates. My parents, as much as I hate them, will also drop everything to take me to the hospital in case I get sick or if I have a bad reaction to medication. They don't give a damn about mental health, but they take physical health 100% seriously. No one else knows exactly what to do in those situations. No one else is prepared for someone as seemingly vulnerable as me despite my size. It's funny, because at 17, posting here, I was chubby and with no muscle mass, and I've developed a lot more of it since, so people assume that nothing can hurt me. Everything hurts me. I have muscle now but sickness still hits like a sledgehammer and if I catch the coronavirus for whatever reason (I'm socially distancing but that's not foolproof), that's a literal death sentence. They know the exact medication I need and how often I need it refilled and the exact methods to use to administer it if god forbid I have some kind of problem. And they hate me too, as far as I can tell, or at least see me as a wasted investment rather than a person, but they will still do it if they have to. They go grocery shopping for me now because they know it's literally dangerous to me to be in such a populated space.

I've never felt like their child. I feel like their roommate. I pay rent (less so than if I was living somewhere else, granted), I do a lot of the work around the house, I do my own cooking and my own laundry and take care of my own garbage and restocking everything. If not for living with them, I more or less am a completely functional and self-sufficient person. I have been for the past several years. People get confused when I describe my living situation and then I say I live with my parents, because we don't act like parents and children. There's no paternal or maternal instinct in either of them sans not outright letting me die. I don't ever remember either of them acting like mother and father. They must have fucked at least once (I suspect they haven't since I was born, dad always has an eye for women my age and I think my mother is asexual, not even as an insult, literally asexual). I would say as a kid that I was adopted, and there's photos of a baby who is apparently me within minutes of being born (they had a home birth with a fucking doula and incense, I am NOT kidding). But I suspect that baby isn't me. Figuratively, that baby is not me, I have changed so utterly and completely since then, all of my cells have died and reformed, that I am not that baby. But I wonder sometimes if I'm literally not that baby and they found some other kid somewhere. But I get big enough and I recognize myself as a child, even though that's not me either. My personality does not even closely resemble myself as a child, someone who would give scared smiles to the camera.

Me now is not particularly talkative and extroverted like my parents are, and not particularly interested in their approval anymore. I want approval from parental figures but I feel like my grandparents (the surviving grandmother) are more parents to me than them. My mother especially has often had really nasty comments about how "not fair" it was that I get along so well with my grandmother, but she actually treats me the way mothers treat their children. She is not particularly indulgent either. She commands and I listen, hell, there was a lot of that last year when we spent about a week packing up my mother's childhood home to be sold because no one else would do it. My grandmother has never screamed at me, never yelled at me. But from what I've heard, my grandparents were hella lax with my mother and that's why she turned into a four letter word I won't repeat here. My mother was apparently spoiled as a child and sexually abused by someone. My father was viciously beaten by both of his own parents. They are responding to everything they were taught. Somehow I didn't turn out worse than them. But my mother HATES it when I talk to my grandmother. She is actively jealous. My father couldn't give a shit as long as he can talk to pretty women my age who are taller than both of us and preferably blond.

But even my father's mother (may she rest in peace), who I actually called Mom, who I spent the most time with, who apparently beat him bloody for his whole childhood, didn't ever once lay a finger on me. Didn't ever once treat me unkindly. My father has angrily said over and over again that "she was only nice to you to get back at me," and maybe, but we're an impatient as hell family. The times with my grandmother were the only times in my childhood where I seemed to be treated like a normal kid and not whatever weird spiritual shit my parents were into that week. My parents literally had an aura reading of me, and my results came out as indigo, and they were told by the old white guy calling himself a shaman that I was destined to change the world. As it turned out, he was completely right. I was supposed to change MY world, and I did, and he said I would become transformative, and I WAS, but not in the self-indulgent way they wanted.

They'd go around the house with divining rods (they actually did this right after the breakup, believe it or not), or they'd swallow enough supplements to make Deepak Chopra jealous. They have an entire room in the house stuffed top to bottom with self-help books (Mr. Chopra is prominently featured, but their favorite is Tony Robbins). It's literally just a small room with nothing but books everywhere, and the only fiction books in the room that don't belong to me are by Ayn Rand (dad's favorite fiction author, natch). If there's some self-help guru type you've heard of, I've met all of them except Deepak Chopra. I met Tony Robbins as a little kid, I met Wayne Dyer (another of dad's favorites), there's pictures of me and dad and whoever he was fanboying over somewhere. He used to display them when I was little. A veritable who's who of snake oil salesmen. There was an incident where they paid a fuckton of money to participate in one of Tony Robbins' fire walks (literally running across flaming hot coals, in a hotel parking lot, no i am NOT kidding), and my mother ran over the coals with three-year-old me on her back, with Tony Robbins and his little groupies encouraging her. My next memory is mom screaming in hysterical pain, burns on the bottom of her feet, and being told she didn't believe hard enough. If she'd dropped me...

There's another dude they were both in love with called David Wolfe, this bearded hippie motherfucker, raw food vegan asshole type. I had once mentioned to someone at work very offhand that I'd met this guy when I was a kid as well when they professed a fondness for him, and they eagerly asked me for my impressions. They were quite displeased when I said he had the worst BO of any human being I'd ever met before or since, he smelled so bad that I still distinctly remember it over 20 years later. I hope that is no longer the case and that he has taken a shower at least once since then. Look him up on Google and he looks like a guy with no hygiene whatsoever. And my parents were in love with him despite him being like ten years younger.

All of this in conjunction with their distorted attempts at being Orthodox Jews, which had them in constant conflict with their congregation, because they love to cherrypick and hate doing as their told, and Orthodox/Hasidic Jews are all about blind obedience, very much the Westboro Baptist Church of Jews in a lot of ways. My mother refused to shave her head and refused to quit her job and refused to give part of her income to the rabbi and refused to do lots of things, and I know that as much as I hate them, they were also rebellious people when they felt like it. Both of them voted Republican consistently for most of my life (they have since become conservative Democrats, clashing constantly with their queer vaguely leftist child, what can you do?), so everything they do is inconsistent and makes no sense to anyone other than them. Then again, this makes them the most left-leaning people in my family other than me. And my family is already pissed at me because they all found out I'm voting for Bernie in the primaries, but whatever.

They were always in search of a higher power, and spent a lot of money on it, jumping from group to group to group to group to group, I traveled all over the US with them to attend lecture after seminar after conference and then we'd get home and they argue for days and weeks and months at a time about all the money they were losing. They're horrible with money. I was never anywhere stable. Nothing about my childhood was stable, and this is why I never had friends as a kid, and why I barely have any relationships, because all the time other kids spent learning how to be friends and partners to one another, I was whisked away on whatever venture they were up to next to serve as a living doll.

I'm intentionally leaving out a lot of details and being intentionally vague, but a part of me is really pissed that I lost all this time. I barely feel like I'm figuring out how to make long lasting platonic relationships now. I still feel barely capable of being in a romantic or sexual relationship with a person sans knowing more or less how the physical aspect of it works. Sometimes I feel sixty and sometimes I feel 12.