This won’t be edited (if you can call it that) until Tuesday morning.
“If everyone else around you is an asshole…” Crankenstein often says, paraphrasing an aphorism that serves as an elegant solution to what Leonard Cohen might’ve called a popular problem: “If everyone else is always the problem, maybe the problem isn’t everyone else.”
Such proposals are controversial these days, depending on your audience.* The suggestion that we might be at least partially responsible for some of our own struggles invites more scorn and vilification now than it did in the past, due in no small part to — yes, I’m about to put on my Andy Rooney hat eyebrows again, so head for the exits if you must — the influence of social media, which traffics heavily in overused therapy-speak that vulnerable and inexperienced young people internalize and wield like Uzis.*
“That’s gaslighting!” youthful shut-ins with minimal life experience are apt to repeat like robots. “It’s the language of abusers!”** But is there not a sliver of truth to it? Sure, maybe both of your parents were jerks, or there were cliques of mean kids at your school, or there’s a branch of your family tree that everyone steers clear of at reunions. What strains credulity for me is the notion that everyone in your family (minus, perhaps, your kookiest aunt’s Pomeranian), or everyone you’ve ever worked with, or all of your exes and former friends, are terrible. Apologies for the coarse language, but if there are that many assholes in your life and you aren’t a proctologist or politician, my suspicion is that the asshole call is coming from inside the asshole house.
The point of this preamble is a development I referred to as “Tom’s perplexing new Schrödinger’s sister approach to estrangement” in a previous post. To briefly recap, my sister Tom’s clichéd spiral into an early midlife crisis, which began when she chose to flagrantly cheat on her long-term partner with a longtime friend, currently finds her estranged from a growing list of family and friends — most recently (and explosively), Youngest Sister — and she has threatened to add our parents to the list if they step out of line.^ But she’s also made several overtures toward me lately and I’m not sure how to respond.
One of the central issues in this whole dumb saga is that Tom and New Girlfriend can’t stop loudly and obnoxiously asserting their own ridiculous boundaries while trampling over everyone else’s. New Girlfriend, who’s as nuts as she sounds and then some, caused problems over the holidays by declaring yet another “WTF?!” boundary: She didn’t want Tom’s ex, who was traveling from out-of-state, to see Youngest Sister’s kids. It would be a violation, she explained, since Youngest Sister doesn’t want New Girlfriend around them; Tom’s ex can’t have something she can’t have. Because Tom is equally insane, she saw nothing wrong with this, unlike Youngest Sister and everyone else who is tethered to reality.
Everything you need to know about the emotional maturity of our principal players, and the odds of their relationship working out, is contained in that wildly idiotic scenario. Tom’s ex was Youngest Sister’s best friend until recently, when Tom threatened to go no-contact with the ex if the friendship continued; her children, who’ve always known Ex as their aunt, miss her and wanted to see her, just as she misses them. When Youngest Sister clarified that she and her husband are the only people who get to decide who their kids hang out with, Tom and New Girlfriend took it less than gracefully and vulgarly expelled Youngest Sister from Tom’s life on December 25th, which was both Christmas night and the start of Hanukkah.^^
With this and myriad abuses of other people’s boundaries in mind, I’m not inclined to respond to Tom’s overtures. After expelling me from a family group chat and blocking both me and Crankenstein from contacting her (which we only learned after I tried calling her on an afternoon when others were worried about her safety), she’s now sending me snail mail — a note thanking us for a gift, and a newer envelope that sits untouched in our foyer but presumably contains a birthday card. To me, these gestures feel like more manipulative, control-freak nonsense: we’re barred from contacting her but she’s free to talk at us whenever she pleases. It’s childish and insulting.
“Doesn’t estrangement mean anything anymore?” is all I’d write, if I wrote anything at all, and instead of my usual college-ruled notebook paper I’d select an elegant piece of stationery for the occasion. It’s a joke, yes, but also a sincere question of morals; one that would presumably go unanswered since she’s temporarily misplaced hers.
* While it’s not OK to hold them responsible for their actions or inactions, they’re happy to assign blame to any of the following: late-stage capitalism (a phrase that’s overused by Zillennials who don’t really understand it); ableism (don’t get me started on this — that people who aren’t actually disabled have weaponized the concept of ableism in ways that are, in fact, exceedingly ableist, is reprehensible); heteronormativity (98% of people who bitch about heteronormativity are self-loathing heterosexuals and the other 2% are just pretentious); or the patriarchy (which is truly at the root of a great deal of injustice that adversely impacts everyone, including men, but it’s not the reason you stubbed your toe or can’t find your keys; not to mention I can’t take young women seriously if they rail against the patriarchy and then turn around and ask their doctors for testosterone prescriptions and change their names to Oliver, as many currently do).
** I’m not sure how old the average reader here is, or how familiar they might be with Tumblr in its heyday; Reddit once it was overrun by precocious 14-year-old girls and pervy 40-year-old men who call themselves trans despite not having gender dysphoria; or Twitter before it traded sardonic blue-haired ‘queers’ for neo-Nazis. As such, I considered illustrating this point with links in case anyone thought it was a joke, and my search yielded an embarrassing bounty of relevant results. The reason I decided against it was that as annoying as these people are, most were clearly in emotional pain and rubbernecking at them felt wrong.
^ That’s a simplification, but ‘queer TikTok’ rotted her brain to the point that she expected rounds of applause and appreciative murmurs of “stunning and brave” for cheating (under the laughable guise of coming out as non-monogamous, something we all knew — and more importantly, she knew — she wasn’t) and couldn’t handle it when the people closest to her were appalled by her behavior.
^^ Our parents were the only ones who didn’t see that coming. The rest of us are familiar enough with New Girlfriend’s brand of “burn it all down” bullshit to have predicted a holiday stunt of some sort, we just didn’t expect quite that much nastiness.