Blown Away in Journal

I’ve exchanged email with my Aunt over the last several days. I find myself more and more shocked and appalled. I don’t know why, but I thought that she was different.
Just another thing that I idealized about in my childhood, I guess.

She is my dad. To a T. Maybe that’s why they can’t stand each other. Glaring hypocrisy and callous disregard for my own stated goals-
I tell her “I don’t a benefit in doing this, only harm..”
“Do it anyway!” she responds, and grinds on.

Maybe it is because she is female? I have such an ambivalent relationship to my mother, but not my father. With my dad, everything is so cut and dry. It is clear. I have no doubts. There is nothing returned for my empathy, for my compassion or sympathy, except hate and blame. “Yes, that’s right, it truly is your fault!” he would say in relief and happiness. Any sort of openness, honesty, vulnerability was pounced on with ravenous tearing fangs. They want to kill me. They want to hollow me out, and make me like them.

I am remiss in that I didn’t see this at first, and so I was too open with her. I was too trusting and too revealing. Yet I wonder… how else can I be?

My mom sent me a giant email yesterday as well, about how I can’t be honest or trust anyone. lol. She had read a short quip that I posted on social media about an encounter with a rude man. She didn’t ask if I knew the man or who he was or how I felt about it. It was just- Michelle, you absolutely cannot do this! You’re putting yourself and your child in danger! Only about a mile long in email.
I responded almost immediately, with the first thing that came to mind;
J,
I believe that it is far more dangerous to have a closed, fearful heart.
With all due respect, your reaction illustrates a high level of reactivity and a fundamental inability to manage your insecurities. For which, I have sympathy. But it’s something that I refuse to engage with.
~Michelle

And, I’m still happy with that response. I am a tad regretful.... I am so unused to expressing myself that I feel like everything is like sandpaper. I am less worried about that, though, than about my own accomplishments and progress in unearthing my own needs, my own wants, and my own expression in this world. I can always work on delivery later.
In a way, she deserves whatever delivery she gets. She raised me (or rather, didn’t raise me) to know nothing about myself, to have no communication skills, to be blind and deaf and lost. She abandoned me to the world, and deserves nothing more than whatever I’m willing to toss back. Perhaps she doesn’t even deserve that.