I Tried Very Hard to in A Childhood Lost

Ignore my brother as soon as I discovered that I had a choice.
For my entire life, I have carried the guilt, shame, and embarrassment of how I was to my brother when we were little. I still carry it, and I may yet for some time. But I know, now, that whatever I did when I was too small to make any kind of choice, that those actions were not because of me.
No… A little child exposed to intense violence, hatred, ambiguity, dishonesty, vitriol, and having never known or experienced any other way to treat someone, of course cannot magically treat anyone else any other way. It’d be like expecting a child to speak Japanese when no one has ever spoken it around them before. That expectation is of course, what held me to my shame. It was that expectation that my parents and others put on me like weights that kept me in perpetual Hell. I hated my brother, and that was bad. The only reason I would hate anyone smaller and more innocent than I was because I was bad. I was just bad. If I did those things and disliked him, it was because I was a terrible person and there was nothing anyone else did or could ever do about it. Because being bad was just who I was.
I believed for a long time, until almost just now actually, that my dad had a justification for beating me. I thought that the justification was how I treated my brother. I made my brother cry- although it was silly kid stuff, and I never hit him- I did make him cry. And that was mean. I made my brother cry, and the bus driver told my dad about it one morning. I don’t know if it was because my bus driver was a man, and usually it was my mother getting us on the bus. But one time, and it might’ve actually been the only time, my dad got us on the bus that morning. He told my dad, “you know, I set your kids together because they’re siblings. But your daughter always picks on your son and makes him cry.”
And, my dad said. “alright, I’ll take her to school today.”
I cannot describe the terror that I felt in that moment. It was like a black despair. I didn’t know exactly, what my dad would do. But what I did know was the tone of his voice. The determined and hard set to his jaw. That glassy look to his eyes. I know that I resisted getting off the bus again, but probably not much because, whatever I did would be made worse because of it. And, I don’t even remember most of what happened after that. But I remember what my dad said once we were in the house, and he made me get his belt.
“You do not pick on your brother. You do not make him cry. You are family, and you need to stick together and protect one another. Family is above everything else.”
And then he beat me with the belt. you don’t hurt children smaller than you he seemed to say, as he beat me- a small helpless little girl.
And for the longest time I believed that he believed in what he was doing and what he said. I believed that he was protecting his child by beating his child. In order to do this- to believe this incredibly upside down, backwards, inside out, irrational lie, I had to do some amazing gymnastics with my mind. Most of that had to do with degrading myself to a level of subhuman filth.
But I know that that is not true. Intellectually, at least. And I think I am beginning to believe it truly. Not only was my dad’s behavior anti-rational and abusive, but he broke my reasoning and my self of self, my will and my faith in my own goodness. That is evil.
I knew that I chose to stop hurting my brother as soon as I had a choice. And that is true integrity. But because of my dad’s torture, I doubted. I knew. But I doubted. I knew. But I doubted.
I doubted because I could not reconcile my behavior with the worm, the subhuman filth that I needed to believe I was in order to survive my dad.