#anon im sending u many hugs and wishing u all the best 🌸 feel free to vent whenever

[magnoliamyrrh]

this is about the convo earlier with being molested by family members..i'm also balkan and i grew up with my grandparents but especially my grandpa inappropriately touching my chest and when i tried to tell my mom, older sis and aunt they all dismissed it as 'ehh he probably didn't mean to/his hand slipped'. i didn't wanna insist and look crazy because i do love my grandpa and he was the only parental figure i had in my life growing up, but at the same time...he did do that. idk if he thought it was normal or what but i think about it often. i can't bring it up with my family again because they'll just ignore it (especially now that he's dead). it's weird to think about how loving and nice he was when he was also doing shit like that from time to time. idk where i'm going with this but yeah. i don't think of myself as someone who was molested as a kid but this shit is definitely normalized. i've seen it in other families where they'd constantly touch and talk about their little boy's genitals... it's so fucked up

it really is fucked up, and its fucked up to realize that so many of us grew up w this.... for a long time i thought this was a me issue not a cultural one - and all the silence and shame around it certainly didnt help w that.... its been fucking weird to think abt the last couple of days since i asked on here abt it. like.. weve really made this SO normal and common huh?? that going against it is outright dismissed or even punished??? i cant help but just keep wondering where the fuck it all went so wrong and how we got here - and whats so wrong that things like this havent been accepted only in the balkans but elsewhere. what. what is wrong with this species. incest is one of the only universal taboos among humans, and most other mammals also have an aversion to it. and yet. we have normalized an abnormal amount of it nontheless over and over again .....? uuuff

im sorry you went through that, and im sorry they didn't take it seriously and listen more to you. thats something that always hurts in particular. discomfort/repulsion is a normal reaction to have and youd expect at least the other women in ur family to care or understand it too, and its rly fucked up when they just... dismiss it or minimize it or make you feel guilty for it or like its your issue or hell do it themselves.. i figure for a lot of them, if theyd accept that what youre saying is bad, itd mean theyd have to accept that things they went through themselves was bad, and they dont wanna do that. so they dont do either.. im sorry that u cant speak abt it and i totally get how him being dead would make it all much harder. in my family at least we v much have a "dont speak ill of the dead" sorta thing, or just excusing the actions of particularly men after they did sorta thing......i still haven't told my family just about anything. any time i ever tried to bring up anything as a kid id get dismissed and ignored at best or be punished or degraded and humiliated at worst so.... learned my lesson on that one but. thank u for sending this, i hate to hear how many of us went through this but also its. nice to know that were not alone in this and that other ppl do get it

and i feel you. its a really confusing mess to try to make sense of how to feel abt ppl like that... be angry? be grossed out, be scared? be numb, be okay with it, pretend it didnt happen? excuse it, explain it away? .... and its just weird in the cases when it wasnt rly something particularly violent, or ""not that bad/bad enough"" ig or towes that line of being able to convince urself that maybe welll it could have been an accident. its weird to know how to feel abt them when they were seemingly ok ppl you cared abt and still do and who were nice other times. .. but also... did shit like this which end of the day just isnt ok. idk... i dont think theres rly a end or solution or one way to feel, i think.... its just kinda bound to be a cocktail of conflicting emotions... im still trying to figure out how to find some sort of. idk, potential resolution or peace w any of it but i haven't rly figured it out yet, i just keep turning it in my mind too

#anon im sending u many hugs and wishing u all the best 🌸 feel free to vent whenever