The nightmare of being a child.

 Imagine tomorrow you wake up in a house you haven’t chosen, with two individuals who you haven’t chosen. They could be anybody. They could be the cruelest people you can imagine or they could be only slightly cruel. But they wouldn’t let you leave. They wouldn’t even let you choose what to wear, what to eat, how to dress, when to sleep, who you hang out, if you hang out. If you’d try to rebel to this treatment, you could get hit, or physically and emotionally harmed in other ways. They could send you to a corner, lock you into a room, sequester any small consolation you might have left from your former life, like a phone or a videogame (if they had been charitable enough to leave it to you). Everyday, you are sent into a sad, dull, grey building for six hours but unlike your former job, you can be insulted, demeaned, and screamed at openly for making any slight sound or interacting with other people in the room, who might or might not hate you and torment you as well. No one would take your side if they do, or try to defend yourself. There is no one you can complain to, if the mistreatment gets unbearable, and if the two people you live with say so, you can be forced to attend no matter how sick you are (if you are sick, those people would also be in charge of determining if you are sick enough to deserve medical attention - or if you are worthy of that kind of luxury in the first place). When you are back “home”, you wouldn’t be able to rest. You’d have to work for a few more hours before you might be allowed a couple of hours of peace, that is, if the people you live with do not decide they could use a domestic servant. When you are outside, people look at you up and down, glaring at you if you dare to raise your voice just a little bit, pitying those two individuals that you are, most of the times, not allowed to be out in public without “it must be so hard”. Nobody thinks you have it hard. If you try to comment upon it, you are laughed at. If you try to say that maybe it would be nice to have a little more freedom, they look at you like they have seen a ghost. You got no accomplices, no friends. The whole world sides with them. The whole world is designed after them. One day, their hold on you might get a little looser. They might let you breathe a little bit more. You might become used to this treatment. At the grey prison you are forced to attend from six to eight hours a day, you might find these so called accomplices that seemed utterly invisible just a little while before. If you’d try to taste a little more of freedom one night, being out longer than usual, drinking for a while, you might find yourself locked up. People like you are not allowed to do that sort of thing. You might fall in love. If the person you fall in love is your same gender, it would be based on utter luck whether or not those two people would break your teeth, or kick you out without any economic means, or any other place to stay.

Or kill you. Or send you to a torture camp even worse than your current life. All this could happen also if you are just a little bit of a “bad kid”. This is how they call people like you when they are not utterly docile. And that mark will make any kind of violence against you justified, might get you drugged or brutalized. Be careful not to be one. 

Oh, but you do not have to imagine it? This was your life before the law decided you were a person right? Or it was worse. Or you had relatives that committed atrocious acts on you, of whichever kind, and nobody believed you. Or it was your parents. Or your teachers or your preachers. Or you never had any other connection with the outside world because your parents feared the contamination and the danger of a possible “bad kid”. But you think this is too dramatic, that it wasn’t so bad? That it was necessary? That you would have ran wild without prison like control? But it haunts you. You have nightmares about school at night. You wake up sweaty because you had a dream where you came to class without your homework done, you sight and thank God you are no longer in high school, but then see a group of high schoolers enjoying themselves in a public place and think to yourself why do teenagers have to be so fucking annoying. You go on with your life, and one day will inflict this dystopia on a new one. It’s not like you were ever shown another way. 

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