Friday, October 14, 2011

My Humiliation by Kelly Sagina

 “Humiliation involves a triangle: (1) the victim, (2) the abuser and (3) the witness. The humiliated person may also behold her own degradation, or may imagine someone else, in the future, watching it or hearing about it. This is what Wayne Koestenbaum thinks about humiliation.


The triangle involves me as all three. The victim, the abuser, and the witness. I am a victim of the failure and ignorance of my parents in raising my sister and me. It is humiliating that I did not turn out to be the over achiever I was perceived to be. As I read these lines in this book I am reading for school (don’t you just hate it when you actually like a book or learn from a book you are forced to read?!), I think about how I learned about how my father married his “new” girlfriend in the spring. I just found out a few days ago, six months after the fact. I didn’t even learn it from him; my aunt had told me nonchalantly one night. I asked her why he failed to tell me, she said maybe he thought I didn’t care. How could I not care? What if I had gotten married and not told him about it? How would that make him feel? Yes it’s true; I did not care very much about his new girlfriend.  She and I never had a one on one conversation. She never tried or bothered to try and start a conversation with me. My guess is that she was afraid of me. Perhaps maybe there is something about me that is standoffish. But how does she expect me to welcome her with open arms while I already went through a bad experience after my dad's second significant relationship? The first being my mom, which was a result of my sister and I existing in this world. Also she is not the saint she claims to be. According to my mom and my uncle, she and my father had relations while I was on a trip to Spain with my mother and sister after my mother’s father passed away about 23 years ago. Why would a woman who has children of her own (she has two girls) try to hook up with a man who also has a woman and two children at home? My parents were never married, but let’s face it when you have a family you are basically married. Only there’s no piece of paper to prove it. That is the only difference.

My dad was still in a relationship with my stepmother when he started going out with his “new” woman. Again, I write “new” but she was always in the picture. She and my father were supposed to wed before I was born... while he was in relationship with my mother.  He is a two timing bastard you may say. Did I inherit his two timing gene? But he broke off the wedding plans because he said he was more in love with my mother. I am not sure about this but my mother may have been pregnant with me, and I’m guessing my dad wanted to do right by me. So he told my mom he would break off the wedding because he was in love with my mom and not her. My sister came about a year later.

So I am a victim of my father’s faults. He pays no attention to me and spends more time in relationships with other women than he does with my sister and I. Is this why I have so much bad luck with men? I remember this guy I really liked who once told me he would never make our relationship official because according to him, I didn’t respect myself.  That was about five years ago. How am I the abuser? Well I abuse people with my tough girl attitude that I subconsciously throw onto others. Is that my fault? Maybe not, instead it may just be a self-defense mechanism, a wall I put up so I can stop feeling so helpless that it just makes me want to breakdown and cry. Why can’t I just have a normal family like the ones on TV such as Family Matters or the Partridge Family and countless others? Maybe those families that look lovey dovey on the outside aren’t on the inside.  I am a witness to all these occurrences in my family, a bystander. Things that are out of my control just happen. Sometimes there is nothing I can do but just stand there and watch the movie go by and just wait to see if what I think will happen, actually will.

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