He [the brother, Yngve] has told me often that Dad had totally crushed his self-esteem on a number of occasions, humiliated him as only Dad could, and that had colored periods of his life when he felt he was incapable of doing anything and was worthless. Then there were other periods when everything went well, when there were no hitches, no nagging doubts. From the outside, all you saw was the latter.
Dad had also affected my self-image, of course, but perhaps in a different way, at any rate I never had periods of doubt followed by periods of self-confidence, it was all entangled for me, and the doubts that colored such a large part of my thinking never applied to the larger picture but always the smaller, the one associated with my closer surroundings, friends, acquaintances, girls, who, I was convinced, always held a low opinion of me, considered me an idiot, which burned inside me, every day it burned inside me; however, as far as the larger picture was concerned, I never had any doubt that I could attain whatever I wanted, I knew I had it in me, because my years were so strong and they never found any rest. How could they? How else was I going to crush everyone?
-- My Struggle, Volume 1, page 358
The above excerpt is from Karl Ove Knausgaard's lightly fictionalized autobiographical six-volume novel, My Struggle. The first volume deals with his relationship with his cold father who descends from being an impeachable middle-class conformist to an alcoholic. When his father dies, Knausgaard and his brother, Yngve, drive to their paternal grandmother's house where their father had spent the last few years, and Knausgaard is horrified by the sight that greets him: the once impeccable rooms filled with vodka and beer bottles; dried feces stuck to the furniture; the smell of urine in every part of the house; stacked up to the ceiling is a pile of old laundry, so old that mold is growing in various layers.
What struck me about the words above are Knausgaard's descriptions of how the father's slights lived on within the two brothers. For the older brother, Yngve, his father's insults "colored periods of his life when he felt he was incapable of doing anything and was worthless"; for Knausgaard, "every day it burned inside me." In the book's narrative, the brothers are sharing their respective perspectives on their father at his death, over a decade after they had left their father's house. When Knausgaard started writing the series, he was already in his early forties. That burning, pernicious memory of his father is what propelled Knausgaard to write his epic novel series.
I don't know if Knausgaard's father was a narcissist, only that his youngest son feared him, so much so that he would listen for his father's footsteps lest he be taken unawares. That sense of watching someone, like a cornered animal, the wariness, and the possibility of humiliation: it is an apt description for my relationship with my sister as for Knausgaard's with his father. For years after my relationship with my sister ended, I was convinced that people thought lowly about me. She had projected her beliefs, her emotions, her fears about herself onto me. Like a member of a relay team, I in turn projected my sister onto everyone. Everyone saw the worst in me, like she did. Everyone thought they had the right to control my life, like she did. Everyone was out to insult me, like she did. I had lived for years in a relationship where I was always in a flight or fight mode and I couldn't turn it off. This has cost me friends and jobs. There were years where I lived each day automatically, the days turning into weeks, months, seasons...all without me feeling anything.
FOG (Fear, Obligation, Guilt) was the triad of emotions my sister deployed against me. These feelings, which form a complex web of the primal (fear) and societal (obligation and guilt), helped keep me isolated and under her control.
Fear: She tried to stalk me. She threatened to destroy my possessions, books I had lent her when we were friendly. She yelled at me multiple times in public. Even though she invited me to live with her, when I didn't do the things she thought I should (not that I disrespected her -- I just refused to let her dictate what I did for a living, whom I dated, and whether I could write in my spare time), she threw me out of her house, knowing that I had nowhere to go. She mocked me in front of her friends. When our parents visited, she hinted around secrets I had told her about my personal life, pretty much letting me know it was in her power to reveal them to our parents. She called me at work to curse me. She would email me at work, sometimes fourteen times in a day. When I asked her to call my cell phone or email to my personal account, she ignored my requests.
Obligation: During the worst fighting, my sister got engaged. She held the wedding over my head. She wrote me, emailed me, phoned -- all with the insistent message that I absolutely must reconcile with her because of her wedding. She told me that I would make our family look bad. When I tried to compromise by saying I would attend the ceremony but not the long reception, she raged: "This is my occasion. You are supposed to be happy for me. You are supposed to care. If you don't come to the reception, you can't come at all."
Guilt: She said that unless I changed my job as she dictated, I would be a bad daughter to our parents. I asked her for her meaning. She said, "Have you seen how much hospitals cost? You need to have a million dollars to give Mom and Dad if they are ever hospitalized. How are you going to do that with your job?" I asked her, "Do you have a million dollars saved to give Mom and Dad?" She didn't answer. If I was late by even ten minutes (although she was always late), she would start ripping into me, telling me how I was wasting her time. Later, after her son was born, she wrote how she wished he could know me but that she couldn't even tell him about his aunt. When I got married, a few years after I severed contact with her, she yelled at my parents, telling them they had to make me invite her. My parents, to their credit, tried. Yet, in a long angry blog post, she skewered them for not getting that invite, called them weak.
Sigh. I don't want to live with her voice in my head. In the mornings, I walk to a park, walk through stretches of man-made wood. A bird perched on a branch above sings the same note twice, pauses, sings those same notes again. His song is beautiful, mine torturous. Many days, I try to remember that her actions are hers alone, that I need not internalize them. One of these days, my notes will be as clear as the bird's.
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