I hate that sharing what I feel gets me hurt

Boundaries aren’t to be set in my household. But what is worse, sometimes, than being unable to tell those that love you to respect a repeated request to cease specific jokes and unwanted contact, is knowing that bringing them closer to your passions and joys is also an act of opening yourself up to such glaring vulnerabilities. If it’s known that I feel passionately about the climate, then an overt littering is in order. That is love, modeled and insisted. Drilled into my brain. It’s just how if my sibling, oh so terrified of bridges after their bus crossed one in near-collapse as a child, is ever in the car and the wheels rolls across the connection between lands, a sudden stop, and an insistent reference to our position is, of course, in order. What revelry beams across that face when I say “please don’t.” I watch those machinations whirl behind those loving eyes. Behind mine, I’m similarly calculating, not to inflict damage, but weighing all that they’ve done for me, and squaring that with all they’ve done to me. And, next time, whether I’ll be preyed upon when I’m happy or when I’m frustrated, the spears jabbed inside me are ones I handed to them. Ones I handed off when I held tight onto my beliefs. Ones I handed off when I shared deeply my feelings about something prescient. Ones I dropped off beside me, thinking I no longer needed weapons of my own. Yet, as expected as they are, when one breach pierces through me, I’m often left ailing, screaming, and wailing to the sky, thinking: “I am not the kind of daughter that suits these people. I ought to better.”