on spending thanksgiving with relatives...

I really dislike my brother and stepbrother. I have done nothing wrong to them, yet they find it nessasary to attempt at every chance they get to marginalize me from the family unit. I know it's extremly petty to bitch and moan about two 16 year old boys and their antics but it's just so frusturating. Especially when it has begun to affect how I feel at family gatherings.

Spending time with my family is never easy for me. Let's just say that I never had what is called an 'easy childhood'. My father's glass was never filled with anything but vodka and my mother was never attentive enough to care. Holidays were spent with my father's family at their home in Englewood NJ, with me and my brother feeling like outcasts because we did not attend Yeshiva nor were we being raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. I think that was the worst. The entire family, children included, would participate in a perverse take on Trivial Pursuit, where mocking was encouraged if a question was answered incorrectly. It was never spoken but if you failed to answer a question correctly, your backside, arms and legs would be quite sore for days to come. Success became not something to strive for, but a nessasary sourse for remaining unscathed.

Maybe my brother and stepbrother are jelous. I started answering the questions right, thus escaping the worst of the blows delt for the crime of stupidity (but certainly not for physical perfection). I know I should have done more to protect them, but it's self-preservation at that point. And plus, I got to escape. I left on my sixteenth birthday and never really came back.

And now, I guess as retribution, every time I enter the room with either of them there, a snide remark is made. Knives (both literal and figurative) are thrown in my direction. And after a while, you just get tired of dodging and let one hit you in the jugular.

I know it's disgustingly cliche, but because all of this, I feel like I'm constantly lonely. Surrounded by people but just an empty shell. All I wanted to do tonight was scream and let everyone know how much I despise the obligatory family gatherings. They are such a farce. No one really can stand each other. At all.

Kind of nausiating to thing about it, really.