Some Shit I Wrote My First Year of College
Marriage for Profit
Part I: The Architecture of Accommodation
There were always emergencies in that house, but never the actionable kind. Never the kind that required someone to admit fault, make decisions, or accept consequences. Samantha’s family specialized in administrative crises – problems managed through delay, deflection, and the quiet agreement that nothing should ever be resolved if it could instead be endured indefinitely. These weren’t disasters. They were policies. The emotional equivalent of a tornado watch that never escalates, because escalation would imply responsibility. Nothing officially happened. Which meant nothing ever had to be fixed.
This is how dysfunction becomes invisible. Not through chaos, but through repetition. Small failures of care accumulate until they stop feeling like failures and start feeling like the structure itself. The house doesn’t collapse. It tilts. And because it tilts slowly, you adjust your posture without realizing you’re compensating. Some families pass down money or religion or mythologies about hard work. Samantha’s passed down avoidance, the conviction that discomfort is survivable, accountability is optional, and silence is preferable to clarity. It wasn’t defended. It didn’t need to be. It was ambient.
That house felt perpetually post-incident. Like something had gone wrong recently, but no one could agree on what it was or if acknowledging it would make things worse. Not wreckage. Not disaster. Just the persistent sense that reality had been edited for tone. Passive silences. Strategic sighs. Glances exchanged that silently said, if we don’t name it, it can’t accuse us. This wasn’t ignorance. It was cooperation. The embers stayed lit because putting them out would have required movement. And movement was the one thing nobody ever learned how to do.
You grow up in that environment long enough and it stops registering as strange. That’s how people are raised inside systems instead of families. Samantha’s upbringing functioned like a closed emotional biosphere. Self-contained, self-reinforcing, hostile to intrusion. Problems were allowed to exist but forbidden from becoming language. There were no explosions, only quiet catastrophes accumulating like dust. Therapists now call this ambient trauma, but the label doesn’t matter. It behaves like carbon monoxide. Invisible, survivable, and devastating in ways that don’t show on the surface.
By adulthood, Samantha had learned how to move through the world without ever engaging it directly. But that disengagement was not calm. On the surface, she appeared controlled, withholding, selectively indifferent. Pain, other people’s pain, registered as information, not obligation. This wasn’t innocence or fragility. It was efficiency. She had learned that attention is power, that withdrawal is leverage, and that ambiguity favors whoever cares less. That isn’t victimhood, it’s a skill set.
But that control was intermittent, not stable. Samantha was not emotionally cold in the way people expect. She was volatile. Easily angered. Quick to escalate. Rage was abundant. Care was scarce. What she rationed wasn’t emotion. It was empathy. Affection appeared in brief, disorienting doses, often following insult or explosion. Just often enough to disrupt the narrative that what you were experiencing was abuse. Just often enough to reset the clock.
This is the paradigm trauma normalizes. The oscillation. The confusing alternation between hostility and fleeting warmth. The moment when the person who has just dismissed you, belittled you, or erupted in anger suddenly offers closeness, as if nothing happened. As if this were proof that the harm was exaggerated or imagined. Kindness doesn’t repair the damage, it invalidates it. It teaches you to doubt your own assessment. It reframes volatility as passion, cruelty as stress, abuse as miscommunication.
Her parents weren’t monsters, but they were architects. They built a system where avoidance was rewarded and accountability was quietly punished. They taught her, implicitly and relentlessly, that if you wait long enough, most problems will either disappear or become someone else’s responsibility. That lesson doesn’t dissolve with age. It calcifies. And when someone raised inside that logic enters a relationship, they don’t stop using it. They refine it. They learn how to control the emotional weather rather than confront it, how to dominate the room through volatility and then distribute calm like a privilege.
I noticed these things because I’d been trained to notice. Some children survive by becoming numb. Others survive by becoming alert. Hyper-vigilance passes for maturity if you don’t look too closely. It looks like emotional intelligence, composure, responsibility. What it actually is, most of the time, is a nervous system calibrated to manage other people’s instability. You learn to read rooms, anticipate shifts, soften your needs before they provoke backlash. You become useful. And usefulness is a dangerous identity if you confuse it with love.
Endurance teaches you what you’re willing to tolerate. That’s the part nobody frames honestly. You acclimate to the slow leak. You internalize the logic that if something hasn’t killed you yet, it must be acceptable. You call this resilience. You call it growth. Eventually, endurance stops being a skill and becomes a moral posture. You stop asking whether something is wrong and start asking whether you can live with it. This is how consent gets trained. Not through force, but through repetition.
By the time Samantha and I were together, she was a polished expression of that training. Functional. Organized. Emotionally erratic – but strategically so. Affection appeared as frequently as insults, a pattern of confusion that someone with their own emotional trauma learns to normalize quickly. Withdrawal was her primary tool, but volatility enforced it. Conflict wasn’t something to resolve. It was something to win by attrition. She didn’t lack the capacity for empathy, she rationed it. And rationing, over time, becomes authority.
The insults weren’t constant. Neither was the anger. That was the point. If the cruelty had been consistent, it would have been legible. Instead, it was patterned. Enough unpredictability to destabilize the environment. Enough warmth to keep hope alive. The result is a double bind the traumatized mind recognizes immediately. If you are hurt, it must be because you misstepped. If things briefly improve, it must be because you learned. Abuse disguises itself as feedback.
There’s a particular danger in people like this because they read as strong. Emotional instability is easily mistaken for self-possession. They seem grounded because their anger occupies all available space. They seem stable because they refuse to accommodate anyone else’s interior life. Their volatility sets the agenda. Their tenderness, parceled out sparingly, becomes a resource others compete for. This isn’t emotional depth. It’s hierarchy.
They aren’t healed, they’re unrepaired. Their emotional foundation isn’t solid, it’s sedimentary. Layers of unprocessed experience compacted into something that feels firm until pressure is applied. Pressure always arrives. And when it does, sediment doesn’t flex. It shifts. Often violently. Often onto whoever is closest.
I carried my own inheritance into that relationship and it made the pairing efficient. I’d been trained to fix things. Productivity as virtue. Usefulness as worth. Love as labor. I didn’t experience this as pathology. I experienced it as character. If something was unstable, I applied effort. If someone was hurting, I absorbed it. My trauma didn’t make me passive, it made me industrious. That kind of momentum pairs well with someone who expects assimilation and offers control in return.
The brain doesn’t care whether a pattern is healthy. It cares whether it’s familiar. That’s the unromantic truth beneath most relationship myths. We don’t repeat dynamics because they’re good for us. We repeat them because they’re legible. We call this chemistry or fate or compatibility. It isn’t. It’s recognition. Samantha brought her system with her. I brought mine. Resonance doesn’t require health. It requires overlap.
At first, this looks like partnership. It feels like purpose. I believed love was a matter of endurance. Stay long enough. Care hard enough. Absorb enough impact. The relationship would transform. That belief flatters the person holding it. It lets you feel noble while you’re being trained. It’s the volunteer-firefighter fantasy. A garden hose, a forest fire, and the comforting delusion that effort alone is morality.
Occasionally, Samantha would gesture toward vulnerability. She’d recount parts of her childhood with clinical detachment, listing betrayals the way someone lists expired warranties. I mistook narration for processing. I thought witnessing equaled participation. I didn’t yet understand that some people display their pain not to dismantle it, but to contextualize their behavior. This is why I am the way I am is not a confession. It’s a disclaimer.
The realization didn’t arrive dramatically. There was no inciting incident. No cinematic rupture. It arrived the way erosion always does. Quietly. Accumulatively. Without asking permission. She didn’t want a husband. She wanted an accomplice. Someone fluent in denial. Someone who wouldn’t question the rules. Someone who would help maintain the ecosystem rather than disrupt it. Someone whose empathy could be converted into compliance.
That was the moment the story clarified. Not because anything changed, but because the logic became visible. By the time you can see the architecture, you’re already inside it. That’s how accommodation works. Not through overt cruelty, but through familiarity. Not through violence, but through consent trained to feel like reason. And once you understand that, the question is no longer how did this happen, but how much of this was being asked of you before you ever realized there was a choice.
Part II: The Laboratory of Control
By the time I understood the rules, I was already playing the game. Which is, of course, how games like this function. No instructions. No informed-consent forms. No point at which you’re allowed to say, wait, this wasn’t in the syllabus. Systems of control don’t announce themselves as systems. They introduce themselves as preferences, sensitivities, boundaries, vibes. Things polite adults are expected to respect. You don’t cross a border, the border moves. You don’t break a rule, the rule is invented retroactively and enforced immediately. What you experience at first isn’t captivity, it’s adjustment. Posture. The quiet recalibration of your internal compass because reality has begun to tilt in someone else’s favor and, crucially, you’re the one expected to compensate.
The pressure began early. Before the relationship had any meaningful history to justify it. I was encouraged, relentlessly, to take a job I already knew was toxic, because it paid more. The job wasn’t framed as a sacrifice, it was framed as responsibility. Proof of seriousness. Evidence that “we” were building something. Discomfort was recoded as maturity. Reluctance was reframed as fear. This wasn’t negotiation. It was expectation presented as partnership.
From there, the logic scaled predictably. A house. Not a shared aspiration, but a milestone I was expected to deliver. Ownership was positioned as commitment, stability, adulthood. Never mind whose labor financed it, whose credit carried it, whose future it would ultimately encumber. Once the house existed, it immediately became insufficient. The conversation shifted to children. Not because we had resolved anything between us, not because the environment was safe or stable, but because growth, in this system, always meant more. More labor. More obligation. More future leverage.
Looking back, the pattern is almost embarrassingly clean. First my labor. Then my assets. Then my potential future earnings, locked in through children. This is how extraction disguises itself as intimacy. Each step is framed as progress. Each escalation is justified by the previous concession. You’re never told you’re being harvested. You’re told you’re building a life.
Once the accomplice logic became visible, the relationship reassembled itself, in hindsight, the way a crime scene does once someone finally turns on the lights. The silences weren’t absence, they were tactics. The withdrawals weren’t mood, they were leverage. The selective affection, administered just often enough to keep you hopeful, never often enough to stabilize you, wasn’t intimacy. It was calibration. Samantha didn’t need to threaten or shout. She had learned something more efficient. Ambiguity favors the person who cares less. If the rules are unclear, the most empathetic person will exhaust themselves trying to interpret them. This is not cruelty. It’s economics.
Empathy became the primary resource. Not hers, mine. My attentiveness. My responsiveness. My reflexive concern for tone, impact, unintended harm. These traits had once passed for virtues. The sort of things people praise in bios and eulogies. Inside this system, they were extractable commodities. Every acclimation became precedent. Every attempt at repair became proof of malleability. The more effort I applied, the more information she had about where pressure could be employed next. Emotional intelligence, it turns out, is just a larger attack surface.
There’s a popular belief that emotionally intelligent people are harder to manipulate. This belief survives because it sounds flattering. In practice, the opposite is often true. Emotional literacy provides more levers, more data points, more opportunities for redirection. If you know how someone feels, you know how to move them. And if you know how to suffer quietly, you can be trained to do so indefinitely. Empathy without boundaries isn’t kindness. It’s a subscription service you forgot to cancel.
Gaslighting didn’t arrive as spectacle. It arrived as tone. As questions that felt reasonable enough to answer. Are you sure that’s what happened? That’s not what I meant. You’re reading into it. None of these statements are remarkable. That’s why they work. The goal isn’t to convince you of a lie, it’s to make you uncertain enough about the truth that asserting it feels irresponsible. You begin editing yourself in advance. Not because you’re afraid, but because you’ve learned that accuracy now carries social cost.
Over time, reality becomes negotiable. Memory turns porous. You replay conversations not because you’re obsessive, but because you’re trying to confirm that the world still obeys cause and effect. It does. Just not here. This is epistemic control. The quiet occupation of someone else’s perception. Once you can’t trust your own recall, you outsource it. And whoever supplies the replacement narrative doesn’t just gain influence, they gain authorship.
The environment reinforced this logic. Space itself became jurisdiction. The RV – presented as compromise, flexibility, adventure – functioned as a sovereign micro-state. Twenty-eight feet of aluminum where every object acquired political significance. Cups were messages. Keys were referendums. Furniture placement was territorial claim. Even the animals became proxies, their attention leveraged, their care politicized. Nothing was neutral, because neutrality dissolves hierarchy. And hierarchy, once established, requires constant rehearsal.
Control scaled outward through proxies, the way all successful systems do. Family became soft enforcement, an auxiliary bureaucracy that ensured no interaction remained unobserved or uninterpreted. Conversations were relayed with edits. Finances became moral audits. Minor discrepancies were reframed as character flaws. This wasn’t anarchy, it was governance. Informal, deniable governance. Which is always the most durable kind. If no one can quite explain the rules, everyone will overcomply just to be safe.
What made the system durable wasn’t cruelty. It was calibration. Escalation arrived in doses, punctuated by long stretches of relative calm that functioned as reward. Compliance was met with neutrality. Resistance was met with correction. Warmth appeared just often enough to remind you what you were optimizing for. This is how people are trained without ever being told they’re in training. The abuse isn’t constant because it doesn’t need to be. It’s instructional. Like a rubric you never asked for but are still graded on.
At some point, you stop asking whether something is fair and start asking whether it’s survivable. This is the cognitive pivot where morality gets replaced by logistics. The question becomes not should this be happening, but how do I manage it. That shift is subtle and devastating. It’s also how otherwise ethical people become participants in their own diminishment without ever consciously consenting to it. People don’t generally just wake up and volunteer to be controlled. They just keep adapting until adaptation becomes the job.
Observation, not resistance, became the only viable survival strategy. Resistance requires stable ground and shared reality. Observation. Pattern recognition. The quiet documentation of cause and consequence. You learn to predict moods, anticipate inflection points, calculate the cost of speaking versus staying silent. You stop reacting and start tracking. This doesn’t make you free. It makes you operational.
There’s a particular horror in realizing that your intelligence has been repurposed against you. The same skills that once allowed you to connect – insight, empathy, anticipation – now serve to keep the system running smoothly. You become an unwilling ethnographer of your own erasure, cataloging rituals of control the way an anthropologist catalogs kinship systems. Objects become symbols. Gestures become data. Nothing is allowed to simply be what it is because meaning has been monopolized.
The courthouse should have been the end of it. Institutionally, it was. Documents were signed. Assets divided. Authority redistributed in tyrannical, procedural language. But the theater intensified. The same behaviors that governed the marriage reappeared, stripped of intimacy and rendered transactional. Maximization replaced ambiguity. What had once been framed as partnership was now openly treated as entitlement.
Samantha performed triumph the way she performed everything else. Through posture, proximity, and implication. The point was never fairness, it was extraction. The goal was to leave with as much as possible, framed as justice, closure, or necessity depending on the audience. Winning was optional. Being seen winning was mandatory. The court, like most institutions, mistook confidence for coherence and performance for truth.
I watched with a detachment that surprised me. Not anger. Not relief. Recognition. This was the same system, scaled up and legalized. The same tactics. The same reliance on certainty as camouflage. The same expectation that narrative control would translate into material advantage. That realization didn’t hurt. It clarified. Clarity is an asshole like that.
Distance did the rest. Not closure, distance. The removal of constant input. The end of real-time calibration. Control systems depend on engagement the way fires depend on oxygen. When you stop the supply, they don’t explode, they suffocate. Slowly. Without ceremony. Which is deeply unsatisfying if you were hoping for justice, but quite effective if you’re aiming for peace.
Writing became the final distance. Not therapy. Not confession. Documentation. Narrative control. The refusal to let someone else finalize the meaning of events after the fact. Writing doesn’t redeem what happened. It doesn’t justify endurance or retrofit nobility onto suffering. It does something more practical. It restores sequence. Cause. Effect. It puts the world back into an order that doesn’t require you to doubt your own perception every time you open your mouth.
This is the part people mistake for healing. It isn’t. Healing suggests return. There is no return from this kind of education. There is only lucidity. And clarity is not warm. It’s quiet. It’s making coffee without wondering how it will be interpreted. It’s speaking without pre-editing for safety. It’s the ability to exist without being conscripted.
Freedom, in the end, wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t vindicated. It wasn’t applauded. It was simply the absence of surveillance. The ability to exist without being evaluated. To think without being redirected. To tell the story without asking permission.
That was enough.
It still is.