The Ink Chapel

There’s this weird expectation people place on adulthood where once you hit a certain age, you’re apparently supposed to stop talking about your childhood trauma like it magically expired.

Like one day you turn thirty and everyone suddenly expects you to be standing in a kitchen wearing beige linen pants saying:
“I’ve healed.” 🌿

Meanwhile I’m over here trying to figure out why a specific tone of voice can still make my nervous system prepare for war.

People love saying:
“You can’t blame your parents forever.”

Okay.
But can we at least acknowledge what happened first? 😭

Because I think some people hear “blaming your dad” and imagine an adult throwing a tantrum because they weren’t allowed to buy a pony in 1997.

No babe.

I’m talking about the kind of things that shape your entire internal world.

The way you react to conflict.
The way you view love.
The way your body stores fear.
The way criticism feels like a gunshot instead of simple feedback.
The way you spend years apologizing for existing too loudly.

That stuff doesn’t disappear because society decided thirty is the cutoff for emotional consequences.

And honestly?
I think people get uncomfortable when adults still hurt over childhood wounds because it forces them to confront how deeply parents actually affect a human being.

A parent isn’t just somebody who packed your lunches and showed up occasionally with a “good job.”

Parents become part of your inner voice.

So if you grow up constantly feeling dismissed, blamed, mocked, ignored, manipulated, yelled at, compared, or emotionally unsafe… congratulations. 🎉
Now you get to spend adulthood trying to uninstall software you never asked to download.

And the worst part?

Sometimes the people who hurt you the most still expect gratitude for doing the bare minimum.

Like wow thank you for housing the child you voluntarily took in while simultaneously emotionally damaging her. Very heroic. Somebody alert the newspapers immediately. 💀

What makes it harder with adoptive parents sometimes is the invisible guilt attached to it.

Because people act like adoption means you owe permanent silence.

“You should just be grateful.”

As if gratitude somehow cancels out pain.

Two things can exist at once:
I can appreciate being fed, clothed, and cared for in certain ways…
while also acknowledging that some things deeply wounded me.

That’s not betrayal.
That’s honesty.

And honestly, I spent YEARS minimizing it.

Maybe I’m dramatic.
Maybe I deserved it.
Maybe I was hard to love.
Maybe I really was “too emotional.”
Maybe if I had just been easier, quieter, less sensitive, less autistic, less me, things would’ve been different.

But you know what’s wild?

Kids naturally blame themselves because believing “I’m bad” feels safer than believing “the adults responsible for me failed me.”

That realization alone nearly knocked the wind out of me.

And now that I’m older?
Now that I’ve raised kids myself?
Some things make even LESS sense to me.

I genuinely cannot understand it.

And maybe that’s why the anger still exists sometimes.

Not because I’m immature.
Not because I’m stuck in the past.
But because some wounds don’t ache less with age.
You just get better at functioning while carrying them.

Besides, let’s be real:
If I survived all of that and still managed to become loving, funny, creative, empathetic, soft-hearted, and capable of deep love?

That’s actually iconic behavior from me. 😌

So no.
I don’t think I’m “too old” to talk about my dad.

I think I’m finally old enough to understand what should never have happened in the first place.

© TheInkChapel — If you steal my trauma for your aesthetic, at least cite your sources properly. 💀