How To Play Passive Aggressive Parlay With Those You Love
A game where the quiet win and the ones who make a stand and say something, don’t
I’ve muted the ability to hyper-react to passive-aggressiveness when it comes to my parents. But, one word kept being repeated that I knew it was never in my mother’s wheelhouse until she uncovered my hidden writing account yet again. This happened as a 10-year-old with a journal and how she found it and read it. So, I hid what I was saying and stopped being honest when writing things on paper. But, I found I could be more open in the text, in what felt like the privacy of a computer and a password to lock out those who wanted to access me better than the doors we locked and found a way to open in seconds.
A locked door was a specific sort of crime in our household. In one of our first homes, you could pop the lock with a door hanger slid into the small hole of the fake brass handle.
When I made my last pseudonym to publish myself in poetry journals, finally, I had a friend named me. When my mother found my name, thanks to a tell I gave her, she scoured one hundred participants in a slam I had competed in. She told me how inadequate that name was.
She never found this account, but I’ve known not to tell anyone where I write lest they get extreme interest in it. They could be careless if I told them who I was…
