Nope

It may or may not be obvious that I am no contact with my foo (family of origin). Not sure how my writing comes across. But to clarify, I am fully no contact, and have been since Jan 2020. Not because it’s a trend, or a fad, or they forgot to give me pocket money, but because of 100,000,000 papercuts that finally stopped being harmless and drew the last of my available blood from my body, my brain and my heart.

The final straw could always be described as being so minimal that it was a rash and ill thought out decision on my part, and yet another example of my awful personality. But without the context of the 99,999,999 little tiny plausibly deniable events prior it loses it’s context. It has been an excruciatingly painful journey, but one that I have not regretted for one single gut wrenching second. Not one. And I would not hesitate to do it again if I had to.

I locked down almost all of the methods of contacting me four days after the event, giving them an opportunity to reach out and offer some form of realisation that the behaviour directed towards me wasn’t ok, and when none came, I closed the doors.

I left one stream of contact open. My email. Ernie (not his real name, but close enough) my dickhead of a father reached out twice. The first time only a month later to complain that his emails weren’t working and somebody needed to fix it. The second came through almost two years ago now, roughly about 8 days after my Aunty Pat died. Thankfully, I was already aware of this sad news, so the email wasn’t quite the punch in the gut it would have been had this been new to me.

This was the email:

Subject line: Aunty Pat died

Message: (exactly as written)
Line one: I am 80 in April.
Line two: Mum 77 in June.
Line three: Any interest?

Sent by iPhone

I didn’t reply, and I blocked his email so he couldn’t reach me again. But if I had replied it would have been something like this…