CHAPTER ONE – THE MANUAL
Who decides there is a manual for living?
Who writes the rules and assumes that families like mine will follow them without question, without pause, without asking what it costs the people forced to live inside those rules?
I am born into a household that sells stability to the outside world. The kind of home that looks neat and respectable from a distance. The kind, neighbors admire. The kind relatives point to with approval. From the outside, everything appears orderly, controlled, and intact.
Inside, however, there is resentment that has learned to stay quiet. Control that disguises itself as discipline. Grief that has no language and therefore no release.
It is not a life I would choose to repeat in another lifetime.
There are good days, yes. Days when laughter escapes into the rooms unexpectedly. Days when food is plenty, when voices are lighter, when it almost feels like we are a normal family. But those days are fragile. They never last long enough to settle. They are quickly swallowed by duty, by expectations, by silence, by rules that are never written down yet strictly enforced.
By seventeen, my life is shaped more by don'ts than do's.
The do's are few and repetitive, drilled into me through observation rather than instruction:
Be a good daughter.
Protect the family's image.
Do not speak too loudly.
Do not ask questions that make people uncomfortable.
Do not want too much.
Freedom is never mentioned. It is not a word we use in this house. Responsibility replaces it. Obedience stands in its place. Love, when offered, comes with conditions.
Sometimes, at night, I lie awake listening to the house breathe. I hear doors creak softly. Footsteps move cautiously down the hallway. Someone sighs and swallows it quickly, as if sound itself is dangerous. The walls hold everything we refuse to say.
In those moments, I ask myself a question I do not dare ask aloud: When am I allowed to live for myself?
And even more frightening, what if that day never comes?
Perhaps life would have been easier if fairness were more generous. Or if the world itself had made better choices. If Adam and Eve had resisted temptation, maybe we would all still be in Eden, spared the inherited weight of consequence. But they didn't.
And we aren't.
This is not a story about hatred. I do not hate my family. I do not hate my father. This is a story about survival, about learning how to remain intact in a place that teaches you to disappear quietly.