Burning Bridges
I’m a college student. When I get stressed/anxious, I get nasty acne breakouts. A couple of weeks ago my midterms began, and my acne started getting bad. My parents have me FaceTime them every week to check in. When they noticed my acne a couple of weeks ago, they made comments like, verbatim, “You look exponentially worse than you did last week”!
Also, “Your face looks awful”! It’s made me feel pretty bad. Normally, I’m a very passive person. But recently, I’ve gotten more confident, and so tonight I decided to stand up for myself. By the way, I have a mental health condition that my parents are very concerned about. My condition is well-regulated, and I haven’t experienced any significant flare-ups in over a year.
Regardless, if I get stressed or worried, or if I otherwise act out of character, my parents immediately assume my condition has worsened, and that my life is therefore in danger. Fast forward to tonight. I called my parents at the scheduled time and they said, “Hang on, let’s switch this to a video call”.
I said, “I’d rather we keep it an audio call. In the past couple of weeks, you’ve made some comments about my complexion that I was uncomfortable with, and though I know you didn’t mean anything harmful, it still hurt, and since my face is still broken out I’m not comfortable talking to you over video”. The tone of the call changed completely—in a bad way.
“No, turn on the video. You don’t have a choice”. I stood my ground and just repeated, “I’d love to tell you about my week and hear what’s been going on in your life, over the phone. I’m just not comfortable using video”. My parents didn’t take that for an answer. Since I rarely say “no” to them, their first thought was that I was mentally ill again.
They told me, “We need to see your face for safety reasons, because we need to make sure you’re healthy”. I replied, “I will tell you honestly that I’m doing fine. Aside from being stressed about midterms, which is a pretty normal response, I am healthy. And since you’ve told me you trust me, you should trust that I’m telling the truth and I’m doing fine”.
They told me they refused to believe that, and accused me of hiding something from them. My mom asked me what on Earth they’d said that could have been hurtful, and that they didn’t do anything of the sort. About 20 minutes in, I was not going to budge. I was not going to turn the call on video. Especially since they didn’t respect my request, which I felt was simple and reasonable.
My parents were getting furious, and it began to get scary. They told me that if I didn’t turn on video and show them my face, they were going to call 9-1-1 and my campus’s security system, in addition to getting immediately into the car and driving the three hours to my school. When I told them I was disappointed they didn’t trust me, they laughed and asked me what on Earth I was talking about, that I had no right to say that.
I had lost their trust, but I was irrational in thinking that I had the right to stop trusting them. I was called a spoiled brat, irrational. My parents asked me what they ever did so wrong to deserve this treatment. They told me how worried they were for my safety, and if I could just turn on video, they would be happy to know I was safe.
My mother told me that if I didn’t turn on video, she would call the authorities, and they would take me into custody and I’d be spending the next six hours, at minimum, in the waiting office of a mental health facility. I was told that I was acting immature, and I wouldn’t be allowed to attend the summer program I’ve been accepted to. They kept going, though.
My father told me I was shutting them out and told me that if I didn’t want to lose all their trust and respect that I would have to turn on the video. I just kept saying, “I’m disappointed that you don’t trust me enough to respect my decision. All I asked was to keep the call off video this week. And I understand and appreciate that you’re concerned for me. This is me acting in my best interest”.
Finally, after about an hour of going back and forth, I decided, the heck with it. I have work to get done. I don’t have time for this argument. When I switched the call to video for them, my mother showed me that she had 9-1-1 into her cell phone, and she told me that she had been hovering over the “call” button for almost 20 minutes.
She showed me all the pamphlets and folders with emergency services and numbers, which she had been going through, and my father told me he had been just about to get in the car to head to my school. She started crying and talking about how worried she was, and she said, “Promise me you’ll never act like this again. This was stupid”.
I asked, “What do you mean by ‘this?’” She said, “Digging your heels in, and being this irrational”. I said I couldn’t promise that, and I reiterated that I didn’t feel I was being irrational; all I wanted was to call over phone and not use video this week, and I felt I had not been respected. Then my dad snapped. “Don’t you EVER say anything about not video calling, ever again”.
I’m feeling alright (and kind of good) after finally standing up to my parents for the first time in my life, but I’m still drained and definitely shaken. Part of me wants to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, and part of me wants to cry because I hate that this is the reality of my family. Where do I go from here? I do enjoy surface-level banter and chitchat with my parents.
I don’t want to go completely no contact with them. However, I also know that this situation is going to repeat itself the next time I stand my ground against them, and I don’t want to spend my time on people who don’t respect me. They say it’s a healthy practice to cut those people out of your life. What do you do when those people are your parents?