Introduction

    The word "unpleasant" was used to manipulate me for as long as I can remember. When I was little, I thought it really meant what it sounded like - that I was being unpleasant, although I didn't understand how or why. My mom would say it so often that I thought I must really just be a terrible person to be around. It didn't really occur to me until I was an adult that it really means "you're doing something that I don't like right now, knock it off".

    "You're being unpleasant" had a lot of implications. Namely, that my job was to be "pleasant" all of the time. To my mom, "pleasant" was: entertaining, agreeable, funny, and most importantly, not daring to have age-appropriate needs, not questioning anything that was going on around me. I was especially "unpleasant" if I was stressed about real problems in my life, or if I pointed out that something in our family was dysfunctional or wrong. For a long time, I was trained like a dog. "Unpleasant" was meant to make me drop what I was doing and immediately grovel for forgiveness and approval.

    She frequently remembered back to tougher periods of my life, where my behavior was erratic and unpredictable due to C-PTSD and depression. "You were so crazy back then! I miss it!". As a wife, mother, and someone who is finally in a relatively good place mentally, I'm almost perpetually stuck as "unpleasant" - because I'm boring and predictable now. I think it speaks volumes of how emotionally stunted she is that she thinks a person should be all over the place and unstable ("so crazy"), even once they're married and have children. I'm no longer the "fun best friend", who I never wanted to be in the first place, I'm practically of no use to her.

    "Tough girl" is a rough translation of one of my mom's favorite phrases to use against me. Imagine something like "macho", they way it's used in the United States as a derogatory term for someone who is being a try-hard, a rebel, a show-off, except it's not specific to men. One of the things I wasn't allowed to point out about my family was the total lack of sexual boundaries, and the fact that it's not normal or appropriate for my dad to corner me and fondle my butt. I remember feeling total panic and dread every time this happened. Eventually, I realized that those feelings weren't a defect in myself, and I started speaking up. My dad would immediately get angry, and my mom would roll her eyes accuse me of "playing tough" or "being a show-off" because I didn't just let it happen. Sometimes, it was implied that I should apologize to him for being this way.

    A couple of years ago, I was expected to drive my mom and dad somewhere, and my dad would not stop yelling in the backseat. I repeatedly asked him to quiet down. I could hardly focus on driving. I hit a curb. This triggered an unhinged torrent of verbal abuse and threats towards me, and then he decided to yell at me that he's "going to walk home". I told him to go right ahead and do that, because I wasn't comfortable with him in my car anymore. My mom demanded that I follow him as he walks down the street, beg him to get back in the car, and apologize. I was being "unpleasant", a "tough girl, a "show-off", because I didn't want to let someone whose disrespectful behavior caused a minor car accident back into my car, especially after they were making threats towards me. She cried and accused me of being a terrible person the entire drive back... radio silence in regards to his violence and threats, of course.

    Any semblance of boundaries, a backbone, or self-respect was met with accusations of being some sort of rebellious brat who just had to go against the grain. "Tough girl" was probably the most common way to degrade me after I dared to insist that I'm actually a human being with rights. I'm still not sure to what degree she was doing this on purpose. There seemed to be an attitude that it's a woman's job, specifically mine, to put up with grotesque violations of personal space and bodily autonomy... otherwise, you were being difficult. When I was much younger, I was convinced that she was just as much of a victim as I was, and I'd vent to her after my dad did these things... today, I know that she was as complicit as he was in a purely evil family system.

    I'm not very good at making creative pen names or usernames. Usually, the ones I choose are just silly. I wanted this blog to be serious, so I couldn't make it some sort of bizarre inside joke or reference to something that makes me laugh. That's how I came up with "unpleasant tough girl". It's not really all that "deep", but it's something I've been called my entire life, and only recently started to question. What did it actually mean, and why was it made out to be so bad?