Can somebody tell me whether I have "wrong" feelings or not?
I am a guy who grew up in Germany. Life was tough here. I experienced a lot of bullying and racism growing up. Germans can be really nasty and evil people (not all). I am a brown guy, and things have been really, really bad since the 2015 refugee crisis. The hatred I experienced... I could write a book about it.
While all this shit was going on, I was dealing with something else: my Indian family. I honestly don’t know if I am the bad guy or not.
Growing up, I had your typical absent Indian workaholic father with no life outside of work. Just greed for money. No interest in anything else, so there wasn’t really a present role model. He was at work for 15 hours every single day. He could honestly live alone and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. He is one of the most depressing people I know. Because of him, I always felt — and still feel — depressed and pressured. Pressured because of his lifestyle, which created this enormous pressure to perform. I was constantly told that he was a good man and that my brother and I needed to become like him. We never felt motivated to be like him.
My brother and I were not allowed to go out much, so my social skills were kind of crippled. My mother was your typical strict Indian mother who was fully focused on our education. My parents were strict overall, but at the same time they coddled and spoiled the hell out of us. We had nothing to do at home — not even lift a finger. So very early on, we became accustomed to being lazy and overly comfortable.
Because my dad never goes anywhere — not even to the Sikh temple — we became kind of an isolated family. My mother, my brother, and I used to go, but we slowly stopped because it became depressing for me seeing all these dads just chilling and enjoying themselves with their families while I felt like I never really had a father.
In my opinion, my mother didn’t know how to raise us properly. She treated us more like girls than boys. She clearly didn’t understand that boys and girls can be mentally different and sometimes react to things differently. She would become overly emotional, while my brother and I would just shrug things off, which often led to us being brutally beaten.
Things were already bad, but there was one more issue: favoritism. My dad favored my younger brother simply for existing and for being born two years after me. My brother constantly got away with so much bullshit, while I just had to shut up and accept it. It was frustrating because I couldn’t even correct him. He would immediately call my dad, and my father would tell me to stop bothering him so much.
The idiot then paid the ultimate price for his terrible parenting: my brother started doing whatever he wanted, rebelled, moved out, started drinking and smoking, and began acting like a complete idiot. This led to the local Indian community gossiping about us, which made me even more depressed.
Sometimes I don’t know if my feelings are valid or not. I’ve often met people in my life who told me my feelings were wrong, constantly invalidating them.