Committing Statuscide - 2
- Bryton Gore
- Mar 20
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 28
Committing Statuscide - Chapter 1 - Continued - Memoir of Bryton Gore
STATUSCIDE
(Excerpt from the memoir of Bryton Gore)
CH.1 Continued
They all thought they knew me, the bad teenager, the warning rather than the lesson. That’s what they saw and whispered when they believed I couldn’t hear. Beneath their judgment, however, lay the quiet unraveling of everything I once believed myself to be, before their expectations took hold.
I’ve spent my entire life confined to that narrow box of “the warning”, a human cautionary tale where every triumph is dismissed as mere luck or the delusion of an overinflated ego. My hard-won victories in single parenthood were a quiet rebellion against a status quo that preferred to credit someone else for my success. Far into my 30s, I nearly believed it myself, overwhelmed by an ungodly chorus insisting I should be grateful, as if I were nothing more than a charity case. And on the rare occasions I leaned on charity, they marked it as proof that every hard-fought victory was unearned, forcing me to confront how easily my relentless drive to build a better life for my children and me could be twisted into tyranny.
As a teenager, I wasn’t out running wild. I was alone in my bed, staring at the ceiling as the world slowly shrank around me. I’d wake in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, knowing that nothing would ever be the same, even though chaos was the only constant I’d ever known. And when the pounding subsided, I’d cower in the shower, scratching at my skin, trying to claw him off of me. They labeled me reckless, but I was simply always scared. Even when I appeared brave, screaming at my mom to stop drinking, I was trembling inside. No one ever tells you that sometimes bravery feels a lot like shitting yourself.
Maybe I had a bad reputation, but I wasn’t the person they painted me to be. The loneliest part is that no one ever paused to ask if their judgment was wrong. No one questions their own perception when it so neatly feeds their ego. It’s easier to cast someone as bad, a loser, crazy, or evil. People crave a fantasy, they live for it. And when you’re condemned as rotten, you can become trapped in that identity.
Then came the day I was finally financially emancipated from my mother. I found myself in a social worker’s office, a room painted in that sickly hospital green; with a woman who had clearly given up on everything. “YOU’LL ALWAYS BE NOTHING, is that what you want?” she screamed. I understand how it must have looked to her: I was in private school, and she didn’t have my mother’s records before her. She was merely the register for independent social payments, thrust upon me to figure out what the hell was happening and why I was sitting in her chair. But she didn’t know the details, the details of how I begged the dean for a scholarship when I discovered my mother hadn’t been paying the fees; how I cleverly forged a note to change my mother’s mobile number to mine and recorded her voicemail. I absorbed that stress by listening to the voicemails of non-fee payers and pleading with the principal to help us stay, all while knowing my mother was drowning in credit card debt.
The social worker sheepishly called my mother, and, of course, she was drunk. With the phone on loudspeaker, hoping to teach me a lesson, I watched her face go pale as she disowned me on air, slurring and swearing. I was handed an emancipated payment and then dumped into a system designed to find guardians, along with my sister. I moved in with my manager and her partner, the very convenience store guy who would eventually become the father of my children.
In childhood, Ashley, my twin sister, managed to forge a close relationship with our mother, but I knew better. By the time I was eight, I was aware that her liver was failing and that she’d been forced into rehab by the courts, while Ashley remained blissfully unaware. That’s why my mother never truly loved me: I had the courage to call her out.
The night I decided to leave home was my final, desperate attempt to hold our family together. After work, I walked through the cold, praying to every god I could name. “Please, help me reach her,” I whispered into the night. I stepped inside and found the hidden bottles. I cleared away the evidence of her vomiting and stashed them in my room, only to realize that she had been watching me all along.
“Where are they?” she slurred, her voice slicing through the stillness like a knife. I had hidden them under a blanket, but her fury only grew. “Where are they?” she screamed again.
“Mom, please listen to me,” I pleaded, my voice trembling with both fear and desperation.
And then, she struck me.
It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, but that night, her rage landed squarely on my face. I felt every blow as if confirming a truth I’d long tried to deny. In the past, I blamed myself for every misstep, stealing the phone, talking back. But that night, I had approached her with love. Whatever she wielded cracked against my skin and skull, punctuating her bitter words: “You deserve this.”
I fled, the metallic taste of blood mingling with my tears, and didn’t stop until I reached work. There, I found Ashley, and for the first time, I confessed: I couldn’t go back. I wouldn’t. Whether she joined me or returned to that toxic home, I made it clear, I would not hate her.
That night, I stopped believing in dreams, fate, or destiny. I ceased to trust anything larger than myself. Then, a year and a half later, I stared at two pink lines, a final, damning verdict confirming I wasn’t the only one who needed saving.
I remember the smell first: the acrid mix of cheap wine and vodka, the bitterness of her breath, and the ever-present odor of cigarettes and piss clinging to her clothes like a second skin. It was the smell of a war zone, a place where explosions were routine yet left no visible scars. In that space, we were all, in our own ways, already dead.
Mom would come home late, sometimes barely able to stand, other times swallowed by a silence more oppressive than the one between us. Her eyes always seemed distant, locked in a silent internal battle. I’d sit in the kitchen, pretending to sleep while straining to catch every creak, every slammed door, every cry that masked her anguish waiting to clean up vomit or blood from her inevitable injuries. The nightly wailing on the phone, her drunken slurs, each sound sent my heart racing as she screamed for her ‘soulmate’. Was that the night she’d finally collapse into self-destruction, or would she continue her charade? She silenced my concerns with threats that the police and hospital would tear our family apart.
In those moments, I’d tiptoe into her room to clean up the mess, learning to care for her after too many frantic calls for an ambulance or letting the police in. She wasn’t fleeing from reality; she was chasing the ghost of my father, a man whose dreams of luxury died with him, leaving behind only broken promises. In time, his memory would haunt me, too.
I don’t believe ghosts are simply specters of the past. To me, they are lingering memories that keep us tethered to a time we can’t let go, a familiar smell, a forgotten word, a piece of music. In many ways, I became a haunted house.
It wasn’t just her addiction that scarred me, it was how she made me feel, as if I were her last hope, her only caretaker. It sounds upside down but I would take Physical Abuse over Emotional Abuse any day. In trying to hold everything together, I was left with my own crumbling foundation. Ashley and I were cast into different roles: her path paved by the need to maintain a perfect daughter façade, groomed by our mother, where mine by a relentless pursuit of unvarnished truth. In front of Mom, I was the one who refused to pretend; behind closed doors, Ashley leaned on me to face her mother’s wrath. I questioned, I confronted, while she masked her turmoil with silence and smiles.
The cruel twist was that Ashley got rewarded for her silence. By siding with Mom, she earned love and attention, turning against me in the process. It wasn’t about love; it was about survival. It was easier to label me as the troublemaker than to confront the painful reality of Mom’s drinking. Eventually, Ashley hurt herself, blamed me, and ran to Mom, sobbing that I had hurt her. And Mom always took the bait, joining in to call me crazy.
I saw the manipulation clearly, yet Ashley was too lost in it, the cycle of Mom’s drinking had ensnared her. It wasn’t entirely her fault; she was simply trying to keep herself safe. Still, I couldn’t bury the truth, even if it meant wearing the label of the “bad kid”, the monster who demanded honesty when no one else would. That belief would shape my decisions and ultimately become a crucial part of my story, the final cycle of my abusive childhood, marked by a stint in the psych ward. I never asked to see the truth behind the lies, but I couldn’t turn away.
Ashley became the perfect mirror for everything left unsaid. She kept the lie alive, and I was destined; 20 years later, to make her face what she refused to acknowledge.
And, like clockwork, the world, much like Mom, would once again blame me for her actions.
"The preceding text was proofread and grammatically corrected by ChatGPT, but the original content was not generated by it."
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