Longform Personal Essay — Family Systems, Scapegoating & Identity Reclamation

The ScapeG.O.A.T.

A longform essay examining systemic abuse, family scapegoating, and the process of reclaiming identity through rupture and recognition.

PULL THE LEVER, KRONK!

So I can take these secrets with me to my grave — and then straight to hell.

(jk… chill, Kronk.)

Somewhere in 10th grade, barely surviving a home life that laid the blueprint for my social death, I chose drugs. I wish I had stumbled into a high-quality pair of headphones instead.

In a home built on systemic abuse, you don’t raise children — you collect hostages.

Family not by blood, but by blood ritual.

You realize you haven’t been alone because you deserved the abuse — you’ve just been isolated in order to make you believe you did.

Then the pain feeds off itself to trap you in its swell, when you realize how much easier it was to believe there was something wrong with me.

Fate…

another four-letter F-word.

Even when victimhood occurs in chronic isolation, it’s always part of a larger pattern. The larger the pattern, the more isolated the target.

Systemic abuse is surgical in its inverted invasion — making torment feel like atonement, and atonement becomes the tone meant to control your hijacked sense of self.

They say money is the root of all evil — but evil roots where it’s seeded. And the seeds come in different shapes of manipulation, each one a distortion of love.

Money isn’t necessary when there’s a bad batch of Jim’s magic beanstalk seeds — these don’t make you rise high in power; they make you get high off control.

When emotion is the transaction and control is the tree of worship, the one holding the seed bag becomes a broker for the devil.

In a system that supports itself simply by existing, humans become flying monkeys, selling their soul to be a useful idiot.

Systemic cruelty is blinding, but the scapegoat becomes the scapeG.O.A.T., once the illusion of your life breaks like a spell, and you realize their roots reach the same circle of hell as your own.

But only the Greatest Of All Time could manage to escape like a goat — climbing impossible heights to reach the thing you needed, in the center of your Self.

And you see that the reason you were held down is the same reason you rise above.

This is an insidious type of systemic abuse that drains what it doesn’t distort, where getting out can seem harder than staying in.

You're left to come into yourself through an out-of-body experience.

Because once the lie is revealed, the psyche cracks — but not because it changes; because it un-changes.

I respect the (likely unwitnessed) grace of those whose soul-searching led them to feel enraged that it could exist like this in the first place.

Because the deepest horror doesn’t come from realizing what was done to you.

It comes from this:

I sold my soul to anybody who asked — and paid them to take it off my hands.

When your vision returns from the liminal space of disorientation, you see the hell you’ve ended up in.

And your anger shifts — from the beast, to the system.

Most of us live a lie because the truth demands too much of us.

The lies I lived have become the forgiveness I embody.

And I no longer care to have a seat at the family table, where cannibals dine over a shared meal of eating one of their own.

Because they know not what they do when they pledge allegiance to an opinion that had more to do with a horned goat than the scapegoat.

A heart can still break once it’s been torn out, in understanding

the only thing wrong with me was that there was never anything wrong with me.

The blood in your veins runs cold when iced-out memory thaws enough to send your body into a freeze.

The only connection I have to my blood relatives is when it’s dripping down my back — blood being relative to whoever’s hand held the knife.

Being filleted at the altar of other people’s demons is a gateway to god.

Still haven’t found one yet, but I’m convinced that I must have been holy to have survived through all of this hell.

It’s good that life is irony — because you learn to love to hate its stupid laugh.

If your family doesn’t operate on unconditional love, but under the condition that you're unlovable, remember:

you’re simply the mirror that reflected the objections that were larger than they appeared — the one they wouldn’t look at unless it was flattering.

When you understand that the reason they put you down was so that they could prop themselves up, you start loving yourself in a way that was never taught to you — the way you always deserved.

Then you can view the hellscape from heaven as they plant their sickened seeds.

And laugh.

Because their tallest tale could never reach

where only a goat can climb.