Raised By Wolves (And Not the Wise Kind)
A declaration of independence from the people who were supposed to love you
When I was a child, my father held me over a two-hundred-foot cliff by my ankles and laughed while he let go.
Not once. Repeatedly. As a joke. My mother stood behind him and also laughed, because apparently this passed for entertainment in my household, the kind of material you workshop on a small child dangling upside down over certain death. He would let go, catch me at the last second, let go again. My mother would laugh. Everyone was having a great time. Everyone except me, a toddler who was busy learning his first and most foundational life lesson, which is that the people who are supposed to protect you will sometimes dangle you over a cliff for the bit.
That is not even the worst story. I wish it were the worst story.
My father, in a brief and catastrophic flirtation with agrarian self-sufficiency (between the vodka and the pot he had exactly enough ambition to purchase one pig), decided one afternoon to place his son on the back of this animal. I was five years old. Five. The pig, who was frankly the most sensible creature present that day, immediately bit me directly in the balls and then sprinted in circles for ten straight minutes dragging my five-year-old body face-first through liquid shit that had been piling up for months because my father was too lazy to shovel it and I was five freakinâ years old and my small, malnourished body could not handle the work myself.
My father stood at the fence the entire time and laughed like a man watching the greatest performance of his life. I was five years old. Because that is what fathers do, apparently.
My dad had a heart attack last month. My mom called me in a panic, said he was dying, so I borrowed a friendâs car and drove out to their farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to say goodbye. I had not seen them in years and honestly that had been working out great for everyone involved, but you do not skip your fatherâs deathbed, so I went.
Turns out he was not dying. He pulled through, which is wonderful, genuinely, except that somewhere between the ambulance and the recovery room he apparently had a spiritual awakening in which he realized that his heart attack was my fault. Also my fault: his cancer, his bad knees, and dropping out of school, which is a remarkable claim given that he dropped out in the tenth grade to ride motorcycles, sell drugs, and summon demons in a gravel pit using instructions he found in Led Zeppelin albums, all of which happened four years before I was born. My father looked at a Robert Plant record insert and thought, now here is a man with practical advice. He was twenty years old when I arrived and spent the next two decades telling me I had ruined his life, which, when you do the math, means I ruined his life before I had a neck strong enough to hold my own head up. Impressive, honestly.
I did not know what else to do so I bought them appliances because I was afraid their 30-year old, Kmart blue light specials were going to burn their house down. That is the move when words do not work, and words have never worked with my parents because anything you say to them goes in one ear, wanders around briefly with a confused expression, and walks back out the other ear while they stare at the television. They are in their sixties and they look eighty, which is what a lifetime of cigarettes and screaming and gas station food will do to a person. They scream at each other all day. They scream at the television. Occasionally they scream at me. Then they stare at the television some more. I bought them a refrigerator because I did not know how to say I love you to two people who have never once in my memory given me any indication that they wanted to hear it.
Nobody said thank you.
I am starting to think my parents hate me. Not resent. Not envy. Hate, the specific and personal kind, the kind you have to work at. My sister is a cancer doctor who put herself through medical school and built a good life through twenty years of daily unglamorous effort, and my parents spend most of their time complaining about how much money she has. Their friends are wealthy for the same reason, because they worked and saved and made patient decisions compounded over time, which is how wealth has always worked, which seems to strike my parents as a personal insult directed specifically at them. I tried explaining this. I got called stupid⊠by a man who spent the last 40-years so stoned that he was too high to see what a lowlife he has always been.
They hate me because I survived them.
That is the whole of it. Certain broken people need you to stay broken alongside them. Your healing is an accusation. Your progress is a referendum on every choice they refused to make. Getting sober and building something real and showing up to help is the unforgivable sin of demonstrating that a different life was always possible, that the wreckage was a choice, that nobody made them this way except themselves.
I spent from roughly sixteen to thirty-five as an alcoholic and a drug addict. I am not ashamed of that anymore, because shame requires some belief that it was your fault, and I stopped believing that.
The first time I did cocaine I was thirteen years old and I thought it was a rite of passage. My father called me over because he wanted to hang out, and I was thirteen and I still thought he was there so Iâd have someone to look up to and learn from despite a considerable body of evidence to the contrary, and I thought this was it, the moment, father and son, the old man finally letting me into his world. He put the line in front of me and I did it because I trusted him, which puts me in a fairly exclusive club of people who made that particular mistake and survived it. His friend Brett, or Brent, or whatever the hell his name was, was there too, the two of them passing a joint back and forth, and they sat there laughing at the kid who was now bouncing off the walls talking at the speed of sound because his father had just fed him poison and called it love.
I spent two decades chemically managing the fallout from that night and a hundred others like it. The drinking was never the disease. It was the treatment. A bad one. The treatment of a kid who never had a single adult in his life model anything different. The disease was everything that came before the first drink.
A few weeks ago, the first major blowup after I arrived, an argument that started because I had the audacity to crack a window in my childhood bedroom to let some air into a room that has not had its atmosphere disturbed since the first Bush administration, my mother looked at me and said with the casual delivery of someone reading from a grocery list that my father had deliberately ruined my life. Those were her exact words. Deliberately. Ruined. Your. Life. I stood in that stale room trying to figure out which part of that sentence to address first and could not, because there is no response to your mother confirming, this late in the game, that the nightmare you spent thirty years trying to convince yourself was not intentional was in fact a plan. There is nothing to say. You just stand there with the window cracked and try to remember how to breathe.
Getting sober did not fix everything. Nothing fixes everything. The one that still sits heaviest is my fiancée, who cheated on me, got pregnant by the other man, told me to go to hell, miscarried, and then reappeared months later acting like none of it had happened, like we could pick up right where we left off before she decided to burn it all down. When I said no, she killed herself.
People have a way of collapsing that sequence into something softer when they retell it, some vague tragedy of heartbreak and circumstance, and the softening is its own kind of violence. The story has a shape. I was the villain in her version right up until the end, which was a role I was already very familiar with, having been the villain in my parentsâ version of their story since approximately the day I was born. The truth is I was not done with her. I was furious and I was hurt and I was not ready to hand her absolution on a silver platter after what she did, but I was not done. I wanted her back. I just needed her to sit with what she had done for five minutes before I let her off the hook. She did not give me those five minutes. She made a different calculation, which is that the most devastating thing she could do to me and the most merciful thing she could do for herself were the same exact thing. I spent the year after that trying to drink myself to death, the full Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas program, with the focused dedication of a man who has finally discovered his true calling. I could not even manage that right.
Some things you survive not because you deserve to but simply because you do. You find yourself on the other side with no good explanation for how you got there and you just keep walking.
When you have walked far enough, when the wreckage is far enough behind you that you can finally turn and look at it clearly, you start to see the shape underneath everything. The same shape in every person who ever burned your life down and then stood in the ashes bewildered. You have been seeing it your whole life. You just did not have a word for it.
The word is âprojectionâ. I learned it in college, which I was able to attend because at sixteen I made the decision that if I stayed in that trailer one more day I was going to hang myself. That is not a figure of speech. That is the actual arithmetic I was running in my head after the fight that finally broke something loose, the fight with a man who had dropped out in the tenth grade to ride motorcycles and conduct occult rituals from Led Zeppelin liner notes in a gravel pit and had then, in an act of staggering optimism, decided to have children. I walked out. Not drove, walked, because I was sixteen and had nothing, and I went to my grandparentsâ house because I knew where it was, I had been there before, and in the specific math of that night it was the only place left. I showed up at my grandmotherâs door crying and begged her to let me stay. If she had not, Iâd already be dead.
My father had spent my entire childhood explaining that his parents were the source of all his damage. The architects of everything wrong with him. I had met these people. I had been to their house. I had spent years holding my fatherâs testimony in one hand and my own experience of them in the other, trying to make the two things fit. Moving in with them at sixteen ended that confusion for good. They were not cold. They were not cruel. They were two of the warmest and most patient people I have ever known, and living with them felt like being let out of a sealed box I had been inside since birth. My father was not broken by these people. He was given every possible advantage by these people and he burned every single one of those advantages to the ground, because burning things down was the one thing he was genuinely talented at. Every excuse dissolved the moment I understood that. I spent a few years in that house.
They were the only years of my entire childhood I remember without regret.
Projection is what happens when a person cannot face their own failures, so they locate those failures in someone nearby and attack. It is not a sophisticated mechanism. It is primitive, which makes sense because the people who rely on it most are generally operating at a fairly primitive level. My father is not complicated. He is a man who made catastrophic choices for sixty-something years and never once took responsibility for a single one of them, and now he is dying and I am here and I am everything he chose not to be, and he cannot stand the sight of me.
Understanding why a rabid dog bites does not mean you should let it bite you.
Look around. Actually look at what we are being asked to accept as normal right now. Men are women. Women are men. Children are being put on puberty blockers and surgical tables before they are old enough to get a driverâs license, and if you have concerns about this you are the problem. The diseases are the cures. The cures are the diseases. The government is demonstrably full of people who abuse children and the evidence is sitting in a federal court document archive that no mainstream outlet will touch with a ten-foot pole. The news cycle is currently laying the rhetorical groundwork for a war with Iran the same way it laid it for every other war this country has fought on behalf of people who never send their own children. There is a playbook. They run it openly because they have correctly identified that most people are too exhausted and too gaslit to notice.
The same pathology that made my father hold me over a cliff for laughs, the need to dominate, the cruelty as performance, the absolute refusal to be accountable to anyone for anything, that is not a personality type that stays in trailers. It scales. It always has.
The ancient world called it demonic possession. Modern psychology calls it cluster B personality disorders. I am no longer entirely sure those are two different things described by different vocabularies.
Every room I have walked into where one person was generating chaos for everyone around them, where the eggshells were a permanent feature of the floor, where the person at the center was absolutely certain that every problem in their life originated somewhere outside themselves, that room looked exactly like my parentsâ kitchen. It looked exactly like cable news. It looked exactly like Congress.
Evil people find each other. They build institutions. They promote each other. They cover for each other. And they will burn the entire world to the foundation before they will once, just once, look in a mirror and say the words: I am the problem.
Mental health is not a soft issue. It is a civilization issue. The damage one genuinely disordered person can do to a family, a company, a country, is not theoretical. I have the cigarette scars on my forearm to prove it. My father put those there. With lit cigarettes. When I was small. Because he was having a bad day. Because it was my fault he was having a bad day. Because everything was always my fault and never his. The only difference between my father and the people currently running the world is the size of the budget.
I am done.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that requires a scene or a speech. Just done. The tumor gets cut out. The cancer gets treated. You do not negotiate with cancer. You do not explain yourself to cancer. You do not go to your childhood home hoping cancer has finally learned to appreciate you.
Cancer never learns because cancer is a disease and the entire world is full of âhisâ tumors now.
If you are reading this and you have someone like this in your life, a parent, a partner, a friend, anyone who seems to exist primarily to remind you that you are not enough, I need you to understand that walking away is not abandonment. It is not cruelty. It is not giving up. It is the recognition that you cannot pour yourself out indefinitely for someone who is drinking you alive and calling it a relationship.
You are allowed to protect yourself. You are allowed to build a life that does not include people who damage it. You are allowed to grieve the parents you deserved instead of the ones you got, and that grief is real and it is legitimate and it does not make you weak. It makes you human.
The world is run by mental patients right now and they are going to burn it down if we do not start naming what we are seeing. Clarity starts at home. It starts with the decision to stop letting disordered people define your reality. It starts with the recognition that their chaos is not your weather to live in.
Get them help if you can. Walk away if you cannot. Choose your peace like your life depends on it, because in ways that are harder to measure than a cliff face or a pig pen, it does.
The Wise Wolf is not a therapist. He is a man who got dragged face-first through a pig pen at age five and somehow ended up with a Substack, which is either a redemption arc or a punchline depending on your perspective. If any of this landed for you, if you recognized someone you love or someone you are trying to leave in these pages, a paid subscription keeps the lights on and reminds me that the work means something. Lily also needs a car that starts without a prayer and I have a doctorâs appointment I have been rescheduling since the Obama administration. Not a pity subscription. A solidarity subscription. Because we are all just out here trying to make something out of what we were handed.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
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Im very sad to say that your parents and probably their parents were under the influence of demons. I somewhat relate to your story so I empathize with you. Im guessing due to your torture by these demon people they inadvertently created a great teacher (you) i appreciate you and hope you make it through this chaos and insanity called life that we know live in
Amazingly honest & beautifully written. Thank you for trusting us with your story. It deserves a wider audience.