Chapter: The Shaping of Silence

Book Introduction – REMÍZA: A Bet on Life

Chapter: The Shaping of Silence

I had been losing the ground beneath my feet long before I was able to admit it.

Outwardly, I appeared stronger, tougher, and more confident.

Inside, however, something was slowly falling apart.

There was no single moment that caused it.

No dramatic event.

It was the result of thousands of tiny wounds.

Unspoken words.

Disappointments that accumulated quietly over the years.

And the silence that had gradually become the primary language spoken in our home.

At the heart of it all stood one person from the very beginning.

My mother.

The older I become and the more often I revisit those years, the more clearly I see that she carried the heaviest burden of anyone in our family.

Yet she rarely spoke about it.

She almost never allowed herself the luxury of appearing weak.

She watched the love of her life slowly disappear.

Not all at once.

Not dramatically.

Quietly.

Without warning.

She could still recognise my father by his face.

But with each passing month, she recognised him less and less by his behaviour, his values, and the choices he made.

She had once imagined a future built on love, security, and family.

Instead, she watched that future crumble before her eyes.

Yet every morning she still got out of bed.

She went to work.

She cared for us.

She protected her children.

She carried on as though nothing extraordinary was happening.

The collapse of a family rarely happens overnight.

It happens one disappointment at a time.

At first, every change seems explainable.

He's tired.

He's stressed.

He's just going through a difficult period.

And perhaps that's what makes it so dangerous.

Because hope survives.

You keep believing that everything can still be fixed.

For a very long time, my mother believed exactly that.

She believed my father simply needed support.

Peace.

Understanding.

She convinced herself that if she could just endure a little longer...

...if she could sacrifice a little more...

...everything would eventually return to normal.

In that hope, she slowly sacrificed her own boundaries.

Her own needs.

Even her own pain.

Protecting our family became more important to her than protecting herself.

She watched my father come home later and later.

Sometimes he didn't come home at all.

His promises became increasingly disconnected from reality.

Responsibilities that had once belonged naturally to him quietly shifted onto her shoulders.

Without discussion.

Without gratitude.

She witnessed his failures.

His excuses.

His empty apologies.

Yet she also understood something terrifying.

If he collapsed completely...

...our family would collapse with him.

So she placed herself between him and the consequences of his addiction.

Even though it was slowly destroying her.

This is precisely where codependency begins.

At the time, hardly anyone used that word.

My mother probably would have rejected it if someone had.

Because in her eyes, it wasn't dysfunction.

It was love.

Responsibility.

Commitment.

But codependency doesn't appear out of nowhere.

It grows inside homes where one person gradually loses control over themselves...

...while another slowly assumes responsibility for everything else in an attempt to prevent complete disaster.

My mother became the one who solved problems before anyone else discovered them.

She explained.

She apologised.

She covered things up.

She protected our family's image from the outside world...

...even though inside our home it had already begun falling apart.

To everyone else, we probably looked like a successful family.

We had our business.

We knew people.

We carried a certain reputation within our town.

But behind our own front door...

...silence had become our daily language.

My mother carried a constant fear that if the truth ever became public, we would lose everything.

Even worse, she carried guilt for things that had never been her responsibility.

Because alcoholism is not the failure of a husband or wife.

It is a disease that slowly pulls down everyone standing close enough to it.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of codependency is that it often disguises itself as heroism.

As selflessness.

As unconditional love.

Yet, over time, it destroys both people.

My mother tried to save my father.

In doing so...

...she gradually lost herself.

She drifted away from her own identity.

From her own boundaries.

From her own right to finally say,

"Enough."

And the harder she fought to keep our family together...

...the more my father unconsciously learned that someone else would always deal with the consequences of his actions.

For us children, that meant growing up in a home where emotions remained hidden.

Conflicts were never spoken about openly.

And the truth itself slowly changed shape...

...becoming whatever hurt the least.

My mother tried to shield us from reality, but children sense far more than adults often realise. It didn't take long before I understood that something inside our home was deeply wrong. We saw the exhaustion in her eyes. We felt the silence that followed every argument. We watched her force herself to function normally on days when she was probably falling apart inside.

For her, it wasn't only the loss of the man she had fallen in love with. It was the loss of the family she had dreamed of building. The loss of safety. The loss of the secure childhood she wanted to give her children.

Every time my father relapsed, she experienced it as her own personal defeat, even though none of it was her fault. Every broken promise deepened her fear that one day she would no longer have the strength to hold everything together.

And still, every morning, she got up.

She went to work.

She took care of us.

She carried the family.

And she remained silent, believing that silence was less destructive than the truth.

Today I understand that homes like ours create enormous risks for children. We learn to suppress emotions. We learn to adapt to chaos. And when reality becomes too painful, we begin searching for our own forms of escape.

My mother tried to protect us from our family's collapse while standing directly in the centre of the storm herself—without support, without guidance, and without people truly understanding what she was carrying. Most only saw the surface.

Yet despite everything, I was never completely alone.

Growing up beside me was my older sister.

She was older, wiser in many ways, and far more emotionally perceptive than any of us realised at the time.

We grew up in the same apartment.

We breathed the same air.

We lived through the same silent evenings filled with tension.

Yet each of us searched for a completely different way to survive.

She was always one step ahead of me—not only because of her age, but because she could put into words emotions I was only beginning to feel.

Perhaps that is why she reacted so differently to the slow collapse of our family.

While I buried my anger until it eventually exploded outward, she slowly withdrew in a way that looked rebellious from the outside but was, in reality, another attempt to find herself.

She became a quiet rebel.

Someone who questioned authority.

Who challenged rules.

Who no longer believed in truths that had stopped making sense.

Perhaps that, too, was her way of escaping the constant tension hanging over our home—a tension that no childish laughter could ever truly dissolve.

While I drifted toward ideologies that promised order, strength, certainty, and superiority, she naturally gravitated toward the opposite end of the spectrum—toward anti-fascist ideals, punk culture, and movements that questioned systems she saw as hypocritical and unjust.

We stood on opposite sides of the same battlefield.

Yet both paths had grown from the very same root.

Disappointment.

Insecurity.

And the gradual loss of trust in the adults who were supposed to protect us.

She sought refuge in chaos.

I searched for safety through rigid order.

Both of us believed we had found the answer.

It is remarkable how two children raised under the same roof can respond to the same pain in completely different ways while, in reality, travelling toward the very same destination from opposite directions.

She dressed herself in defiance, irony, and rejection of authority.

I wrapped myself in ideologies that gave me an illusion of power and certainty.

Yet both of us were trying to fill the same emptiness—the void left where security should have been.

Instead of leaning on one another, we slowly drifted apart.

Each of us retreated into our own private world because there was no space at home to speak honestly about what we were feeling.

Her rebellion was never an attack on our family.

Just as my radicalisation was never a sign of genuine strength.

They were simply two different languages expressing the very same pain.

She searched for freedom.

I searched for control.

She rejected authority.

I tried to replace it with my own.

Both of us were responding to the fear of watching the world we had trusted as children slowly fall apart.

Without my sister, my story would never be complete.

Looking back today, the contrast between our lives has taught me something deeply important.

In families marked by addiction, silence, and emotional neglect, there is rarely a "right" or a "wrong" way for children to respond.

There is only survival.

The search for identity.

And the desperate attempt to preserve at least a small part of your dignity in a world where the boundaries between love, fear, loyalty, and pain have long since disappeared.
Perhaps that is one of the greatest tragedies of homes like ours.

The children who should be holding each other up often end up walking in opposite directions, each convinced they are fighting against the chaos, when in reality they are simply searching for a place where they can finally breathe.

When I described my sister as more sensitive and mature, I did not mean only because she was older or because life had given her more experience.

I meant something far more difficult to explain.

She seemed to possess an unusual inner awareness, as though she could sense changes beneath the surface long before they became visible to everyone else.

She noticed shifts in the atmosphere before they turned into arguments.

She sensed tension before a single word had been spoken.

She could feel that something was wrong long before anyone admitted it.

As a child, she probably could not explain what she was experiencing, nor could she fully understand it.

She simply carried it inside her as a quiet state of constant alertness that never completely left her.

While I often recognised problems only after they had become painfully obvious, she seemed to detect what was happening underneath the surface—the subtle changes in people's moods, the fears nobody spoke about, and the silence that was never truly empty, only heavy with warning.

That gift became more apparent as she grew older.

With age came more courage, more understanding, and the words to express what she had always instinctively felt.

But its foundations had always been there.

You could see it in the way she observed people.

In the way she tried to understand rather than judge.

And even in her rebellion, she never lost a quiet sense of empathy.

Many times I felt that while I was fighting against the world, she was trying to understand it.

To read it.

And sometimes, in her own quiet way, to repair it—one small, almost invisible step at a time.

She recognised problems before they grew into disasters.

She searched for solutions, even when they were imperfect.

And she carried responsibilities that no child should ever have to carry.

But in a family filled with silence, tension, and uncertainty, someone inevitably carries that weight.

Only years later, when I was finally able to look back at our childhood with distance and honesty, did I realise that she had been far more than just my sister.

She had been a quiet anchor.

Someone who often sensed a fall before anyone else realised it was coming.

That is why, years later, I began calling her the angel of our family.

Not in a religious sense.

Not because she was perfect.

But because she stood in the middle of the chaos, carried burdens that should never have belonged to her, and despite her own wounds, kept trying to protect everyone else.

Her gift was never that she could solve every problem.

Her gift was that she noticed.

She felt.

She refused to let everything completely fall apart, even when doing so cost her part of her own freedom, innocence, and peace.

Without her, my story would have been lonelier.

Harsher.

And perhaps much darker.

As time passed, the image I built of myself became increasingly hard, provocative, and confrontational.

It was as though I was desperately trying to convince not only everyone around me, but most of all myself, that I was strong.

Untouchable.

Unbreakable.

The walls beside my bed slowly filled with swastikas drawn by the hand of a child who had absolutely no understanding of the historical horror that symbol represented, but who quickly discovered its power to shock people, provoke fear, and create the illusion of strength where only helplessness truly existed.

I drew portraits of Adolf Hitler.

It was never the result of studying history or understanding ideology.

To me, he represented something entirely different.

Authority.

Discipline.

Absolute control.

Everything I believed was missing from my own home, where authority was slowly collapsing beneath silence, alcohol, and words that were never spoken.

Looking back today, I understand how disturbing, disturbing, and deeply wrong that appears.

Because it was.

But at the time, those symbols became a language.

A language I used to hide a chaos I did not yet know how to describe in any other way.

And that is perhaps the greatest contradiction of all.

Inside the same bedroom whose walls carried symbols of hatred lived a boy who was, beneath all the anger and provocation, deeply sensitive, painfully vulnerable, and capable of loving others with extraordinary intensity—even though almost nobody would have believed it.

That contradiction slowly tore me apart from the inside.

Because..........
 - JK -