A letter to my tutor

21 January 2020

Dear [Tutor],

I am writing this letter so that I can tell you how I feel, what I could not tell you, either for fear of reprisals, or out of shame, or out of denial, towards myself or towards others.

I think that you have not been a good tutor, teacher, etc... I even think that the circumstances in which we found ourselves made you a lost, tormented, and therefore dangerous man. Especially when you were supposed to be the tutor of a lonely and vulnerable child.
I'm not in your mind, so I'll never know what your true mental state was through all those years. However, there was very real suffering, even if I hid it from myself. You were mocking me, pretending that you had nothing to blame for, because "no", you did not "wake up every
morning and imagine 'how to torture [TonyC]'".

You were supposed to be someone I could trust, confide in, work with. Yet we lived in opposition for years. There was an opportunity every day for us to explode and go on a rampage of screaming, crying, threats and other manipulations. What was most difficult was this kind of "codependency" that bound us together somehow.

Every time a conflict arose, it was resolved by threat. Every time there was an opportunity for us to get closer, you made fun of my passions, my interests. You would only talk about it when it was useful to me, and then you would shamelessly say, "Well, if you keep solving your calculations like that, the next Apollo will crash!"

I was a person who was already growing up in an environment of fear of the other: fear of "what others will think", fear of reprisals, and in your case, a jolly mixture of both, sprinkled with the fear of abandonment.

Getting back to my passions, you were constantly criticizing my interest in video games. Games like Minecraft allowed me to socialize, to forget the hassles of home life, and yet you saw them as a source of ridicule, or even a form of corruption. I remember the day, just before the holidays, when I mentioned that I had played the game "Battlestar Galactica Online", and you got carried away, threatening not to come back next year, for fear that I would become, supposedly, an increasingly impulsive and violent individual.

Whatever my reactions to these situations, be it anger, sadness, fear, shame, you saw this as nothing more than a mockery. When I cracked my fingers in pent-up anger, you blamed "video games" for turning me into a "violent teenager".

When you'd walk past the doors and I'd hang onto your {monk's} dress to hold you, begging you not to leave, or after we'd spend a whole day yelling at each other, it would end with "was it that hard?". These moments of suffering were then simply reduced, in your image as well as mine, to some kind of masquerade, a theatrical coup. All my frustration was then reduced to the simple exaggerations of a spoiled
and stupid child; this was all the more ironic because, in our arguments, you kept repeating: "do you take me for a fool?!".

Dear [Tutor], if I now fantasize about suicidal acts at least once a month, or even several times a week, it may not be because of you, but it is certainly because of the things that happened during 10 long years. Do you remember the times when I started threatening to jump out the window, because I too was reduced to communicating by threat? Was that too just a string of lies, coming from an obviously annoying child who was trying to avoid doing his work?

You can always add a layer to it: towards the 9th grade, and the 10th, when our outbursts had stopped after I had started, towards the end
of the 8th grade, to copy the CNED's {State homeschooling system, provides books etc} corrections. Do you remember the times when you started to dwell on your relationship problems? For example, when some people, supposedly, accused you and "rejected" you because you were too close to [woman] {as a monk, he had to remain celibate} ? Or when you were turning everyone, the whole hill, the whole département {county, of sorts} against my parents, when you were trying to turn me against them?

If you wanted to settle things with my parents, you should have done it face to face, like real responsible adults !

With these 10 long years at your side, I now find myself cultivating, in spite of myself, fear of work, fear of authority, passivity in the face of manipulation. I don't know what is acceptable and what is not.

Perhaps we can relegate the "fault" to the circumstances, which made the situation fall deeper than the deepest black holes. But what I will always find revolting is the pride with which you strutted around after I got into high school, where you pushed me to say a word of thanks to my tutor, "thanks to who? and if you're doing well now it's thanks to?...".

I don't know if that feeling is justified, or if things will change, but know that I feel a deep hatred towards you. You were, in my eyes, the most revolting mixture of a "Père Fouettard" {evil equivalent of Sauta Claus, whips the bad children} and a sort of false father figure, doomed to educate me in suffering, with threats.