An automated family.

 I probably haven’t had any conversations with my family other than about grades and meals. I say, “What will I eat?” and then comes the answer. I say, “I didn’t like the meal,” and they say, “That’s because you’re sick.” They ask, “Why didn’t you do your homework?” and I tell them I don’t need teachers. They ask, “What job will you do?” and I say I don’t want to be trapped in a job. They ask, "Have you earned any degrees this year?" and in doing so, they only care that their misleading external perception of “wise parents” continues. It goes on like this. We don’t say or ask anything else. Instead, they even say things like “We do everything for you, but you do nothing for us,” probably because they see the mechanical act itself as some kind of display of affection. No one has ever asked, “How are you feeling?” Even when I’m sick, the effort they show isn’t really for me, but for my body. They don’t want me to feel better—they just want me to be better. And the strange thing is, in their view, the only reason for this is that I stopped responding to them, so they stopped asking. I stopped responding to them because people like that never ask such a question sincerely anyway, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have the inner depth to handle a genuine answer other than “I am okay.” They are incapable of true engagement with my inner life. This isn't necessarily malicious, as they are too robotic and stupid to be abusive; it is simply a complete lack of capacity. Hence, my conversations with them have been reduced to simple necessities: school and food. Sometimes I think they feed me only to keep my body alive so that I can go to school, sit there all day, come back, and repeat the same thing the next day. I go to school merely to “justify” my being fed; they feed me merely to “justify” their role as parents. Simply put, aside from my surviving and being obsessively forced to conform to “social expectations” that I don’t even value slightly, there is no other care between us at all. No one’s heart is in the exchange. A mutual automation.