The thing for us survivors of child abuse is that being Wrong about anything is the most terrible thing imaginable. There is stage in personality development where kids are allowed to get things wrong and mess up and correct themselves with minimal penalty, which was denied to us. Instead, we lived in a world of conditional humanity.
This means that the acceptance of our basic physical and emotional needs as humans were all conditional upon our behaviour – Bad-Wrong or Good-Right.
For us, the world was a minefield of things we could get Wrong and the punishments would always be unpredictable, random and disproportionately severe. Everything from small embarrassments, accidents and mishaps, other people’s breaches in social protocols as well your own, misinformed political opinions, lost arguments all seem equally catastrophic because all Wrong is Bad, and to be Bad is to literally not be seen as human anymore. Right and Wrong are seen not as something we do but as something we are.
In adult life, I’ve been trying to come to terms with merely being wrong, a simple non-catastrophic thing one can easily flip into right, and the fact that Wrong, if it exists, lives very far from me. This is doubly hard to believe when I am in pain. Because all pain is punishment, and all punishment is the consequence of being Bad-Wrong-Monster.
The most painful thing for a survivor of abuse is acclimatizing to a world where punishment is not deserved. It’s a fundamental truth of our universe turned on its head. It requires one to the acknowledge the power of chaos and chance. The concept that chaos and order live side by side is such a natural and easy thing for most people to understand, but so utterly terrifying for us to grasp. It feels like the world is still a minefield but now there are no Rules anymore, and we can’t comprehend where Safe is without The Rules. Even when The Rules never did keep us Safe in the first place. The Good-Right-human/Bad-Wrong-monster model is also important because it would mean that not only did we deserve our punishments but also the people who abused us would be due theirs. A cyclical hell driven by vengeance.
Humans are able to function because we are socialized into an illusion of safety and justice which is integral to psychological and social order. For abuse survivors to move forward, we have to first give up the illusion of order that we have constructed for ourselves and enter into a world where consequence is not yoked to morality. “Right” is now not the place where it doesn’t hurt, but the place where we refuse to hurt those we perceive guilty – including ourselves. It’s the very painful place where we can’t assign monstrousness to anyone who breaks The Rules. “Wrong” is now denying humanity to anyone on any grounds. “Wrong” is trying to plant The Rules in new places and rationalizations so we know where to feel Safe again, pretending it is the same as healing.
We won’t ever be safe unless we heal. We can’t heal without compassion. We can’t find compassion if we are focused on vengeance i.e finding the Bad-Wrong-Monster, in ourselves or in others. The monster is not a tumour we can excise but an open wound we have to stop gauging.
It’s okay to be angry. It’s not okay to stay angry. We deserve to heal.
sneaks into people’s bedrooms in the middle of the night
literally steals children and spirits them away
supposedly all of these children are ”lost” and fell out of their prams and whatnot but he also happily absconded with wendy, michael and john who were not even a little bit lost
chopped a man’s hand off and fed it to a crocodile nbd
(peter is supposed to be a child can we bear this in mind)
at the end when he rescues the lost boys et al he sneaks onto the jolly roger and slaughters ten pirates before they even realise he’s there
boy is a stone cold killer yo
and slightly just keeps a running verbal tally through all of it like those children are so unfazed by Peter Pan, Killing Machine
and a couple of quotes from the text to top it all off:
and when [the lost boys] seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out;
peter thins them out
okay
and my personal favourite:
He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out you found the body;
THEN WHEN YOU WENT OUT YOU FOUND THE BODY
?????????????????????????
I wrote my undergrad thesis on that little fucker!! Protip: read the original novelization of Peter Pan. It will weird you the fuck out.
My favorite part is when he scares Hook by mimicking the croc’s ticking noise. Except, in the book, he doesn’t do this on purpose. Instead he’s swimming along to the ship, hears the ticking, and starts ticking along, compulsively. For a few minutes, he sort of FORGETS that he’s human and his mind goes animal-blank, and he’s just rolling along ticking like the crocodile because HE THINKS HE’S A CROCODILE. Fun times.
My thesis was about how he’s a fundamentally amoral character. He does what he likes, and whenever anything happens that could result in character growth, he just FORGETS it.
Peter Pan is seriously like the scary child monster in a horror movie.
If you read the first appearance of Peter in Barrie’s The Little White Bird (later published alone as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), it is fairly apparent that Barrie originally conceived of Peter as a ghost of a child who died of exposure in the park overnight, and who now buries other children who get lost in the park after the gates are shut. It ends: “But how strange for parents, when they hurry into the Gardens at the opening of the gates looking for their lost one, to find the
sweetest little tombstone instead. I do hope that Peter is not too
ready with his spade.”
Peter Pan: sort of a kid, but mostly some kind of child-shaped GOBLIN OR SOMETHING idk
That is 100% where Peter came from, but the story is even more complicated and bizarre than that. Barrie spent twenty some odd years writing and revising Peter Pan, in various incarnations, and the true story behind how LWB, Kensington Gardens, Peter & Wendy, and Peter Pan came to be is just… it’s quite unsettling, really. More or less so, depending on which rumors you believe about Barrie and how much stock you want to put into various biographies. But I do recommend you read the Lost Boys biography (Andrew Birkin) if you want to know the truly uncomfortable history behind it.
And yes, Peter was meant to be demonic and amoral, in Barrie’s own words. In fact, Barrie loudly complained about the statue of Peter in Kensington Gardens, because it didn’t “convey the devil in Peter”. Although, I reckon he was more pissed off by the fact that the sculptor, who Barrie paid out of his own pocket to erect the statue, used another boy as the model rather than the images that Barrie gave him to use and, frankly, if I was paying for something like that, I’d be pissed off too.
We need to talk about Peter
no one mentioned that he is twelve years old and has never lost his baby teeth and is described as having tiny tiny teeth with wide wide gaps, which is when i stopped reading the book, and liking peter pan, forever
The Chaos Bitches 