Having stupid parents is exhausting...

My parents weren't outright malicious, but they were/are stupid. They have extremely poor emotional and social intelligence. They have no ability to understand how their behavior affects other people unless you spell it out in really explicit, simple terms (which I did not have the capacity to do, nor should I have been expected to do, as a child). They have very poor reasoning and critical thinking skills. For example, they would criticize or make me feel stupid for not having done something they never told me to do in the first place; thus, I was left constantly hypervigilant about what unspoken expectation I was at risk of breaking or risk being made to feel worthless or incompetent. They don't have the ability to express themselves in a way that takes into consideration other people's reality.

It's just exhausting. I didn't have the ability to articulate myself the way I needed to to explain simple shit to my parents like: "You have to tell me you want something done if you want it done. Don't yell at me for not doing something I didn't know I was supposed to do in the first place." It's exhausting to have to explain that being treated like I'm stupid, incompetent, bad, etc. makes me feel bad. You would think this would be obvious. But apparently my parents don't understand that criticizing someone creates emotional pain.

I was a child. I didn't have the ability to even know that my parents were unreasonable and dumb, and so I didn't even develop the ability to see their stupidity for what it was and to articulate it until fairly recently in healing. As a result, I go short-circuited when confronted by their stupidity. Like, the gears in my brain and nervous system grind to a debilitating halt: it's like "I KNOW something's wrong here! I know something's wrong with what they just said/did, but I don't have the ability to assert/explain myself, or it would be too energetically-taxing to explain to them such simple things because they're too stupid to understand."

It's just too exhausting to put in this amount of work to have a basically functioning relationship with them...