i have ptsd. it makes me freeze up and get scared of doing anything for myself. if it’s for someone else’s sake, i do it easily. when it comes to doing something i want that is important to me, i freeze up, get scared, and sort of stare blankly until i decide to do something else. i don’t know why. i think it’s because my abuser would frame it as a mistake to do things for my soul. and that expressing myself to them always lead to feeling hurt and rejected.
i know i’m not anyone important, but i also know there are people who love me, but i can’t seem to teach myself that they do and act like it. my abuser was my dad, he emotionally abused me for years, and he did financial abuse too. i couldn’t control anything in my life. ultimately, i couldn’t even escape because i wanted it for myself. my partner at the time, who is my now wife, i couldn’t be with her unless i left. my brother, who used to be my best friend, i now realize is really narcissistic, so even though he cares about me, it mostly becomes about whether or not he’s interested in what i have to say, otherwise he doesn’t really engage. he moved out with me at first, and living with him was really hard, and now i live across the country away from him, but he’s the only family member i still talk to
my dad and step mom are taking care of my half brother and i miss him, but my dad treated me bad. he acts like he did everything for us, but i know he did it for himself because he cares more what people think about him than how we feel. he always talked circles around us and thought he was “convincing” us but really he just didn’t care. because listening isn’t hearing and saying “that sucks,” and not doing anything about it.
me and my brother grew up under my dad’s house because my real mom divorced my dad, we think because she was being abused. some signs were him casually talking about how he recorded her conversations with her friends, and he caught her friend telling her to run away from him. but then my mom also was probably undiagnosed bipolar and nobody took care of her or got her diagnosed or medicated, so she felt she couldn’t take care of us because she was bad. but she was so good. i miss her so much. she died of unknown causes when i was 17.
my step mom was nice, but she was 12 years younger than my dad and she had a lot of expectations on her shoulders. and she was selfish, a little. at first when we were small, she took care of us but as we got older, everyone just treated us like our feelings didn’t matter. i ran away when i was 12 at a choir concert because my friend said she has friends who care about us living somewhere else. it turned out that she lied and when i finally called my mom, i had to go to the police station and they kept asking me where i was trying to go and i couldn’t tell them because my friend didn’t tell me a place. i don’t know what my friend told the police because i never saw her again after that. but she told me so many lies that i just can’t bring myself to ever talk to her again.
my dad told me i got expelled because of that even though i got good enough grades and the teachers liked me and i never did anything before. but he said what i did was really bad. everyone kept trying to gang up on me and ask me if everything was okay. but i didn’t tell them anything and now i wonder why i didn’t. i can’t remember things very well, but i remember feeling unsafe and like no one would believe me. but i don’t know why i felt that way.
my dad told me that i was going to meet the family in the motherland abroad for a few weeks in the summer. when we got there, in the last days, my dad told me i was going to do school there from now on. it turned out he took me there for that reason alone. when i asked him why, he said i know why. i didn’t speak the language and i had to learn from scratch from baby books in school but eventually i got it. but even speaking the language with my dad didn’t make him less mean. he just thought i was more agreeable to our community.
i really loved my dad, despite all that. he told me when i was young that he almost shot himself dead because my mom left him. that he was saying his goodbyes but then my grandmother convinced him to give his life to god, and he did that. and he was a good single dad, but he didn’t really get to know us then either. i came back to the US during my junior year, so my dad messed up my high school prep for college without knowing better. i was totally unprepared for college. my mom died and my brother was the golden child and i was alone.
i let my little brother stay the golden child and didn’t tell anyone about his going off and doing high school kid stuff like faking concerts to sleep over at his boyfriend’s house or anything like that. i kept all his secrets. i couldn’t make him suffer. meanwhile my dad thought i was addicted to the internet. the truth was that i had joined some otherkin cult trying to make a found family. but that didn’t work because the people there were all deluded and making power grabs within the group all the time based on crazy world saving fantasies. it was bad. the group broke.
i was just trying to find friends through roleplay. writing has become hard because i freeze up, because i can’t seem to do things for myself. i’m so scared everyone will see how bad i am and hurt me even more. i’m scared that someone will hurt me and i will deserve it. i tried to take care of everyone, but i can’t even take care of myself. i got depressed in college and flunked out of pre med. and then i went to community college, and then back to uni, and i failed at accounting. finally, i got into the english program but it was kept a secret from everyone in the family except my dad, who somehow agreed.
but the same year i changed majors to english, my dad forced me to get a job so that i could get a “reality check”. i worked at subway for a summer. i didn’t get to use any of my money because my dad put it in some other account. and my step mom kept talking about how it should be for surgery to remove my body hair (i have a lot of body hair from having pcos). when i started college again, then my dad opened me a debit account and started putting my money in there 300 dollars at a time. but all my money from student loans was with him, all the refund checks and everything. i couldn’t even drive, because they said i would try to kill myself, so i wasn’t allowed to learn no matter what i said. so now i’m almost 30 and i still can’t drive but i’m trying to learn right now.
after i graduated and ran away, then i tried again to talk to my dad and step mom because they were my only parents left. but my dad ignored me every time i talked to him and then just talked about whatever made him feel good, like asking me if i pray or about my cat. i tried many times to tell him about my best friend, my wife, but he didn’t even want to listen about her when she was presented as just my friend. so finally i told him that i’m marrying her and he said he wished me a happy life and stuff, but then my step mom called and asked when they will arrange my marriage. and i asked her, didn’t my dad tell you? and she didn’t know, and then i told her i’m marrying a woman, and she thought i was joking. in my last call with my dad, i told him to get help for therapy because he is hurting everyone around him. he tried to make it about himself, saying how he protected us from my “evil” step mom who wanted to kick us out when we were in our 20s, and i thought it was normal of her to expect that we start looking out for ourselves at that age. she wasn’t trying to push us out, even though she was ashamed of us when we were around.
so i told my dad i won’t talk to him until he sees a therapist and he said how will i know? and i told him i would know, because i do know that i would know. but he started talking over me after that and getting mad like i was ungrateful, but i don’t know. i told him i don’t give a f*** and hung up and blocked everyone except my brother. but i still feel lonely because my brother is really self involved and doesn’t really care in a genuine way about other people. he’s a good person, but he is just very focused on himself and doesn’t know how to connect with others well.
i see a therapist and am medicated but i just feel lost even so. i keep trying to find answers about how to focus on myself and care about myself genuinely but i’m so upset that no one was there for me in the past and i still feel like having no family in my life means i’m worthless. that i’m a bad kid because i had to leave my family. i miss my mom so much, because despite her problems, she loved me and my brother for real. my wife loves me a lot, too, but i get so scared that i’m going to put too much on her, because i can be very intense when i’m upset and she had depression and anxiety, so i don’t want to burden her more than i already have.
i want to write my stories but it’s hard when i feel like my voice is unimportant and what’s the point. i want to do things for myself but all i can manage to do is feed myself and go to work and play games and do chores. i can’t do the extra stuff. i only go on adventures when my wife is there.
i don’t know what i want to hear. i am haunted by these feelings of being unworthy and small and disappointing my family. i want so badly to fit into my wife’s family but i’ll always be an in-law. i wish i was a good person with interesting thoughts but i don’t know who i am with the past at my back. all i know are stories and that thinking about my story makes me really upset and sad. i guess i want to not feel alone and that’s why i’m here. i’m sorry i took up so much space and text. i don’t have any community anymore like i did back in my hometown because i moved out to the west coast to be with my wife. it’s been really good, but meeting friends is hard now. i’m sorry if nobody knows what to say. i don’t mean to be difficult. i just don’t know how to be me in a way that’s okay with everyone.