Journal Entry #1

I want to figure out things about myself. I want to know who I am, without any doubt. I want to feel comfortable as myself. I want to be able to love myself like I love the people around me. I'm not blind to their flaws, but I choose to not only except them but to find beauty in them. So, why can I embrace the character flaws and physical flaws of the people around me, but I berate myself for every little thing I didn't do perfectly? Is it how I was treated as a child? Do I just pick apart every action I make or word that I say, just because I was ignored and neglected until the age of 16? At what point will I be able to let that go and figure out how to exist without hearing the loud and callous voice of my father and the screams and cries of my mother? At what point will their existence stop causing my breath to speed up and my heart to race and my brain to feel fuzzy? They aren't able to get to me now, and I know that. I know deep inside of me that I am out and I am safe and that I am my own person that matters and exists. I made the choice to be completely done, and yet I feel like they still have this control over me. At some point, the feelings have to be on me, they aren't doing anything, but I still feel their presence with every move I make.

Is there some truth in the need for forgiveness to move on? How do I forgive what I don't understand? As a mother, I can't imagine doing any of the things that were done to me. My children are my world. I can't imagine not taking care of their basic needs. I'm so scared that my mental illness will take over me and make me like my mother. She was fine, until she wasn't. Sure, drugs played a huge part in that, but she had so many things wrong with her without the drugs, and I am absolutely terrified to turn into her. Sometimes I avoid looking in the mirror because I'm really starting to look like her. I don't know why it bothers me so much, I am very clearly their child, but I can't stand looking at either of them. So to see them in my own face absolutely wrecks me sometimes. I feel like its cruel and wrong of me to say I wish they didn't exist, but I also know without a doubt in my mind that if I received a call telling me they were dead, I would not cry. If I did, it would be out of relief. What kind of person does that make me? I like to think I'm a good person, but my parents, the people who brought me into this world, have somehow broken me to the point where I would genuinely be happy if they were gone. I like to think that I am mostly fixed, but how can I be if I can't move on from the anger?

I've tried different things over the years, things that are supposed to help me forgive and forget. I tried to write them a letter and never send it, and even planned to burn the letter afterward as some sort of symbolic way of releasing myself from the pain. I got about a quarter of the way through and only felt angrier the more I wrote. I could hear my fathers voice in my head, telling me my memory and feelings were wrong, even though I know they weren't. I knew with every word that I wrote that it wouldn't matter even if I said it directly to him. I knew my mother would just cry and insist she did the best she could, even though she was too high to function most of my life. I knew my father would probably laugh, tell me I was wrong, maybe even tell me I was just crazy like my mother. His favorite thing to say to me, because he knew how much it hurt me to hear it. He would probably smirk at me, and stand at his full height and look down at me, because he loves to make others feel small and unimportant.

I cut them out and planned to never see or speak to them again, and while I'm still doing that and have no plans to change that, it doesn't feel like enough. I also have to deal with the fact that at some points, I will have to see them. How can I heal and move on and make peace with my childhood when there's been nothing done to acknowledge what I went through? How can I fully escape the feelings that come along with all of it? How am I supposed to figure out who I am, when I don't understand what I came from? Was I created by two addicts who had rough lives and couldn't control their actions, or was I truly created by a mentally-ill woman who never got the help she needed, and a man that has a heart filled with evil, that only knows how to inflict pain, mentally and physically? How do I make peace with that? How do I forgive someone I genuinely am afraid of?

I'm ready to love myself, and I'm ready to accept my past and every bit of pain that came with it. I just don't know how. I don't know how to come to terms with the things that I went through. I still have nightmares, I still feel terrified to go anywhere by myself. My father always made sure I knew that he had friends that would help him, that he had ways to find people and hurt people. I'm sure that he exaggerated his power, but what can people find respectable and redeemable about a man that would threaten his own children? I have to figure out who I am, without digging up old feelings and pain. In the few years since cutting ties with my parents, I've learned so much about myself. Now I just need to figure out myself, and figure out how to get past what a dumpster fire my childhood was, so that I can be happy.