How My Unloving Family Tried To Destroy Me

This is a true story. 

It's October of 2014, so seven years ago now, practically to the day, and I have lost everything: my business, my apartment, my family, and now, probably, my wife. She's moving back to her parents' house, a few hundred miles and two states away. She's going to stay in their basement until she can land on her feet. Me? I'm going to live on the subway. I guess I'll beg, I don't know. I sure as hell can't sing or play an instrument or spin around on the subway poles. I'm sure there are charities that can help me. But despite working in the human services field for over a decade, I am painfully unaware of what kind of programs are out there to help a person in my position. I don't even know how long I will live, but I don't really care much at this point. Maybe I'll slowly but surely go insane, assuming I'm not there already. My wife – I'll be calling her Fiona on here, because she tells me she always wanted to be named Fiona – keeps reassuring me that it's only temporary, that we'll be back together again, we'll bounce back, and we'll be together again, we'll bounce back, over and over again. Me? All I can think of is the end of Requiem For A Dream, when Jared Leto calls Jennifer Connolly from some hellhole of a prison down south and they assure each other how they'll see each other again and repeat their love for each other over and over. As the viewer, we know there's no chance in hell they'll get back together, and this is almost definitely the last time they'll ever talk. I always wondered if the characters knew that or if they were still delusional about how far they'd fallen.

I wondered just how delusional I'd been over the last year, when I first decided to start the business and worked and worked and worked to get the money, borrowing and borrowing and basically risking it all; I wondered how delusional I'd been to even move back to NYC about a decade earlier to help my aging parents and my severely disabled brother and sister; I wondered how I hadn't seen just how much my siblings hated me, not just the disabled ones, but the fully abled drunken pothead who lived out west, and if they'd always hated me, and how stupid was I to have put myself in a position where I was vulnerable enough for them to have destroyed me.

But most of all I wondered how I had been the smartest kid in school when I was young, getting scholarships to every private high school I applied to and going free to one of the most prestigious schools on the Upper East Side, a poor kid from Brooklyn; then went to a well-regarded small liberal arts college in New England for practcally nothing, where I spent four years drunk and stoned and still got decent grades basically by reading the text book just before any test.

I wondered why I had tried three career paths now, none of them having a damned thing to do with my dream of being a writer and despite my claiming to write in my spare time I had just a few short stories and the beginnings of a novel – none of them published, by the way – to show for it after almost three decades.

I wondered why my family had tried so hard to make me feel shit about myself that every single time I walked into a room, I was convinced I was the smartest guy there, but I was also the poorest, had the shittiest job, and was so afraid of girls that I was 29 before I had my first girlfriend and lost my virginity (after she asked me out).

The Turnaround

Cut to 2021: I'm sitting in my apartment in the suburbs, far from NYC. I haven't talked to any of my siblings in years. Quite frankly, I'm not even sure if all of them are alive, considering COVID and all.

Fiona was right. We bounced back. We're not rich by any stretch of the imagination. I'm going to be 58 in just a few days, and we don't have a damned thing set aside for retirement. In fact, our net worth is a whopping $58,000. Negative. Yep, we are still 58 grand in the hole. But I like where we live. It's a small place, but it has this insane view overlooking the town and harbor. I'd show you all a picture, but I am quite frankly still terrified of my siblings and want there to be no way for them to either figure out I am writing this stuff or to track me down if they do.

I somehow managed to find a job almost immediately (before having to actually sleep a single day on the subway and before Fiona moved back with her parents).

And what did this job bring me? Well, I've met all sorts of famous and semi-famous people. I've hung out in a Malibu mansion with world renowned DJs and models and even an actor or two whose names you would know. I've traveled to Paris, Italy, Monaco, spent tons of time on South Beach (there's actually a semi-viral photo of me on South Beach with two beautiful young Italian women as I, a pale fat old man, sip from a coconut). I've gone to the World Series, the US Open several times, the Orange Bowl, and even the Grand frickin' Prix of Monaco.

I am so happy. I love Fiona dearly. I love our two cats. I love my job (which is no longer the one that brought me to all those cool places – that was a job for a younger man).

The Lingering Doubts and Depression

But I don't have a family. I have Fiona and the cats and my in-laws, whom I love.

I have no siblings. My parents are both dead. We never had kids. I barely knew my cousins and don't like them anyway.

I wake up at night sometimes screaming and I have to get up and walk around while Fiona tries to calm me down. I break out in tears for no reason. I've put on tons and tons of weight and feel absolutely horrible about my looks and worry about my health. I am also obsessed with my death as well as my wife's. I'm not sure what worries me more, dying or living without her.

I have created this account anonymously as a form of therapy. I'm in therapy now and am learning about how unloving my family was (I was never once told “I love you” by my mother, who almost ruined my wedding and who turned her back on me after I prevented my sister's friend from shooting my youngest brother; my father said he loved me once, but he was really, really drunk, which by the way is worse than hearing it zero); I am learning about my addictive and self-destuctive behaviors.

What I want to do now is somehow get to the point where I can sleep 8 hours straight and where I don't panic if I have to hold my breath underwater (even in the shower) for more than a second. I want to learn how to be a friend to people again, and I want to enjoy my older years.

And maybe, just maybe, I can let others who grew up in an unloving family know that they are not alone. I invite anyone who finds this interesting or therapeutic or inspiring to follow me and find out just how monstrous my past has been and how there is hope, and maybe we can find that hope together.