Painful Explanations

There’s a not so small part of me lately that just really needs people to understand how much breaks when your parents abuse you. And not just when they abuse you as your parents, but later, when they decide to cut you off because you’re not living how they want you to live as an adult.

I need people to understand the thing that seems unfathomable for people who have pretty okay relationships with their parents.

I spend hours at night trying to draft thought experiments for people to understand the loss, the pain, and the confusion of being disowned.

And here’s the thing. It hurts me. I can’t be the one to explain it. I can’t carry that weight, because when I do, I re-live, over and over the abuse my parents put me through as a child, and the fallout and confusion of their rejection of me as an adult.

I want people to understand that I’m not just whining or blaming my parents they way they say teenagers do…but being abused, and being disowned…..destroys a lot of you, and it takes a really long time to undo the damage of 19 years and one email that completely turned your world, your confidence, and sense of self upside down.

And I feel like it’s weakness that my parents held that much of me. That as a 19 year old who knew their parents were abusive fucks, their abandonment still shook me to the core and upheaved the very fiber of my being in ways I’m still learning and ways I don’t like to admit.

It’s been almost five years and I still don’t understand. I understand it’s not my fault. But I don’t understand why there’s been so much personal fallout. I feel like it’s a key piece of me that I need to explain to people for why I’ve grown and changed the way I have.

But it hurts.

I need people to understand how much breaks when your parents are your bullies, your abusers, and then, after spending years beating you down, decide they want nothing to do with you until you crawl back to them for more abuse. The overnight orphanhood is almost a relief, but then everything they told you that you brushed off to survive comes back a million times louder. Every comment about your hair, weight, appearance, voice, friendships, abilities…it’s all there, staring at you, suddenly holding weight that you have to decide what to do with.

Suddenly, you have to decide, all over again, from square one, without history, without parents….who you are.

While at the same time reconciling that your past happened, your parents disowned you, your parents abused you, and would do it all again in an instant.

You have to find your truth by yourself, and it’s really hard when the only source of information you ever had until you moved out was the source who just decided it would be better if you didn’t exist.

I want people to understand how much that breaks you. But I have to continue to put myself back together first.

I don’t want to make everything all about me and my pain, but sometimes that’s all I can feel.
I need that to be okay, for now.