So now that November is here and my entire town is already dripping in Christmas decorations (why), my yearly anxiety of going home for Christmas has resurfaced. I never enjoy it anyway, but I have not spoken to my parents for months despite living 30 minutes away from them and it's exacerbating the problem.
I didn't have a great childhood. I was constantly bullied in school for my skin colour/sexuality from age 4 to 18, lived in a super isolated area where I didn't know any people my age/was ostracised again because of my race, and so was stuck in what I now understand to be a really uncomfortable living situation. When I was a little girl it was relatively okay but as soon as I started developing was when shit hit the fan.
My dad is very religious and as soon as I started wearing clothes he didn't like/expressing opinions he was against, he was pretty abusive. I came home upset a lot after being made by my classmates to sit by myself, often missing entire classes to cry in the school nurse's office, and things often got physical. I ran away after one of these altercations when I was about 14 and after that the physical interactions stopped because it freaked my mum out so much. He never apologised and everyone just pretended it all never happened.
My mother is equally as emotionally closed off and narrow-minded. Although there's no religious wall to break down, I remember trying to suss her out her opinion on homosexuality because I knew I was queer and she told me "there's nothing so good as feeling normal". Well, ever since then those words have been carved in to the back of my mind because I have never ever felt normal. She justifies my father's actions because I was a "horrible teenager" and we were "both as bad as each other". I had a personal tragedy happen when I was 19 that I can't really discuss here, and once I plucked up the courage to tell my mother she refused to allow my father to know, told me to never tell anyone about it, and has never talked about it since. Even now, she is confused as to why I'm so depressed and refuses to acknowledge it. I tried to open up to her last year about how bad I was feeling, and she didn't say anything for a minute and then started showing me the new nail polishes she had bought. I had never felt so closed off from them in my life. It's like they refuse to see me for what I am and only judge me against the person I think I should be.
Despite all this, I feel a tremendous pressure to appease them even though cognitively I don't want to. Their opinion of me affects my self esteem a lot. Now that I'm living in my home town again (away from them), they turn up uninvited at my work and complain they don't see me enough. They make no secret of being dissappointed in me because they wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. They both came from poor backgrounds and did well from themselves, and I know they expected me to surpass them. I don't care about that. They forced me to go to university when I said I wasn't ready, being poorly socialised and undiagnosed. The four years after that were absolutely harrowing and I hated my university experience, got a degree I didn't want and that they complain about ("we wish you had gotten a proper degree") so the whole charade was utterly pointless and I now have student loans I doubt I will ever pay off.
As I'm older now, I can see how the way they raised me had a massive effect on who I am: I am terrified of confrontation and have real trouble voicing my opinions and oftentimes just shut down if faced with having to express myself; I have zero motivation because everything I liked doing (singing, drawing) wasn't good enough for them; I often allow the men I see to treat me poorly because I don't have any other frame of reference.
A couple of months ago, they rocked up with my little brothers and I said a brief hello and apologised for not being able to come to their barbecue because I was working. After that, my little brother reported they spent the entire car journey talking about how I looked, what I was wearing, and how they're disappointed that I'm underachieving.
I don't know what to do. I hate going home. Everything is so tense. Bonus stupid story: my mentally-ill grandmother has stayed with us for the last 25 years (was only supposed to be for a little while but, surprise surprise, they never breached the subject of her leaving) and as soon as my dad retires he wants to kick her out. She's in her 70s and has no where to go and helped raise us and we can't do anything about it. Me and my brothers all know this and being at home is just a melting pot of decade long bitterness and unspoken conversations. Everyone mostly just ignores each other until the next big argument flares up.
For some fucking reason, I do feel guilty about avoiding them. I have texted my mother about the way I feel and how I'm unhappy, and she seemed responsive but didn't acknowledge the fact that I had said that she and dad had personally made me feel terrible about myself for years. It's a good first step, but I'm not even sure if I want to take another.
I've been clinically depressed for as long as I can remember and every day is a struggle. It would be nice to have them support me, but I don't know if that is something they're capable of. We do have the capability to enjoy each other's company if I pretend I'm happy, but I can't remember the last time I was genuinely happy to spend time with them. It's always out of a sense of familial obligation, and now that I don't have to rely on them financially I feel less and less sense of duty to see them.
I don't know what to do, or if an open dialogue is even possible. I'm halfway between loving them and loathing them at all times, and I don't know how to improve this. The idea of opening up to them absolutely terrifies me and I don't know if I could sit in front of them and express any of this to them in person. How should I proceed? After years of zero emotional support, am I even obligated to connect with them?
TLDR: my family is a quagmire of fuck and my parents have been emotionally distant for as long as i can remember but want me in their lives.
Submitted November 02, 2018 at 03:40AM by LOOKATHUH https://ift.tt/2OlvOfX
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