Over the past year or so I have been watching my family.
I watch their interactions with one and other and I have been analyzing their interactions with me. I\"ve been watching their facial expressions alone and also around the rest of the family. My family consists of five people: mom, dad, sister, brother and me.
It\"s been a hard thing for me, to realize that this whole time, my mother has been a Narc. Each family member has a coping method when dealing with her.. We each, in our own way, have something different. I try to adapt and listen and if I\"m targeted I yell back, my sister cries to get out of situations, and brother and dad scream, get angry, then walk away.
Each family member has the same sullen demeanor after an argument. I notice it because I\"ve spent most of my life feeling and looking the same way.
I started to realize in the past few months the strangeness of my upbringing opposed to my other siblings. Things that were important to me, were not as important to my mother. That started my senior year when I had my last choir recital and they also honored the seniors, so I had asked them to come and I was told no, that they were done with those things.
Years later, they went to every one of my brothers talent shows.
My sister has always been more intellectual and my mom powered through to get her volunteer hours, and supported her in her academics and bent over backwards to help her get through high school and succeed. She did her FAFSA and held her hand the whole way through college.
In middle school I struggled, high school I struggled, college I struggled. That whole time was a tug of war session in my brain based on my home life and academics. I could not pay attention because my home life was a mess because I had to deal with a lot of awful situations that children should never be subjected to. I was changed around in middle school and my classes were all messed up, I went from a school that cared about my schooling because I learned differently than the other kids and got thrown into a school to sink or swim, and then we went to public school where I was completely lost. I actually got to do a few amazing things in middle school because of my higher learning and one was going to Zion National Park and then getting accepted into Las Vegas Academy where I was planning on learning Japanese and being a translator.
Then we moved to the South and that\"s when I started struggling with high school. My parents really stopped caring after that. I got shoved into the closes school there was, while a few years later my siblings went to a like minded school like Las Vegas Academy, for higher learning. I was left to flounder at that below average school and fight daily to understand the things I needed to do in order to get the most out of the four years and then later, college.
I always knew college was expected of me because that\"s what was drilled into my head at a young age. The problem was, I didn\"t have time to think about what I wanted to do with my life, mostly because I was stressing over the fights my family had, unfair treatment and actually passing my high school classes. I took the time on my own to look into different avenues, like culinary school, I loved to write fiction, so I looked into journalism and being an English major. It took an additional year to realize I should just stick to Culinary because my attention span was not the greatest and I knew I worked better with things if I was able to be hands on.
I had been set up to fail for most of my life so I figured I would do something I was remotely good at. Now, I cook for my own pleasure, it has become something I can do without thinking and it relaxes me, so it was worth the three years and all the money I spent by myself on schooling.
But I did not finish in the allotment of two years, before I finished I actually moved out of my parents house into another abusive situation and into the hands of other Narcs. I have already touched base on that.
My parents would instill in me these words of wisdom, daily, \"Don\"t get yourself into something you can\"t get yourself out of.\" This came down to getting pregnant, or getting into financial ruin, and my actual one was getting married to a narc.
\"Work on your marriage.\" \"Don\"t give up.\" \"Go to counseling.\" Is what I had heard for years. I would be the family embarrassment if I got divorced. I needed to \"pull up my big girl panties\" and not run away from my problems. So, I stayed, got emotionally abused daily but I stayed because that\"s what I was told strong women do. We don\"t give up when the going gets rough, we keep on fighting!
But when you have been fighting your whole life to be heard, or to be treated equally to others or even just be left alone and not picked on any more...you want to stop fighting. Like most young people, I had thoughts of suicide, even made mental pros and cons lists in my head about if I should or should not, which always led to me not doing it because I don\"t like pain. I\"d probably overdose on Vitamin C and throw up, because everything else sounded awful.
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