Where to begin...

This feels so foreign to me. Like a dream lost long ago. 

Keeping a journal is about self expression, unleashing your soul in order to unburden the mind. It's something I think everyone should do at one point or another. 

But, I haven't done this since I was a teenager. 

A journal is meant to be sacred. Secret and for your eyes only. 

Yet my privacy was destroyed. My room invaded. No longer a safe place in which I could escape from my home life. 

To explain, I came home from school to find my Mother sitting in the living room with my sisters. They were reading my journal and laughing. 

You know that moment where you feel the world tilt, and your heart sinks into your stomach? I felt like I was sinking into nothing. All I could think was: "How could she do this to me?" 

After that, I burned my journal and never wrote my thoughts down ever again. 

It was only after she started dating a new guy, after my sisters abusive Dad ( my Step Dad, Mom made me call him that ) was kicked out and arrested that things just got so much worse. 

He was a different kind of abusive. Not physical, but emotional and mental. There is so much that happened during the course of such a horrible year. I could fill a large book case with my experiences and trauma. 

18. I was kicked out at 18, because I began rebelling against them. Against my Mother. 

No longer would I clean up after those slobs. I stopped going to the GED classes, because I knew she was going through my room. Trying to find anything she could to ensure I'd be locked up. 

"Your brain damaged, honey. It's okay. I understand. We'll fix everything and get you help." 

"Help." Her version of help was to lock me up in a mental ward for a fucking year. To have me pumped full of meds, so she didn't have to deal with me. I was nothing but a problem for her, because I looked and sounded too much like my Dad. With whom she had issues with, and refused to tell me why. 

When she wasn't dating men, she actually had a kind and caring personality. 

I have so few memories spent with my Mom that I can actually cherish. But there's a rusty tinge to them. There's an underlying malice, and disgust. 

She was only nice when I obeyed her. When I was her "Doll". 

I can remember so many times where I'd sit on the floor after a shower, and she'd brush my hair. Her play thing. Her precious doll. 

I'm unsure if she ever saw me as a person. 

Mentally and emotionally, I think I'm stunted. There are so many memories I carry with me from those early days. I can close my eyes and still smell her perfume, the brand of coffee she drank and those sunny afternoons when we'd lay in bed. She would run her fingers though my hair and I'd lay in her arms. 

It all feels wrong. Tainted. 

A Mother should not use her child for emotional support and a paycheck from my Dad. She used me to get back at him. For what? I don't know. 

Constantly moving us all around the United States in order to make sure he never knew when we were. To hide me, but also make sure he kept paying child support. 

I never really had a childhood. There was always screaming, things being thrown at me. My sisters tormenting me and pushing me into a seizure while my Mom laughed and mocked me. 

There was so much medical neglect. She ignored when I was sick, and only ever really stepped in when I was at death's door. Did CPS ever step in? Maybe once or twice, but they didn't do anything and did not believe what I told them. 

I was a Doll. A toy to be broken. An object. 

There was no childhood for me. I was abused in so many ways.

Do I speak about this with the found family I have? Not really. 

I know they want to help, and to give me the security I was denied as a child. But whenever I try to speak, the words get caught in my throat and I feel like I'm being pulled under the waves. 

Part of me believes that if I do speak about what I endured, that one or more of them would think I'm lying. I know for a fact that they wouldn't, but my mind always does this. 

Childhood was a war zone, and I did not have the ability to protect myself. 

None of it should have happened. My Mother should have been kind, but she was a monster. An abused child herself that perpetuated the cycle she herself endured. 

There were so many nights that I'd wake up to her screaming, fighting and thrashing in her sleep. I held my Mother while she cried. 

I was always there to comfort her. But she never did the same for me. 

Why did she hate me so much? Why couldn't I have a normal childhood? 

This is only a small snippet of what goes through my mind. I feel myself drowning and I don't know how to ask for help or save myself.