When you reach 28, married, with kids and have to start therapy, because you’re angry All. The. Time. And don’t understand why you cry when people are nice to you, but are a stoic MF when people are emotional around you or shitty to you.
When you were always the “little adult,” because your parents were addicts or too emotionally volatile to take care of you and your siblings, so you just took care of things and didn’t know that wasn’t normal until you left for college.
When you’re female, but you were the muscle, the handyman, the surrogate husband, and the comforting therapist most of the time, but when convenient, you were demeaned into being a stupid, ungrateful child, so as an adult, you have no idea how to process feelings. All feelings are happiness or anger—nothing in between. When you finally tease out what you’re actually feeling, it’s 4 days later and the moment you could have stood up for yourself is long gone, but at least you now know what’s wrong.
When you wake up to your dead pet rabbit, you fix your 3 year old’s breakfast, go buy a shovel, set him to play happily in eye-shot while digging your bunny’s grave—never feeling anything—until your sweet husband comes home from work for lunch to bury your pet, so you don’t have to be the one to do it. This little act of kindness is actually what cracks the dam and brings on tears—that someone was so thoughtful of your feelings and wanted to take care of you feels foreign.
Having to be mature from early childhood for survival is fucking brutal. The rippling implications into adult life are so magnanimous that often, I don’t realize how screwed up parts of my childhood were until I do something, and my husband almost cries, because he can’t understand how I could have been expected to do some of the things I did long before being even a teenager.
If you’re the underaged adult in your house right know, it gets better. Move out and be at peace. Live in a place where you are actually in control for once.
Get hobbies, grow things, stitch things, meet people, get an education, find a job—whether you like it or not—spend your free time doing what you LOVE.
Learn to feel and be happy without feeling the fear that everything will go wrong all of a sudden—and if it does—you’re going to be ok. You’re only caring for yourself, not your parents who were supposed to take care of YOU.
When you can be happy with yourself and your life and feel like inviting someone into it, to share in it, date. Date who you want. Don’t date someone out of spite.
Don’t date people like your parents.
Date GOOD people who think of you first, with no expectations, or who make you feel like you “owe them” (sex, presents, attention, anything—you two should want to be together because you enjoy each other’s company).
People who really love you, won’t make you feel this way.
Date people who want to bury your dead pet for you, and try to make you laugh at lunch afterward.
Date people who shine from their inner-most being and make you happy.
I know you feel like that happy is short lived, that the bottom will drop out (hell, you may even unconsciously TRY to make things go bad, because that feels normal), find that person and accept that it’s real.
You’ll argue—healthily with no name calling, cursing, or melodrama.
You’ll be poor together—but still enjoy a six pack and streaming binge or board game.
You’ll wake up some days thinking you don’t deserve them or your peaceful life.
You’ll wake up most days almost in tears, because you’re so thankful you don’t live under someone’s thumb anymore.
I don’t even know where I was going with this, I’ve had too much wine tonight, but this post really spoke to me and I hope offering a future letter to my childhood self might speak to anyone struggling out there who had to be or still has to be the mature child in the house.
Pardon all of my run-on sentences 😬
amandla
dailybridgerton
jimmyeatworldofficial
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
yousharknotpass
