Alone in the Dark, Volume II Part I: When Chaos Became Normal

I spent much of my life wondering why I was ever brought into this realm.

If we choose to come here, what would have possessed me to make that choice, knowing what I was up against?

Why these parents?
Why these people I once called family?
Why a life that felt like a detriment to me emotionally in more ways than I can count?

Before I knew what depression was, I experienced it.
Before I knew family could hate you, I was hated.
Before I knew emotional scars could last decades, I was already feeling their ache.

I had no terminology.
No psychology language.
No understanding that what I was experiencing had a name, that other people dealt with it too, and that some of them did not make it out.

When I eventually found that out, it scared me. It almost broke me.
But we’ll talk about that later.

What I knew then was this:

I have never been protected.
I have never felt psychologically safe.

Even with people around me, I have been alone ninety percent of my life.

Life felt like one hit after another.
But the real battle wasn’t the hits.

The real battle was trying to get up and not stay down.

I had to learn everything on my own.
Figure life out on my own.
Because when I listened to family, I later realized their advice was often to their advantage, not mine.

That realization came slowly.

My family has a subtle way of manipulating. It is so subtle you don’t see it until you stop cooperating.

You only feel it when you go against their program.

And once you do, everything shifts.

In 2016, my home flooded.

Not one family member supported me in any way.

“I thought you had it,” my aunt said.

That sentence still echoes.

I never had it.

I endured it.

I could never understand why it felt like they wanted to keep me down so badly. Why were my reactions to their treatment always magnified, but what they did was minimized. Why they seemed almost energized when I hit a hard place. Why was it so easy for them to believe lies about me.

Everyone knew how my mother treated me.

Tying me to chairs.
Sending me to school with my hair in ways that prompted teasing. My mother didn’t just bully me; she positioned me to be dismantled by others. Through her deliberate actions, I was attacked from every side.
Smearing my makeup before a dance.
Not teaching me basic life skills, then ridiculing me for not knowing them.
Favoring my brother.
Blaming me when he failed.
Leaving me home to raise him while they went to work.

At eighteen, I was punished for not wanting to stay home with my aunt’s three children.

I wanted to model.

That dream was dismissed because my aunt needed help.

When I tried to leave, when I ran away, I wasn’t met with concern. I was emotionally annihilated by my mother and my grandmother.

The fathers were never called into question.

I was.

I was wrong for leaving.
Wrong for not staying.
Wrong for refusing to sacrifice myself.

I was told I was abandoning her while she was vulnerable and pregnant.

And somehow, that responsibility became mine to carry.

When dysfunction is your origin, you don’t label it dysfunction.

You label it normal.

And what we normalize, we repeat.

For years, I experienced the same person in different fonts.

Different men.
Different friends.
Different environments.

Same undertone.

Same psychological destabilization.
Same subtle control.
Same emotional erosion.

I didn’t know it was narcissistic abuse.
I didn’t know what gaslighting was.
I didn’t know trauma bonds were real.

I only knew I kept ending up in relationships and situations that felt strangely familiar, like my childhood had shape-shifted and followed me.

Some of us have to accept that certain family dynamics feel like spiritual opposition. Not because we are dramatic. Not because we refuse accountability. But because the resistance to our growth feels organized.

Systemic.

And when you are raised without protection, without emotional safety, you grow up thinking love feels like anxiety.

Control feels like care.

Criticism feels like guidance.

And chaos feels like home.

True freedom would later require me to choose the complete opposite of what felt natural. So opposite that my nervous system panicked. So different that my subconscious had to relearn what safety even meant.

But that awakening didn’t come in a lecture.

It came in a dream.

Everywhere I turned, they all had her face.

Different bodies.

Same face.

That was the beginning of understanding.

That was when my eyes opened.

And once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.

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To be continued in Part II of Alone in the Dark, Volume II.