I grew up thinking something was wrong with me.

The fear of being alone for the rest of my life was a constant pressure exerted on my entire being.  I was never good enough for anyone, maybe not even for this world. It was a fear brought on by years of emotional, verbal, and mental abuse by numerous people. It can be easy to overlook or make excuses for abuse, especially when it is something that has been walking hand in hand with you for most of your life. I know it was like that for me.Ever since I was a child, I seemed to have a knack for being drawn to people who ended up being manipulative and abusive. I grew up in a small, middle-of-nowhere town where one misstep or false rumor could follow you for years. I grew up with parents who loved me, but were each abusive in their own way: my father on the verbal side; my mother, the manipulative.When you’re a child, you believe what you are told even if it is something horrible. You catch onto things unspoken, hidden in a glare or the wording of a phrase, and unknowingly can morph yourself into something you are not. Those words, those looks, they were part of what set me on the course to meet some of the disasters I came across in life.There were two disasters in particular that almost took my life, and they strangely enough fall on different ends of the abusive spectrum. These two people were friends who I cared for greatly, more than I realized at the time, and both of them dragged me away from myself and tore my mind to shreds, a place where no one could hear me scream.It is hard to write this. Not so much because of the receding pain, but because of my parents. I have no doubt they care greatly for me, and I think my father would understand the whole of this tale. I don’t think the same about my mother though. She is fairly tech savvy, and I wonder if she will read these posts and deduce who I am. I know if she does, she will deny everything, saying that this is some ploy of my girlfriend, or even my friends, to pull me away from her. I fear she will do this even though these are conclusions I’ve come to long before I met any of the beloved people in my life now.I choose to write this because I want people to know they are not alone. I want you to see that even if you are not being abused physically, abuse is still abuse. Your mind and emotions matter just as much as your body does, and, if someone cares for you, they will respect every single bit of you. I want you to know that even the people who love you, and who you love in return, can abuse you without realizing it. I don’t want people living in fear or in silence because of feeling like their abuse “isn’t bad enough” to constitute as “real” abuse. Pain is pain, everyone is affected in different ways by it, and I hope my story can help others heal or open up about theirs.