This might be a long read.
I've found the core of my, well, unfortunately, self; Perceived unreturned love from parents, mostly mom.
My parents were once intelligent, insightful, progressive people, sensitive to importance of culture, education, free-thinking. To me.
Wonderful people. I am sitting now alone in their home, my old home, and it's full of wonderful and creative art, the place is tastefully decorated, with attention to detail. Full of great books.
I remember feeling I could talk to them about anything - they would understand. When I was around 5 we had discussions about religion, perception of self, and various other crazy shit. Then I started school, mom quit her job (paediatrician at a local paediatric clinic), dad quit his job as an anesthesiologist to start a private office of a different branch of medicine (nothing alternative, just forward looking and quite effective but I won't go into details because it might disclose too much about my family). Mom was gearing up to start a private paediatric office in a time where this country didn't really have the living standard for this to work.
We went into financial hell. Dad was pushing on and slowly building what is today a fairly successful and socially beneficial business. Mom had to close her office after a year due to lack of profits, and that ate up a shit-ton of money. We had to take money from loan sharks.
That's when she would stay home most of the time and started drinking much more prominently. She's almost certainly a BPD-er. She was constantly wallowing in her misery and started becoming aggressive towards me and my dad. This turned into verbal and emotional abuse, sometimes physical towards my dad, at the worst of times. At the best of times she simply wasn't "here" - she was emotionally cut off from me. For years, then, I already couldn't have talked to her. Worse, I was afraid of her because I didn't trust her judgment or intentions as she had become self-obsessed (probably always was in a less prominent form), but also she would turn into this monster - eyes dropping, a painful grimace on her face, just evil. She'd terrorise me, yell at me, insult me, barge into my room every 5 minutes just to fuck me up and remove my safe zone. If I faced her, she would fake falling unconscious and sometimes threaten she would kill herself while climbing on the window (although I knew she wouldn't do it).
And dad often wasn't there - he had to work and would often come home around 8, 9 PM, sometimes later.
This went on for the majority of my life here. In the meantime I turned from the smart kid to a failure as I couldn't concentrate any more and have lost any sense of self and what I wanted in life. I've fucked up two universities and finally am finishing up a third, private one.
Thankfully, in the meantime, I escaped from home to live with my ex - my ex was also traumatised and love-sick so we functioned in a state of limbo and safety. There was not real love here, just safety and a bit of relief. I regained enough of myself to start learning some skills - learned basic web design and programming, now I'm neck deep in graphic design and art and love it. I'm rediscovering my passions and now find my passion is everything so I just have to choose and do whatever. Guitar is awesome :)
Anyhow, I've finally achieved ok-ish financial and prospective stability as well as a blurry vision of where I want to be in the future, so recently I've begun to focus on me (having also recently been in a short but fucking stressful relationship recently that I ended very untactfully and hurtfully, very BPD) and trying to dig out all these repressed emotions.
And so, I'm at my old home for a month, while my folks are on a vacation at sea. And I'm crying practically the whole time - for 4 days now. And getting drunk, eating, sleeping. It fucking hurts. It feels like I could do this for years. Will it ever stop? Is there an end to this bottle of emotions?
It took half a year to just remember that I love my parents, as I had to wade through the hate for them. And now, fuck, I've opened the Pandora's box it seems. I have a couple of good friends, but they can't identify with this - to them this seems over the top, and I understand that and tell them to trust me that it isn't. I've, besides, proven myself as a rational person many times before to them as we're all designers and have all worked together through some very complex and challenging projects together. I am not rational, I have to enforce myself to be much more often that I'd like, but this is wonderful compared to how I was - in the not-so-recent past I've driven myself so mad that I've, for instance, become convinced words are enemies and should not be trusted. All because I couldn't any more find any relief anywhere - I've started distrusting anything written and music and art have long ago stopped getting through to me because of the storm of anxiety and chaos in my mind. That's when I started talking, talking, talking. Telling anyone I trusted even a little bit how I feel. And then I slowly regained a small bit of stability so that I could begin crying. You must understand - for years I couldn't allow myself to feel - I had to be stable at home, watch over mom, be there for my dad, finish education.
Does the crying stop? How does it work? If I've years of repressed emotions does it take years to let them out? I want to live. And, sadly, I function better when repressed than like this. I now have responsibilities at work and to me that I have to maintain, and being like this doesn't really let me.