Collateral Damage

Gosh, it’s sure been a while since I’ve written. It’s like the further I go into healing from my childhood the less I write about it. I end up frozen and defeated and feeling less than alive, and quite often wonder if my brother made the better decision by ending his suffering.

Knowing what I now know about my family and putting plenty of pieces together, there is no way I’ll end my life. I’ve came to the conclusion that my brother and I were collateral damage in my mom’s plan to destroy my dad and everyone’s vision of him, because he left us. He left his wife and his children in 1978 to chase his own father to try to claim the love he never received. My grandfather died in 2010 or 11 and my dad never did get what he was looking for from his father but he spent many years trying.

If I end my life it will be the icing on the pity cake my mom has been making since 1978, and I just can’t allow that to happen, not without telling our story.

How does one even begin to share a story that is hard to believe? Every time I try to explain to anyone what it’s like to be raised by a covert narcissist, I end up being the one who looks insane and then my narcissistic abuser gets to point it out and say “see, I told you something is wrong with her”.

Do I start from the beginning and share what I know or do I jump around all over and share examples of things that I found interesting? Do I start with my dad’s story or my mom’s? Should I jump right in to when I was born?

What I do know is no matter where I start the flying monkeys will be there, the smear campaign will start again and I will be pushed further away from the family I was never a part of to begin with.

My brother and I were collateral damage in a war that wasn’t ours and he took more abuse than I may never know about because he never wanted me to suffer like he was.