Finding out someone’s story can be such an enlightening journey. Everybody has one, after all.

I was not aware that unconditional love was a real life concept until I met my husband. Growing up in a warped church and home environment taught me that forgiveness was only a preached myth from the Bible. In my experience, love was issued on invisible strings of terms, conditions, rules, and regulations. People left one by one after the terms were broken, because I was broken, I learned that I had to follow all of the rules set forth to me in order to receive care; constantly on the edge of a cliff.

Being raised in a bubble of fear means you only really know fear. If you are not taught that peace and help could be provided to you, you are not going to know to look for it, especially when your childhood precedes the age of technology. As I was homeschooled full time throughout my schooling years, I had little understanding of how the real world worked on the outside by the time I was ready to enter it, let alone any social skills.

While many children were raised up to appreciate human interaction, affection, social development, and nurturing, some of us are not as blessed. Some of us are left to stray off to the side to be forgotten in a sea of unimportant faces, left for no one to hold. When most kids were being exposed to new and exciting development, I was being conditioned to avoid a leather belt. To accept violent, corporal punishment for misbehavior, some incidents leaving lifelong mental and physical scars. To long days and nights of constant arguments and tension while I hid from the war zone. To learning the best pressure points to torture an animal with and how much enjoyment you can get watching the life leave their eyes when you kill them by the time I was seven. To keeping my feelings to myself.

To never say anything about what happens behind our front door because our business was no one else’s.

I was raised by a sociopath.

Depression, PTSD, personality disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, agoraphobia, and a horrible case of morsicatio buccarum since birth. These are some of the effects I have faced after a childhood that was not and for the sake of normalizing the ability for me to talk about my abuse, after thirty-some-odd years of life, I want to talk about it. It is time to talk about it.

The past four years have been a difficult road of pain, processing, acceptance, and healing as I finally decided to turn around and face it all. I am still at the point of understanding and healing and I think I always will be, but I am tired of keeping that to myself. My experiences in life have made up who and why I am today.

Everyone has a story of their journey to becoming who they are today. Welcome to mine.