I swear I won't let this kill me, (but it's cutting it pretty close.)

Damn, its been three years?

It's really been that long? I never meant to leave you all for that period of time, I suppose life got.. crazy. Life got really, really bad. I've missed you. I've missed this.

Let's catch up for a quick spell.

Well, I guess I should start by telling you where I've been. It's only good manners.

I guess the start was leaving a toxic family members house. I lived my life there plagued by constant critiques, and they were constantly talking down to and about me. My anxiety and depression, along with what I know now to be a panic disorder, made it impossible for me to work. I was stuck in bed more often than not, begging the adults I lived with- my family- to help me. Their answer? They didn't believe in mental illness.

Let me just say, if any of you have ever cried out for help just to have someone laugh in your face, I am genuinely sorry. You deserve better than that. It's hell.
Remember that therapist I talked about? Inevitably, she told me I was above her pay grade. She said I needed to cut ties with every member of my family, and get better help, because she wasn't equipped to handle my degree of issues. What a shitty pill to swallow, huh?

Basically I spent years being harassed and called lazy, selfish, worthless. So I packed a bag and went to stay with my maternal parent.

Who abused me all of my childhood, had a severe set of addiction, mental illness, and narcissism.

I felt like I didn't have a choice. I thought if I got away, maybe I could find hope in being alive again. A fresh start. Of course, getting there (a whole different state and 14 hours away from where I was running from) sucked. She told me she'd help me get on benefits, medical insurance and food stamps, things to help me get better and not feel so horrible all the time. She went back to her abusive ways soon after getting my food stamps. I had to leave, leaving me homeless and back in my home state- while my mother continued to illegally take and use my food stamps in the state I had left from. That's all she had wanted me for. What a bitch.

That aside, it left me with two cats and homeless. I bounced from shitty motel to shitty motel, getting eaten up by bedbugs in some, dealing with shootings in others. I barely had enough to eat. Pancake mix and water popped into a microwave is what I lived off of. It was.. rough. The suicidal ideation of just slipping into a motel bathroom to die quietly was one of the hardest urges I ever had to fight.

Eventually, after about two months of living that way, my paternal parent got a house with me. My 18th birthday, I got old blood money from a dead relative (rest in peace, thank you) and was able to put down over $2,000 toward renting the house. It was in a horrible neighborhood, rented from a slumlord. But me? I was just happy to have a roof over my head.

My father brought other people into the house. Put bills in my name and didnt pay them. Didn't even buy a kitchen table. The people staying with us didn't do anything to help. After less than a year, the ceiling was caving in, and he left. Just.. left, to be with the woman he married without my knowledge. All his money had been going to her and her kids for a while, leaving us constantly stuck and hungry and suffering.

When he left, the other people we lived with did nothing to help me. In fact, I remember plainly, one of them looking me dead in my crying face and saying, "Maybe being homeless with make you grow up." That coming from someone who was supposed to be my family, yet again another person who didn't believe my mental illness.. well, it broke a part of me that they will never get to have back. Since, and forever, they will be held with distance, because they don't deserve my love.