Why I Moved Out on My Own (cont.)

That’s just one small example of life in my parents’ house. Everything had to be done to my father’s standards, and even if you met those standards, it wasn’t good enough. It was also assumed that I was going to screw up my life somehow. The chorus of my childhood was, “If you ever (fill in the blank here with any serious failing: do drugs, get pregnant, get caught smoking), you will be out on the streets so fast you won’t know what hit you.? I was determined not to do any of those things, but the possibility of living anywhere but home was like a tiny seed planted in my brain, and I began looking forward to that day.

When I was little, my three older sisters kept me sane. We all lived upstairs in a two-story house, and my parents’ bedroom was downstairs. I grew up with an us vs. them mentality, and my sisters protected me. I knew my parents’ opinions were often wrong, because I grew up hearing them constantly criticize my sisters. That helped me create a shell of self-protection. Since I knew they were wrong about my sisters, I had no trouble believing they were wrong about me. Whenever they implied or came right out and said that I was stupid, disobedient, or lazy, I knew they were wrong.

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