What You Helped Me Learn This Year.

Living within an emotionally sick world, whether because of outside factors or biology or a fun combination of both, is not like it seems in any movie or book or rock song. It is not filled with emotionally poignant moments and character-building struggles and romantic angst.
It is only a constant struggle to not feel entirely horrible about yourself. It is hideous and unattractive, meaningless and unproductive.
For me, to be more specific, it is a fight to believe that what I feel is real. That the way my mother makes me feel isn't just because I am a tainted awful person and I deserve it but because she is sick too. She took away my reality when I was a child and I adopted tv emotions and intimacies that were more real to me, more powerful, than my own memories and feelings that I learned to ignore. She takes away my abilty to know when I am hurt or know when I am not with her small dismissive half-listening responses. Until I know I can hear her and still hear myself I can't be sure of anything.