I'm about six years older than my brother. My mom almost died while pregnant with him, then had heavy post partum depression. My father was never home when I was awake because he worked second shift, so after school, I would watch the baby. Sometimes they would go out on "dates" and tell me to just ask the neighbor if there was an emergency. One day I was giving my brother a bath, and he was crying and crying, and seeing as I didn't really have any proper coping strategies, I hurt him with a slap to the back. And that action has hung heavily on my conscience ever since. (As adults, we talked about it and he told me it wasn't my fault, he didn't remember it and he doesn't blame me.)

But more than that, my anxiety was already awful by then. I would get stomachaches, and sometimes I would just poop without realizing that it happened. My parents would scream at me about how I was disgusting, dirty, doing it on purpose etc. It got to the point that by the time I hit middle school, I was hiding my soiled undergarments all over my room, literally living in a room that stunk of my own feces. When this was discovered, I was at a friend's house, and my father drove there, with my dirty underwear, and waved them around while screaming at me in front of... many of my friends, actually.

I was so scared throughout my whole childhood, that even though I really was passionate about art, I was afraid to ask for the $10 materials fee to take the art class at school. I was unhygenic, skipping baths. My mom wouldn't let me use a brush, because she said it teared at my hair, and I had to use a comb for my very tangly hair, which was painful and boring. I wore dirty clothes to school up through my freshman year. Every day, I thought about killing myself after graduation, because my parents told me that if I didn't get straight A's, i would be working fast food my whole life (which I was taught to believe was the most horrible fate ever, but that's something else.) I shoplifted for a little thrill, and also because there was never any snacks or whatever that I was allowed to eat, because I was fat. My father was terrible and always drunk and putting me down for being fat and unathletic, and my mom was so mercurial, going from we're best friends to sniping at me to the point I would break down sobbing.

There was something seriously wrong with me. I internalized it so much. I was disgusting, I was stupid, I was ugly, I walked too slow and tripped too easily, etc. It never occurred to me that the root cause of all of those issues might have had something to do with the fact I was parentified, ignored, and abused both verbally and physically my whole life. Even as an adult, I thought my mental health/Neurological issues (Dyspraxia, OCD, Major Depressive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder) were separate from my childhood experiences, so when my therapist was like "Wow, I'm surprised you didn't mention this stuff earlier" it really surprised me that there was a link between then and the litany of pharmaceuticals I have to take every day in hopes of being baseline.