Being the one that throws up the signal that something is wrong is not the popular course. Even if that signal is as silent as you trying to take care of yourself and setting boundaries with no words spoken.

You are denied and judged by your peers, your very own family of peers. They want to know, “what is wrong with YOU?” “Why are you always bringing up the past and trying to ruin everything?”

No matter how much your therapist, your sponsor, your safe friends tell you that YOU ARE OK. You wonder if you really are ok.

Maybe the family of origin is right? Maybe I am a waste of space that is always living in the past. They ask, “What is wrong with YOU?” as if, I am the root and soul of the problem. No, those questions are merely a distraction from what is really the problem.

Now, I know better. The pain that comes with questioning yourself. No more, I know better. Now, I do.

You are trying to remove yourself from the insanity that lives in a hoarded stack of papers, plastic things, and food from 1996 that cannot be thrown away. The thick smell of smoke and of a person that hasn’t bathed.

The smell of sickness, the dark, pungent smell of mental fucking illness. It makes you physically ill, and no breakthroughs in therapy can protect you from the despair or emotional reaction of knowing that this is what you came from.

WHY DO YOU ACT LIKE EVERYTHING IS OK?! I won’t do it. I will not act “as if” EVER AGAIN FOR HER OR YOU!

You are all sick, banding together stifling the sickness with alcohol and drugs. If only we all could be as peaceful as you try and convince me that you are. I know you are not. I know.

Now more than ever, I am assured that I am on the right road for me. Your road is different from mine, and that’s ok. I am no longer so emotionally intertwined so that I believe everything I do must also be done by you in order for you to be ok.

I only know what I need to do for myself. After many years, I’ve never been surer of anything else in my life.

This is the road of clarity that I never thought I’d walk, but I made it. I’m here. It is possible.

And, NO ONE can take it away from me. Once you know, you cannot ever NOT KNOW.