Tangled

@NightLight1

so sorry you are struggling. you have dealt with a lot but are working through it.

@NightLight1 i definitely can relate to the people pleasing. I’ve done it all my life and I’m sick of it. I’m getting better at expressing my feelings, it’s still hard to tell my parents what I think though. I still need more practice but I can do it:)

-Just

@NightLight1 You are definitely going through a lot. Live your life the way you want ❤️

@NightLight1

hi i can relate with the pain thing. I didn't have any suicide attempts but I did self-harm. I liked the feeling of pain and seeing the blood flow on my hands. I stopped it with some help.

If you wanna talk i would like to hear your thoughts.

also about your family not believing you I had a different experience. I suspect I might have BPD I told my Parents but they didnt believe me. I was told that I was just imagining things. It hurt so much to hear that.

And about pleasing everyone I have probs with that too, I tried to be perfect to please my parents,teachers I never realized I didnt give myself time to enjoy life, now i'm trying to find time for myself and just be selfish but it feels hard coz I feel guilty for indulging.

@NightLight1

Yeah, no, that relationship with your mom was toxic, I'm sorry for all that you went through. She should have, at the barest minimum, protected you from abuse once she knew about it. That's the barest minimum you can expect from a parent, and she failed that. Pleasing her isn't worth a hill of beans, glad you're realizing that.

It's healthy to do your own thing, I want to see you be selfish, live your own life, find your own happiness. I mean, maybe it's that I'm a rugged Western individualist and we overvalue this kind of thing. But you've soaked up enough abuse and gotten little thanks for it, go forth and break things.

Here's the problem. You have kids. You don't owe your mom or even your husband jack, but your kids didn't ask to be brought into this world, and you and your husband both share a responsibility to them for bringing them here. This is my own cultural bias, of course: "the world is not inherited from our parents, but borrowed from our children." In my cultural view, you never owed your mom anything, but she owed you everything and she failed you. (Of course, we could get into cultural relativism, but my selfish, individualistic culture is the one that's going to pat you on the back and tell you to take your happiness from the world whether the world likes it or not.) This doesn't mean you're bound to stay in a marriage you hate. You can get a divorce, you can play the field, party with women and have many freeing lesbian experiences. But it does mean that you have to meet a certain baseline level of okayness for your kids....like not disappear from their lives entirely, not abandon them, look out for them in some capacity.

But putting the shoe on the other foot for a moment--you actually DON'T have to do any of that, not even for your kids. I mean...so what...so I, an internet stranger, will think you're a good person? Who cares! If you're going to already be hated by your mom, your husband, and your kids, and laughing about it while you live the life you always wanted, disappointing the random internet stranger should be the easiest of those injuries to shrug off. You don't live to please other people, and you certainly don't live to please me. People can and do abandon their kids all the time--and men do it more, and why do we accept that, while gasping in horror when women do it? There are no limits. You can do it, you can get away with it, you can laugh about it, you can tell your next girlfriend how you never even liked your kids anyway as she goes down on you. The freedom we really have is dizzying. You don't have to do ANYTHING. And people do all of that and far worse, every day, and get away with it. I really mean all of that. Newt Gingrich, the American politician, on his third wife after dumping the first two because they both had cancer and women with cancer aren't fun enough for him anymore, made a credible run for president. Society actually condemns very little. Those with the will to more or less do as they like, and nobody stops them.

Or you could be gentler about it, not because I said so but because you felt like it, and try to balance the divorce and your self discovery with parenthood. It's up to you, and that's the real heady trip. You're the master of your destiny, and you have been for a while. When you stop giving your power to other people, you realize the kind of power you really have.

Part of why I painted such a broad picture for you is that you have no idea how selfish you could actually be, with very little in the way of consequences. And you could actually go that far if you wanted. But if that isn't what you want, it's still instructive to remember that you could have, and any restraint you feel like showing was not duty, but kindness. This is not an obligation of any kind. But I mean, sincerely, that people should show gratitude towards any concession you feel like giving them, even if they didn't get exactly what they wanted from you.