Things I need to get off my chest

**Trigger warning on this entire post*** I am a grown adult now. 

I feel the need to get a lot of my chest to someone who might understand my situation or to someone who might listen and have some insight. 

I had an insanely hard life from the very beginning. My dad was very physically and mentally abusive when I was a child, he never wanted a daughter. After an attempt on my life and years of abuse at the hands of him my mom got the courage to finally leave him and try to live her life as a single mother.  

She tried her hardest but that didn’t come without hardships for her and for us kids. We grew up very poor, moved from one housing unit to another (and also in some woman and children shelters) I spend a good amount of time in and out of foster care throughout my childhood, experienced interfamilial sexual assault, CSA, CSE at the hands of my grown adult sister, physical abuse, mental abuse, and more. 

My mom passed when I was 14 and my crank addicted sister got custody of us, it honestly went all downhill from there, it was torture living in that home my mom died in in front of me having to just pretend my sister wasn’t doing drugs in our mothers old bedroom that I used to share with my mom when she was alive till my sister kicked me out of it. She had a baby during all of this which I raised till he was 4, did all his feedings, saw his first steps, he used to call me mama and then I woke up to what she was doing after, only after my now husband told me when I was 18 and we first met that the stuff she put me through was literally not normal and it wasn’t ok that she did this to you. 

I had to steal from the dollar store for food, dive into donation bins for clothes, panhandle money to give her for “rent” she spent all the money she got for us on drugs, any other money she got (because she was on welfare) also on drugs. She would even go as far as buying food for herself and hiding it in her closet in her room because “we ate it all on her” we were literally hungry and eating food bank food ffs. And even sold me to her dealers when I was just a teenager for “rent money” but that too was also for drugs. My first “experience” was with a 45 year old random crank dealer who knew I was underage. I feel like an idiot for not stepping up and trying to stop her from the wreck she was making of our already severely broken family but I was literally a broken, abused, mentally ill child who just lost their whole world in one swoop.

Now I’m a grown adult and I haven’t been in a horrible situation like that for almost 10 years, I have made a amazing life for myself, finished high-school, got my culinary diploma, and am now a chef but half of me still lives there, still lives in fear, depression, ptsd and anxiety. 

So many things that adults can do normally I have to fight my body and brain to do. I can mask so well that people think I’m “normal” if they don’t know what I’ve gone through. They even go as far as thinking I grew up “privileged” I have lived with this inside me for so long I needed to get out out there and if I can’t get some relief from it I can at least maybe help someone who might be in this situation has gone through this situation or anything in between know they’re not alone.