#disfunctional family
Title: as special as the family (right? right)
Fandom:Encanto.
Prompt: Please Don’t Leave Me.
Character(s):Mirabel Madrigal.
Warnings:Self-Worth Issues. Also spoilers for the movie.
Summary: The Madrigal Family was fantastical and magical, Mirabel is sure of that. But does she come in under that feature when her door doesn’t appear?
Hello. This is probably my last post on this blog, I don’t intend to post any more after that. My reach for some reason has been getting ridiculously small these days and I have over 300 followers who don’t interact with me, in any way.
This is more of an outburst than anything else. I am constantly taking impulsive desperate attitudes that are supposed to make people look at me and this is just one more of them, although it almost never works. I doubt anyone will read this.
My name is C. I am 16 years old. I’m brazilian, so I apologize for gramatical mistakes. I wrote this text when I was 15 or 14, but I updated it. I’ve tried to publicize it before. I’m trying again.
First, I have a dysfunctional family. It was something that happened when my stepfather arrived many years ago, I was 6 or 7 at the time. My mom is divorced and I don’t know my biological dad. She raised me and my older brother on her own and was always looking for steady partners because of - which I didn’t understand before but now I see - financial issues. She was a teacher, now retired, so our condition of life was very simple. My stepfather is also retired and has always been paid very well, compared to her. So they started dating and I was too young to see any problems with that or even to understand what that meant. He brought more money to our family and the financial stability that my mother was looking for. We left a tiny and falling apart house to live in a much bigger and more beautiful one. He looked ok at first. But after a while it seemed that my stepfather didn’t really like the way our family worked or the way my mother treated me and my brother and decided that he wanted things his way. I also remember very well the first times he raised his voice to me or my brother and one of the things I most regret in life is to have let him go around dictating rules over us from the beginning, because letting it all happen just ruined my family. My stepfather started to become unbearable for both of us. Nothing was ever good for him. He was always pointing out defects in everything we did. He was always screaming. He was always talking to my mother about how she had raised us wrong. Everything had to be his way, how he wanted it, when he wanted it. It became a problem for us in a very short time. My mother also ended up moving to something a little more like him, since the way she acted “was not good”. I remember thinking to myself about these things since I was 8 years old. My brother and I hated him. Soon my mother and stepfather became my two greatest enemies and this is still the case today.
Basically, to save your time, I spent all these last years of my life hating my stepfather so hard that everything he does disgusts me. When I’m on his side, it feels like I’m on the side of a complete stranger. Everything I do inside this house is meticulously thought out and planned to please everyone and especially him. The simplest tasks become nervous anxiety at the thought that I may be doing something wrong. Anything is a reason to complain and raise his voice. And now, as I said, it is not just him, because my mother is not very different and recently it has been even worse. In the beginning of my adolescence, when my family became really unbearable, I started to isolate myself in my room all day and now I just go out to eat and use the bathroom. And I do it precisely to avoid meeting anyone. I don’t even eat with them anymore.
My mother is a submissive woman who knows very well that our family is horrible but we still depend on his money. That’s why they never fought and got along as far as possible because she never opposes him, always agrees on everything. My relationship with her is terrible. I remember that before my stepfather our life was simpler but we were happy in some way and now because of the decision that my mother made our family is totally over. Nobody here spends a day without complaining about the other. My brother is always getting more credit than I am for things he doesn’t even do. I have always been a good daughter. I were always a quiet child, my grades were always great. My brother is a grown man with 20 years on his back who can’t find a job, is still in high school because he repeated two years and does nothing at home but always receives the best things while I always stay with the rest and have to run after absolutely everything. I see people talking about their brothers with that “we fight, but we love each other” story and all I can feel is envy because I never had this relationship with him. We hate each other as much as we hate my stepfather.
Last year, when I had just returned from school, the two fought. My mom was still working, so she wasn’t at home. I was inside my room with the door closed, as usual. Recently my mother had talked to my stepfather about us to try to ease the situation. I heard him entering the room where my brother was. He complained about collecting clothes on the clothesline. He muttered “and then you two complain about me” and then went to the kitchen. My brother followed and retaliated for the first time. My stepfather must have come over to hold him or something and they started fighting. Really fighting. Punching each other. I heard the sound of someone fiddling with the sink drainer and then my stepfather told my brother to lower something. I was terrified. I started to cry and to shake. I took out my cell phone and my headphones and put the music on at maximum so I wouldn’t have to listen. I sent a message to my mom saying what was going on. Of course, one hour they stopped. I was crying all afternoon. I’ve never been so scared.
Most of my problems are related to my family.
2016 was the worst year of my life because of them. The fights were very constant since the beginning of the year. At that time I was entering 6th grade and my grades plummeted. I couldn’t concentrate on classes, I didn’t have the willpower to do the activities, or the school works that I never used to do, or anything, whether it was related to school or not. Before that the situation was already terrible but I believe that that year it started to really get worse. I had no friends. I had just changed schools and was completely alone. My self-esteem was horrible. There was only one girl who talked to me but she was always exchanging me for other people and leaving me aside. I was always an introvert, very quiet, and I couldn’t make friends at all. This girl was doing me really bad - once, we were talking to our history teacher and she told me that I was despicable for being very pessimistic and for, according to her, “not living”. When I heard that I didn’t think too much about it but then I started to think and I have never felt so bad in my life. I spent weeks thinking about it. I started to accept as true the fact that I was unable to make friends because I was a despicable person and that is why no one liked me. It was the most painful thing I have ever heard.
Still in 2016, we made a travel to the south because my stepfather is from there. We went to visit his family and it was not the first time, actually. It happened in December. I was really excited but the travel only resulted in more fights. The only thing I asked my mother for was a book I saw in a store that was about depression and I ended up earning nothing, just like my brother. I was really upset. My stepfather kept on teasing me. We were all asleep in his parents’ living room and one night, when everyone else was asleep, I laid on the mattress crying low all night.
I was constantly thinking about suicide. It scares me to think about the possibility that, if I had an easy and fast way at the time, this could have happened. I was thinking of talking to someone at the life appreciation center but I didn’t. I did a lot of research on the technique they used and realized that perhaps their rhetorical questions would not help me prevent my own suicide if I got in touch. In the end, I never told any of this to anyone. There are only two people who know the whole situation but apart from them, no one else knows what I went through that year and what I go through now. Not even my own family knew that I was thinking of killing myself because of them.
I was alone. I couldn’t count on my family. I couldn’t count on friends because I didn’t have any. I couldn’t count on anyone because I just didn’t trust anyone for that. Totally alone, thinking about suicide. I was 11 years old.
In 2019 I started to self harm. I was in 9th grade and at the beginning of the school year I found a small razor inside the used art book when I first opened it. It was the opportunity I was in need of. I started to cut my legs instead of my arms so my family wouldn’t see. My mom saw it, anyway. I said I did that because of them. Yes, my mother was desperate, she cried, she told me that she had related to my stepfather for the money and that my father was abusive to her and so on. She said that if she had known that my brother and I would be so unhappy, she would not have done that. And I started attending a psychologist.
What good did it do?
Me, who at first was moved by the things that my mother told me, blaming myself for being a terrible daughter and for giving her such disgust, in the end I saw her returning to the same disparaging habits as before. I still go to a psychologist today, but a different one from the first.
First, the psychologist never helped me and does not help me at all. They are the two who know what happens, although I no longer have contact with the first one. I basically go into the clinic so she can tell me everything I want to hear and everything I already know. The treatment is having no effect on my point of view and I suggested to her that perhaps medications would improve my mood, my lack of desire for everything, my lack of hunger and my insomnia. My mom was really upset because she didn’t want me to take medication, but my psychologist is insisting and the consultation with the psychiatrist will probably happen sometime. But secondly, right after I started going to psychologists, my mother did absolutely nothing to change my reality at home and started to fight and yell at me in the same way that she did before. I was really stupid to have fallen into that little theater of hers. The problem is in them, and it is useless to send me to a psychologist in the hope of making me better if when I return home the same problems are repeated and everyone goes back to fighting, complaining and throwing everything at me. My stepfather never even bothered to change his conduct because of that but I expected a lot more from my mom. Pathetic to believe that something was going to change. She is spending money aimlessly on consultations and I wonder if that is what she pays so dearly for. To upset me and then send me to a psychologist for not being able to take care of her own children hoping that this will change something.
Anyway, I don’t tell her that consultations don’t work because I don’t want to waste my time with another exhausting discussion. I always heard from people that I should talk to my family if something was wrong. I’ve tried to talk to them a million times and I’m where I am. There is no conversation here. All of this about my consultations is very frustrating because I always hear people talking about therapy as if it were something miraculous that will definitely help, which just doesn’t happen to me. Going to psychologists does not help me.
In conclusion, I still don’t stop at the urge to self-harm. My leg is full of scars and there is no one to see them. My psychologist doesn’t know. I suppose she doesn’t even know that I’m there because of that. In fact, there are many things that my psychologist doesn’t know because I don’t tell her.
Again, in 2019, thanks to a girl in my classroom, I also started drinking. I asked her to go to one of these teenage meetings and she told me that they went to the market every Wednesday to drink and smoke. Another opportunity that I needed. I thought it was time to stop being the good daughter. I tried to be it for a long time for my family. They didn’t deserve to have a trophy daughter to go around showing off to friends like they did to me. I went out with them that day and drank. Very simple, actually. I found out that I am very weak. I got drunk, of course. I threw up a lot when I got home. Nobody noticed anything. And I’ve been in this for a long time now. I also started drinking at the beginning of the school year. When I’m drunk, I don’t have to be thinking about school, or my family, or friends, or anything else. My bad reality is much lighter.
I didn’t want to have to resort to drinking and smoking to be able to forget what I live inside my house. I really didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be that teenager. I didn’t want to have to do that. I didn’t want this to be the only way to make me happy for at least a few hours. I didn’t want any of that.
I’m not in it because I think it’s cool or because I want to be a cool teenager who drinks and smokes. It started out as a form of revenge, but then I discovered that it could actually be a valve.
I know I’m throwing my life in the trash. I know I shouldn’t be doing any of this. But I need my ways to get out of this house. I can’t stay in a toxic place all the time that makes me sad all the time. I avoid going back here when I’m out. I just don’t want to be here anymore. I linger on the street when I come back from school so I don’t have to arrive so soon. I used to go out every week. And I hope I’ll be out again when the pandemic is over.
The saddest thing about the self-destructive way of life is when no one notices it. In so long that I do this, my family has never noticed. I kept coming home drunk and the most my mother ever did was to suspect when I said I was going out on my birthday. I disguise it very well, so that must be the reason.
Since I started entering adolescence, I have never made friends again - although I remember that feeling of loneliness from a very young age. There were some people I talked to at school, but I never trusted anyone. A friend to me would be much more than someone you just talk to or hang out with on a daily basis, I think. I can’t talk to people. I cannot introduce myself to them. I can’t socialize with them. Nowhere. Not on the internet, not at school, not even on the street when i’m drinking.
I did a lot of research and I’m almost sure that I have a severe social phobia and I’m going to talk about it with my psychologist.
I tried to make up for it by posting the texts I write on reading platforms to see if I could get any fame from it. I always wrote. My texts are mostly oneshots that I write according to what I am feeling, so my thoughts and my personal life are very much exposed in them. My constant readings have improved my vocabulary and grammar. I really care about my texts. And I also draw. I have been drawing since I was little and also regularly, so I draw very well. Everyone knows that I draw well but nobody knows about my texts. Writing and drawing is all I know how to do. My texts and drawings are all I have. My family took a lot of things from me. My family is still taking everything from me, but I put my heart into every word and illustration because it is the only thing I have left. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve posted more than 30 short stories out there that hardly receive views, just like the illustrations I post. I wanted to work with one of these things and pursue a career mainly with drawing but I am a failure in both. Nobody reads my stories and nobody sees my drawings.
Sometimes I take the texts from my own diary. Sometimes, they carry so much truth and so much need that I collapse on myself in the end. My own tales move me. I put all of myself in them and in the drawings. I produce them with all my soul. But whatever. I don’t think it’s enough for people.
That is the question.
I feel like a ghost. It’s almost as if I don’t exist anywhere.
I am totally alone. I don’t feel loved by anyone. At home I have a dysfunctional family and the only person here who seems to care about me is my mother, disregarding that she is also responsible for having ruined my life. At school, I am completely alone in the classroom, or at lunch, or any other part of the day, and I simply don’t speak to anyone. On the street, I still have to settle for the least amount of people who also ignore me and hardly talk to me or take my desires and opinions into consideration. In social networks, where I should get support from people like me or at least disclose the only things I know how to do, I end up receiving the same cold indifference and I end up being alone anyway.
It seems that nobody cares about me. It seems that if I died, it wouldn’t make any difference. It feels like I’m in the wrong place.
Everyone always says things like “you are not alone” or “there are people who love you” and etc., but I literally have no one. I can’t socialize anywhere. Everyone ignores me. Everyone makes me feel like I don’t exist. I am a failure at everything.
I dont know what I’m doing here. Reaching adulthood and leaving this place is the only hope I have of being able to be happy.
I wanted to have a normal life. A normal family. Friends. People who care about me. People who love me. I would give literally anything to have the childhood that I didn’t have because of people who were supposed to love and support me and actually made me hate my own life. Anything to be a normal teenager who doesn’t need to resort to self-mutilation or drugs to escape problems. Anything to at least have some friends.
I don’t know what to do.
I’ve tried everything to make people like me. I’ve tried for a long time to be someone I’m not for that. I am constantly taking desperate and impulsive actions just to see if I can get anything, such as this post, but it is always in vain. They say that if you don’t give up, you get things. I’ve been here trying for so long. I put so much of myself in drawings and texts. What do I get from that? What do I get out of trying? I’ve been doing these things for so long. All these years trying. All these years of holding on. I’m tired of trying. I’m tired of holding on.
All I want most in life is just for someone to look at me. Someone to look at me and see all these things. Someone to show that they care. Anything. I just wanted someone to care.
I’m practically screaming for help and it just seems like nobody cares.
On this quarantine, I have been without talking to practically anyone other than my family and my psychologist for months. Nobody came after me. Nobody sent me a message. Nobody even gave me a “happy birthday”. I disappeared, deleted my few contacts, stopped using my inactive Whatsapp. Nobody asked me why. Nobody even noticed. Nobody cares enough. Nobody ever cares enough.
I wake up every day with the first thought that my life is terrible and that I will still have to deal with this family and this loneliness for a long time before I can get out of it. I have no motivation for anything else. Writing and drawing no longer seem like flashy activities. They are no longer helping. I can’t stop crying all the time. My mother and stepfather made me an extremely sensitive person. I go around showing people that I have a strong personality, or that I am a cold and impassive person when in fact I am completely falling apart and nothing hurts more than knowing that no one cares. Just listening to someone screaming in an argument, even if it’s not me, is enough to make me nervous.
I’ve been in this for a long time and I can’t take it anymore. I wanted to have a happy childhood and adolescence and I just can’t have it. I’m too young to be having these problems. I was too young in 2016 to be having suicidal thoughts. I was too young to start drinking because of these problems. I was too young to start self-harm, too, because of these problems. I’m too young to be suffering like that.
And I know that I no longer have the opportunity to be happy for now, while I’m here.
This must be another cry for help that I am exposing in vain. I’ve already sent emails to certain people, I’ve done posts like this before, I’ve posted explicit oneshots about my conditions, I’ve done threads on twitter. I’ve done everything I could, I’ve played all my cards. I am literally alone, not much else that can help me. All these things were calls for help, but there is no one to notice them.
I’m tired of being ignored.
I’m tired of not being seen by people.
I’m tired of being here like an idiot posting all these things and giving all these clues and being ignored by everyone. I’m tired of doing it all in vain. I’m tired of keep trying.
I bet this is just another waste of time.
Sometimes it feels like stepping on a thin ice;
I see my sibling walking consciously towards hole in the sheet of ice.
I see my mother, who’s standing on cracked ice, shouting at my sibling to get their shit togheter, but only encouraging them to go futher.
I see my father standing on the shore, aware of what’s happening right before his eyes, but not able to stand on the ice.
And there’s me, who is trying to call out to them, but when everyone are just minding their own business, nobody really listens. I’m also on cracked ice and afraid to move, scared of getting involved.
September 20, 2020
Hey morning, it’s what 6 am where I am and my stupid bitch of a mom just came into the living room (where me and my youngest sister sleep) and started screaming about her seeing a mouse and how it’s because we don’t take out the trash. Then proceeds to calling us “dirty bitches” and “nasty mother fuckers”. Which is hilarious because she lives in an apartment and her neighbor said she saw a mouse in her apartment a month ago. Mind you her neighbor isn’t that clean, I’ve seen inside her house. So I guess she never thought “hey! maybe it came from her!” No I doubt it. I highly doubt it. This woman is an immature, selfish, hyper lying piece of dog shit. Fuck it, rat shit. I have ZERO REPECTFOR HER. I don’t care that she gave birth to me. That’s all she did because she didn’t do SHIT for my sisters and I growing up. Just abuse us physically, emotionally. She us part of the reason I wanted to kill my self so badly when I was younger. She.. why did she even have kids? Money? Because that’s honestly all she cares about. Oh and the best part about all this?! I have an interview and trail shift in an hour at a coffee shop near by but now I doubt I’ll go. Mostly because I have a fucking headache that’s slowly turning into a migraine from her screaming and there are no pain killers here. God! I need my own places!!!
