When I was 17 I decided I’d had enough of my batshit crazy mother’s physical and psychological torture, so I walked right out the door, never to return. We tried working it out for a while by having me live with a relative but she cut up my driver’s license and made it impossible for me to drive to class. I was a straight-A student and heavily involved in extra-curriculars including college courses for dual credit. She said she didn’t care if I never graduated high school.
So, I legally emancipated, just about two months into my senior year of high school, got my driver’s license back, got a full time job, and continued with my school plans. Things got really bad when a social worker breached the confidentiality she had promised me by disclosing my stepfather’s abuse, which means I was then disowned and/or ostracized by the vast majority of my family within about 1 week of telling someone for the first time. My mother would call me up on the phone daily and scream about how I was ruining her life and I was so selfish and the abuse was my fault yadda yadda.
Me? I was working full-time to support myself while trying to keep my high school class rank. I would spend hours in the bathroom at school crying. I wore a heavy winter coat even inside to keep people out of my face. I can’t describe how painful it was to lose my stepfather (who was actually my adopted father, Mom’s FOURTH marriage and by all accounts the man I called Dad) as this was the first time I really acknowledged to myself the implications of what had happened, that he had betrayed me. It is the most significant loss I have ever experienced and in some ways I think it is worse than death because my loss was never validated. Very few people believed me because it was such a ‘‘convenient’’ time to come out with abuse accusations. Lots of friends couldn’t deal with my negative attitude, etc.
I graduated 2nd in my class with 13 senior awards and a full-ride scholarship to University of Michigan. No clue if my parents were there. (My Mom later revealed that she was, by threatening to sue me for harassment over one of the words I used in my graduation speech.)
Once I was through the gauntlet, I fell apart. College was a litany of debilitating medications for PTSD, hospitalization for depression, useless navel-gazing and feeling like a complete and total freak of nature compared to the seemingly normal kids in my classes. It didn’t help that my mother stayed married to my abuser, and expected me to regularly interact with him, until I withdrew from school to get my act together and cut her off from my life at 22. When she tried to convince my therapists to give her power of attorney over my medical decisions, it was kind of the last straw. (BOTH my therapist and psychiatrist gave her a royal smackdown. They opened my eyes.)
So the short answer is that being age 17-22 was the hardest thing I have ever done. Once I finally started asserting myself in my relationship with my mother, though, I got my life back, and I can only describe everything that came after that as pure fantasy. I returned to undergrad, married a wonderful man, graduated with honors and just started my first week as a graduate student of Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice.
Sometimes I think life started out so shitty just so age 23+ would be mindblowingly awesome and I would truly realized how blessed I am. And I do.