When my dad lost his job (he was drunk 24/7), my parents separated and me and my mom had to move to a different place.
I had to change schools and leave my friends, it was pretty traumatic for an anxious, socially retarded kid like me... I was bullied in my new school for 6 years, never managed to make real friends. It fucked me up, I still have some kind of a panic attack whenever I see young teenagers.
I think this whole event ruined my chances of ever being functional, if I ever had any to begin with...
Something similar happened to me, except for my parents separating. Sometimes I wonder if they should have split.
Hokay, story time!
In the span of the 2 years I spent in Dubai, I noticed my parents' marriage falling apart for the first time. The most dramatic part was my mom trying to immolate herself at the stove after a particularly loud argument. Since that, there have been many things, such as accusations of infidelity and theft of money.
I didn't see anything like that after, but I still heard all the slanging matches and felt the pressure to perform academically and succeed to prove some unknown point. The family dynamics are... fucked up on my father's side, and passive-aggressive on my mother's side. And I'm stuck between the two. It often feels... wrong. As if I was the product of a billion contradicting wishes and meant to prove many different things to many different people. I constantly get the feeling that my parents made sacrifices for me, but in the context of an investment.
And then in the middle of 7th grade, my dad's company in Dubai shut down, and we came back to his hometown. I entered a school that was composed of people from rich families, and it always reminded me that there were people who were absurdly rich and had some level of security in life. Since then, I've seen a slide in academic results (I somehow remained a straight A student till 10th grade, but then slipped a bit in 12th, and screwed up most major entrance tests except the one for the college I'm in). I've been lucky to be able to land a computer science degree in an institute like the one I'm in, but my academic results have gone down even further to slightly above average now.
Someday in the near future I plan to ask my parents whether they had me to prove to the snarky relatives that they could raise a kid in a nuclear family where one person was a designer and the other was a teacher. I don't know if they succeeded or failed, and I don't think I'll ever hear my parents tell me that they love me for what I am. And it hurts to not hear that, especially after all that I've tried to do to hear that.
