I Am Me Anonymous

I will never forget the look of the freshly fallen, pure-white snow that blanketed the streets just outside the car when my mother said, “I don’t even consider you my son anymore.” The white snow was suddenly blinding, glaring at me with its purity. I never imagined that those eight words could have such a profound effect on me. Eight words simultaneously shattered my world, and opened a whole new world. It was in this moment that I had a choice; I could let these words define me, break me, ruin me, or I could overcome these words, rise above my mother’s shallowness and become a stronger individual; I chose the latter.

The whole ordeal began in February 2012 when, finally, I realized that something was wrong. There was an unexplainable weight on my shoulders. A weight I was no longer willing to bear. For years I knew that my relationship with my mother was unnatural, unbalanced, and chaotic. Not knowing any better, I figured that the constant barrage of yelling, the continual arguments, and her sporadic need to verbally unload her anger upon me, was normal, something every child went through one way or another.

However, it was on an early February day that I realized this wasn’t normal by any measure, this was emotional abuse,...