The War of Independence

October 1st, 2011
252 Days Left Until Graduation

There is a new found immediacy to everything I do.

For the first time in my life, I am on a timeline that cannot be lengthened or altered. I have 252 days left to establish myself and secure employment away from home. It is not the fact that I cannot return home that drives me further and faster than I ever have been driven before. I advance with the dawning realization that, should I return home, I would be completely destroyed.

I should explain. Recently (and by recently, I mean within the past four weeks), I have come to the realization that my mother's family is far more dysfunctional than believed. Their relationships with each other are simultaneously self-supporting and self-destructive. It was, and still is, a poisonous environment to grow up in.

From a very early age I was taught that my needs came second to the needs of anyone else, especially my mother. I was volunteered without my consent, taught that my own needs were unimportant when they inconvenienced someone else and that extra-familial relationships were unimportant.

My parent's divorce brought with it vilification of my father and his family and ten years of narcissistic lies have damaged my sister's relationship with my father.

Coming to college has helped put distance between me and my family but still their influence is felt. Financial support is used as leverage for manipulation and basic amenities are given with great sighs of exasperation and implicit demands.

I am in college now to attempt to break that cycle. I want to repair the relationship I have with my family and help it onto some semblance of normalcy. More importantly, I do not want my children to live in the family I lived in.

My independence will not be won easily. My mother has made it clear that I would be more than welcome to move back home where any independence I've won would be snuffed out.

My only recourse is employment. I must get a job by the time I graduate and be able to live away from home.

These are the stakes. These are the reasons I fight.

252 Days Remain