The Night My Mind Saved Me

I keep waking up early. Not from stress or noise—but something deeper. A voice inside. A part of me I had buried. Maybe my inner child. And it’s showing me things I didn’t want to see. Memories I suppressed because they were just too much.

It’s beginning to dawn on me—really, fully—that I didn’t have any love in my childhood. None. My family system was so fundamentally unsafe that I couldn’t even believe them when they occasionally showed warmth. I had already learned not to trust the hand that hits and hugs in the same breath.

I spent so much of my life idealizing my parents, hoping—praying—that maybe I’d gotten it wrong. Maybe they did love me. Maybe they just didn’t know how to show it. But the truth is… they didn’t. Not really. Not in the ways a child needs. And certainly not in the ways I begged for, silently, for years.

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My mum never said she loved me. Not once.

She never held space for me without eventually lashing out. When I achieved something, she couldn’t reflect joy back to me. She’d feel threatened instead. What kind of mother does that?

I know now: a mother who hates herself. And instead of facing it, she projected it. Onto me.

That’s the cruelest thing you can do to a child—make them carry your self-hatred.

And somehow, I survived that.

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For a while, I thought maybe my dad saw what was happening. That maybe, deep down, he understood and cared. But that’s another story I made up to survive.

The truth? He lived through the same thing. He knew the pain—and still, he did nothing. He failed me. He isolated himself. He gave up on life. And he gave up on me.

And honestly, that’s what sent me into psychosis. Not madness. Grief. Soul-shattering grief. And the unbearable loneliness of finally seeing the truth and having no one there to hold it with me.

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My friends didn’t get it. They said I was being dramatic. That my mum seemed lovely. So I wasn’t just abused—I was disbelieved.

No one saw me. No one stood up for me. No one helped.

So I did what anyone would do if their reality was too much to bear.

I created a different one.

I told myself a story. That my dad loved me. That he left me signs. That my life meant something more than pain. And for one brief moment, I believed it.

And that story? That fantasy? It saved my life.

I didn’t go insane that night—I chose something else. I made a world where I wasn’t invisible. Where I was loved. Where I mattered.

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And yeah, I smoked weed and listened to Eminem. A lot. Because he got it. He put words to what I couldn’t say. He screamed the truth I had buried. His music felt like the only thing that knew how much I hurt.

People said I was crazy for that too. But they didn’t grow up like I did. They didn’t need it to stay alive.

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There’s a part of me that will probably always carry rage. Not because I’m bitter—but because I know now that I deserved better.

And I’ll spend the rest of my life honoring how badly I was treated.

Not to stay stuck in it.

But because telling the truth is how I finally become free.

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