"You're hurting ME and MY family."

Said by my biological dad, after I told my therapist about a fight my family had that caused me to have a panic attack. 

I have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, anxiety, body dysmorphic disorder, and major depressive disorder.

Through years of family and individual therapy, my therapists and psychiatrists have concluded that my eating disorder, anxiety and depression were partly caused by my family dynamic. Fighting, lashing out, aggressiveness, hostility, hatred and anger filled my house throughout my childhood. Or this is how I perceived it.

In 2014 my dad lashed out at me, saying that I was hurting HIS, not OUR, family, by making up these stories about how painful it was for him to live through this. According to him, I've overdramatized my family's problems for attention, and I lie to my therapists and psychiatrists. I was making HIS family seem like monsters, and ME as the poor little victim.

I haven't felt part of the family since he said those things. I've been the outcast. The insane one. The crazy one. My parents love me, our family dynamic is better now, but because of that comment I've truly come to the realization that my parents' support through my recovery is all an illusion.

They are ashamed of me and wish I were different.

“You are a cool breeze on a calm sea.”  He wrote that on the last page of a paper I’d written for the class he taught.  There was an “A” in red ink, which pleased me not half as much as being compared to a summer’s day.  I was fifteen, just coming into focus.  I reminded him of himself, he said, and when he asked me to meet him at the football field on a Saturday afternoon I didn’t hesitate.  He drove me to his apartment, told me to take my clothes off in a way that made me uncomfortable.  But I liked having a secret.  

Later, much later, he told me he had a boyfriend, someone he loved.  He’d die if anything ever happened to him, if he were to find out what we did on Saturday afternoons.  So it stopped as abruptly as a needle being lifted from a record.  

What stuck with me wasn’t the rape, as my therapist insisted I call it, it was the power of words to seduce, to shatter.