It’s been hard for me this past two years. I moved away from my home state 4 years ago with my boyfriend. We saved up our money and moved, I never had a good living situation so those 3 years that I was away was the best thing I could’ve done for myself. Things with my mom were never really good, she was in a emotionally abusive toxic relationship and I felt like it created a lot of conflict between her and I. I always felt like she put me second and it really felt like she definitely didn’t care about my mental health. And most importantly she never put herself first. Her boyfriend would say really mean and hurtful things about me and her when they would argue and he made sure that I would hear it. My mom and I were always staying with her friends or at my grandparents when things would get bad at home and it created a lot of anxiety and depression because I didn’t have a safe space to call home.

I decided that when I turned 19 I would leave home and create my own home. My boyfriend decided to move with me and the first two years were great, I really enjoyed living on my own. Then COVID happened we ended up moving to another state where my bfs dad lives and he offered to help us, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I was told to scrub the entire house, scolded for cleaning when I wasn’t told to, my bfs dad & step mom spoke bad about me behind my back and told my bf that he had to leave me, I just didn’t feel welcomed there. My bfs dad also tried to control everything that he did while we were there. We got fed up and decided to get help from a family member of mine, but as time went by, we started to have a lot of financial problems and my boyfriend suggested that we pack up and go back home, which was a hard pill for me to swallow.

So we did just that. But we moved back home with our own parents, which has so far been really hard on me. I feel like the support that I had gotten from my boyfriend is just not there anymore. We left as a team but I feel like we might have given up in the process of creating a life together. Moving back with my mom has been even harder. My mom never ended up leaving the guy who’s been horrible to her for years, he has a teenage daughter who is out of control, she would runaway from home for days, go to parties drink and was doing drugs, she would get in my mom face when they argued, she had a short fuse,she was always trying to fight others out in public. To keep it short most of their arguments became about her, and my mom begged him to get his daughter some help. He started using the fact that I came back home as a argument point when they would get into it. I shortly found out that him and his daughter were complaining about me coming back, they said hurtful things about me to my mom, like that they hated me and they didn’t want me to live there anymore while also being fake to my face. I spent a lot of nights crying and staying at my bfs house avoiding going home and one night something happened that I never knew would happen. My moms bf’s daughter beat my mom and he didn’t do anything to stop it, in fact he provoked it. He even tried to gaslight my mom about the attack and called my moms brother right away and told him that my mom started hitting his daughter first. My mom was the only one with a black eye and bruises all over her body. It was so hard to see her in that state, worst of all, it was all so hard on her body. She was under so much stress that she fainted and was rushed to the hospital, I stayed with her the whole day, we spoke to acs, nurses and doctors about what happened, she was advised to get a restraining order and file a report but she refused.

Now we’ve been living with my grandparents & two cousins in a two bed room apartment, I sleep on the floor on a mattress. I live out of a suitcase and most of my things are back in the other apartment, I run a small business, so I still have a lot of valuable things at home and can’t properly run it. I have two cats who don’t have space to move in because we are currently living in a little room shared by three people & a litter box in the room. I feel trapped and lonely. And worst of all my mom has been seeing him again, and wants to get back with him. After seeing apartments for a whole month and almost giving her my savings for a new apartment instead of using it for my own apartment she decides that she wants to move back in with him. I want to run away from here and never come back, I want to move far away. I don’t know, I just empty inside.