Dear Parents

I know it's been hard since I left the house for college, I was the baby after all. But everything you did was unreasonable. Threatening to take me off the car insurance and shut off my phone because I didn't come home for a few weeks? You say you want me to be independent and be my own person but then when I try to do that you get angry and hateful...and say the meanest things. My grades slipped because I didn't want to get out of bed for two weeks, you had me convinced that my family didn't love me anymore. I finally made friends in college, which I thought I'd never do, and all you have to say is that you don't like them because they're different, when you go from a small town in Pennsylvania to college, it's gonna be different. You were always so focused on my grades that you never looked to see how much stress you were putting me under, and my anxiety got so bad for the longest time. I've thought about suicide more than I'd like to admit but the thing that keeps me going is that there's still people who love me. That boyfriend who is "just using" me, and "will never go anywhere in life" and "will never make me happy", he's talked me out of killing myself, he's been there for me in my darkest times when you weren't, he wants to graduate college early and get an apartment and sustain himself, he wants to get me out of this toxic situation I'm in. Telling me that I'll "never be the favorite child" and I "was never the favorite child" it's stuff like that that makes me so emotionless, my college friends and my boyfriend have pulled me out of my shell, the shell that maturing at the age of 13 built up, the shell that crippling social anxiety built up, the shell that depression that I was told wasn't real built up, the shell that hateful and shaming comments for every year of my life built up. So yeah, I wanna leave home someday, and yeah I'm not the little girl you raised anymore. Because I realized what was happening, I was being used like a toy, I was being controlled and manipulated and put down constantly to keep it that way. I still love you, I can't deny that as much as I wish I could, but you have to understand. I'm doing this for me now, I'm living my life for me now, no putting everyone else's feelings before my own, I'm done with that shit.