Sharing Our Innermost Thoughts

Hi guys, an Indian girl here. I really needed a place to vent and pour my heart out in a forum that is non-judgemental.

I have never seen my parents happy with each other. Always bickering, fighting, and name-calling and there have been rampant instances of physical abuse on my mother by my dad over the past 30 years.

My mother comes from an extremely well-off family, is well-educated, an independent woman, and worked at a bank. My father hails from a not-that-well-to-do family, is well-educated, and worked in a senior position at a manufacturing firm. He is a narcissist, an egocentric individual who is slightly sexist too. The kind of person who blames other people for his failures and problems. It is taking me a lot of courage to speak up but my father has been so violent with my mother during their early years of marriage that one day he accidentally broke my mom’s nose. He has beaten her up very badly that it gave her bruises all over her back, hand, and legs. My mother has often left home in the middle of the night and we took shelter in public places: sometimes in a temple, sometimes at a bus stop and my father could be least bothered about it. He had filed a divorce case once and we started living separately. I was 7 years old back then. I am talking about early 1999. Indian society has always been condescending to single women and I am talking about a time when it was not very common in India for middle-class women to leave their husband’s homes and live on their own. We have faced backlash, and humiliation wherever we went. My mother has tried to shield me the best she could but society is always cruel.

When I see the people I have known living happier lives, living their dreams, I can’t help but get jealous and lament about the life I have never had. A traumatic childhood, unloving grandparents, being considered a burden, I have seen it all. I have been affected by the mental trauma inflicted by my father which has molded us for the worst. I have been in severe depression for the past several years, have no social life, no friends, never been in a relationship. My past demons are so dominant that it has affected me in ways I cannot imagine.

This is not a cry for help. I just want to get out of my past and live a better life.