So, one of the reoccurring dreams themes I have always has to do with being uprooted from my childhood home. They used to be about me hiding in secret passageways in my bedroom closet. Often I was hiding or escaping from an attacker of some kind, poltergeist, a monster, serial killer etc. There is usually an element of my things being packed up and moved into places by others. I am trying to put things back where they are meant to be but something or someone keeps moving things out of place. The luggage my grandmother gave me for graduation is usually in the dreams too. I am packing up the match set with clothing that I often don’t recognize as my own. I search the closest for what I am wanting but can’t find what I am looking for. The family sometimes travels to places. Sometimes to the home of my parents old friends from our neighborhood. Or the lady who baby sat me in grade schools rural property. Sometimes to my mom’s family’s homes in Texas. More recently in these dreams we are being told we are being asked to leave and become homeless. Or we are moving back to my home town and I am being asked to give up my own life to do so. Sometimes My parents are going to their own place without me. Sometimes they are going with everyone in the family except me. I am more often than not the one that is asked to sacrifice myself for them and their needs or I am the one being abandoned by them. I am being told to do as I am told for the sake of the family. I am being told my goals, life, wants, dreams are less important than theirs. I am told the if I advocate for my own needs that I am being selfish, or dramatic. I woke from a dream like this today. In it I was so violently ill. In so much physical pain that the act of getting dressed was a challenge and I had to ask for help to do so. I crawled to the living room in an unfamiliar place. I told my mother I could not walk and was in intense pain. I was met with ridicule and mockery. She was going to drive my sister and I to school. My sister was given praise and choices to go to school or not but I was told to suck it up and go to school. My mom stopped at a store on the way to get her and my sister pastries for breakfast. I am in an annoyed tone told, "I suppose you want something too." I respond by asking for pain killers and the options to miss school to see a doctor. Again I am told I am being dramatic. She gives me tips on things to try and leaves me to fend for myself to find these things in the store while she takes my sister for breakfast and ditches me in a parking lot. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach. The pain all over my body from the dream still lingers in my limbs. I remember being treated like this when I was depressed, or actually sick as a kid. I remember when I was up for hours at 12 years old vomiting stomach acid. I was scolded and told that I was doing it on purpose and I was going to be in trouble because my mom had to stay up with me because I wouldn’t just knock it off and go to bed. A few weeks later I had an endoscopic procedure. They stuck a camera down my throat. At 12, I had a bleeding ulcer. That was what was causing the vomiting. I was told that if I wasn’t such a worrier, I would not have that kind of problem. Not that my home was toxic, that I had no support systems. Or that by this age I had tried to kill myself several times already. Or that I would have an eating disorder within the next year. That my body shaming from my family would making binge and purge several times a week. I was never enough for them. I was always being asked to do everything for them. I would try so hard to fit in and do what they wanted but ultimately had to fend for myself. I often wished for death or that mom and died instead of my dad. I never will be like them. I never have been like them. I will never fit in with them or belong. I am starting to think a lot about why it matters so much for me to have people like them love me. They aren’t really the best people. So why to I care so much about them accepting me? Why does it hurt so much to be the outcast?

Next Chapter: Dreams about Him