Anonymous Wrote

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Lessons on friendship":

I think you sound like a selfish person with no real feelings for people.


Thank you for sharing "what you think"
I regret if I "sound" like that.
That is not my heart however.

I had a option if I was to keep alive , healthy and be restored from the madness that was my youth. I had to look real hard at these things. Did I do everything right? No of course not. I did however attempt with all that was within me to get off the triangle of dysfunction and the crazy making that it created.
Was I able to keep a strong independent relationship with some family and friends? No unfortunately not. Others however who also gained functional lifestyles I have intimate wonderful friendships. With the level of victims, martyrs and controlling offensive/abusive people that surrounded me I simply did have to become "selfish" in order to survive.
I cared and still do care for those I love, those I have had to walk away from. More than you or they may ever know. I had to fight for life, my own.
I have grieved and watched from a distance those who I have missed as they grew into adults and raised their families. They too perhaps see me this way. Yet they may never really know the whole story. For like any of us we only see from our own vantage. They may never know what it was like for me in the inner circle. The ways I was kept suppressed and laid low before those I walked away from. The freedoms gained in the absence of the adults that raised the kids that I am now a stranger too.
That legacy of appearing selfish, of appearing as if I don't care about others...
That is the price I paid to stay alive!
It is a great sorrow to me that the price they paid was hurt and misunderstanding.
I chose life and fought so hard for it , with such an intensity that they just have no idea.
Neither you nor they have any idea of how painful, how ripped of soul I was to walk away from nieces and nephews just so that I could stay alive. For being in that circle would of cost me my life at my own hand many times over. There were those around me at the time who caused me to be able to be so "selfish" as to walk away. We paid so very dearly in many ways to chose life. That just sucks to have to make those choices.
That is however what I chose. Life...my own.