Author name: Esha

I vividly remember every night when my father would come home and my mother would already be in full-blown anger, convinced he was cheating when he wasn’t. The arguments would rise fast, sharp, and loud, and within minutes it always turned into her provoking and him reacting, and I would end up screaming, begging them

I am a daughter of a narcissistic mother with bipolar and delusional disorder, and a father who was emotionally absent long before he physically left when I was nine, then died when I was sixteen. I don’t even have to explain the level of people-pleasing that created in me, you can probably guess it. Still,

I grew up in a house where calm didn’t mean safety. When I think about it now, I can still picture myself sitting in a corner pretending everything was fine while my body was doing something completely different. I didn’t know what stress felt like back then. I only knew how to stay still, stay

I still remember the sound of my own screaming. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies(that still makes my heart drop). The kind that rips your throat until it burns like someone pressed hot metal against it. I was a child watching violence that no child should witness, standing between two adults who were

Most adults think they’re living as grown, rational, emotionally mature humans. But half the time we’re just running around in adult bodies with childhood coping styles that never got a software update. You can be twenty-five, thirty-five, fifty-five, it doesn’t matter. If the younger version of you had to become the peacemaker, the parentified child,