I’ve sat at my computer several times this past week, planning to write what was on my mind. Yet every time I tried to write, I couldn’t do it. The emotions were too overwhelming and I ended up in tears.

I couldn’t really understand why. I’ve written quite a bit about emotionally laden things, and I’ve always been able to write through the pain. But this was different. This pain left me silenced in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

It’s my fault, though, at least in part. I have been holding on to something I should have let go of years ago. I knew it wasn’t good for me. I knew that it would only continue to cause me pain. But I held on, because I didn’t want to lose that piece of something that was part of my identity: my family.

I could never quite understand it, how anyone could stand back and allow someone to be hurt over and over again. I wanted to believe that no one else knew, I wanted to believe that we were so good at hiding the pain that no one else could see it. It was much easier to believe that than to believe that other people knew and chose to do nothing. Those beliefs allowed me to hold on to the very tiny bit of self-worth I had left.

That is, until that false reality was ripped away from me, and I found out people really did know what was going on. Some people knew for years. YEARS. Yet no one ever said a thing. No one ever helped. Didn’t want to cross any lines. It wasn’t my place.

That pain is inexplicable. At that point I believed I was worthless. I wasn’t worth being helped. I wasn’t worth being protected. I wasn’t worth being saved. If I was, someone would have said something, someone would have put an end to my pain. All I wanted to do was matter enough to someone, I wanted to be loved and cared for by someone. Instead I was left with nothing but a facade of a family.

I still played along. I still kept up my end of the facade, hoping that one day  they would change, hoping that one day I would be worthy enough to be saved. But time has only shown me how much I still don’t matter. Time has only shown me how much I don’t belong.

There must be something wrong with me. There’s no other explanation. How could someone stand there and ask me to protect their child from my mother, when they knew full well I could not even protect myself? You know how that made me feel? Worthless. It was okay as long as I was the one being abused, as long my mother didn’t hurt anyone that mattered. They were the ones that needed protection, protection I obviously wasn’t worthy of.

But I still held on to hope. Maybe one day I will be worth saving. Maybe one day I will be a part of the family. That never happened. Even in my darkest times, when I was in and out of hospitals, I had no one to turn to. The social workers begged me to ask family for help; there was little the system could do to help me. When I finally got the strength to give them the okay, it was only met with rejection — the same rejection I had experienced for years.

There is only so much a person can take. I think I reached that point a long time ago. Yet I still held on. I still hoped that one day, things would change and I would have some semblance of a family bond. I kept forgiving. I kept making excuses for things I’m not really sure could ever be excused. All because I wanted to experience this sense of belonging, this notion of worth, this concept of being part of a family.

I realized this past week that I can no longer hold on to that hope. It is wearing away at me. I want something that has never been, and never will be. It hurts my heart to be ignored. It hurts my heart to know that friends and neighbors will always be more important, more worthy than me. I can’t change that. I can’t make myself part of a family that has continuously shown they do not want me.

And that’s hard to acknowledge, because I’ve wanted for so long to just be part of my own family.  Instead, I am the reject, and nothing I can do will ever change that.

I made a choice this weekend. I could have reached out. I could have made another desperate attempt to be included. But I feared that the pain of another rejection would be much harder than just not knowing. I made the choice not to put myself through that any more. I made the choice to put myself first, instead of my ‘family’.

It didn’t take the pain away. My heart is still broken. I still cry. I still feel lost. But I am no longer lonely.  

There is nothing wrong with me. I am only the reject of my biology, of the people who carry my last name. I have been accepted, cared for, and protected by strangers who became friends, and who have become more of a family than any biological family has ever been.

My only mistake has been caring too much and too deeply for something that was never there — a facade of a family.