In my family, the one who tells the truth always gets called crazy.
It doesn’t matter how calmly you say it, how many years you’ve kept quiet, how many olive branches you’ve offered. The moment you name what really happened—the screaming, the manipulation, the narcissism, the drinking, the cheating, the “pretend everything’s fine” on holidays while someone silently bleeds out emotionally in the corner—you become the problem. The unstable one. The liar. The drama queen. The mentally ill one. The overreactor. The ungrateful daughter. The “crazy one.”
I used to flinch at that label. Now? I wear it like a name tag at a family reunion I stopped attending.
In families like mine, love is conditional. You get affection when you’re funny. You get praise when you’re productive. You get attention when you’re broken just enough to be pitied but not enough to be inconvenient. You get safety when you say nothing.
The second you stop playing your part in the family play, they write you out of the script. Or worse—rewrite it so you were never sane to begin with.
I stopped drinking. I started healing. I started talking. And suddenly, I was “too much,” “too emotional,” “rewriting history,” and “burning bridges.”
Let’s be real: I didn’t burn bridges. I built them. I begged people to walk across. Then they lit the damn things on fire and called it my fault.
I’ve realized that when someone in a dysfunctional family says you’re “crazy,” what they really mean is: I can’t control you anymore.
I stopped letting people gaslight me. I stopped agreeing to the family myth that our childhood was “fine.” I started calling out the subtle digs, the guilt trips, the boundary violations. I started saying no.
And in return? Silence. Smears. A weird funeral vibe from people who still breathe.
Families like mine don’t know what to do with women who wake up. They’d rather call you unstable than face the damage they did. Or worse…the damage they normalized.
Healing looks absolutely unhinged to people who’ve never done it.
You start crying at things you used to numb out to. You start getting mad about stuff you used to laugh off. You start telling the truth with a calm voice and shaking hands, and suddenly you’re the volatile one.
Let me be clear: I am not unstable because I feel things deeply. I am not dangerous because I refuse to pretend. I am not broken because I won’t keep secrets that never protected me anyway.
I’m healing. Which, in this family? Might as well be witchcraft.
Do I miss them? Of course. I miss versions of them. I miss the good days. I miss the made-up stories where we were normal.
But I don’t miss being someone else to earn love. I don’t miss abandoning myself to keep the peace. I don’t miss the gaslighting, the lies, or the way my body used to shut down just to survive a fucking dinner.
I didn’t choose estrangement to be dramatic. I chose it to stay alive.