My grandmother was my biggest bully growing up

I (23F) was raised by my grandparents due to my mom being a… less than great parent and my dad leaving when I was 2. Although I appreciate greatly that they treated me as their own child, there’s some behaviors that I could never quite get over from my grandmother specifically.

Some examples:

I’m 5’2 and my weight since middle school has always been 150-180 lbs. I understand this is overweight and I’ve currently been losing weight to fix this. My grandmother has made it well known throughout my whole life that I was fat. Specific memories include that I would say I wanted to wear skirts as a teenager and she would claim that everyone would stare at me and then compared me to our neighbor at the time who was over 300 lbs. She did things like that a lot and would say that I shouldn’t wear specific clothes because I had “big legs.” She would “help me” by putting me on absolutely bullshit diets that consisted of large portions of mainly meat-related foods covered in olive oil.

I would like to make note that my grandmother is morbidly obese and has been since before I was born. Her behavior towards my weight has never changed and she has actually been trying to make my current weight loss harder by ordering in/cooking foods she knows I’m not supposed to eat and saying that “I shouldn’t be counting calories at all.” And yes, she’s still calling me fat while doing this.

Growing up she was my biggest bully. I don’t think there is a single thing about my appearance she likes. Pale? “Why can’t you just tan.” Reddish brown hair? She bleached it blonde from 7-13 years old and I had to put my foot down to stop it. My weight? Y’know how that went. I need glasses? She would bully me and say that no guys would date me. I got them when I was 12 and I ended up not wearing them until I was 20 because I legally need them to drive.
She also denies doing any of this when I bring it up but will then repeat the same things about how I should bleach my hair and tan again. No one in my family is blond btw.

I now can’t stand swimming because when I was 13 I told her I liked a guy and she said that I needed to exercise and lose my glasses so he’d like me. So “exercise” meant swimming laps in the pool everyday until I was exhausted and couldn’t keep my head up. She fully believes the “girl isn’t hot till she takes glasses off and loses weight” movie trope and references it all the time as if it’s a real thing.

My family travels to other counties to work and while this sounds nice it ended up with me missing months of school throughout 1-9th grade because of traveling and eventually being put in online high school. During my teenage years I was horribly unsocialized and my grandmother would use this to say that I was antisocial and “didn’t like talking to people.” I was in fact in small communities of countries where I didn’t speak the language for most of the year. Since going to college I have fixed my social skills and I have a large network of friends but she still insists that I’m antisocial.

Speaking of my education: I graduated high school (something my mom didn’t do) and my grandmother complained that my degree had the word “satisfactory” on it. I took some pictures in a cap and gown and that was the only amount of celebration that came from it. This was followed by me getting into my first choice of college and her not being excited in the slightest. After 2 years I finished my prerequisites to get into nursing and I got in, and her response was (with no exaggeration) “Well it’s not that impressive, black people get in all the time.” Despite the fact that her daughter didn’t make it past high school, she acts like me achieving my academic goals isn’t that impressive.

Mental health talk is nonexistent in my house. She got a degree in the 1980s for psychology (for her job) and her education about the matter has not been updated since. Despite there being extremely obvious problems with my family members, no one will seek help because she has made it a social stigma to admit there’s any sort of problem. Because of how I was growing up (hard time learning in school, having to manually learn social cues, having very deep interests in specific things, liking things deemed “childish”) and my current behavior I think I may be on the autism spectrum. Emphasis on “THINK” because any mention of me having a slight mental quirk sets her off and she’ll use it as a crux to call me lazy, childish, and stupid.

She holds gifts above people’s heads as a weird manipulation tactic. She’ll buy things unprompted that she likes and if the other person doesn’t show as much interest she loses it. Not helped by the fact she doesn’t acknowledge what people actually like. A recent example was she had bought me 3 pairs of pants, with the guise that “Well if you don’t like them I can return them”. I tried them on but I had to tell her that 1 pair was already similar to a pair I already owned and 2 of them realistically weren’t going to be worn. She lost it and said that it didn’t matter because how I dressed normally was stupid and childish (usually jeans and black t shirt) and that people were gonna stare at me in public and think I’m weird for wearing jeans all year round. She has an odd fascination of clothes being seasonal and I said that I have shorts and leggings and she went in circles arguing about how white business casual pants are better than jeans and that jeans made me look fat. She ended up saying really horrible stuff like “Well you think like a teenager so you don’t know how to dress yourself.” And “Sometimes you leave the house in horrible outfits and I just don’t feel like telling you.”

She does this weird thing I’ve never seen anyone else do. If she thinks an outfit looks bad she’ll insist on taking a picture of you “just to show you what you look like.” And if you say no she gets REALLY offended. This has happened (no joke) in the last week and she called me childish because I said that I didn’t want her taking pictures of me if she was just gonna insult me. She literally will not take “no” as an answer.

On the note of “she doesn’t acknowledge what people actually like,” she makes a point of not interacting with anything I like at all and will usually straight up insult them. I am insanely jealous of people who can share their hobbies with their family because anytime I put on a movie/song I like she immediately calls it crap or tries to ignore it. It’s not like I have out there taste either. I like sci-fi and action movies. I like pop and dance music. It hurts a lot seeing the person who is technically “my mom” make a point to diss anytime I show interest in something.

She goes out of her way to be as embarrassing and rude in public as possible. She will see someone of color/any sort of LGBT person and loudly say something horribly insulting. And my family has to hope to god that the person didn’t hear. There have been several times where I’m genuinely surprised she didn’t get beat up because of it. When I was a teenager and I had to go shopping with her I would actively avoid walking with her because of it. And yes, she would be pissed off or offended if you pointed out how she was acting.

When I was 12 or 13 I was having a really rough time mentally and ended up writing a letter about how I hated living with my family and listing specific reasons why. My mom wanted me to give it to my principal for… some reason but I didn’t and she gave the note to my grandmother. TEN YEARS LATER she still had the note on her and she made me apologize for writing it and said “Well I guess I can get rid of this now.” I have no idea if she actually got rid of that note.

And you might be wondering “OP, why don’t you just move out?” Trust me, there is a reason. Any step I can take to become a functional member of society she pushes back on for some god forsaken reason. I want to see friends or my boyfriend? She makes as hard as possible to schedule. I’m going to college? She tells me she’s disappointed in me unless I get all As. Driving? She didn’t let me drive until I was 20 because “it’s not safe.” Job? Anytime I mention it she guilt trips me with how I’m “spoiled” anyway and that I can do that after college. Which of course means if anything goes wrong with my car or I need stuff for college, she holds it over my head that I can’t pay for it myself. This includes moving out too. I’m planning to move out with my boyfriend as soon as I leave college and get a nursing job but she insists that I have to be married first because “if you move in with someone it makes marriage pointless.” But in the same breath will say that you don’t know someone till you live with them. Have fun figuring that out. I can’t argue with her on this either or else she’ll have a meltdown.

Thank you for reading if you got this far. I appreciate having somewhere where I can get this off my chest. Have a nice day.