the only thing I've ever been good at was pleasing my parents

I kept my mom happy as a kid by letting her use me physically and emotionally. I was my dad's parent and partner, he confided everything in me, I did my best to be there for him too. would spend hours holding him while he sobbed into me about his childhood and alcoholism and how no one would ever love him. would tell him I loved him and hoped that would be enough to save him, same with my mom. I thought if I took on all of their burdens and traumas I could save them. they could get sober and they'd stop hurting each other, themselves, and me. the beatings would stop. our money would finally stop going towards drugs and alcohol and would start going towards family vacations, toys, clothes, and food. my dad and mom would start taking interest in me beyond my body and my ability to be a caretaker. they'd stop screaming at each other every day and stop beating eachother. we'd be a real functioning family like everyone I knew as a kid.

I tried for 24 years to save them. I put everything I had into it, every little piece of me was dedicated to being there for them. I disregarded school, I disregarded hobbies, learning art, learning to socialize, learning to learn, reading, teaching myself skills, forming a personality, exploring myself and who I am. I gave it all up for them. my mom died when I was 24 covered in her own piss after suffocating to death in her own body. she told me once she'd rather me watch her die and suffer at the sight of that than ever give up crack cocaine and cigarettes. everything I did for her amounted to her telling me that and her dying alone, afraid, and miserable in an ICU. the only thing I can remember about her now is her raping me and the smell of her piss covered corpse. and the hole inside my chest

i gave up on my dad and felt like an absolute total failure. just lost. the only thing I've ever been and ever had been was their savior. their caretaker. their lover. I'm not anything without that. I have no hobbies, no personality, no substance to me beyond what I was to them. I'm almost 30 now and I feel like an alien compared to every other human being around me.

I grieve who they took from me. they stole me. I never got to be anything because of them. I'm nothing. I sit in a dark room and just self soothe all day when I'm not working. I feel lost and useless in relationships where I'm not actively trying to save the other person. I don't trust anyone. can't ever let my guard down and I feel like every other heart beat in the room wants to hurt me, so I isolate almost constantly. I'm a shadow of the person I could have been and this is all I'll ever be I think. I just wanted to find a better way to love my family

I don't see a future for myself and my inabity to trust and connect to other people without pushing them away is killing me, literally killing me. I genuinely see no future for myself and I don't know what to do anymore. I'm in therapy. it's not fixing this. I'm putting in all the hard work, have all the self awareness, have a loving gf and some good friends for the first time in my life, and I'm horribly horribly horribly broken and miserable. I'll never be like other people and I might really die very young. I'm sorry I don't know what the point of this post was. I'm extremely sleep deprived and am just feeling a lot of bad things right now and I'm trying to stave off the urge to self harm so I wrote this