“So much of our lives is just carving through the dark
To get so far
And the hardest part
Is who we are
It’s who we are”
-Hozier

So it’s been almost a year and a half now since I moved out of my house and into my school’s dormitory (+ weekends at my partner’s family home). I had a realization a few months ago during my birthday that I've been out of my family’s house in the way that I used to dream about. I see my father maybe once a week, live with other queer people, and never feel unsafe. Just awkward and occasionally irked, which is a welcome tradeoff. There’s still the desire to rent an apartment of my own and create a space that I can call mine, but that’s a separate area of progress than getting to live apart from my family in a physically and mentally safe environment. And I’ve been doing that latter thing for a year and a half now!

What I also realized a few months ago is that I used to have a lot of fantasies about how things would fall into place once I moved out. I used to imagine that I would develop a consistent sleep schedule, cook decently healthy meals every day, and be on top of household chores just by cutting out the whole house of terrors home life from the equation. Never were they thought of as particularly hopeful ideas, just the inevitable outcome of escaping my house. I now recognize that those ideas were definitely not inevitable nor feasible. And to a certain extent those things have become easier to do, but I still have an insane and constantly changing sleep schedule, I still cook maybe once a week (maybe some slack is warranted there on account of having school cafeterias), and I still struggle with the most baseline chores on a daily basis.

One of the things that had me the most frustrated was that my general disposition is nearly the same. I thought that without my family around to stress me out all the time that I would have nothing to feel mad or down about but…that’s not the case. My baseline is about the same. For the most part, the me that lived with my family is the same me that exists now. Maybe those expectations were part of why I had a hard time truly feeling like I was in the place I had always wanted to be.

I think a lot of the fantasies had to do with escaping not just my family but also my disabilities. A year and a half ago I had accepted my ADD and anxiety, but I didn’t have my symptoms sorted quite as well as I do now. There was a lot more that I thought maybe didn’t have to do with a disability that would never go away, which let me conclude that those actions were the fault of my family or my bad mental state. It let me imagine that if things were just right that those issues would go poof in the wind like a fart ripped in a monsoon, totally negligible. Unfortunately, no more than 20% of the things that were dragging down my day-to-day functioning were fixed by removing my family. That leaves 80% of those fantasies dead in the water (from the monsoon). The slow-dawning, scary truth is that moving out will not magically change your habits, especially if you’re someone who struggles to make big changes to your lifestyle already.

I’m not saying that I haven’t seen my life change for the better since moving out or that it isn’t worth hoping for. In fact, I’ve changed a lot, just not in the ways that I had expected. I am happier in the sense that I’m less angry, less self-destructive. Being separated from my family has made it possible for me to distance myself from their misogynistic, manipulative ass commentary to a degree that might not have been possible when I lived with them. I know there’s been progress partially because being around any of my family for more than a car ride sends me back into a worse headspace, meaning also that I moved forward by having hundreds of tiny choices and conversations away from them. I have more room to work on developing coping mechanisms and workarounds for my issues than I ever did before. And for some people these disturbances might make up more of their dysfunction. My household wasn’t particularly controlling in a direct, verbal way, so maybe my experience is also not the norm for people escaping their families. I don’t claim it to be typical in any way.

What I think is the point of this whole realization that I’ve had, and the point of turning it into a post, is that it returns power back to you to realize that you shouldn’t wait to become the person you want to be. Waiting for the day that you’re somewhere safe is necessary for some things, and perhaps the only option someone has when they’re in a bad situation, but there is no guarantee that it will transform you just to survive it. There is no certainty that you will find more energy wherever you escape to. Your habits might follow you until you actively change them, because while your coping mechanisms and disabilities are separate from you they are also very much part of you. Confusing stuff. If you can begin to work on yourself like you say you will when you’re free, you’ll be closer to being that person when you do make it out. That said, it’s hard to know what’s coming from your disabilities, your trauma, your material limitations, and your own choices while experiencing all of them. Even harder is knowing what will follow you out and what will fall away. I’m aware that lots of what I now know about my ADD has come from being able to rule out my family’s interference. You might also need to accept that you might never be rid of that time blindness or be able to do chores like others do, that your disabilities will never fully disappear. But if I could have been aware of the voice whispering that I should wait for a ‘someday’ and how it was wrong, I might have seen it as the escapism it was and pushed through some things sooner. I’m happy with who I am and where I’m at, and part of that comes from knowing that I’m finally willing to work with myself to make ‘someday’ today.

“it’s time for you to learn to dance in the rain rather then wait for the sun” -unknown
(I saw it on a fortune cookie lmao) (suggested by a friend in response to a first draft of this post) (also thanks for reading my first serious post!!)