if I had the option to start my life over from the very beginning, I would without hesitation. I don’t know what went wrong. I was looking on my dads Facebook at old pics of me as a kid. I looked so happy. My mum looked so happy. We would go out to the allotment and plant flowers and vegetables, go to the zoo. They told me that when I was 2 I ‘turned evil’. There’s pics of me on that holiday. I asked what I did, they said I had been climbing on the tables the whole time. I asked what else and they didn’t say much. My whole childhood I’ve been told I’m evil, wrong in the head. I vividly remember one time my mum told me she was going to put me up for adoption because she couldn’t deal with me anymore. When a social worker came to my house to see my family situation after they had kicked me out and I’d returned home, they told her they knew something was wrong with me since I was little, she asked why they never seeked help, and they said they ‘didn’t want people medelling’. I’ve since been moved into a supported accommodation, they blame me for ‘what I did to them’. Meaning, finally telling someone about everything while I was kicked out and living at my friends house for almost a week. My dad used to hit me so hard as a child that my mum had to drag him off of me a few times, now they both deny this, or say it’s fine because it was just ‘a tap on the bum’. I think they think I’ve forgotten, that I was too young to remember. I can’t remember how old I was, but I remember being pinned down on the floor, having my bum and legs smacked so hard they’d go numb by my 20stone dad, while he screamed at me, I remember my mum screaming at him to stop a few times, saying to remember he works with his hands and to not be so rough with me. After a while she stopped defending me, I can’t remember after how long or how old I was. I remember at some point it became my dad defending me from my mum. I remember being thrown onto the sofas off of the floor, crying, and being told to get a grip. I remember running into my bedroom and hearing his footsteps stomping after me while screaming at me. The only proper memories I really have of my childhood is the feeling of being so lonely, so scared, so frustrated, not understanding what was wrong with me. When I was in year 2, I tried to tape my stomach in with masking tape to make myself skinnier, and a teacher at lunch time asking me if I was okay repeatedly because I refused to eat the slice of pizza my mum had packed for me because I wanted to be skinny. I remember my mum falling out with my best friends mum, and manipulating me into saying that my best friend had done a similar thing to me, so I never spoke to her again after that. She was my only real friend at the time. When I went into secondary school I was obese after a few years of my parents letting me eat whatever I wanted because it would stop the ‘tantrums’, meaning 4 kinder bars after another, so I went from around 12 stone to about 8 and a half stone in about 2 or 3 months, by eating just a warburton thin pitta bread with a slice of chicken in it for dinner after school. I remember the amount of compliments I got from everyone for that. In the car the other day, we were talking about how on my first day of primary school I got hit by someone on a bicycle. They said they said twice to watch where I was going, and so I asked why didn’t they pull me back since they had seen I was about to walk into it, they said they didn’t want to deal with the tantrum I would’ve had, then my dad said he should’ve pushed me in front of it. I’m now facing getting kicked out of my supported accommodation, I’m 18, and they said today they ‘hope I have a warm tent’. I say to my friends that I love my parents, they think they’re lovely people who can be a bit mean sometimes, and I go along with it, but rarely, on days like today, something triggers all these memories and my whole life feels like a lie. I feel lost, I don’t know what to do. At some point in all of this as a young child, my mental health went severely downhill and got punished instead of helped and I think that has broken me in a way I’ll never be able to repair because I don’t even understand it myself. Subconsciously, this is always on my mind, I tried to self medicate in a way with drugs, which has now meant on top of not remembering most of my childhood, I also don’t remember from 16-18. This probably doesn’t make much sense, and I don’t know what the point of this was, but I just don’t know what to do.