My mother, in hindsight, was not mentally sound. I think she knew it but didn’t know both equally at the same time as she often described herself as “backward”. I think she had a concept of mental illness but was too oblivious to herself and others close to her. She believed psychiatrists or anyone in the mental health field were evil or “did the Devil’s work”. If you are familiar to the movie Carrie, Carrie’s mother loosely describes my mother which I pointed out to my sister who I would say reasonably agreed (she definitely didn’t disagree). There were a lot of things that were evil, the list is long. My mother was/is easily described as someone semi-paranoid of people judging her. She was/is never wrong–never. She played a game of chess with her children, manipulating her children to “be on her side” against her husband (my father) and any act of normal childlike “coming of age” behaviour was an act of betrayal. We were instructed to not share of the ongoing of the household, warned that if we did “they” would take us away (circa my age 6 or 7). People who I came somewhat close to (as close as possible) at school were never permitted to my house, nor I theirs. It took me years to slowly wake up, finally talk with counsellors and psychiatrists who have very easily pegged that I was/am a victim of brainwashing. At 34, turning 35 this year, and only just recently waking up from my dream I fail to see much point in carrying forward in life. I try to decipher whether or not if I had been exposed to a healthy family environment if I’d be in the same mental state. I’ve concluded that things would have been incredibly different. I know that at some point growing up I entered into my dreamworld I just don’t know when. Yeah, I’m a survivor but there’s not a whole lot to mere surviving when the very world you know if not the world around you.