Hello folks. I gotta tell you families, sometimes, can make you feel lower than anything. I am now on my own, and have been for a few years, but my family can still make me feel like I am a piece of crap. I have done some growing here, the very hard way of reality hitting me in the face more than a few times. They say they have seen me grow and stuff, but they sure don’t know how to show it. When I am with them I feel like I am supposed to wait my turn and be a “good little boy” and just sit there like a lamp shade until they feel like I am worth their time to talk to. I know I have to regain their trust in me for a lot of crap I have done over the years, but you would thing that I would at least warrant some respect for being one of them. Sufficed to say there are trust issues that run both ways in this part of my life. I tell you I wonder about that sometimes with them. there are times when I just feel like telling most of them to go to hell for how I am treated. I feel like my opinions don’t mean a damn thing to them no matter what I say. I could be dead right and made to feel like I am somehow in the wrong for even speaking. I am trying to get better at expressing my feelings to them, but it doesn’t seem like the right time half the damn time, cause I only see them, for the most part, during family gatherings that I don’t want to be the downer for the whole thing. I have written to them in the past and I think I will, again, in the future to get some of these things straightened out, hopefully, but there are no guarantees that will happen or that they will even listen to what I have to say. I just wonder, sometimes, if I shouldn’t just cut all ties with my family and just leave them alone and vice versa. Families you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.