Becoming me

Eliana’s POV It was a cold morning in August — just another normal day in a dysfunctional home. The air carried familiar sounds: shouting, objects smashing against walls, doors slamming, and foul, uncouth words flying back and forth like weapons. I was the second of three children… or so I thought. It turned out the girl I had always called my sister wasn’t my biological sister. She was my cousin. That discovery made me wonder who else in my life wasn’t real. My father tried everything in his power to make me stop calling her my sister. But the word had already rooted itself in my heart. I refused to let it go. I didn’t hate it. If anything, I needed it. Let me tell you a little about my family. My father is an engineer. My mother is a pharmacist. They were never married — just cohabiting, existing together without anything truly solid holding them in place. I have a baby brother who is four years younger than me, and my supposed older sister. My mother was peaceful. Quiet. Soft. My father… was chaos. He could turn the smallest issue into a battlefield. Arguments were his language, and physical violence was his punctuation. At first, I used to scream and fight for my mother, trying to protect her the only way I knew how. But it always backfired. The insults would shift toward me, sharp and cutting. Sometimes it escalated into beatings. Watching them destroy each other broke something inside me. It was traumatizing… heartbreaking. Slowly, I slipped into depression. Anxiety wrapped around me like a shadow that refused to leave. Every sudden sound startled me. Every raised voice sent my heart racing. Some nights, I cried myself to sleep, asking questions that never had answers. Why was the world so unfair to me? Why couldn’t I wake up in a peaceful home… a normal home? But enough about them. Let me tell you about me. I have always been fascinated by the human mind — how it works, how people think, what drives them to behave the way they do. Understanding people felt like trying to solve a puzzle I desperately wanted to complete. I also loved music. Singing made me feel free, like my lungs finally remembered how to breathe. And reading… reading was my escape from reality. Books gave me homes when mine didn’t feel like one. I dreamed of building a personal library one day, shelves filled with stories and knowledge that could never hurt me. For a while, I wanted to pursue music seriously. But my father shut that dream down quickly, trying to force his own ambitions onto me. I resisted. I told myself I wanted to become a doctor. Later, I settled for psychology. As I grew older, I realized those dreams weren’t truly mine… but I held onto them because I needed something to believe in. Whenever life felt suffocating, whenever numbness swallowed my emotions, I would write in my notebook. Over and over again, I wrote about owning a coffee shop, living quietly in the countryside, traveling the world, and making enough money to finally feel safe. And sometimes… I would write until my tears blurred the ink. Then I would cry myself to sleep.