So, earlier today, I had it out with my mother. She made a rant at me a while ago regarding covid and the end of days, and since then, I wasn't able to bring myself to speak with her. I'd had an anxiety attack over it at work, one that was bad enough to cause me to throw up and get sent home, and now my coworkers think I've got covid.

I should clarify why her mentioning the end of the world threw me over the edge like that. When I was little, my mother would tell me horror stories about what the end times were going to be like, being as brutal about it as she could, going on about how it would both be an Orwellian dystopia complete with barcode tatoos and a zombie apocalypse, sometimes interchangeably, sometimes both at once. She would terrorize me with these stories, about what it would be like for us, being hunted down by whatever government came to power, about having to live in the wilderness and forage to survive. And then she weaponized that fear.

Any time I did or said something she didn't like, any time I made her upset, she would rub my face in it like a dog who peed on the floor, screaming at me like I'd just murdered someone, and then bring up the end of days and tell me that I need to shape up or I'm going to die. She used the fear of death to keep me submissive, and it was especially effective since she explained death to me long before any child would be ready for a concept like that, so yeah, there were plenty of nights when I cried myself to sleep because I didn't want to die. And that's only the verbal torment.

You see, my mother could easily be called abusive towards me. She would get violently angry, throw things at me, hit me, scream bloody murder at me, play the victim about everything, especially if we got into a fight and I dared try to defend myself, that's when she'd say things like "how dare you hit your mother" when she'd just been beating me senseless, and most often times, she would go for the head. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not really autistic, and it turned out I have some sort of brain damage instead. One way that she would torture me was by pinning me down and holding my wrists so that I would feel trapped, as though I were buried alive, and then she would scream at me and tell me that I wasn't going to be let up until I calmed down. Naturally, since what she was doing was causing me to go into a panic, and she was doing in to punish me for panicking, these episodes would go on until I was so exhausted that I couldn't cry anymore.

The only time she seemed loving to me that I can clearly remember was when she would talk about how I was destined to be a famous game designer, how I was going to make an award-winning game that got me rich so that I could take care of her. She would even encourage me to do things that were getting popular in mobile gaming, practices that I found disgusting for how manipulative and anti-player they were, things like loot boxes, pay to win, idle/skinner box games, and the like, even trying to get me to use my most cherished characters in them. Looking back, it seems more like I was some sort of retirement plan for her, given how she was trying to drive me towards the most profitable outcome, rather than actually telling the stories I wanted to tell.

What's ironic about that was our house. My mother is a hoarder, often buying things she didn't need and leaving them lying around, throwing her trash on the floor for us to pick up, bringing home pets that we didn't need and didn't need us, but they were so cute that she just HAD to adopt them, and then they'd pee and poop around the house and we were supposed to clean up after her and her pets, and if her stuff got ruined, it was our fault. If I ever happened to get along with an animal, it was suddenly mine and my responsibility, especially her dog who clearly loved her more than me anyway, something that she would frequently rub in my face, which always made me feel worthless. And through all this, while she's telling me to hurry up and become a famous game designer for her, she's making me pick up her trash, yelling at me to get off the computer and do more cleaning when I'm trying to learn to code and get better because I didn't know how to make something worth selling even if I wanted to.

Nothing I did was ever good enough for her, either. Like one time I remember so well, she took the girls to a horse show and told me to stay home and clean. Bear in mind our house was BAD with how much trash was in it. I cleaned up twenty, TWENTY, bags of trash, and had them ready to go to the dump when she got back. She got home, went off on me for not doing anything, accused me of playing on my computer the entire time, despite physical proof of what I'd done being right there in front of her. She screamed at me, hit me, told me I was just like my father (who, by the way, was never around and never had any influence on me at all because he moved out before I could even remember him), told me that I didn't care what would happen if someone came in and saw the place, screamed about how much she sacrificed for me (probably meant she made the mistake of having kids in hopes that they'd take care of her after retirement). I've never been able to forget about that day.

A few years ago, I was very mentally unwell because of all this. I was often afraid for my life while living with her, but at the same time, I wanted to die, and her torture and gaslighting me had led me to despise myself to the point where I didn't even want others to mourn for me. I had these periods where I would lash out at my friends, try to destroy every friendship I had so that no one would miss me when I was gone. I had seriously nearly reached that point one time, and were it not for my best friend, Teric, I would not be alive right now. In one of my videos, I mentioned he had saved me from "social suicide"; I didn't mention actual suicide because I was still living with my mother at the time, and I was afraid of how she would react if she ever came across my channel and heard me say something like that.

Since I moved out, I've had this recurring nightmare of going back to her just for a visit, but then I'd miss my flight or something, and would be unable to go home. As soon as she had me, the fighting would resume, and I'd wake up thinking I was still there, and it would be so surreal to find myself in my room, living with my pack. I still have frequent panic attacks at the thought of dying, too, especially when I'm going to bed. I'll lay there shaking and twitching, any movement I can make just to remind myself I'm still alive.

Last Christmas, I wanted to see a good friend of mine, and we'd already made plans, but then my mother decided she wanted me to spend the weekend with her, and wouldn't you know it, she picked the weekend my friend was coming, and refused to reschedule for anything. So I was with her and my sisters in a crappy motel room while she did nothing but criticize everything about my life, made me do things that she wanted to do and never once asked me what I'd like to do, and made no effort whatsoever to be pleasant to be around. If it was an honest attempt at reconnecting, it was the weakest one I'd ever seen, and I don't know what she was trying to accomplish, other than to waste my time and feel like she had some control over me again. She wouldn't even let me stay the last night in my own home, saying she'd drive me to work instead, so I didn't even get to see my friend off when he left.

And so, after days of her trying to get my attention, days of me not being able to answer her because I just couldn't take being reminded of my past with her by her anymore. I went off on her about everything here, as well as going off on her about saying that Walmart making people wear masks was a sign of the end times. At the end of it all, my sister texted me saying they were disowning me, even though my sister knew full well my mother is insane and had sided with me in the past, especially after my mother's rage had started being directed at my other, much younger sister, but nope, now I'm the bad guy for bringing up all the times my mother hurt and terrorized me, for the anxiety and paranoia I still have in me because of her, about the multiple times she nearly drove me to end my own life.

But then there was how my mom reacted herself. She didn't get hysterical, or angry, or beg me not to cut her off. She simply said she'll always love me, and that she hopes I have a good life, that she'll keep praying for me, even if she never hears from me again, and she'll stop bothering me, followed by a simple "good bye".

I know my mother, at least I knew what she was like when I lived with her. She was very good at playing the victim, very good at turning things around so that everyone else were the bullies and she was helpless and being treated unfairly. Heck, she even used that skill against me plenty of times, like if we got into an argument and I managed to beat her with facts that she couldn't refute, she would break down crying and say I was being evil to her, yes, "evil" was the word she used.

But this? This was different. She actually sounded like she was being mature, calmly letting go. It scared me, and it put a seed of doubt in my heart, made me think "What if she isn't lying? What if she really, honestly does want to fix things between us? What if she's really been trying to redeem herself, but she just doesn't know how, and now I'm kicking her when she's down?" Like I said, she's always been good at making others look like and even feel like the bad guy, even when all evidence was to the contrary, and so part of me is saying that this is just another one of those times, that she's trying to make me feel sorry and grovel to her, that I've been gaslit for so long that it's easy for her to make me unsure about anything, even after I've heard her say outright insane things like "Atlantis invented pigs because they wanted meat that tasted like humans and that's why pigs are unclean, it's in the Bible" when the Bible says pigs are unclean because they're scavengers with unhealthy eating habits, or that when Revelation says "the dead will rise" it literally means a zombie outbreak and not just people waking up to be judged. She can say crazy things like that, and yet, she can still make me believe it's my fault that our grandfather's furniture that she brought home and crammed into the house when we had no room for it got ruined when she put it in the room that the cats liked to poop in and was hard to reach because the rest of her stuff was in the way. She can say all that craziness, and yet SOMEHOW, still manages to make me doubt myself.

I don't know what's going to happen now. My pack says I'm free now and don't need to worry about her again, but I can't shake this fear that I've made a horrible mistake, that I should have tried to be good to her, even if she wasn't good to me. Part of me thinks it's because of my Christian upbringing, and a certain Commandment: honor thy father and thy mother. After all, how can I do that when my father is gone and may well be dead, and my mother is an insane child abuser who is impossible to please? It's like now that I've cut ties with her, it'll be impossible to ever get into her good graces, and thus, impossible to please God. The way I see it, even repentance wouldn't save me at this point, because that only works if you stop repeating the sin, but what if it's a sin that's continuous? What if it's impossible for me to stop dishonoring my mother now? Why is that even a requirement in the first place when it's possible for your parents to force you to break that rule? What even is honor, anyway? Every culture, heck, every individual seems to have their own idea of what honors them, so does that mean that getting into Heaven requires me to obey the subjective rules of a mortal sinner? I don't know, I just don't know. Part of me thinks that, assuming the Christian faith is true, given what my mother is like, I never had a chance of going to Heaven in the first place, and so nothing I do will matter anyway.

I don't know what to do now.