Growing Up in Chaos: Depression and Family Fights

I can’t remember a time when things ever felt calm.

My childhood was a storm—loud voices, slammed doors, nights spent lying awake listening to my parents fight, wondering if love was supposed to sound like that. It wasn’t just arguments. It was tension so thick you could feel it in the air, the kind that made you shrink yourself, made you careful about what you said, made you wish you could be invisible.

And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, I grew up—carrying a weight I never asked for, longing for something I couldn’t name, searching for a love I was never sure I deserved.

The Unstable Home That Built Me

I grew up walking on eggshells.

Some kids grow up in houses filled with warmth, laughter, and stability. I grew up in a house filled with tension so thick it felt like another presence in the room. A place where love and pain blurred together, where yelling was a second language, and where I learned that silence could be just as dangerous as words.

There was never a sense of peace—only the feeling that everything could explode at any moment. And in a way, it always did.

When you grow up in an unstable home, you develop survival skills before you even know what survival is. You learn to read body language like a book. You learn the warning signs—the shift in tone, the way a door is closed just a little too hard, the way a glance can carry an entire storm behind it.

You learn to shrink yourself, to blend in with the background, to become as small as possible in hopes that today won’t be the day that things spiral.

I became an expert in disappearing. In being present but unnoticed. In knowing exactly when to leave the room before the fighting started, before the slamming doors, before the cold silence that followed.

People think that once you leave an unstable home, the damage stays behind. But it doesn’t. It follows you. It lives inside you.

It’s in the way you flinch at raised voices, even if they aren’t angry.

It’s in the way you second-guess yourself, constantly wondering if you’re too much or not enough.

It’s in the way you struggle to believe that love can be safe, that it can be gentle, that it doesn’t always have to be earned.

For years, I carried that home inside me. I let it shape the way I saw myself, the way I trusted (or didn’t trust) others, the way I believed love worked. Because when you grow up in instability, love isn’t something you expect—it’s something you chase, something you fight for, something you hope won’t hurt too much when it slips through your fingers.

It took me a long time to realize that I didn’t have to keep carrying that home with me. That I could build something different. That I could choose peace, even if I had never known what it felt like before.

But breaking the cycle isn’t easy. It means unlearning things that were wired into you before you even had the words to describe them. It means recognizing that the way you were raised doesn’t have to be the way you live. It means giving yourself the love and stability that no one ever gave you.

I still struggle. I still have moments where I feel like I’m that kid again, waiting for the next storm to hit. But now, I remind myself: I am not my past. I am not my trauma. I am not the instability I grew up in.

I am something new. Something strong. Something that refuses to let the pain of the past define the future.

Because I may have been built by that unstable home, but I refuse to let it break me.

Depression: The Shadow That Never Left

I don’t know exactly when my depression started, but I know it’s been with me for as long as I can remember. Maybe it was always there, a quiet ache in the background, or maybe it grew out of all the nights I spent crying into my pillow, wishing for a different life. Depression as a kid looks different. It looks like not wanting to go home after school. It looks like staring out the window and wondering if you’d be happier anywhere else. It looks like feeling empty in a room full of people, like carrying a sadness that no one can see, like never quite believing you’re enough.

And then, somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that love—the right love—could fix it.

Searching for Love Like It Was the Answer

I spent years believing that if I could just find someone who really loved me, everything else would make sense.

I craved the kind of love that felt safe, the kind that didn’t leave, the kind that made up for all the times I felt invisible. I wanted to be chosen, to be wanted, to be enough for someone.

But when you grow up in dysfunction, it messes with the way you see love.

I chased after people who didn’t see me. I let myself believe that any attention was good attention. I confused toxicity for passion, silence for comfort, inconsistency for excitement. I ignored red flags because deep down, I thought that love was supposed to be hard, that maybe I just needed to try harder, be better, prove that I was worth staying for.

And every time it didn’t work out, I blamed myself.

Learning to Love Myself First

It took me years to understand that love—real love—doesn’t look like what I grew up with. It doesn’t leave you questioning your worth. It doesn’t make you feel small. It doesn’t hurt you just to apologize later.

And most importantly, love isn’t supposed to fix you.

I had to learn, painfully and slowly, that no relationship would ever heal the wounds my childhood left behind. That wasn’t someone else’s job—it was mine.

Healing meant unlearning the lies I told myself. It meant realizing that I was enough, even if no one had ever made me feel that way before. It meant letting go of the idea that I needed to be “saved” and instead learning how to stand on my own.

If You Grew Up Like This…

I see you. I know how heavy it is to carry a childhood like ours. I know how easy it is to believe that you’re broken beyond repair. But you’re not.

You deserve love—the right love. And most importantly, you deserve to know that you were always enough, even when the world made you feel otherwise.