By Tara Overzat
Over the years, I have been lucky to have a lot of good friends from all over the world. However, I fell into a habit that I was only recently able to shake- getting close to toxic people.
Toxic people may be drug addicts or alcoholics; perverts; criminals; or just normal-seeming people who put you down at every turn, feeding off negative energy and kicking you when you’re down.
While good friends and associates tell you that you are mature, responsible, intelligent and cute (and are straight with you when you miss the mark), toxic people will tell you that you are immature, crazy, dumb and fat all of the time. Any praise you get from them is backhanded and intended to make the toxic person feel better about himself.
Growing up, these dual messages were all I got. When teachers, classmates, or other “outsiders” congratulated me on my accomplishments, all my mother could say was, “They don’t know what you’re like at home!” Read more »
By Tara Overzat
I never remember being spoke to as a child by either of my parents. My mother used me, from about the age of 5 on, as confidant and, surprisingly, advice giver. So dependent was she on my father, that when he mercifully left, she sincerely did not know how to do the simplest of things.
Not long after my father left, we went to visit my fraternal grandfather, who lived 3 miles away from us in our New York town, a town she had lived in well before I was born. Leaving his home, she got to the stop sign down the street and asked “Left or right?” Read more »
By Tara Overzat
I would discover years later that not only was the divorce decree between my parents never kept, it was extremely different from what I thought it would be. It would also prove to be completely unenforceable in the State of Florida that my father had cleverly moved to, since my mother never made a move to have it be made legal in that state.
That being said, what started out as short afternoon visits a couple of Sundays out of the month, where we returned to the relative safety of my mother’s care in the evenings, turned into weekend long odysseys where we weren’t quite sure what would happen.
My mother, knowing my father was a drunk, knowing he’d abused us Read more »
By Tara Overzat
I remember our house being clean and nice when my mother and father were still married. He fortunately wasn’t around much, and I remember always being afraid of him. In fact, there was Read more »
By Tara Overzat
I have to live with the fact that there are many questions I will never be able to answer. Even if my father sobered up, he has done so much damage to his brain over the course of 40 years of alcoholism that I will be unable to get Read more »
Alcoholism, Healing, Personal, Surviving | admin, 17 Jul 09 | 
Comments (1) 
