I'm very grateful for everything my parents did for me, they clothed me, fed me, sent me to school. I feel terribly guilty for writing this journal entry about my mother - she raised me on her own. My parents went through a really long drawn out divorce, which lasted 6 years ( between 9-15yrs of age for me). Calling their divorce acrimonious would be an understatement. It took a toll on both of them and I'm 100% sure that becoming a single parent so suddenly was the reason for my mothers' actions at the time. Right now, I have a really good relationship with my mother. I love her to the moon and back and share every detail of my life with her and try and do as much as I can for her. But I can't let go of the trauma of my childhood and I'm resorting to writing in this journal to help alleviate some of that pain. At 23, I'm considered a weird person to be around. I wear the same clothes everyday, my friends can never understand why I apologise for every little thing, I've never had a stable relationship, keep my emotions to myself and have terrible self esteem. Recently, I've been wondering if my childhood could be the reason for this. I was spanked regularly as a child, something which is very common in the community and social environment in which I was raised. Most of the time, I deserved it. I was a really bratty child. But, I think sometimes, it went too far. I would be spanked more if I cried - to toughen me up, I was sometimes asked to show her my arms and back - if it wasn't red enough, or if she couldn't see fingerprints, I would be spanked some more. Once, when I was scared after watching a movie, she heated up the kitchen clamps over the stove and threatened to burn me if I cried. I was often confused - she would tell me she loved me a lot, and in a few days, tell me that she wished she never had a daughter. She would drive miles every weekend just to take me to the library, then tell me that I was a good for nothing useless human and that I would amount to nothing because I was so much like my father. I remember a day when I came home to tell her that some girls at school had troubled me, and she laughed and told me I deserved it. I used to come back home from school at 5 and my mum would come back at 6. Every day, I would cry for that one hour - I never knew why I was upset but I cried. My mother stopped hurting me when I was 14. And we've built this great mother daughter relationship since then. But I still feel like I'm carrying a giant burden on my shoulders. Even my closest friends of 10 years know nothing about this. I feel like I don't deserve nice things in life, I feel like I only deserve pain ( however dumb and illogical as it sounds) and I'm always scared of little things. I really want to be able to embrace life, and to take risks and love deeply, now is the time to be young and free right? Is it possible that my childhood experiences have caused these problems that I'm facing in adulthood? What should I do to be able to lead a more normal, happy life?