Redditors who "went out for cigarettes" and never came back, why did you leave? Where did you go? What is life like for you now? [Serious]

I guess I did this with my mother & stepfather..

My mother is an extreme, abusive narcissist that was more interested in drugs and the various men she would marry/bring home than her two children. When I was in high school, my brother had just graduated high school, and instead of going to college, he started working, and our mother started charging him rent. Citing the reason that because he wasn't going to college, he needed to pay to live in her house. She specifically said "as long as either of you are going to school, you don't have to pay rent."

Yeah, the next year.. when I was a Junior in high school, she forced me into getting a full-time job (I had summer jobs every year since I was 13 before this, but never during the school year so that I could focus on school). However, we also lived in a state where you had to be 18 to get your driver's license (there were some loop holes you could jump through to get it sooner, but that involved parental involvement which wasn't an option), so I didn't have mine. Despite forcing me to have the job, my mother would NEVER be willing to drop me off at or pick me up from work. This was a rural area, so catching public transportation wasn't an option. I made friends quickly at the job so that I could catch rides, but sometimes I ended up walking home the 7 miles in the dark. Then my mother started charging me rent to live in her house.

When I graduated high school, I had a small scholarship, so I started going to community college. She still charged me rent. The scholarship didn't cover all of school/books/bills, so I still worked my job. Having to pay rent and utilities while living in my mother's house as well forced me to work more jobs. At one point, I was working 3 jobs while going to school just to make enough money to live in my mother's house.

During this time, I put a small whiteboard on the refrigerator in the kitchen to write down things to keep my life organized. My mother and her then-husband thought it was cool to erase things like my grocery list or morning/weekend tasks that I had written to myself, and instead write snide comments to me.

I finally got fed up and just moved out of the house when they weren't home one day. They thought I was just going for another shift at work, but I took the bare minimum of what I could, and moved in with a friend.

They only noticed a few days later when I got a text asking "did you take down the whiteboard because you were mad?" They only noticed because I took the whiteboard with me.

I had a complicated relationship with my mother for years after that. I tried to work with her to work things out. At one point, she opened a bakery, but was too cheap to hire help, and talked me into helping her run the counter. I was still going to school and still working those 3 other jobs at that time. Sometimes I would try to decline because I knew I had to go to school and work my other jobs from 9am-11pm the day before she wanted me to be at her bakery at 7am the following morning. Any time I tried to decline, I would get a barrage of insults in my text messages, voicemails, facebook messages.. any way she could.. for days at a time.

The straw that broke the camel's back in this instance was when I asked her what was most important to her in life (as part of a bigger, more general conversation). She listed her stupid little dog, her shitty car, and her even shittier house. My brother and I didn't even rank. That's what made me realize what I meant to her, and I cut off all contact with her completely. That was about 6 years ago, and I don't even slightly regret it.

She's tried to establish contact a few times since. She sent messages through my brother, she set up fake facebook profiles to message me, called me from other people's phones, showed up at the public event I hosted to try to talk to me, showed up at my jobs, etc. I just kept blocking her when I could, told people who tried to help her get to me that I had no problem writing them off if they couldn't respect my wishes, had a police officer escort her from the event, managers escort her from work places. I was afraid she would try to crash my wedding - I had security in place to remove her before I would ever even notice.

Maybe it's not considered a happy ending to some, but for me, it is. Cutting that toxic person out of my life was the best decision I ever made. And before anyone mentions it, I'm already a frequent contributor to /r/raisedbynarcissists.

This story was actually just a very small amount of the hell she put me and my brother through, but it's the part that's relevant to this thread.

/r/AskReddit Thread