My parents have given me a lot. They've helped support me through college and encouraged me to follow my passion and have a good future.

However, they divorced about 15 years ago and it was bad.

Since the divorce I have never seen them in the same room together. When I graduated high school I would find one in the crowd and the other would disappear.

They would also continue to fight through me. When my grandmother on my mothers side passed away, my father sent flowers to the funeral and my mother complained to me that he had no right and was doing it to upset her.

And when I graduated college, it was during the 2008 election. My mom (Democrat) got me Obama's book Dreams from my Father. My father (Republican) saw it and immediately went to his bookshelf and gave me his copy of John McCain's autobiography. I'm fairly liberal and my dad takes it personally if I bring up anything political because he sees it as my mom brainwashing me or something.

The worst thing they did was act like the other was the worst person in the world and if I said something they didn't like, that wasn't me talking that was the bad person that got me every other week putting bad ideas in my head. So they'd yell at me as if they were yelling at them, telling me not to listen to the other one because blah blah blah.

It kinda just shut me down. My social life deteriorated, I couldn't make friends, I spent most of my high school life quietly avoiding eye contact, I was too embarrassed to ever talk to a girl I liked, I was too nervous to learn how to drive, I could barely form my own opinions. Even to this day, with as far as I've come, I still feel regressed in a lot of ways.