Ok, I hope you can appreciate something rather far from bright and cheery, otherwise my posting will have been in vain. I remember the conversation that made me realize that I couldn't rely on my family for emotional support. First the backstory: In my junior year of high school the day before my birthday my first "real" girlfriend of approx. 2 1/2 years broke up with me. Following that I got seriously depressed. Rather than deal with it, my mom kicked me out of her house and I was forced to live with my dad. So being fucking sad, I was sleeping most of the day, crying the parts I was awake, and didn't really want shit to do with anything or anyone. That continued for about 3 months. 3 months of nobody talking to me for the most part, only being awake for the midnight hours on most days and filling my time with a sense of my world is shattered and the only person to whom I could open up to hating my guts. Now that I think I've described how I was mentally at the time, here's where the important moment comes in. One of the days I'm awake for normal human hours my dad comes into my room and says "Stop it, you're making me feel bad." I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the sentence that made me start to look at my interactions with my family differently. Looking back, I now know that both my parents are lightweight narcissists and I was in a toxic relationship for several years. My head was ALL the way fucked up, and I couldn't even tell you how the world around me really was from that perspective. But hindsight is 20/20.
Hopefully the story has come across not sounding like me whining about my past. I find it important because it's one of the moments that changed my perspective completely and made me start to take more responsibility for myself and dealing with my own problems. One of the things that makes you realize you're and individual, and unless you take care of your own shit, no one else will. That and never try to open up to my parents because they'll try to turn it around like their the injured party every fucking time. Now I am just bitching. Sorry man, probably isn't what you were looking for, but it's the first thing that came to mind when I read your post.