I am in my 30s and see a therapist for a while. Since my 20s it has become even more striking to me that my youth wasnt like others of 'healthier' families. It's not schizophrenia per se but the stigma around it, and the fact my mother was so sick but my father unable to bring a well needed balance. 

My mother was schizophrenic (as far as I know it started in her thirties so when i was born) and my father not, but I still think he was not stable enough to cope with the absence of my mother and her sickness and help me, truly and deeply as the only child they had. I think by now that my father has always been psychologically a bit unstable, even in a completely different extent than my mom.

Among not informing himself about the sickness of my mom he also did not really talk to me about my mother's suffering. But rather as I see it he chose to stay uninformed himself, and divorce rapidly. 

I grew up, ashamed, hiding, struggling to be myself, show up for myself, make friends. My parents did not really have friends either. 

Nowadays if i look back at my childhood and early adult years:

\-my mother has been sleeping a lot, from early on, medication having her very tired

\- I developed rapidly anxiety, tremors, unable to feel relax with others outside home

\- I could not really invite friends, I found my home to be messy and untidy to much extent. None of my parents could keep a nice home. I was the one as a child wanting to clean the kitchen and remove the mess, but I felt completely helpless. My father was not there to help my mom. I think she was the cleanest, until her sickness took over. My father even when living on his own always had it messy..

\-As a result I could not really relate to other children, and also in my adulthood in dating etc I always felt a difference "will they see that I can not keep up with cleaning my flat every week?" that I do not necessarily brush my teeth after every meal. That improved with age, of course, but I still see and feel the differences quite often with other people. And immediately there's a gap forming, because there's no way they can have experienced what I experienced. 

I show up to the world, clean, but if I am on my own even when much cleaner I struggle to keep the routine because I was never told to do so.

I dated people and felt miserable when they ran away from me but today realise they were not accepting in any case, and would have never accepted the way I grew up. We were too different.

This arised also in work, where I had success,because of ending up in environments where others had these healthy parents with good jobs and a good home. My mother could never work and my father barely landed short term jobs, and always complained to my mother and I, even after they divorced.

I did evolve over the last years, but these ideas are still within me. I wonder if I am the only one here, suffering from them?