Leaving Your Family

It sounds almost criminal to say...but sometimes leaving your family is the healthiest and sanest thing to do.
Growing up, I was taught that my family was everything to me and that I was nothing without them. No one voluntarily leaves their biological group....it's unheard of and reserved for outcasts, addicts and the sick in the heads. I can't think of anyone who willfully dons the title of black sheep.
I was shoved into a corner. Mentally, I couldn't handle my incestuous father sneaking over to my apartment during his lunch hour. I couldn't get my mother in denial to support me in any way, shape or form. I couldn't confide in my siblings, aunts or uncles. Hell, I couldn't find words to explain the emotional torment of being my dad's sex slave for 20 years. I went crazy inside. I left in the middle of the night and turned myself in to a psych hospital 3 hours away. And I didn't tell anyone in my family where I was going.
I left them all.
No, it wasn't easy. I cried on that 3 hour journey over leaving my brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and my loving grandma. I simply could not live, deeply embedded within the family of high dysfunction whereby the patriarch raped and sodomized his own children, the mother covered it up and no one was able or willing to help me make the madness stop.
It hurt to leave but it hurt more to be my dad's constant victim.
Leaving your family Is an option. It is a Personal choice that no one can make for you.
I made the right choice for me. There was no way that I could have ever been able to achieve a degree of sanity living within the family that secrets built.
If you are thinking about it, know that it Can be done and it is sometimes the Healthiest option.
I'm living proof.