you are not property

There comes a point where you stop trying to explain yourself and start drawing lines. Some families treat their children like assets that never mature. Like things that grow legs and move out but somehow still belong to them. The house changes. The address changes. The control script stays the same. You build your own life. Pay your own rent. Feed yourself. Fail on your own terms. Get back up alone. And still they talk to you like you are five. Still they talk about you like you are theirs. This is not confusion. This is ownership instinct. It shows up in small sentences. We just worry about you. We only want what is best. You do not know what you are doing. What they mean is simpler. We want access. We want leverage. We want to stay in charge. Emma Jane McKinnon Lee left home around twenty. Worked. Struggled. Sometimes slept rough. Built her life anyway. The independence scared the people who expected her to stay controlled by the mental illness of her parents. So the story shifted. Every win became a problem. Every step forward became proof she needed guidance. Every boundary became an attack on them. Control loves to dress up as care. It still smells like control. There is a moment when you stop asking why they cannot understand and start seeing that understanding was never the goal. The goal was compliance. The goal was access to your decisions. The goal was to stay central in a life that moved on without them. That is when contact breaks. You do not get to decide whether I stay in your life. You do not get to monitor who I talk to. You do not get to track me. You do not get to frame my independence as illness or betrayal. How do you not see the harm you cause. The constant checking over your shoulder. The fear that someone is watching. The sense that every conversation could be used against you. The exhaustion of having to defend your adulthood to people who benefit from pretending it does not exist. This damage does not disappear when you turn eighteen. It follows. It sticks. It costs years. When someone cuts contact with family, people love to ask what happened. They want a story with villains and heroes. Most of the time the story is quieter. I stopped letting myself be owned. That is all. If parents and relatives cannot accept that their children grow into autonomous people, that problem belongs to them. The work belongs to them. The discomfort belongs to them. No one owes their life to anyone who treats them like an object that wandered off. You are not property. You are not a project. You are not a role assigned at birth. You are a person who chose herself. And anyone who cannot live with that gets to sit with their own failure.