Crazy? 9-23-11

I realized today I might be crazy. Not the kind I always knew I am-in short, not the good kind. The bad kind. Voices in my head? Kind of. If imaginary 'friends'-such as book characters-that follow me around twenty-four seven count. I've always known they weren't real, and that it was all in my head and everything, but it...comforted me to know they were there. I've never really been close to anyone, I've always been alone.... Sure, I had my family. But I'm different than they are, not as...confident in myself. Before sixth grade, I didn't really have any friends following me. It was at night, before I went to sleep, that I would pretend I was in a book world. Harry Potter most of the time then. It was my way of destressing, of actually feeling wanted and appreciated. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were my best friends and we would go on adventures. After sixth grade, when my father left and I was forced to grow up and be an adult, it got worse. They wouldn't just be my friends before I went to sleep, they would follow me around at school, at home, pretty much anywhere. I would have conversations with them in my head, they knew everything about me... I relied on them for everything. That was about five years ago. I'm still doing stuff like that, though I have a wider range of characters that I 'talk' to, all of them book characters. I've thought about stopping, but the thought of being so alone scares me. They've served as versions of me, helping me reason out things I must've known the whole time, I just needed some...help...to come to those conclusions. Why don't/didn't I have a relationship like that with other people? I can't. I'm always afraid that they won't like me, that I'm not good enough. That's pretty much what I was taught as a child by my parents. And more recently, as a matter of fact. My father left and never really wanted anything to do with us. My grandfather decided when I was a baby that he didn't want to get to know me. My mother abandoned us about the same time my father left. She got a job, forced me to babysit my sisters all the time. When she had a boyfriend, she was with him all the time. In the past year, she practically lived in her boyfriend's apartment while I was forced to raise my two sisters. They hate me now, because I don't like my mother. They idolize her. I was the one that was always home with them, making dinner, trying to keep the house clean... Most of that has been going on since sixth grade. So I needed the characters to keep myself from going completely insane. They were always there for me, guaranteed, they always liked me... But I think that by trying to keep myself sane with these characters, I really drove myself insane. And I'm not sure how to stop...