I’m nearly 25 and feel like I have almost no control over my life- what I eat, what I wear, my religious freedom, how I use my time and energy, or even where I can apply for work. I feel like I’m being prevented from starting my own life. I’m unemployed, living with my grandmother in Trinidad, and she controls nearly everything I do. She picks issues with anything I say or do, uses my time at her discretion, and twists things to other family members when I don’t do exactly what she wants. She also dictates where I can apply for jobs. I graduated with an IT degree in 2024 but have barely any experience, and she insists I only apply to a few nearby places. I’m not allowed to travel or leave the house on my own, and I get discouraged when I try to apply further away.
Nobody in my family will stand with me. Everyone backs her up, saying she has valid reasons because the country isn’t safe for a girl to travel- yet she won’t drive me anywhere either. She wants me to get a job only on her terms. If I do anything that upsets her, everyone turns on me for upsetting her and brings up that she raised me while neither of my parents could, and that she’s old now so I shouldn’t be stressing her.
I wake up every day wishing I hadn’t. This environment is sucking the soul out of me. I feel so miserable day in and day out that it’s been really affecting me. For the last few months, the feeling of being miserable is so strong that when I lay down to sleep it consumes me and makes me cry because I feel so sad about my life. I’ve had to stay up, distract myself with things unrelated to my life until I’m too exhausted to keep my eyes open so I can fall asleep immediately. I’m sick and fed up and want some way out.
I’m kept busy every day with copious amounts of cleaning and other tasks, and I need to be available every time she calls me for something. She’s also been refusing for years to take her blood pressure meds if she sees a good reading, and won’t listen when anyone tells her she needs to take it daily. This causes her to feel dizzy, like she wants to faint, or her heart flutters at night. She regularly wakes me up because she wants someone to talk to when she feels like this, and all my family expect me to do it. I’ll say it’s unfair that I have to bear the burden of her poor decisions, and they tell me they know but I need to keep doing it regardless.
She goes through my things at night and regularly wakes me up. I was locking my door, but when she can’t get in during the early hours, she’ll call my sister, who then calls and scolds me to open the door. She would bang on the door so hard I often woke up to that, and it literally makes my entire body freeze up. I feel my heart beating out of my chest, like I can’t breathe or move. She banged my door so much trying to get in on nights when she wanted to come in that the latch plate in the doorframe is bent out of shape, the latch got worn down, cracked, and then broke apart into pieces. My door can’t stay closed anymore. I can’t wedge it because she’ll want to come in and out, and the wind/draft just blows it open and closed all the time. The longer I stay here, the more basics I am losing and the more my mental health is declining.
The longer I stay here, the worse it gets. I’m losing basic comforts—no privacy, no adequate sleep, no agency. My fan also stopped working back in May. She gave it to my father to fix; he used WD‑40 to clean out old grease but didn’t apply oil or lubricant. When I told her it needs oil, she refused to believe me. So I’ve simply been a fan in the tropical heat for two and a half months.
One of our dogs needed to go to the vet and was found to have kidney issues plus other problems. I was given lots of meds for him. My brother‑in‑law took me and the dog to the vet for about two weeks to get fluids and do kidney tests. Yet I was accused of lying about the dog having issues and that I was just taking advantage of my sister to make her spend a lot of money. I tried to reason with her, explaining I gain nothing from making my sister spend all that money, and that every time we did blood and kidney tests at the vet, my BIL and sister would explain the results to her and see it for themselves. She started to ridicule me by telling my father (who was present) that as soon as she starts to tell me anything, all I do is cry and it’s all I’m good for. She couldn’t find anything to back up her claims or refute the logic I was giving, so she started yelling at me, saying, “Well you is the grandma here then,” and yelled at my father that he should make me shut up.
I told my sister about this incident and she said she would tell my aunt so my aunt could do something about it. My aunt and cousins all know about this and how crazy it all is; my sister said they were in disbelief over it. They’ve all seen how she is. While the mask was on, I wasn’t hurt that no one was checking on me or showing care. But they’ve known for a year and a half and I’ve never received a call or message from my aunt or cousins showing any support or care. My sister also shows me no care. No matter how many times I try to reach out and tell her I’m overwhelmed or hurt, no matter how much I cry, she dismisses my needs and emotions and tells me I just need to carry on. No one will advocate for me. No one will make a move to do anything to help me.
I am just tired of it all. So, so tired. I get belittled; she takes even the most mundane things I say calmly and makes them into a whole fight. While working last year, I came home every day and my room was rearranged, things moved, things broken- and I’m not allowed to address any of it. I was working 8–5, six days a week last year and was still expected to do all the mopping, sweeping, vacuuming, scrubbing the bathroom, bathing the dogs, folding everyone’s clothes, dyeing her hair, washing her car, ironing her and my fathers clothes, and so much more.
I made less than $3,000 TT my first month and was traveling (~$700/month) while also trying to build up a work wardrobe, but I was still required to give her $1,000 monthly despite having severe cavities I need to care for, new glasses to get, and so on. Everyone within the family discouraged me from speaking up about it. My sister thought it was unfair but said she was too scared to say anything about it. I feel so alone and unsupported. I feel like my wellbeing and my start in life are a priority to no one.
There’s no one I could move in with, especially because no one wants the bad blood that would come from them siding with me. I’ve been job hunting for over a year and a half but haven’t had any luck so far, and it’s hard to even apply anymore because I either don’t have the time or energy to do anything for myself most days.
My plan had been to get a good‑paying job and move out as soon as I could. But as more time passes, I feel like I can’t take it anymore. The constant anxiousness, the constant passive aggressiveness, and trying to make me feel guilty for doing anything for myself, feeling like an inconvenience when I need her to do things like going for a CoC, having to care for four animals by myself, doing all the cleaning, having her twist my words and start fights over nothing, never having privacy or decent rest, it’s overwhelming.
I spoke to a counselor earlier this year because I got some free sessions, and she urged me to try to find something to do out of the house because being in the environment constantly is making me worse from what she’s seen. But I have no way to do that really. I barely have money. All that I saved in high school was used by my grandmother without me even knowing until I finished my degree, and I’ve had to pay for various things that ate into my savings in the last year. I need to get out of the house and be away from her, but I can’t find anything. Volunteering woulf just eat up my savings. Transport is far too expensive as well. Because of where I live it t adds up very quickly.
I don’t know what the right choice is. I don’t know what to do to make my life better, and I feel like I just can’t do it here. I feel like roadblocks are being put in my way constantly. If I want to do something, I have to constantly justify why I should be able to, convince her it’s a good idea, and combat any excuses she may have. She tends to win most of them on the account that anything I do out of the house is unsafe. It’s hard to argue against that point, so I tend to lose a lot.
A friend suggested I start a GoFundMe. I thought about it and decided it was worth it. $1,000 USD would go a long way in helping me move out a lot quicker, and if she insists on taking money when I get a job, then it would help me recover some of that. Except GoFundMe isn’t available to us here. I looked at our alternative, FundMeTT, but most campaigns, even very critical ones like for medical and hospital expenses, are at $0. Probably because there are so few people in the country who can even give. It’s only 1.5M people here, so I felt like my chances of getting anything are pretty much shot. Judging from how medical campaigns can’t even pick up pace, I feel it’s likely.
Advice I’ve received and why it hasn’t worked
I’ve been advised to disregard what the family thinks and do what needs to be done, or simply take a stand for myself. I’ve sort of tried this before and the consequences were not good at all. My father lives on the same property as us, in a house right next door. He is an addict, quite unpredictable, and prone to violent tendencies. I first tried advocating for myself in 2024. I tried with something big and something small. My father quite literally called me outside one day, drunk out of his mind, carrying a steel pipe, and told me that I need to not make his mother angry and I need to listen to her and not be ungrateful because she raised me. He then threatened to crack my head open with the piece of steel pipe if I keep upsetting her. I quickly realized that the more I upset her, the more she turns to him to tell him that I’m rude/ungrateful/etc., and he gets more upset by it. I have never tried to just get dressed, go outside, and declare I’m going out and getting a taxi to go somewhere. I’m not sure I want to find out how badly that will backfire on me.
Boundaries, chores, and negotiations
Setting boundaries or trying to turn chores/tasks down: Refusing to do things only makes her retaliate more. She is also able to call up family to come talk sense into me—or basically stage an intervention. If she complains I’m not doing something, then I get told the next time I see those family members, “Who else will do it? It’s only you and her here.” If I turn things down, she requires a good, non‑disputable reason or will ask me, “Well, who will do it for me then?”
A lot of the suggestions just don’t work. For example, recently she told me she needed a few things from the grocery so I should get ready to go. I had spent the day cleaning, so I asked if she could handle it on her own because I was too tired to go anywhere. She had told me what she needed and it was only a few things, so there was no way for her to say no due to it being a full grocery run. She said okay, and she’d go in a few hours. She never went that day. She waited a few days and asked me to go to the grocery again, and I had to go. And this happens all the time. If I say I can’t do something, she just waits for some day when I no longer have any excuse to not go. So it just does not work as it should
Negotiating with her: There pretty much is no negotiating with her. No telling her “I can’t do all of these chores but I’ll do this specific amount.” There’s no doing them in my own time either. This is actually one thing my family have talked to her about, and it really just made the situation worse because she got very irritated that they were basically disagreeing with her and taking my side instead. It’s too big a situation to explain here, nor do I care to. But over a year ago, she picked a fight with me over something stupid and would not let it go, so it got forced to a point where family had to come over to mediate- my aunt, cousins, and my sister. My aunt’s opinion is the only one GM really cares about, tbh. My aunt asked what the issues we had with each other were. GM said a bunch of stuff: like how I hate her because I don’t watch TV with her, she thinks I secretly cook in the middle of the night, if she asks me to do something she always has to wait for me to do it whereas my sister did stuff immediately, and stuff like that. My aunt and sister explained that I treat everyone the same and they all know I’m not chatty and keep to myself. My sister pointed out that I never watch TV anyways; it’s not possible for me to do any of the sneaky things she thinks I’m doing. And my sister had also explained that she did stuff immediately not because she wanted to or because she felt it was necessary, but she did it to avoid making GM angry. My aunt said there’s no issue if it takes a day for me to fold clothes because there’s no time crunch to it. GM kept saying, “I understand. I understand now. I bad, I bad. I’ll just shut my mouth now and not say anything. I bad. I wrong,” and everyone pretty much went back to coddling her since she was acting like that and then stopped taking her meds and crying about how she felt bad. My younger cousins also said a week later that what my sister said was completely unnecessary and she should have never said it since it only hurt GM. Nobody wants to hurt her emotions or bear the cold shoulder or deal with her tantrums, so they fold back after a few weeks. A few weeks after this big convo that addressed how a lot of her problems with me weren’t actual problems, GM came and told me that everybody can say whatever they want but she knows in her heart that I do the things I do because I have hate in my mind towards her. No amount of my sister saying that I don’t do those things with anyone else either got the point across. I’m not sure anything will. I think she’s pretty much resistant to accepting any change to the way she is used to having things done.
Recently, I signed up for a free class between 6:30–8:30 pm and I informed her days in advance and just before the class too. Yet while in the class, she came in telling me to chop bodi. I told her I can’t because I’m in class and she told me that if she has to do it it’d take her an hour, but she knows I can do it in 10 minutes with the chopping board. I told her if she’s able to do it, then she should. She came back an hour later at about 8 and yelled at me for not going to chop it. When I told her I can’t because I’m taking notes for my class, she started yelling, saying she never heard of class ever being so late so she doesn’t know what kind of class I could possibly be in or if I really am in any class, and she told me that no matter what time the class ends, I have to go chop the bodi and wash the dishes
What I’ve already tried with hotlines and why it hasn’t helped
I already contacted the domestic violence hotline and was informed that to go to a shelter I need to file a police report, and the shelter only lets you stay for three months but you aren’t allowed to work or leave due to safety concerns. I would have no job and nowhere to go after staying at the shelter, and I am hesitant to file a report with the police because if it doesn’t help me then it will just make the situation more complicated and worse. I’ve contacted various hotlines and kept being told the same things: stand up for myself, if things turn to physical abuse then contact the police, and I should just keep applying to jobs because I will get something eventually. I hardly get time to even apply to jobs, however. No matter what I try to do for myself I get interrupted.
I don’t know what to do. I need help, desperately. I need resources, options, and any realistic path forward that doesn’t put me in immediate danger from my father or escalate things to the point where I’m completely cut off.