I think you were just doing what most abused children do, trying to survive and find happiness in spite of everything.

I've seen home videos from my childhood, and the ones that always stand out the most to me are ones from when I was an infant. My parents would place me on the floor with no toys, and then wait for me to try to grab onto something, cords, houseplants, furniture, etc, and then yell at me and threaten me and spank me over it. This would repeat endlessly, because I just kept trying to crawl and find something to play with, no matter how many times I was yelled at or spanked.

But then fast forward some months, and I'm in a highchair in the kitchen, with a dull look in my eyes, and silent. And my mother keeps handing me a spoon and then yanking it away, chanting, "Baby's gonna scream!" into the camera. For over 20 minutes she tried to get me to cry and scream, until she seemed to grow bored and disappointed and shut off the camera, because I was mostly unresponsive.

And I feel like that sums up most of my childhood. With different things, I had different breaking points. Different pieces of me died or went dormant at different times. And it wasn't until I was in my mid-teens that I had shut down almost completely.

Just because you tried to keep your spirit alive for as long as you could when you were a kid, doesn't mean that you were to blame for anything.