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Does it even make a difference if I suddenly recognize that I was raised in an isolated home with some physical arguments between parents, psychological warfare, emotional and verbal abuse, a father who self harmed in front of us, and sometimes, but seldomly and it didn't really hurt, my mother hit me?
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Yes it makes a difference.
Quite often kids blame themselves for whatever problems are in their lives. When we realize that a background of abuse caused/explains these problems, we can come to learn that we ourselves are okay, we are not the source of the problems.
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A couple years ago, I cut myself off from the pain and started getting mostly A grades at school, and now I'd say I've caught up to an extent with the overachieving kids. But something is missing. I think I need to change again because I've hit a wall. Honestly I'm starting to regress. I think I'm scared of going higher because it contrasts so much from my background, which is of nothing.
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Fear of success is a known phenomenon. What would it say about you if you went higher?
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I'm not sure if Sam Oven's advice is good for me because I can't change since I'm actually no one.
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Sam might say that if you are no one you don't have a preconceived image to cling to.
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is this the corny and saccharine part where I say I have to understand myself before I can cut myself from the past? Maybe I don't know where I came from, so I can't truly cut myself off from it?
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He might say that dwelling on where you came from interferes with being free. Just as you said above:
I think I'm scared of going higher because it contrasts so much from my background
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Or maybe I just need to wake up and stop being so self absorbed? Even the act of posting here on PC is performative. I'm creating an identity, probably one that I worry too much about, and that identity is of a person who is chronically depressed.
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My guess is that he would want you to be free of a preconceived identity, including the depressed person identity.
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I'm already halfway addicted to people giving me pity attention because of sad things, but maybe this is because I don't give myself attention to the my sad self.
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This runs counter to what Sam was saying. Here I think there is recognition that the past matters and that a person cannot just will to be free of the past. The past, though, can be worked through, and integrated into the present, especially in therapy.
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So I think Sam Ovens would say that on one day to the next, you can shift yourself, and all those selves are real. So some days, I will be a person who wasn't abused at all, and that's real, and on other days, I can also recognize the problems in the past, and that's real too. There's no such thing as making it up. Does that sound weird?
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I don't think of it as weird, but I just wonder if it is possible to shift ourselves so readily away from abuse. For me, it took a lot of time, and is still taking time.
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Anyway, the only reason I'm writing this is that I can't get out of bed this a.m. Oh wait, I can. I'm a person who can get out of bed. I drank some Lipton, "America's favorite tea"  It is not a great tea.
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Good job getting out of bed!
I had Lipton ice tea with peach today. I never had that before. It was cold and I enjoyed it.