my story... really long

VioletTears

Well-known member
I wrote this up a couple of months ago to give to my therapist, since I tend to get tongue tied and not know what I'm suppose to say. It's so long that I don't know that anyone will read it, but since this section is here, I thought I would post it just in case...



As a little girl I always sensed that I was somehow different. When I was three I was diagnosed with selective mutism. Years later I read a report describing how I sat in preschool, backed silently against the wall, timidly watching the other children play. I felt torn between the fear of speaking and the fear of upsetting people if I didn't. My parents, at my therapist's request, began offering me gummy bears to reward me for answering people's questions. Gradually, I allowed myself to take the risk. Still, my speaking was forced and the fear remained, and even up through the 5th grade my parents had to continue to lecture me before going out that I needed to answer people if they talked to me. It was always hard for me. I guess it still is. I have learned to engage in basic small talk, but I still sense that I'm not like other people, and I still fear that the more people know of me the more I will open myself to their judgment and ridicule.

While in the early phases of my mutism, when I was rather alone, a stray cat showed up outside my window. It wasn't long before he joined our family, and in doing so, became my closest friend. Although I found it nearly impossible to connect with people, I soon found that I connected easily to animals. Muff, as I named him after a cat in my storybook, quickly filled a gaping void for me. He became the object of my affection as well as my intense obsession.

When I was five, my brother (then fourteen) was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His fear ruled our home. He tried to shove my cat in the microwave several times, laughing hysterically at how Muff flung his legs around and cried and how I begged him to stop. He told me how cats blow up in the microwave, how their guts go everywhere. He also told me of how his friend who lived down the street was satanic and sacrificed cats who he found wandering outside. He talked to me of other things, too. Over and over again he dug into my head that I was a sinner. He always said the word "sinner" with an evil sneer. If I argued and said I wasn't he would say I was going against the word of God, because the Bible says we are ALL "sinners." He spoke to me of Satanism, of taking angel dust, of how evil my parents were, of how the CIA was out to get him. There were constant mind games. I never knew what to believe. Once he came home and stormed into the living room while I was in there alone. I must have been about seven by then. He began screaming about a therapist who he hated and throwing furniture and things around the room. He threw one chair right through the window and shattered the glass. I think that even then I understood, in a way, that it wasn’t his fault… There were times, like when he ended up in the hospital after injecting Drano into his veins, or when he called me to tell me that he was homeless living on the streets of New York, when I even felt sorry for him. But that didn’t change the fact that I was often scared of him. To this day he says that I'm the one person who he always trusted. Part of me is proud of that, but part of me also knows that I earned his trust primarily by being timid and passive.

Meanwhile, my other brother, who was three years older than me, would make fun of me constantly. He would tell me how stupid I was, take my things and provoke me in any way he could. When I became angry and tried to argue back my mom would step in and send me to my room. Sometimes he would be sent, too, but mostly me. She would never hear my side of the story. I would throw myself on my bed and cry in frustration. Sometimes I would throw my toys all onto the floor. Once I tore the wallpaper off the wall. When she told me I could come out I refused. I was too angry and humiliated. Years later, when we were adults, my brother admitted that he tried getting me in trouble on purpose and how easy it was to make me suffer for his crimes. I guess sibling rivalry isn't so unusual, but I never understood why my mom always sided with my brother after he treated me that way... Perhaps because he was the only child in the family who hadn't yet required therapy and he was an easy source of pride. To surrender the image of him as the perfect child would have meant admitting complete failure as a parent. For me, though, it may have been what first triggered my fear of rejection. I was a victim, small and powerless, and nobody was there to lift me up.

Nobody except for my sister... I totally adored my sister and I knew that she adored me. Even with her mohawk and shredded clothing she was glamorous, pretty, artistic, and always sweet to me. We would sit at the table and do art together, or go through catalogues of formal dresses and compare favorites on each page. Sometimes she would babysit me and let me stay up late, then sneak me off to bed hidden in a bundle of blankets when my parents came home sooner than expected. Ten years older than me, she was my idol. She was, however, out of control, doing drugs, sleeping around, causing trouble out on the streets and with the police… And she and my parents clashed. I still remember going into her room with my mom and seeing the words, “**** you, Mom and Dad” sprayed across the walls. I think I must have been just old enough to read and to know what the words "**** you" meant. She threatened to kill herself and to kill my mom. She could be so nice to me in one breath and so mean to my parents in the next. It was hard to know who to side with.

I know none of it was easy on my parents... They slept with a police scanner by the bed, they were meeting with people daily concerning my brother, their two oldest children hated them, and their youngest was selectively mute. My mom would wake in the middle of the night shaking. For awhile they turned my oldest brother and sister over to foster care because they were worried about what everything was doing to my other brother and I, who were so much younger. My dad, a geeky perfectionist, tried making up for the family's shortfalls by trying to impress everyone with his intelligence, and all I could see in it was that he thought he was better than all of us. As much as I wanted to love him, even as a young girl, I remember hating him. Yet, in some ways, I was like him. I was a perfectionist, too. I would draw pretty pictures and wear pretty dresses and avoid upsetting anyone in any way... And whenever my feelings weren't pretty, I hid them, too. The older I got, the better I became at it. When I was five and I broke my arm I wouldn't even admit it hurt. My parents took me to the hospital only because I was so stiff and wouldn't move it.

As I entered into elementary school I struggled with my self esteem. I never felt as good as the other kids. I always sensed that I was different. In first grade I made my first close friend, who remained my only friend for the next two years. She suffered from mental retardation. Like me, she was different... To her, there was nothing wrong with me. In the end we were separated because my teacher wanted to push me into making new friends. I would wait for other girls to seek out my friendship, and amazingly, some did. I was never picked on, really. I was always incredibly shy and had few friends, and in junior high and high school I often found myself in the awkward position of having no friends at all in certain classes or during lunch. Still, life had quieted. I was anxious, but generally not miserable. Not until I was sixteen.

I never really took interest in boys. I never believed that they would want anything to do with me, as nobody else did. But when I was sixteen, that all changed. I found out that Adam liked me. He was handsome, intelligent, mildly popular... I was shocked, but in a happy, excited, totally infatuated sort of way. Eventually he asked me out. I remember crying after our first date because he brought a friend along and I felt so invisible. I remember crying again when a classmate teased him about dating an herbivore. And of course, there was our first kiss, which he initiated and I was too scarred to reciprocate until he told me to, even though I knew what a fool I was. But mostly that first month was bliss. I felt loved, adored, wanted, and I soaked it up. I had never been happier.

Then he wanted sex. Suddenly I felt that was all I was to him. I feared that if I said no he would leave me for someone who would say yes... I feared that if I said yes everyone who had ever remotely cared about me would be disappointed in me. So I did the only thing I could cope with doing... I said yes, and I didn't tell anybody.In the beginning I was so tense that he couldn't even penetrate, but after a couple of weeks we gradually began to manage. From then on, I became his personal slut. Yet it wasn't enough. He still made it clear that he was interested in other girls. Once the two of us were in the backseat of a car with our friend's flirty 12-yr-old sister. Someone called back to us to "behave yourselves back there" and DH said, "Yeah, maybe if she was a couple years older." It didn't even occur to him that they meant me. Once I found a note from a girl tucked in his notebook that said "You make me horny." Sometimes he would take phone numbers from girls. Whenever he was late, whenever he went out with friends and failed to call me, my mind went wild. I was so certain that he was cheating on me, or that it was only a matter of time until he did. I was terrified. Everyone would know I wasn't good enough for him. To make things worse, I was fighting with the only real friends I had. If I lost him, I would be totally alone, and nobody else would want me. I could never go on. But I could never go on with the pain, either. I tried to be sweet, to please him however I could, but I was never enough for him, and the reality dug sharply into me.In the beginning I pretended not to care, but inside was a time bomb waiting to explode.

My thoughts became consumed with suicide. It seemed the only escape. One day I searched for a razor from my parents’ cabinet and made a tiny cut on my wrist, far away from the veins so I knew it wouldn't kill me. I had never heard of self injury, I just wanted to know what it would feel like, if I were to do it for real. The next day my boyfriend found the cut and he became enraged, and then concerned, and for the first time in some while, he HEARD me. I didn't have to whisper a single word, but my inner turmoil seemed to scream through that tiny cut. I was no longer invisible. Soon I began cutting frequently. My cuts communicated something that I was too scared to express in words. But in time, I also found that it calmed me. When I saw the blood flowing out I felt a release, and the more blood, the more satisfied I was. Sometimes I would draw pictures or write death poems in my journal using my blood, too. Once I overdosed on Aspirin. Another time I burned myself.Soon my world became enveloped in darkness. It became my identity. I tiptoed my way into goth culture, I became Wiccan, I wrote of death, drew of death, thought of death... It seemed so certain that it was my destiny. I struggled deeply with the notion of hurting my family, but I wanted more than anything to believe that someday I would find the courage to act, to finally leave my torment behind...

After high school things began to improve. I continued dating Adam, but because he no longer went to school, it began to feel as if there were fewer temptations, which made me feel a bit safer. I began working with preschoolers in the campus child care center and they adored me. It gave me a sense of purpose. I worked my hardest and strived for perfection. Often I found myself on the brink of exploding from the stress of it, but after four years I earned my degree in Early Childhood Education and graduated Suma Cum Laude.Immediately after graduating I married the love of my life... Adam. Part of me was scared, knowing our history, but I couldn't imagine being with anyone else. Amazingly, things were fairly good. I began teaching and he got a job as a Geek Squad agent. We bought a cute little house, adopted two dogs and two cats, and eventually had a baby. Our little boy, Gabriel, became the center of my world. I had never been happier. For months I lived in a state of almost uninterrupted bliss. It isn’t that everything was perfect, but I honestly felt like the luckiest woman in the world. Then, right around his first birthday, a familiar darkness slowly began to creep over me...

I couldn't say what set it off. Perhaps stress over work. Perhaps the fact that all my responsibilities were simply becoming too much to cope with. I found myself thinking more and more about death. I even found myself regretting having a child, since I couldn't bear to live and knew I could never put him through the pain of loosing his mother. I felt trapped. Eventually, I stopped even finding much joy in him, which made me despise myself even more. I began cutting myself again to deal with the huge amounts of tension that kept swelling inside of me. I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't deal with the most minor of stresses, and I felt like a failure at everything... This time, though, I hid it all from Adam. I didn't want to burden him as I had in the past, so instead I withdrew. My only outlet became the internet, on a close-knit parenting forum where I found my time increasingly absorbed.

When my beloved dog died an early and tragic death, I finally burst. I ended up writing a post on my forum that worried a lot of people. I felt guilty burdening them but I was horribly lost and didn't know what else to do. At that point I had taken what was left in our bottle of Ibuprofen (a total of 18 pills) and was struggling with wanting to cut my wrist and not knowing whether I would do it. When I got home from work on the next afternoon my mom informed me that someone from my forum had called and spilled my dark secret. She and my dad were taking me to the ER. My emotions were a mess, twisted in every direction. Part of me was relieved to finally be receiving help, part of me was humiliated, part of me was scared to death, mostly because I knew they could commit you if you are “a danger to self or others” and I didn’t know what the hell I would tell my supervisor if they locked me up on suicide watch… Thankfully they let me go after referring me to an organization that has psychiatrists and social workers on staff that could provide immediate services...

I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and was treated with Zoloft and later with Prozac. Both made me more angry and irritable and very dazed. I was then put on Effexor XR, which helped calm my anger just a bit but made me very sleepy and did nothing for my depression. My psychiatrist raised my dose but the side effects became insane. I found myself lying in bed, feeling as if I were on a boat, as if the ground below me was swaying. I could barely walk straight. I immediately cut a pill from my dose but swiftly entered into terrible withdrawal. I was nauseous, vomiting and intensely manic. If I tried to sleep my eyes would race in circles. If I tried closing my eyes I would visualize monkeys swinging in circles. I couldn’t stand it, so I stopped weaning myself off, I just quit cold turkey and got it over with, and I never went back to my psychiatrist again. I tried seeing a therapist but quit after two sessions. I didn’t feel that it was helpful to me and I felt stupid and humiliated. I also felt like my life wasn't bad enough to complain about, like I was pathetic for needing help to begin with...

That was a year ago. Since then things haven't really improved. Truthfully, I find it hard to imagine ever truly getting better. Sometimes I wonder if I, like my brother, am destined to fall further and further until I enter the realms of insanity… And sometimes I even think that would be okay. I’m tired of pretending that everything is perfect. I’m tired of working so hard to maintain the illusion that I’m okay. Maybe if I could no longer pretend, that would be better than this… But I look at my son and I know I don’t want that. I want to be there for him, to see him grow, to see him happy… And in order to show him the way, I need to discover my own happiness as well.
 
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VioletTears

Well-known member
Sorry, I wrote it on Microsoft Word and when I pasted it the paragraphs got lost.

I don't really expect people to read it though, like I said, I wrote it for my therapist. It's just here in case anyone is ever interested. I should probably edit it out and make it a shorter version for here.
 
Sorry, I wrote it on Microsoft Word and when I pasted it the paragraphs got lost.

I don't really expect people to read it though, like I said, I wrote it for my therapist. It's just here in case anyone is ever interested. I should probably edit it out and make it a shorter version for here.

ahh its cool dont worry its just abit eaiser to read then lol, but you can edit it and just add the paragraphs in :) that way you dont have to make it shother
 

VioletTears

Well-known member
Ok, I seperated the paragraphs and cut a little out, where I was babbling and also when I was listing my laundry list of "symptoms." It's still long though!
 

VioletTears

Well-known member
Thank for reading:)

Well, I only met my new therapist once... But I really like her. My first therapist seemed scared of me (like she thought I was one of those people who would make her life hell, which I'm not). My second seemed to pitty me, plus she was really abstract and confusing. This one, though, seems to have the right balance. She was nice, she gave me new insights, she set goals with my input and told me what we would need to do to reach them. It just felt like if it's possible then she can get me somewhere. So, we'll see.
 
That was really interesting. You're a good writer. I hope that you like your new therapist. Have faith in yourself that you can get better, because you can and you know it! You know you can heal if only you are given the right tools. Just remember that there are people out there that want to help you. People that spend loads of money on their education to spend time with people who need their help. Take advantage of it.

Keep these numbers around just in case you need immediate help.
1-800-SUICIDE
1-800-273-TALK


Hope that helps,

Sarah
 
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