In my last post, I mention being happy. Not only happy, but completely and utterly, 100% overjoyed with every aspect of my life. And I am. The thing I don’t want people to start thinking is that it just happened overnight. Depression’s gone, everything’s automatically all better. Took some magical beans from the backyard and now my life is perfect. No, that’s not how it is.
The beginning of my journey to happiness started in May of 2011. I dropped out of high school. Pretty crummy place to start, yeah? But school for me was torture. It was my own personal hell that kept me away from anything and everyone that was good for me and my life. It damaged me in such a way that I started to contemplate suicide, each day getting one step closer to ending it all. I was fighting everyday. Whether it was with myself, my parents, a teacher, people who were supposed to be my friends. And I just carried around all this anger, hurt, sadness, all this pain for so long; I knew something had to change.
I hate to tell people, “oh, just drop out of school!” like it’s no big thing. School, no matter how useless it is to me, can be beneficial in getting into good colleges, getting a good job, etc. But I have to be honest: there’s no point in going to a good school or even having a great job if you’re going to be unhappy. You have to make the best decisions for yourself. There might be things in school that you dislike or think are unfair, but there’s a difference in not wanting to do something because you don’t feel like it, and not wanting to do something because it makes you suicidal. I want to write more on this subject because I don’t feel like there’s enough information about it, at least none that’s written from the point of view of someone who isn’t a therapist. Next post, perhaps…
Anyways, a bit off topic there, back of track:
Dropping out of school made things better, but it wasn’t the end of my spiral downwards. Being out of school, I was left alone in the house all day everyday with nothing to do, no one to talk to…and for the first couple days, I was okay. But again, it’s hard to make people understand. I have social phobia. No, I’m not “shy”. I have an actual, legitimate FEAR of people. I don’t know why or how it happened. It just did, and to this day I’m still living with it. So think about someone who’s fearing for their life everyday, then suddenly…isn’t. Sounds like some fucking PTSD shit, does it not? So not only am I living with severe social phobia, I now have this fucking PTSD or whatever you want to call it going on, so being home, not even going to school, isn’t helping.
Queue depression….
I thought dropping out of school would be the solution to everything. Wave the magical wand and it’ll all go away. But then when that didn’t fix the problem, something else happened. It’s called “oh, fuck! I can’t be happy there, can’t be happy here, I guess I’m just not meant to be happy”. So on top of having all these fucked up things going on in my head that I didn’t even really know were happening, then you add depression, and oh, let’s see…the disappointment and shame I brought to everyone around me? Yes, my family were on the verge of disowning me after I stopped going to school. The fighting stopped, it turned to silence. My parents didn’t talk to me, my older brother didn’t even acknowledge me as his sister anymore. And what does that feel like in this situation? Well, I already felt that I didn’t deserve happiness, and at that point I was pretty sure my family didn’t think I did either. So it all built up; the mania, the depression, the issues with my family. Not to mention the fact that my “friends”, who I went to school with for the past two years, didn’t even notice I was gone.
So let’s say maybe all that came down in June. Moving on to July…
Over the fourth of July, my entire family got to together and we vacationed at my grandmother’s house for the week. To make a long story short, I don’t like my family and they don’t like me. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. I don’t know what I’ve done to make them hate me so much, and just thinking about it makes me upset. I can’t change it, so I’m not going to worry about it anymore. So seeing them on “vacation” didn’t help, it made everything that much worse.
After vacation, my grandmother came back to stay with us for a couple of weeks, and one of my best friends also came to visit me at that time as well. My friend kept me distracted from everything that was going on, and more importantly, she kept my grandmother and I from fighting. Yes, my grandma and I fight. My mother and grandmother are best friends, so since my mom and I weren’t getting along at the time, that automatically gave my grandma incentive to be angry at me as well.
So after my friend left, and the invisible fires had been fueled via my mother and grandmother, it was almost like a tag team to see who could beat me down the most.
Queue breakdown…
After taking verbal and emotional abuse for two weeks straight, my mother fucked with me one last time and called me an idiot. And that was it. I snapped. There was no fighting; I remember throwing a box that had Jacob’s art supplies down the stairs because it was in my way, then I grabbed some of my things and was out the door. I spent the rest of the day at various places just thinking about my next move. I was almost positive I was going to kill myself that night.
My father, after getting off work and hearing about how I “just ran off”, somehow managed to find me at Wal-Mart and convinced me by the power of fucking god to come home.
So the next day I called someone, who isn’t my friend anymore but at the time I thought they were my friend, and I asked her if she just wanted to hang out because I really needed talk and figure some things out. Long story short yet again, said friend didn’t help me with any decisions, it was my mother who started texting me more verbal abuse that had me set on only one option: I was moving out. My friend offered to let me stay with her for a couple days while I looked for a place to live, so I went back to my house (my friend and I had met up at the park previously) so I could collect clothes, toothbrush, etc.
My mother had other plans. In front of my house, like we lived in some kind of Detroit ghetto neighborhood, we ended up having a knock-down, drag-out fight to the finish, where she literally ended up dragging me into the house, threatening to call the police if I even tried to leave. I ended up having a mental breakdown in the middle of my living room.
It was at that point that any desire to live had been beaten out of me. I remember sitting with the my back against the wall, just praying to disappear into wall, to make it all stop and go away. I cried for what must have been two hours, telling everyone that I was going to go upstairs and kill myself. And they all sat there and watched. My mom, my dad, my grandmother; my friend went the fuck home! And then they just let me go upstairs like they didn’t even hear what I had been saying.
Rock bottom. I went upstairs and attempted to kill myself.
And then I woke up the next day.
The weirdest thing happened that morning, and it was horrifying and glorious and freeing all at the same time. I realized I was on my own. Not in the “I’m so alone and miserable” type way, the “there’s nobody left to take care of but myself” way. And that was the attitude I took on for the next couple months. I want to say my mother and I (after my grandmother left) started talking again in November. We didn’t talk about that night, we still haven’t, we probably never will. But we started to come together, not necesarily closer, but almost like puzzle pieces, we found a way to fit together, and our relationship since then has been decent, if not good. Because I stopped caring what she thought, and once she realized that, it became apparent she could no longer mess with me. Let me say that again: my mother stopped verbally and emotionally abusing me, not because it was wrong and damaging her daughter, but because she knows it will no longer effect me. These are the types of people I’m dealing with.
My father and I talk, but not often and not about anything deep or personal. We’re more like friends rathet than a parent and a child. As for my brother, after explaining and really trying to make him understand my decisions regarding school and ya know, the rest of my fucking life, I guess he has found a place in his heart to try and accept me. I don’t know how that’s working out for him.
So how did I get here, from being in such a shitty place not so long ago? Balance and strength, I guess. I learned to not let the entire world crash down on me at once, but in small doses that I can handle better. I also let go of a lot of things these past few months, and it’s been hard, but it’s so worth it. I will never have the ideal relationship with anyone in my family, but because it’s something that won’t ever change, why worry about it? I have tried and tried to make things better, but there’s only so much a person can do. So I let it go.
I set goals for myself that are attainable, and I’m happy working for and reaching them. I’ve learned to enjoy little things, like a silly joke or cute kitten pictures on the Internet. And when things are hard, I look bad and scare the fuck out of myself, because I don’t ever want to be in that place ever again. So I keep going, and I keep moving forward. And I don’t yell anymore or get into fights with people. I’m on a one and done policy, and if you fuck with me or piss me off, boom, out of my life. That’s the only way I can live. I’ve tried to put other people’s happiness and well-being before me, and what happens? They take advantage and fuck me over. I now live my life for myself and for Jacob. And I’m happy.
I’m independently strong, courageous, brave, and intelligent. I deserve life, love, and happiness, and anyone that has anything to say about me or the way I live my life can fuck right off. Because I don’t need you in my life. I WILL be independently happy.
§Rainbows & Skeletons§
And on that note, wow, I can’t believe I just wrote all that…
rainbowsandskeletons 