How did I become so avoidant?

My mum has told me that from the time I was a baby people would smile or talk to me and I would give them a look of contempt and look away. When I was a toddler I recall being in my pram and being taken outside into a large windstorm and feeling absolute panic. I was inconsolable and my mum took be back inside. I also recall her taking me into a swimming pool and feeling terrified that she would let go of me. I clung to her as tight as I could, crying and wanting to get out of the water. She would let go of me to show me that I would float and I would go under and swallow water as I screamed.

My mum had my brother eighteen months after I was born. Apparently, when I was taken to see her in hospital I ignored her and pretended not to know whom she was. I must of felt resentment that she had left me for those few days. When my little brother was brought home from hospital, I used to stand at his bassinet and tickle him until he squirmed and cried. 

My mum spent a lot of time with me at home. I remember her reading to me all of the time, making things with craft, cooking and drawing. I went to preschool and would play on my own. She taught me to read before I started school and I remember feeling that reading was a great escape and a place where I could be on my own.

During this time I remember watching my little brother as he began to learn how to talk, he would talk anyone and make him or her laugh. I would cling to my mum and try to ignore people as much as possible. I was positively surly.

At four I remember being at an outdoor festival and there was a clown looking for kids to volunteer to be in his show. My dad encouraged me to go up on stage and I cried at the thought.

At five I started school and I remember hating free play time. I would just sit in book corner and read. I enjoyed the structured activities but when we were allowed to go and play dress-ups or with toys I would tell the teacher I was sick and go and lie down again in book corner.

Later, my mum took my brother and I to little athletics and he was so excited. I remember feeling deep embarrassment; I didn’t want to try as I didn’t want people looking at me. I didn’t want to be compared.

It was at this time that my dad started to leave my mother on a frequent basis and return. Home was a tumultuous place to be. My mother frequently wept.

At seven, my father called my brother and I into their bedroom and explained that he would be leaving us. That he was going away. I didn’t comprehend at the time that it was for good. I spent many years later thinking he would come back from his long holiday. I remember feeling so much shame at the time. My father must have stopped loving us as he was living with another lady and her little girl. I remember going to school and feeling sick with dread every time the topic came up about dads. I would lie and act as though my dad was still around.

My brother was most affected by his leaving. My father did seem to favour me at times. He became quite aggressive, boisterous and disruptive at school. I would do my best to love him but we were too young to be of much help to each other then.

I tried very hard at school, as I knew my father valued achievement and that perhaps this would make him love me again. Consequently, I did well at school. Over time, I made a few one on one friendships. I remember that I could make people laugh and I began to realise that they were laughing at my jokes rather than at me. I think that is when things started to improve a little. I remember being mortified when boys would take an interest in me, being chased around the playground as the tried to catch and kiss me. At the same time, I realised that although I was painfully shy that people were interested in me.   

I started to get a sense of pride in doing well at school, I couldn’t catch a ball and I hated sports. I did however, have a sense of achievement from doing well in class. Throughout the first five years I topped my class with results. I did a test at age 10, which resulted in me changing to an opportunity class for gifted children. I enjoyed the first few months but soon realised that I wasn’t the top of my class anymore. In fact, I was struggling again with the thought of being compared and being part of the pack. I started to dread going to school. On my way home, some girls from my old school waited at the bus stop for me on some days and started to throw oranges at me as I alighted from the bus I had taken home.

My brother had become very popular at school; he was never academic but always was the leader of the pack. He was the best at all the sports he played.

That is when I started to tell my mum that I felt too sick to go to school. She would ask me what was the matter and I would say my tummy just hurts. Days turned into months of feeling dread about the thought of ever having to return. The alternative was to go back to the school where the girls picked on me. My mother took me to a doctor frequently who finally referred me to a doctor at the children’s hospital. He asked me a range of questions about school. Do you like maths? What don’t you like? Has something happened to you at school? I lied through

out the whole interview process and told him that I loved school.

He lost patience and explained to my mum that he was going to examine me. He asked me to take off all of my clothes and walk around the room. I felt absolute panic, my body had started to change and I didn’t not want to feel that exposed in front of a stranger. Then he told me to get up on the bed and roll over onto my side. I was facing the wall and he asked my mother to hold me down whilst he conducted the exam. At first he just felt my belly and then he whispered something to my mother. Suddenly, he slapped on a glove and told me that he was going to have to examine me on the inside. Without any warning he gave me an anal examination which made me want to vomit as I tried to get out of this situation. When it was over, I dressed and felt inconsolable. I went home and went to bed and struggled with what to do. I went in and told my mum I would be going to school the next day. I went to school there until high school and felt extremely anxious and depressed during my time there. I felt constant dread.

On my first day at high school I felt like I was the only new person there. Everyone else knew each other from primary school. I walked up to a girl and told her I was lost, did she know where I should go? She laughed at me and walked off.  Although I had that horrible first day, I soon realised that I was back being the top of all my classes. Although it took me time to make some friends, I had attention from the boys. I would avoid sport because I hated people looking at my body and again would find elaborate ways of avoiding public shame.

Throughout high school, I started to feel normal for a while. I was doing well in terms of my grades; I was part of a "group" for the first time in my life. Not once did I invite a friend over until I was 17. I was embarrassed by our humble circumstances. My mother struggled to support us; we lived in a unit we didn’t own, with pre-loved furniture. I remember thinking; I will never live like this when I am an adult. I worked throughout school and noticed that as I turned about 15 that older men would look at me like lechers. It made me extremely uncomfortable. I hated my body and I hated people looking at it even more.

Despite this, I was the first girl to have a boyfriend and I lost my virginity at 16 to a boy I was with for 18 months. My mother had started drinking very heavily and my brother had started bringing his friends home. This made home feel very unsafe for me. During my second last year of school, I lived with him and his parents. I had started to become quite popular in my final years of school and was voted school captain. It was during this time that I started to do a lot of public speaking, not just at school but also for community events and debating competitions. My confidence grew. Public speaking was strangely one thing I was not frightened about despite all of my other anxieties. I felt in control and knew that I could work a crowd. I remember on our last day of school doing a speech that seemed to make the whole audience cry including the teachers.  

In my last and most crucial year of high school, things became unbearable at home. I had broken up with my boyfriend and was feeling very low. Like all first loves, I was broken hearted. My brother and I had begun to develop an extremely strong bond, confiding in one another and being the other’s crutch.

Strangely, although this was probably the easiest time for me socially, I started to experience severe anxiety attacks. I would experience a sense of deja vu after smelling something strong, or recalling a bad dream and then I would feel the world tilt on its axis. I would stand and start reeling, hyperventilating and feeling as though I was going to feint.

I returned to live at home again but now found that my mother very resentful with me for abandoning her for the previous year. She would get very drunk and abusive with me, even though I worked and supported myself and was doing extremely well at school.

She would recite a litany of my father’s crimes against her and us kids and tell me how much like him I was. I remember having saved for months to buy a stereo (the first for our family) and within a week, she had thrown it up against a wall to have it smashed to smithereens. She would wake me up in the middle of the night to scream and swear at me and I couldn’t work out what I had done to make her this angry with me. She told me that she loved my brother much more than me but I didn’t resent him because I knew my father had never demonstrated his love for him. I was glad someone loved him as much as me.

The environment became so unbearable that I asked my father if I could move in with him and his wife. I said good bye to my brother, which broke my heart but we still remained very close and saw one another often.

What I didn’t know then was I was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. I didn’t realise then but my father and step mother were having problems in their marriage and I was like a dirty big catalyst for making the whole situation amplified. I had a year of the silent treatment from both of them. I was there to clean the house and to keep quiet. I was really looking for support from my father but the day his wife kicked me out onto the street with all of my belongings in garbage bags he let me walk out the door and did not contact me again for months. I had to go back to my mother’s with my tail between my legs. I returned to finish my higher school certificate. My brother had several of his friends living with us then, so I could no longer share a room with him. I studied and slept in the lounge room. It was here that my brother and his teen age friends pulled cone after cone to get stoned.

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buchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial”>I was so depressed, anxious and alone that I wanted to die. When I was out I noticed men looking at me all the time and I found it unbearable. I felt like their sex target. Soon after I moved back into my mum’s I went to the bathroom one day with a pair of scissors and cut my long hair to the quick. I then shaved the remainder of it all off. I then found that men would still look at me. However, now, if they spoke to me I had the confidence to tell them to fuck off and leave me alone, I wasn’t interested. Then I would be abused for being a lesbian (even though at the time I would never had even considered being with a woman). I just wanted to be loved for me, rather than for how I looked.  

When school ended, I moved out of home at age 17, went to university and studied visual arts and took another part-time job. After paying rent, utilities and a small amount of food, I had no money. It was an extremely stressful time financially and clearly this time was to shape me much later as now I am extremely independent and want for nothing.

I had been topping my major (drawing / printmaking) for the first two years. In my final year I had a lecturer who came to review my portfolio of work and he told me it was the worst crap he had ever seen. Again, I started the cycle of feeling dread, anxiety and fear about going to class. I didn’t want to be compared in a poor light when I seemed to be getting so much approval for being Number 1. Also, as with anyone that makes art, who is at an impressionable age, the work was intensely personal and important to me. Rather than challenge him on any level, I believed what he said about my work being crap, and felt that this meant that I was crap as well.

I had originally lived with flat mates but soon the anxiety became so bad that I moved out. I could not cope with people dropping in unannounced. I liked my privacy at home. I moved into a flat on my own and began avoiding people again. I never once answered my phone in that house. It would ring and I would look at the phone and watch it ring and wait for it to end. Friends would drop by and knock at my door and I would sit there and wait for them to leave. I felt very isolated.

I started to see a psychiatrist as the anxiety and depression was affecting my whole life. He was a very fatherly guy called Alan and when I met him for the first time and told him my story, he cried with me throughout the session. I went to see him weekly throughout that last year of university and he never once charged me a cent. This man saved my life. I still think back to advice he had given me then and realise how healing his influence was for me during that time. Despite his help, I had gone from topping my class to failing at the end of my final year.

He stopped me from becoming agoraphobic and did everything in his power, including writing letters to my university to tell them that there had been extenuating circumstances in my case and that I had good cause to be re-admitted. This was a cross-road, I only told my father and mother that I had failed and both wanted me to finish. Instead, I made my first adult avoidant decision. I was not going back, I would continue on working in part-time job with kids and hopefully make that full-time. I decided to close that chapter of my life and start again.

At age 23, my hair had grown back and I had moved back into share accommodation with a friend from school and a friend of hers. During the years leading up to this time, I had drunk myself silly, smoked some pot and had taken some speed. My brother and I had become extremely close and he was a great support to me throughout my depression. He had his own black dog to fight and would spend time with me reading his poetry, playing his guitar and us listening to music together. We discovered so many bands together, would play their LP’s repeatedly and sing along. Although he too was depressed, he would tell me everything’s going to be all right and I believed him.

One day as I walked home from work and the sun was beating down on my face, I felt that perhaps Marty was right, on that weekend I had seen him and he had said to me, “Never give up on life blue”. He gave me the strength to carry on. He was my remaining inspiration.

Little did I know that at that very time of day he had been killed in a car accident.