2. TMI!!!! (also: Trigger Warning- Literally, everything thats triggering, ever)
I swear they wont all be this long. (thats what she said)
The rest will probably be like one or two sentences at most.
This is for the people just tuning in to the shit show. including my new therapist because there is going to be a lot to catch him up on, but also for everyone else who doesn’t know all of this, so you understand what’s going on, exactly. Again, the more people that talk openly about all of this, the easier it will get for everyone else. This might be a long one so I’ll make it as short as possible. Also, I don’t believe in trigger warnings, I think everyone’s getting to fucking soft, but I decided to do that anyway, so here I am contributing to the pussification of the world and saying… Trigger Warning: Abuse, self harm, substance abuse, death, and idk, probably everything else. If you have certain triggers about ANYTHING you should probably just click off this page now because it’s about to get a little rough in here.
Ready?
Okay here goes.
I was born to a mother who didn’t want me when she was too young for kids. I mean, I don’t know that she didn’t want me, but she didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant until AFTER I was born, and my sister and I never really felt like she really wanted us. I have one- exactly one memory from childhood where she was like, THERE. She brought us to a toystore one day to get barbies, and played hide and seek with us when we got home until our nap time. That was it though. I mean she wasn’t negligent, she brought us to school every day and made our lunches and cooked us dinner, but she wasn’t really PRESENT. Other than that once, I can only ever remember her being motherly towards my brother. He was born when my sister and I were 8 and 9, and then she was present in our lives at that point. The rest of the time she was reading or watching TV or napping.
She never told my biological dad about me. I was raised by my younger sister and brother’s biological dad, who, for the most part did an okay job at parenting. He worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week, but when he was home, he was present in our lives, actively asking us about our days, etc. He was prone to anger outbursts when we would misbehave, and I still find myself justifying this with the thought that “that’s just how he parented us” because it’s what HE knew. His father was physically and verbally abusive to him and his siblings and sexually abusive towards his sister. His verbal abuse when angry was just what he knew about parenting.
From ages 4-12 I was sexually abused by a number of male relatives.
I finally came forward about this abuse at age 12 after a failed attempt at suicide.
I spent my teen years in therapy, attempted suicide several more times, spent a year in a group home, and was eventually diagnosed with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD without hyperactivity. (why they cant just call it ADD, i do not know)
By the end of high school I sort of levelled out. I had a kid at 21 (got knocked up by some douchenut on my 21st birthday, whats up) and he continued to be a thorn in my side for the rest of for fucking ever, abandoning our daughter numerous times throughout her life)
When I was in school I took a class called Violence and Maltreatment in Intimate Relationships where I learned that the way I was parenting my daughter, was at times abusive. Now, that’s a really hard pill to swallow and I wasn’t ready to do it, so I continued trying to justify my actions and behavior with nonsense like “that’s just how she’s going to learn” and what not- because it’s how I learned, I thought. (but I mean, maybe I would have learned the same things without the verbal abuse too?) But I finally broke down one day when I yelled at her so bad that I felt nothing but shame and regret and guilt. I pulled over in the parking lot of an indian super market and sobbed. Then I called CPS. on myself. Yes, I called CPS on myself. And asked them what they thought I should do because if I truly was abusive, then she shouldn’t continue to live with me, but it wasn’t fair to make her leave when I was the one in the wrong, so I suggested leaving the house and letting her live there with my mom. CPS told me I was okay, and to relax, and where to look to get therapy, which started this whole ass journey to be a better person.
My first relationship after she was born was with a really nice guy, whom I’m still friends with today. He was good to addy and me, but I wasn’t into him, and we didn’t seem to understand each other. I quickly sabotaged that relationship.
The next one was short- only a few months, before he accidentally overdosed (I’m not 100% sure on what, his dad didn’t want to find out but assumed it was heroin, his mom assumed it was pills, I thought it may have been the combination of pills and excessive drinking). His death came one day after I was starting to consider ending the relationship because of his drinking and the amount of pills he would take. This messed me up for a long time, I had a really hard time coping with my grief, developed a pill problem of my own.
The next serious one was with a pathological liar with an anger problem. I stayed in that relationship for 2.5 years, being yelled at for everything, lied to about anything, and being hurt, emotionally, very often. He only got physical with me once when he threw a lamp at me and pushed me down to the floor, but his anger outbursts were the hardest part for me. My (still continuing) pill problem was the hardest part for him. It wasn’t until he threatened to leave me if I didn’t quit abusing the fuck out of xanax that I tried to quit, had some psychological issues during the withdrawal period (got extremely depressed) and decided to write a few letters out to my family and I OD’d that night. Then it was off to rehab for me, for a few weeks. , During those few weeks, I denied having a problem, using the “I can stop any time I want, I just dont want to” line- and I truly believed that.
Immediately after all of that I ended up in another shitty one. This guy was an alcoholic, and although he’d been sober for the last 8 years, he started drinking again exactly one week before our first date. At first I didn’t notice his drinking was a problem, because it was only on saturdays. then it was fridays and saturdays. Then he had leftover beer on sunday so he’d have to drink those too. Then he couldnt just have one or two beers on sunday, he had to get a case. Then he was drinking himself into a literal coma on a regular basis. When he’d drink he’d hit me. The first time it happened, I left. He lured me back in with promises to stop drinking. Then the second time, he had me convinced it was my fault (if I hadn’t shown up so late, he wouldn’t have been so mad). The third time he almost killed me. He broke my nose, gave me two black eyes, tried to choke me and tried to snap my neck. I remember curling up in a ball as he was kicking my face and thinking I’d never see my daughter again. Then he had the police arrest ME because he knew them for a long time. Thats a long story for another time. Good old Vineland PD. Anyway, This went on for the next two years. I was getting hit pretty often, and emotionally tortured on an almost daily basis. He was blackmailing me into staying with pictures and videos he had of me, or of us. When I did try to delete them from his phone and got out of there, he had backed them up to his computer and uploaded them to facebook and sent them out to people. That was one of dozens of police reports I’d made over those years. I finally got away when I convinced him to go to rehab in another state. When he came home I told him we wouldn’t be getting back together, and he threatened not just me this time, but my daughter as well. That was what I needed to go to the police and ask for a restraining order. They gave it to me. He died last summer, and while I always expected it to happen, I didn’t expect that I wouldn’t feel anything about it. I was genuinely surprised that I really didn’t care. I did call his mom though to offer my condolences, but I wasn’t sad to hear about his passing at all.
Next one was a sweetheart, but was in the middle of a divorce, and as I later found out, was still trying to reconcile with his wife. I tried to make that work, but it didn’t, and ultimately a difference in life goals made us say that was it. Otherwise was a relatively smooth relationship until the end. Oh, that was my high school teacher by the way. I make great life choices, don’t I?
Next serious one was 30 years older than me. Yep, he was 60 when I was 30. He looked about 40 though, so I believed him when he lied and told me he was 41. That got off to a great start. He was an eye doctor with a psychology degree who thought he was Dr. Phil and would try to diagnose everyone he met with a thousand different things. While doing this, he would subtly pick me apart. He would use his psychoanalysis of me to control me. He’d never come out and SAY “you can’t do this/that) but he’d flip his shit if I talked about it, so for the years I spent with him, I couldn’t go to school or cut my hair. He disproved of anything that would take even a minute of my time away from him. He had me convinced that I was a horrible mother to my daughter and that she’d have been better off with anyone else but me, and had tried talking me into letting my mom adopt her because she’d have been better off. That was around the time my daughter’s dad decided to bail out on her, so I wasn’t as available to him as I usually was. It was around this time that I started feeling much more depressed than usual. To a point where it ached in every part of my body. One night while I was at his house, I took a bottle of benedryl, and tried to go to sleep. Then realized if I was going to die, I didn’t want it to be anywhere near him, so I drove home, clutching the steering wheel because I was seeing the roads moving in all sorts of weird directions. I didn’t die, obviously, but I didn’t feel too good for a day or two.
After him I spent about a year with someone who was angry, controlling, manipulative and… sorry, but crazy. Like really crazy. He’d yell at me for EVERYTHING. He called me every name in the book and it was always my fault. He would break up with me once a week and trash me all over social media, block my number for 3 days, then come back and act like everything was okay. This went on for about a year. To say I was walking on eggshells is an understatement. It was like walking on landmines. I never knew what was going to set him off into a blind rage. This relationship did more damage to me, psychologically, than anything else in my life. For the first time in my life, I started cutting myself. I’d cut my legs, mostly, because it wouldnt be seen. I don’t know why I did it. I’d never had the urge to do that in my life, not even as a troubled teen, and then at 33/34 I decided that would be a good idea. One day he was screaming at me on the phone and I cut the words “go away” into my leg. On another night I was feeling so low and desperate that I drove to crisis and was about to check myself in. He “coincidentally” was driving by and saw my car and decided to stop by and talked me into not going in. I later made another attempt at suicide by once again, taking a lot more benedryl than the last time because I felt like I couldn’t get away. It was a weird feeling of desperation.( As you can see, I’m not mentally very healthy). He broke my windshield once, and the final straw was when he tried to run me over with his truck. I also found out he was tracking my location from my phone as well.
Then this amazing man came into the picture and turned everything upside down for me. He’s sweet and patient, he doesnt yell at me for every dumb little thing i do…. or for anything, at all, for that matter. He listens to me when I talk and he tries to understand me. He is great to my daughter and to me, and he exhibits a kind of strength I’ve never actually seen in anybody before. He’s very patient and is just a genuine sweetheart. I can’t say enough great things about him. I’ve tried to find his “but”…. ya know, the “I think he’s cool, but….” or “yea I’m into him, but….” and there is none. Trust me, I’ve looked. I’m a chronic self-sabotager, if there was one, I’d have fucking found it. It isn’t there. I’m not saying he is perfect and doesn’t make mistakes, but he’s got nothing to say “but” to. At all. We also had a kind of chemistry that I can’t really describe. Like, to me, it seemed like we just fit together like puzzle pieces. And I still managed to fuck that up, and hurt him.
I’m no saint. I’m a fucking bitch on wheels when I want to be. My anxiety acts up and I get super anxious and intrusive thoughts about shit that isn’t real, then I get mad at them and pick a fight. I’ve done this in almost all of my relationships. I struggle with having a really low self esteem and almost no self confidence. I’m insecure and get jealous over nothing important. I believe that’s linked to not feeling “good enough” as a kid, and not feeling like we were really wanted. I remember going to friends houses as kids and seeing how their parents interacted with them, and I never had anything like that. I literally could have disappeared for days at a time without even raising a single concern from my mom about where I was. I believe that’s where my insecurities come from. But as an insecure adult who gets upset about dumb shit, I hurt people. I start stupid fights that in the past has lead to all of this shitty behavior that I’d been subjected to. Like, one time I got pissed at a dude (the old guy) for texting this woman all day and night, and it turned out she was his cousin. Had I asked him about it, he could have told me that. Instead I decided to sling shit at him (verbally. not literal shit) and get all angry. Another time (same guy) I found womens underwear in his room. Like, a lot of it. I thought he was cheating, so I grabbed my things and started to leave when he ran into me at the door, and I spazzed out. Turns out it was his ex’s and he didn’t even know they were still there. Another time I was tired and had to wake up early, and this guy wanted to stay out later. Instead of taking an uber home, I decided to pout and bitch about it all night, and then pick a fight with him as soon as we got back into his truck. Shit like that. I can give a million more examples.
I also give up easily. The slightest thing can go wrong and I immediately want out. “I don’t want to do this anymore” is my signature line. This last one was amazing and gave me the option to say to him “I am feeling like giving up right now” and that did wonders for me. Like, miraculous wonders. That was something I never thought I’d overcome, and just by him allowing me the freedom to say that, I no longer even WANTED to give up anymore. I asked him if it bothered him the two (I think two?) times I did say that (hey- it’s a LOT less than it would have been otherwise) and he said it didn’t, which alleviated some of that stress too. I did manage to fuck that relationship up though. My whole life has been a shit show and I’ve picked up all of this bullshit along the way and I have a lot to learn, and a lot to unlearn, and a lot to fix. Theres so much he’s made me realize about myself that isn’t healthy, and so much about past relationships that I thought was normal that he’s made me realize just by being the kind person that he is that those things weren’t okay- about me, and about them.
Now here’s where I’m at. I started trying to fix myself for my daughter a few years ago, but my relationships were still suffering.
When I almost destroyed my most recent relationship the first time, he gave me another chance. Now, I love this man, a lot. Like a WHOLE lot. So I did a lot of things, like started going back to therapy, started taking meds for my anxiety and depression which I believed to be at the root of all of my bullshit, and started journaling. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it helped me- A LOT. Therapy helped me learn a lot about myself- just how bad my self esteem was, how low my self worth was, etc, when my therapist pointed out not only THAT i was blaming myself for all of my childhood traumas and relationship abuse, but how much of that blame I was putting on myself. She was helping me figure out where it was all coming from, but then she got promoted and they moved her somewhere else. I still kept journaling and subscribed to Cerebral and was seeing a psychiatrist both in real life and through Cerebral while waiting to be reassigned to a new therapist. I finally started nagging them about it and they reassigned me, but I wasn’t a fan of the new one. I start with a new old one (Therapist i saw a few years ago, and one I saw once as a teenager that I really liked) on Wednesday. I improved a lot in that time. There’s no way you can convince me that I didn’t- because I felt it, and was so proud of myself. But I was knocked back a few pegs by my stupid ass setbacks. I hurt him again. I feel awful about that. Awful isn’t even the word. I don’t know what is. But not only do I feel guilty for that, but also I feel disappointed in myself. I felt like I was doing so well, and then I let myself down. And I didn’t even see it coming, which more or less told me I couldn’t even trust myself, so why should he?
This time around I’m going to be working harder. Ive got some serious shit to work on. I can work on correcting my behaviors, but until I work on them at the roots, they could just manifest themselves in other ways. Like I may work on not being a horrible fucking bitch about dumb shit, but I might start, idk, smoking crack or something, because I never dealt with the actual root problems. So that’s what I’ll be doing for a while. I also decided that until I get right, I’m done drinking. I don’t think I’ve got an alcohol problem, but Ive been drinking at weird times for weird reasons, like, self medicating almost, and I feel like that is the start of alcoholism. Also, it heightens my anxiety. I can’t have that.
I realized while typing this that I’ve made about 7 suicide attempts in my adult life. Only the ones mentioned on here were ones I told anyone about and only one of them I actually got help for. About 4 of them in my teen years I got help for. That has me wondering WHY.
As of 9/4 (I wrote this post several days ago, I’m just adding this part in here) I’ve come to the conclusion that I think it’s because I’m tired. Like physically tired, but more emotionally tired. I thought about how I feel after making these attempts and its always relief that it’s almost over. That I won’t have to feel guilty or tired or overwhelmed anymore. I make a lot of jokes like “God hurry up and get me out of this flesh vessel” but that’s joking about how I legitimately feel most of the time. What I would tell someone else is to fill their lives with more things that make them happy- but my problem is that I don’t have time for that. I have bills to pay. I have a kid. I have cleaning to do. I have no energy. So… I’m tired. I’m drained and overwhelmed. This is stuff to talk to my shrink about, for sure. Some people love life. I would love to be one of those. I’m just surviving and keeping my body running and for what? I’m just tired.
So… I can’t do this alone, but thankfully I do have a pretty good support system- my friends and family. My current love interest is there too, although not with me. When we were together, he was my biggest fan. He was always rooting for me. I never really felt like I had someone who was really in my corner like that before. He genuinely wanted me to succeed and do well. So hes been given the link to this, and he can check up on it as he pleases.
So… there it is. The condensed version of the fucked up shit show that is my life. Hope this paints a picture of what I’m dealing with here, and hope it helps anyone else out there who may have gone through one or two or 20 of these things. To you people, I say- WE GOT THIS SHIT.
FUCK YEA!!!! (for you folks, I may add contact info in case you have questions or need help finding resources. I’m not a big help otherwise but I can point you in the right direction for someone who is.)