April 22, 2010

• What I’ve Learned

  I’ve had a lot of new readers in the last couple of weeks, and I’d like to share a couple of things about myself, and also a little message about my experiences.

  There are some people who know me pretty well, and they would say that I’m very mature for my age. Actually, I talked to my mother on the phone the other day. She mentioned to me that my step father has a very high opinion of me, and he’s proud of me for being the person that I am given everything I’ve been through in my life.

  As a short run-down of my 24 years, I’ll give a little taste of what I’m talking about.

  My parents were separated when I was 1, divorced when I was 3. I lived with my father and he found a girlfriend who had a son about my age and we all lived together. My mother was a cocaine addict and an alcoholic. My father had been just a stoner and an alcoholic, but his new girlfriend introduced heroin into his life. When I was about 5 years old, I was repeatedly molested by someone who would hang around our apartment. One time, I was shot up with heroin. I have a scar on my arm from this.

  I don’t remember much of anything before the age of 10. Most of the memories I have of that time are bad ones, such as fist fights between my dad and his girlfriend and other things.

  We moved a lot. I’ve been to so many schools, I never remember how many. I always have to try and count…which doesn’t work anyway because I can’t remember all the schools I went to before 4th grade. We moved because we were really poor and my dad switched jobs a lot, so we couldn’t afford where we were living anymore. When I was in 4th grade, my dad left his girlfriend. The two of us moved into a basement apartment of a couple who had 3 kids. Their youngest was a year younger than me, and the others were a few years older. Cassie and I became fast friends. She was a bad influence, to say the least. At 10, I started smoking. I drank beer a couple of times. We ran away once. We were constantly at each other’s side and we rode our bikes everywhere.

  I stopped that behavior when we moved away 2 years after we moved there, including smoking (EW! I can’t believe I ever did that). When I was 5, my dad and his girlfriend had a baby, and when they split, my sister stayed with her mother. My sister got taken away by social services, and we had to move to a place where we had enough room for her.

  In 6th grade, I became suicidal. I started seeing things that scared me. I could sometimes see myself lying on the bathroom floor with blood all over and my wrists slit. I tried to figure out what was wrong with me and I got books from the school library. One day I said to my dad, “I think I’m depressed.” “Why do you say that?” He asked me. “I don’t know.” The subject didn’t come up again until one day I went to the school counselor and told her about the things I thought about. The school called my dad and he had to come pick me up. He made an appointment with a therapist or a psychologist or something and I saw her a couple of times. She told me there was nothing wrong with me.

  At the end of 9th grade, I went to live with my mom. My other 2 sisters lived there with my step dad and mother. They owned a business and were moderately successful and they bought a big house. For a long time, my mother had been clean from coke. When the business really started doing well and they bought the house, she started doing coke again. Up until this point, I never knew how crazy my mother was. I didn’t see her much when I was a kid, and after she met her current husband, I only saw her every other weekend, if that. Anyway, when she was on coke, when she was coming down it was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced. If she slept in in the morning and then started stomping around when she was awake, you knew it was going to be a bad day.

  She was violent and cruel. She screamed and sometimes hit. She went after my step dad with kitchen knives and she would disappear for days at a time. From the time I moved in, I took care of my sisters. I was the one that woke them in the morning for school, made sure they were showered and dressed. When I got my driver’s license and my dad gave me his car because he bought a truck, I did the grocery shopping every other week. I was the one that took my sisters school supply shopping.

  By the time 12th grade came along, I couldn’t handle it anymore. My one sister had moved to her dad’s house and she had been my rock. She has always been and still is my favorite sister. You’re not supposed to have favorite siblings, but I do. Anyway, I moved out and into a friend’s house. The year before, her mother had given me an open invitation to stay there because she knew about my mother. I moved 6 times senior year and my grades slipped. At one point, I was living at home again and I was terrified that my mother was going to kill me in my sleep so I didn’t sleep. I had really bad insomnia. I would fall asleep in class. My teachers became concerned. But this was a small town and everyone knew everyone’s business. Everyone knew about my mother, so they let it pass. They passed me and let me graduate, even though I’m sure I was going to fail a class and if I would have failed it, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate.

  I went to live with my father and he got me a job where he worked. I paid him rent and my own bills. I’ve worked ever since.

  When I went to live with my dad, I went through a dark period for several years. I started cutting, and sometimes it was really bad. I had rage. The years of bad things happening to me and resentment and everything had been building up inside of me. I had never had real therapy and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Sometimes I would get so angry that I would literally see red and the blood would rush to my head and I could hear it in my ears. I said things I didn’t mean to the people I love. I had always had a problem with anger, and it was so much worse.

  The funny thing is, ever since 6th grade, there was pretty much not a day that went by that I didn’t think about killing myself. I thought about all the ways I could do it. I never tried it. After I graduated, I never thought about it, even through this really dark time. And during this dark time, there were times I surfaced for long enough that I thought about committing myself, because I think I was truly going insane. I was a danger to myself with the cutting, and I was very mentally unhealthy. Then when I turned 21, I was an alcoholic for awhile. It was almost the only time I felt good, when I was drunk.

  During recent years, I rarely cut myself. I haven’t been drunk in over a year. I’ve drank, but I haven’t been drunk. I think it’s safe to say that I can get drunk now without being an alcoholic, as long as I don’t do it every weekend.

  It is not my intention to look for sympathy in telling all of you this story. In fact, I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t want pity. The point of this post is to tell people what I’ve learned from the life I’ve lived thus far.

  I truly don’t know what turned around my way of thinking. At some point, I think I made the discovery that life is full of ups and downs. There are going to be really bad things that happen to you in your life. There are going to be good times. But you can’t let the bad times get you down. You can’t let it beat you. Sure, it feels bad and it hurts at the moment, but it will get better. Then when it gets better, you’ll fall again. You just have to pick yourself up and put the pieces back together when it’s time. You have to consciously make the decision to change your thinking. It’s hard. Believe me, I know. But I’m the amazing person I am today because I’ve made that decision.

  Also, it really pisses me off when people hear my age and tell me I’m still just a baby and that I still don’t know what life is. Don’t tell me that. The people that say these things don’t know me and what I’ve been through. It’s not only our experiences that make us who we are, it’s how we handle them.

  This is what I’ve learned.

  

  • 8:31 pm
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