As a mental health worker, I am always telling my clients to
own their stories. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I am taking this
time to own mine. This is very long, as it covers 31 years of life. As you read
this you will hear things about people you know and love, and I want you to
keep these two things in mind as you do: First, everyone is the hero of their
own story but a villain in someone else’s and secondly, just as I’ve grown and
changed through the years, many of these people have, too. Content warning: this
contains mention of suicide and abuse.
I was born to a mother who wasn’t ready to be a mom. She
loved me in her own way, but it was clear from the start that I wasn’t enough
to fill the hole that she had from her own story. Growing up, my mother was
always my safe haven. Her hugs were one of the best things I could get and I
felt safest when sleeping next to her at night. But my mother had untreated
depression. She would go to work, come home to our dark house, drink tequila
sunrises, and then go to sleep alone. As a child I didn’t really understand
what was going on, but I knew something was wrong. So much so that one night when
I couldn’t find my mother and a knife was missing from the knife block, I
became very afraid that she was hurting herself. This was not the case, but
that seed was inserted very early on.
As a child I was smart, confident, and hopeful. I had dreams
of being a lawyer or the first female president. I was allowed to be myself
wholeheartedly in the way I dressed, thought, and acted. I am thankful for this
because it made me not care what others thought of me. I was bullied a lot in
school because I wasn’t pretty or popular; I was very poor and wore the same
clothes all the time and I wasn’t taught to care for my face or my hair. I
didn’t need others’ shallow opinions of me to know that I was smart and was
going somewhere. I did care about my parents’ opinions of me, though.
You see, no matter how many A+s I brought home, no matter
how many clubs I joined, no matter how many awards I received, none of it was
ever recognized. It was expected and expected behavior only gets noticed when
you stop doing it. My father has been in my life since I was a baby, when he
met my mom. And he was the biggest offender of mistreating me when I didn’t do
what was expected. I suffered from verbal abuse (being called a bitch, told
that I was the root cause of all the problems he had with my mom) and physical
abuse (dragged me by my hair to my room when I didn’t do the dishes correctly,
destroyed my school notebook because he was mad at me). If I learned early on
that sadness was the default emotion for my mother, then I also learned that
anger was the default emotion for my father. Both of which found solace in
self-medicating, my mother with alcohol and my father with marijuana. Sobriety
was not common in our household.
These emotions were born out of an unhappy relationship with
each other. My parents never slept in the same bed, with my father choosing to
sleep on the couch every night instead. They did not talk to each other; they
yelled about everything. To get some form of intimacy, my mother threw herself
into romance novels and my father threw himself into porn. My parents divorced
when I was thirteen, but I had internalized this notion of what it meant to be
in a relationship and found myself drawn to unrequited love, a romanticized
version of my parents’ dysfunction.
When my mother left my father, she packed us kids up while
my father was at work and moved us into the home of her new boyfriend, George,
a man who had just got out of prison. This man destroyed my relationship with
my mother, and she let him because she valued being with a man more than she
valued her relationship with her children. This codependency is something that
I vowed I wouldn’t do in my future relationships but was doomed to repeat. My
mother let George hit me on two occasions, both leaving huge welts on my face.
When I reported this information to my school, CPS was called, and during the
investigation they conducted my mother informed them that it did not happen and
that if it had I would have deserved it. She then proceeded to tell my entire
family I was on drugs and making up lies. She did not speak to me for an entire
month after that because I was “trying to ruin her life.”
It was during high school, living in George’s house and
experiencing the physical abuse, emotional neglect, and abandonment that I went
through, that I started showing the first symptoms of depression and social
anxiety. That smart, confident, and hopeful child had become a lazy, insecure,
and lost teenager. I failed classes, became extremely concerned with why boys
didn’t like me, and began to hate myself to the point that I didn’t know why I
was alive. I frequently wrote about suicide, listened to music that talked
about death, and tried to overdose but was stopped by a friend. I asked for
help on a daily basis, including requesting to go to counseling, and not once
did my mother do anything.
Because I was desperate for someone to care and understand
me, I found myself in a relationship with a man who did not respect me. I
really liked Randy and I liked that we had a lot of fun together, but from the
very first month of dating I knew I didn’t want to be with him. We were lying
under the stars and I became very anxious about the idea of being with him for
the rest of my life. He frequently pressured me to be intimate with him when I
had already told him I was not ready and he cheated on me two months into our
relationship because of it. I left him, vowed that I’d be single until college,
and then went right back to him a month later. I had no respect for myself and
I stayed with Randy for almost two years, even though the relationship was bad
the entire time and he frequently mistreated me. I learned from my parents
well.
During this relationship, I went off to college. My mother
took all the money I made that summer before college, maxed out my bank account
and overdrew it, and told me that since I chose to go to college I could figure
it out. She didn’t drive me to college and set me up in my dorm like all the
other kids. I drove up with Randy and stayed by myself on campus, rooming with
my randomly assigned roommate, Emily. Besides Randy, I was alone.
When I left Randy at the end of my freshman year of college,
I tried really hard to be a different person. I tried to be what my mother
wasn’t: an independent, strong woman. My mother was getting divorced from
George at that point, and I was excited that she and I could be these new women
together. Then she got together with another man shortly after leaving George,
and she kicked me out of her house, dropped all of my belongings in my father’s
yard, took the car that my name was on, took my phone, and took my laptop. My
father drove me to college that next year and I began my long journey of being
homeless and having to change my address every few months as I moved for breaks
and back for school.
During sophomore year of college, I struggled to survive
with no laptop, phone, car, or money. I got a job and started building myself
up. I also continued to room with Emily, who I developed feelings for and began
to date. I loved that she made me feel beautiful. Had I not been blinded by her
charm, I would have seen the early warning signs. She didn’t want anyone to
know about our relationship; she wanted me to tone down my own pride and
confidence about myself; she only loved me in private. But it was love, and I
was desperate for it.
I was so desperate that I spent the next eight and a half
years of my life with her. Throughout that time I had many great experiences
with Emily. We traveled, we laughed, and we grew. But I became increasingly
more depressed as time went on. When you’re in the storm, it’s hard to see
where it’s coming from, but looking back on it I can see clearly the abuse I
was going through. Emily slowly chipped away at who I was and made me into who
she wanted me to be. She shamed me when I wore clothes she didn’t like and
bought me clothes she wanted me to wear instead. She made me feel bad about
spending time with my friends and family. I couldn’t eat the food in our house
because any time I did, she would chastise me for not asking first. She refused
to support anything I wanted to do, like my writing, saying that I never
complete anything and I’m lazy. I couldn’t spend my own money on anything or
I’d get lectured. She never touched me, in front of others or at home, and our
relationship became as barren as my parents’ had been. She let her friends and
family talked to me like I was nothing, accusing me of “an agenda” and “turning
her.” She refused to tell our realtor we were together when we shopped for
houses and refused to put my name on the house. When I tried to tell her how
all of this was affecting me, she told me it was “my problem” and that she was
happy with the way everything was. I wasn’t dating her; I was her property.
During my relationship with Emily, I went to multiple
therapists. The first therapist I saw was my senior year of college (2010). I
had been dating Emily for two and a half years and I was unhappy with how
things were. I also was not speaking to my mother but wanted her to come to my
graduation because she’s my mother. The therapist taught me one of the most
important things I could learn: you only have control over yourself; you can’t
change others. This brought me a sense of peace for a short time.
The second time I saw a therapist was in graduate school
(2012) because I had lost all ability to focus, nothing made me feel good, and
I wanted to be able to get back to doing the things I loved. Instead of helping
me see that I was depressed, the therapist focused on activities that tried to
build my internal reward system that I did not have. I stopped seeing her
quickly.
The last therapist I saw while with Emily was in 2015. You
see, Emily had proposed to me a year before. Had I not been thinking about
leaving her after we went on vacation to Florida, I might have been happier
that she finally proposed, after waiting seven years for some forward motion in
our relationship. But she knew I was thinking about leaving and proposed to me
in the middle of vacation with friends. I had no choice but to say yes. She
forced me into it and then yelled at me when I told people we were engaged. I
spent the next year trying to plan a wedding with someone that I didn’t want to
marry and who didn’t want to marry me. It should have been a happy time, and
instead I felt nothing but dread and sadness. I started taking trips to Kingman
by myself to see friends and family and get away from Emily. And every time I
had to go back I would cry the entire 3.5 hours home.
Around October 2015 I began waking up every single day
wishing I had died in my sleep. I spent all day every day for three months
thinking about suicide, hoping that something tragic would take me and end my
misery. Emily had convinced me that I was the problem and that I just needed to
change and things would be okay again. My therapist I started seeing helped me
acknowledge that my relationship was the root of my pain and that I’d be
happier if I left. But even though I knew I needed to leave, Emily wouldn’t let
me go. She forced me to buy a new car so I was more financially tied down by
her. She demanded we do a separation with a contract, including when we would
go on dates, who we could talk to about things, and when I could see my dog.
But regardless, as soon as I moved all my stuff out of the house, I instantly
felt the weight lift from my shoulders and knew I’d never go back. After a
month of fighting through the separation, trying to find some semblance of the
love we had, I told her I didn’t want to be with her any more. She accused me
of cheating on her and tried to vilify me for something I didn’t do, but I was
free and her abuse didn’t matter any more.
The road after Emily has been a very long and tumultuous
one. I started dating Allen and for the first time in my entire life, I had an
active role in being with someone. The love and companionship we share has been
so amazing that my broken, abused self didn’t feel like I deserved it. I am
thankful every day that he stuck by me through the processing of what I’d been
through, the extreme mood swings as my trauma was triggered and I became
extremely suicidal and started to self-harm, and the eventual calm when I was
finally able to get the treatment I needed.
I have seen two therapists since leaving Emily. The first
was through my EAP program at work and he helped me see that I was not crazy. I
had been severely abused. I deserved to be listened to and not told that it
wasn’t true because “we just didn’t see that in her.” I was allowed to be angry
and sad and confused and mourn the loss of my relationship, even if I didn’t
want it any more and was happier with Allen. My second therapist I’ve been
seeing for over a year now and she has helped me process the entire trauma I’ve
outlined throughout this very long narrative. She helped me see how the
patterns of my childhood with my parents led me straight into Emily’s claws.
She helped me see that I didn’t have to hold onto anger, depression, or anxiety
any more because they were just unhelpful tools that I was using to try to hurt
others the way I had been hurt. I also tried three different types of medications,
all of which helped in their own way. But medication isn’t for me and I’m
medication free these days. And despite my diagnosis of Complex PTSD that will
never go away, I am pretty happy these days, too.
Owning my story is important because it made me who I am
today, and although I’d trade all of the trauma for a happy life any time, I am
glad that I am resilient and understanding and empathic because of what I went
through. I am glad that I get to go to work and help people who could have been
me as a child needing someone like me as an adult. I am glad I made it out
alive.
