Scars

A close friend of mine did something similar to this on his page so I decided to try it too. The difference is I guess my suicidal thoughts and low self esteem started long before online friends or dating.

I grew up in a family of eight plus. We did foster care for two kids so there was sometimes an extra girl in the house. I was always biologically the oldest though. If you’ve grown up in a big family, then you probably understand where I’m coming from when I say it’s like survival of the fittest. And when the three oldest siblings are you and your two brothers, you never let them see you cry. That’s just the rule. But my problem is bigger than that. For as long as I can remember, it was my parents.

One of my youngest memories is when I was 3 or 4 years old. Back then, I had been diagnosed with aspergers(though apparently I don’t have it anymore :b they said the brain isn’t fully developed when you’re young so I was probably misdiagnosed) but one of my ‘symptoms’ was sensitivity to touch or certain feelings. Aka- I had something against socks lol. My parents didn’t tolerate any disobedience though. Even from a diagnosed 4 year old. I had refused to put on my socks for school and missed the bus. My dad was angry with me so he took me up to his room and beat me with a belt. He first hit me because he was mad with my disobedience. But then he started to hit me out of pure anger. My mom had to come in to stop him. I still have a scar on my arm from it. It’s faint but still there.

Fast forwarding a few years to when I’m 15, and my parents and I still aren’t getting along. They want me to follow their every command without question and I want to start doing a little on my own. This is around the time when we started getting in more fights and I started running away. FF to 16 now and the fights have worsened. this is around the time when my parents cam up with this brilliant punishment idea called ‘black out’ where if we question or resist even a little, they sit us at the table or ground us to our room and we’re not allowed to move or do anything but eat and clean until we comply. My problem with this is that I’ve developed something over the past years where I now have this phobia of being left alone or not having someone I’m close with to talk to which does not include my family considering how much we fight. So as you could probably guess, this didn’t go well with me…so this is when I started to cut. and not just the small shallow ones either, they were deep. I couldn’t do anything else. I would lock myself in my room and sit in the corner, letting my arms and legs bleed into my clothes. I washed my own clothes so my parents wouldn’t know and I would only cut where they couldn’t see. But when I was 17 and close the end of November, I decided to tell them. I thought that maybe if I showed them my arms and legs that they would see how much pain i was in and maybe they would change. But of course, that was only my wishful thinking…I took off my sweatshirt and showed them the blood stained glass and my dad looked at me and laughed.

They were so convinced there was nothing wrong with me that he thought I was just cutting to try and manipulate them, to try to control them. Another few weeks and we got into another fight. It was around the beginning of January and I knew I needed to get away from home. I tried to get my parents to allow me to go to a friend’s house to live there for even just a few weeks but they refused to allow it saying how “if something (happened), they (were) still responsible for me”  So I wrote my first suicide letter and took it to the school. I showed it to my teacher and they immediately pulled me from my classes for the day and called my parents. They then took me to the ER and I waited while they looked for someplace to institutionalize me. They finally found a place closer to the city for me so they drove me over there, checked me in and I was set. That’s were I met everyone else there, my friends. I wont mention names but I will say I was surprised…they were all like me. sure they had their social or family issues but they were NORMAL. Just like me, they just needed somewhere to get away. They just needed somewhere safe.

While I was there, my parents came to see me twice, the first time, I wasn’t invited in to talk with them. I didn’t want to. but the second time I was and it turned out like you’d expect, they said something, I snapped and left. The only other time I talked to my parents was when my mom called me on the phone while I was there and that didn’t go well either. All she talked about was how well everyone was doing without me and how much better everything was with me gone. Great self esteem booster huh?

After 6 days, they let me out(more like kicked me out. I didn’t want to leave) my parents made me a deal that they would change and the rules would be different for me now because I had been hospitalized but that only lasted for a few weeks before we got into another huge fight. They started going back to how things were because they thought the way they were doing thing present wasn’t working so they were going to go back to the plan that had caused me to snap in the first place. I didn’t want anything to do with it so I tried to walk out the door to go to my friend’s house to cool down and stay away from it all…for a break but my dad wasn’t gunna have any of it. It got physical and I ended up pinned down, hardly able to breathe. My parents called the police and even after my dad let me go, I still couldn’t get up for another 15 minutes so I was lying on the floor gasping for breath. Of course the police didn’t do anything. They’re just useless when it comes to metal health. After that, things calmed down again and that’s when I met a lot of the close friends I still talk to now. I guess they’re the reasons I was able to make it through the next couple months and stop my cutting :3

Finally, there was the final blow. My dad pushed me down the stairs a few months ago(3 months before my 18th birthday) and he’d finally had enough(I’d had enough years ago but as I had said before, they never let me leave). I packed my suitcase and walked around the block to my friends house. from there I stayed a few nights and then moved into another one of my friend’s house and I’ve been living there since around December.

I don’t actually know why I wrote all this or what the point of anyone else reading this is. I guess I just wanted to get it all off my chest..I could have written a lot more too but a lot of the other stories are EXTREMELY long and take forever to tell so I just left them out…