I’m tired and I don’t think I can endure much more

I was never happy in my life.  Successful by other people’s standards?  Sure.  Beautiful?  Average, not ugly.  I supposedly had everything going for me in life: a career, a family, a fiancé, friends.

The reality is that I had nothing.  My parents were emotionally and/or physically absent for much of my life.  My mother was mentally ill and my father tried to be out of the house as much as he could.  As a result, he left a small child in the hands of an unstable woman.  She ranted and raved, threatening to commit me to a mental facility by age nine.  I was the recipient of name-calling and emotional torture as early as age three.  My mother finally had her first major breakdown when I was a teenager; I still have nightmares of her accusing me of trying to kill her.  At one point, she tried to kill my father with a knife and swung it at me when I tried to disarm her.

No one intervened or cared; as far as the rest of the world was concerned, they were the perfect parents.  They were very careful about their public image: “Don’t air dirty laundry in public,” “Don’t speak too loudly or the neighbors will hear x.” I tried to save my own life by going to college and getting two, almost three degrees in completely different fields.  Were my parents proud of me?  Insofar as they had bragging rights.  But they never gave me unconditional love.  Instead, they borrowed tens of thousands of dollars from my student loans to keep themselves afloat; neither of them kept a job for long.  I was lazy, yet I’d never been fired or laid off, and I often worked two, three jobs just to feed myself.

I tried therapy, tried to keep “positive,” was always the type to pick herself up after getting struck.  That’s what the rest of the world wanted.  I was everyone’s girl friday – I was “smart, pretty, understanding, kind, blah, blah, freakin blah,” but whenever I needed help, no one stuck around long enough.  “Oh, that’s too bad….”  A year ago, I thought that I finally found love with my ex-fiancé.  But he was younger than me and wasn’t really ready to “settle down,” even though he kept telling me that he loved me and I was the only one for him.  He blamed my depression, my anger, everything on me.  To a certain extent, that was valid; yet he never demonstrated enough self-awareness to see how selfish he was.  He wanted a girl to hang out with and have sex with; he didn’t care about how I supported him through his indecision, how I always stayed up to talk to him on Skype at his request, even though I only got four hours of sleep a night.  I always listened and apologized; he often said, “I don’t understand.  How did I hurt you?” Even after I directly explained it to him, as in “You did X and that hurt me.”

All of this drama while attempting to finish my doctorate, all of this while living abroad.  But as long as I smiled and said, “I’m fine,” no one gave me a second or third thought.  After my ex and I broke up, I did try to reach out, to exercise, do the right thing.  Nada.  Everyone said, “But it’ll get better; you’ll see” and “Just move on; get past this.”  Was anyone actually listening to me?  Hell, one “friend” stood me up even when she knew that I was depressed.  At that moment, I knew that no one ever cared about me.  No one called to say hello, to see if I was okay.  My father did, but only because I told my mother to go to hell after her latest drama play.

I’m tired of being Atlas, the go-to person.  Suicide survivors often blame those who committed suicide, saying that he/she took the coward’s way out.  However, from my experience, the suicidal person does leave clues, even says he or she is and wants someone to care.  Yet people are fickle and just don’t give a damn.  They only care after the fact so that they aren’t seen as evil people.  I haven’t taken this lightly; I have just come to realize that I matter little to the world.  I’m not special, inconsequential.  If I mattered, then someone who actually knows me would ask if I’m okay.  But that won’t happen.  I’m tired of the heartache, of waiting for someone to show me that there’s hope.