everything that’s happened and everything that’s happening

So where do I even begin? Well, I signed up for this website so I guess I should explain why. Currently, I am not thinking about suicide, but I have in the past and fairly recently thought about how I would do it, why I would do it, who I would hurt and so forth, and then I realized that if anything happened to me, no one would know why, so here I am. Telling all of you what I can’t tell anyone in person.

I’m 15, I turn 16 in three weeks. I have a job that’s pretty mediocre, get good grades, I’m what you would consider popular and well I would look perfectly happy to you if you saw me smiling and laughing at my school. I’m fairly nice to everybody and with friendships that have faded, well they have just disintegrated with no bad blood between the two of us. My life sounds pretty great right? I’m not bullied by anyone, I’m well liked, there seems to be no problems at all.

Wrong.

When I had just turned 13, I started having problems at home that escalated from more than the usual. I don’t know why or how I knew about self harming, but I started, and I couldn’t stop. My friends started noticing the cuts on my arms, but we were all too young to understand what I was truly doing to myself. I played volleyball, which as you would imagine would be pretty painful. On days the cuts were more noticeable, I skipped practice. I had a boyfriend who just didn’t understand, so I kept him in the dark, a fact he is still hurt about today. Then I stopped going to school, and thats when my friends were really worried. Instead of going to school, my dad would let me stay at his office, and would drop me off before school ended. I started fighting with my mom a lot over stupid, minuscule things but my life just seemed to spiral down, and my dad, who I worshipped at the time, well he stopped coming home.

One night, after a volleyball game, I decided I was done staying at home. My friend and her mom offered to let me stay for a couple days just to get a break from my home life. It seemed like a great idea, but my mom came to grab me the second she found out. I refused to leave and she called the cops on me. Long story short, the cop found out I was self harming and took me to the hospital in the back of his cop car. I was checked in and placed in a room with two doors. They asked me questions, took my blood, I just remember being so tired. My dad stayed with me, while my mom took my little sister home. He answered questions from the psychiatrist as did I, and I guess we were pretty convincing. They seemed to think nothing was wrong and sent me home the next morning. Maybe I should have told them more and I could have stopped the snowball of effects that followed this. Little did they know, I had previously stood in the laundry room and tried to decide which chemical would kill me. That was the first time and one of the only times I have ever nearly come to actually attempting to commit suicide. At 13 years old, I wanted my life to end.

After the hospital incident, I was required to seek talk therapy with a counselor and basically tell her why I started self harming and talk about everything that I was feeling. I went to her, she was great, and she tried to improve my home life with a group therapy with my family. Well, this didn’t go so well. After I explained how overbearing they were with school, they stopped caring, when I said that I didn’t like how every other day my phone, computer and friend privileges were being taken away, well they shrugged their shoulders. Once again, maybe if this had gone well, we could have done something.

So this went on for a couple months, eventually my dad stopped showing up, eating, showering, etc and tensions arose with my mom because she was upset about my dad. I didn’t get along with my mom and my dad, I hardly saw him. Then around Christmas, things started to take a turn for the worse. My dad got into trouble with the law, did some things at his business that weren’t great, and left my family, and when I mean leave, I mean he comes home, grabs whatever he needs, packs up his car, and says he headed to somewhere away from us. All I remember from that night is giving him a blanket to help him pack.

After he left, CPS got involved. Two days before Christmas, cops came to our door with a person from CPS and started questioning us. “Are you scared of your dad?” “Do you feel safe?” and then they said we had to leave, so we spent Christmas in another state with my alcoholic grandparents (more on that later).

You still keeping up?

Then we came back home and I had two weeks to say goodbye. My friends planned a going away party, made a scrapbook, and everybody was just going to think I moved away. Then yet again, CPS got involved when a restraining order was placed on my dad. We had to move out of the state that weekend or my sister and I would be put into foster care. So, we left a week early. No goodbyes, no closing up loose ends. We moved in with my alcoholic grandparents and I was registered into school. My mom’s dad came to our home to help her move, he cleaned out my locker, returned all my school books for me, and that was the end of it.

So I started going to my new school. It was terrible. I made friends, sat through their awful classes and mainly spent time in my room. We lived too far away from anything to go to the movies or mall all the time so I ended up with a lot of free time. A month into the stay, we got kicked out so we moved in with my mom’s dad and her stepmom, which was in a different state. Once again I was enrolled in school, made friends, and eventually completed eighth grade there.

During this time, well I found out my dad was Bipolar, and while he was dealing with himself in a court mandated treatment program, we were suffering. So then after completely eighth grade, we moved back in with my alcoholic grandparents for the summer. The drinking got worse and eventually my parents took it up themselves to start the habit as well. All I remember from staying there is wanting to leave and always doing the dishes. I cleaned very bowl, plate, wineglass, for some reason, that was the price I had to pay for being allowed to come back to the house.

We eventually moved back home and I went to school with all my friends again. My dad wasn’t taking medicine and didn’t have any plan to, so we accepted his decision trusting he had himself under control. Things were pretty okay from there, we were poor due to my dad’s legal issues and our three moves in a span of 9 months, but we were back home and together as a family.

Isn’t that admirable? Despite everything he did, my dad still wasn’t going to take medicine and we still were a family, but then came the rumors. The reasons I left ranged from witness protection program, runaway from home, pregnant teen, and dealings with the Russian mafia.

So that was my freshmen year I got pretty decent grades, dated I guy I really liked, and things seemed to be okay. But after we broke up, I made some stupid decisions which luckily, didn’t have any serious implications, and ll in all I had a pretty great year.

Sophomore year was the same, except my parents drinking got worse. They became so dependent on alcohol that they stopped being parents. They started getting mad at me for things they shouldn’t care about and didn’t get mad for things they should. They started fighting a lot, playing music loudly at night, drinking, and well living like they didn’t have kids in the house. I got into fights with them, had my stuff taken away, got grounded, the whole ordeal. Sophomore year, I started having panic attacks, there were nights I sat on the floor and just said “I can’t do this” I lost my best friend partially through the second semester of the year and reconciled with an old one. Honestly, I thought I would be more upset over this but just ended up not caring instead. Just to give you a glimpse of what life has been like, my dad took my computer during finals week due to my “bad attitude” and then on nights I tried to study, they started fighting, drinking, and playing loud music. Meet my parents, everybody.

During the summer, I found a job. I worked full time so 5 days a week, 8+ hours a day. It was exhausting but it kept me out of the house, which meant less interactions with them. We still had bad interactions and they still found ways to punish me. They started being controlling over the chores and how if I didn’t do the chores, well there goes my privileges. They threatened and took way my phone, friends, computer, debit card, whatever they could think of. There were some nights, I lost it, throwing everything in my room and collapsing on the ground crying. I was so stressed between chores and work that I forgot that I wasn’t eating, and I started only eating one meal a day at work. I’ve been losing a lot of weight which normally would make me confident, but now makes me tired. I have less energy to go out and do things with friends and such, I spend a lot of time in bed, feeling sick and tired.

Now I’m about a week into junior year, I’ve already been punished by my parents for something despite the fact that they just told me I had been stepping it up recently and have been doing so well. So in a week I went from a very loving, helpful daughter who has been doing great with balancing school, family and work to a liar and a dissapointment. Maybe I’m one of those things, maybe I’m both, I honestly don’t know. As of now, I guess I’m whatever they say I am.

Before I end this, I want to say that in the course of three years, I have thought of suicide and/or suicide attempts more times than I can remember. The only reason I haven’t gone through with it is for the people I love and how they’ve already had so much pain in their lives and how I don’t want to add to that. Ironically, I hate seeing people in pain, either physically, emotionally or mentally, yet I feel it every day.

So there’s my story, I’m sorry that was so much, but I needed to write it down. I don’t keep a diary or journal of any sort so this is as close as its going to get.