Not Going to Lie, I’m Nervous to Post This

I know it’s been a while since I last posted.

When I say things have been crazy, they have been wild in the best possible ways. Before my 22nd birthday I had put in my two weeks notice at my old job and have been working at my current job for almost a month now. (That whole transition is going to be another post.)

I’ve also started seeing this guy, and I’m happy and nervous all at the same time.

I’ve never felt more comfortable with a guy before, and my brain is starting to produce some irrational thoughts. I’ve talked about my mental health with him, and he has shown me nothing but support. Last night we were talking about “us”, and for a rare moment, I just couldn’t find the words to express my feelings.

Even this post feels like a train wreck, in my head (I think I’m either getting a cold, or recovering from one so cut me some slack please).

Because I’m happy, so happy, but also scared.

I have never felt like I’ve clicked with someone (as a love interest) as easily as I had with him. He respects me, is nice to me, and seems good for me.

But I’ve been burned before, so my brain doesn’t care about his good points. I truly believe this guy wouldn’t hurt me, not intentionally, but the more relaxed I am with him, the more my brain starts producing these irrational thoughts.

“It’s a chemical reaction.”

“You’re just happy you don’t have to spend the night alone.”

“You just like the idea of being with someone.”

“He’s just saying this.”

“You only think it’s real.”

And then I get nervous. What if I overstep some imaginary line while trying to prove to myself this is real. If I post about him, it’ll be real. If I tell my friends and family, this will be real, right?

But what if it turns out it’s not? Or what if I do something (like this post) that takes it a step too far?

I’ve been good mentally.  I only go to see my therapist once every 3 months (shout out to Dr. Savard), and I haven’t been on antidepressants since this past June.

I have always known relationships could break me. There are so many uncertainties, there are so many things I don’t have control over.

But I do have control over how I react to them, so for right now it’s a little bit of a battle between my brain and myself.

And this time, I plan on winning.

When he puts his arm around me and kisses my forehead, it quiets my insecurities. When he makes me laugh, it eases my anxiety. When he holds my hand, it feels real.

We feel real.

When we’re together, I feel like I can be myself.

It’s been a short time, but things just feel right.

And I think he feels the same about me.

I’m still anxious about us, but things are getting easier and I would be stupid not to recognize part of it is because he’s a good guy.

Thanks babe.

I promise the next post won’t be this sappy, but I needed to sort some things out and thought some people could relate to this.  I also wanted to ease my way back into posting.

Until the next post lil homies,

Alexis

Chapter 4: Coming Home and Trying to Erase the Bad with the Good (Final Chapter of this Story)

Howdy everyone. I do apologize for the horrible delay with the posts. Work has been hectic, I picked up boxing classes, and I have been trying to study for the GRE/get work done for grad school applications. When I finally felt like I got everything together, I had to evacuate because of a Hurricane. Your girl has been busy.

That being said I have thought about posting but honestly, my teens/high school were some of the worst memories I can think of when it comes to red flags of my anxiety. Mostly because, to be honest, they weren’t subtle flag, they were in your face.

The memory that comes to the front of my mind, is when I thought I lost my car keys and I had a breakdown in the parking lot of my high school. Thankfully I had a friend (shout out to SATAN [friend’s nickname, she is still a great friend to this day]) who stayed with me and helped me retrace all of my steps to see where I left my car keys. The red flag was that I was manic and on the verge to tears that I couldn’t find those keys, but as soon as we located them I acted as if nothing had happened at all.

This is still a moment where I look back and think, “Yeah, something wasn’t right bout that.”

High school wasn’t the greatest time for me, no matter how good my resume/transcript looked my senior year.

I was a successful student and athlete. I’d like to think that I was well liked by the people that knew me, they definitely would’ve tapped me into a fight if that counts for something. I didn’t have a solid group of friends, I had some ride or dies, but we weren’t a group. I mean I guess there was the high school track team, but too much has happened with that group as a whole that left me with my own shit to work through.

Because of Hurricane Florence Khan (my cat) and I had to come home, and now I’ve been here for over a week cause I can’t get back to Wilmington.

It was nice at first, but the longer I stay the more all of this past shit gets dragged up to the front of my mind. Shit I thought I’ve moved past, but I guess I never faced in the first place.

Coming home, made me realize how some of my happiest memories in this house only occurred after I officially moved out. I moved out my sophomore year of college in 2015. We moved into this house around 2003. All those years, and the things that stick out were how unhappy I was for a good portion of that time. It made coming home sad, because I was unhappy so much and I wish I was happy when I was younger. It made me sad because I’m still unhappy and I may always be a little unhappy for the rest of my life. It made my heart break thinking that in all the years of growing up I couldn’t remember a solid year where I was more happy than anxious, nervous, unhappy on the inside.

I may have been born with my anxiety and depression, but that’s not to say it doesn’t fucking suck to realize it robbed me of my childhood.

Another thing is that coming home just really sets in how much of my past I’ve let dictate how I want to live my life now. I was supposed to be the “successful” student, but I don’t feel successful. I am in crippling credit card debt (my parents know and know that I am working hard to fix it but it’ll probably take years).  I have a full time job that is good for me, but I don’t use my degree. I work out but I still feel out of shape and dislike the body I’m in. I have social anxiety whenever I go to bars and clubs because I feel like I don’t fit into the scene. I fear that I either there’s something wrong with me and that I won’t find a relationship with someone that actually gives a shit about me. I’m afraid that I won’t get accepted into grad school. I’m afraid that I peaked in college.

I’m afraid I have made some wrong turn somewhere in my life and that I can’t go back.

I’m afraid that I thought I’ve changed, but I haven’t.

I’m afraid that I thought I was good, but I’m not.

I feel like I need a friend but everyone seems to have their shit together, so I get my shit together. I suck up the loneliness and chalk it up to life.

I pretend to be confident. Fake it till you make it. I tell my friends to be confident with their decisions, but I’m not even confident in myself.

I want to be happy with myself, but honestly I’m not. I post the happy stories, the pick me ups online, but when the screen goes dark, the messages say zero, shit gets hard.

But I keep my head up. I’m the rock, the strong one, I have friends that rely on me. I have friends that come to me for advice. I oddly have people that look up to me. So I suck up all this up. I go to therapy. I work out. I go to work. I eat food with friends. I live my life.

Note:

I know this chapter doesn’t really talk about incidents that happened in my teens, that’s mostly because I was more interested in talking about how these things still affected me to this day.

I did attempt to commit suicide during High School. It wasn’t the first time, and while I’m working really hard, and am in an actual good place where I don’t see myself getting that low, I’m not dumb enough to say it’d be the last time I get close.

I’m sorry I didn’t end the chapter on lighter note, but I will be going back to my “normal updates”. I guess to end this on a lighter note here’s a song that has resonated with me while I’ve been home. I won’t analyse it but I think the song/music video speak enough on their own.

 

Until the next post.

Be you and stay authentic my lil homies.

Alexis

Chapter 3: Hormones + Foreign Country + Tween Girls = My Introduction To Self Harm

Picking up from the previous chapter, when I was 10 years old my parents shipped me off to New Zealand to live my Mom’s side of the family.

Let me set the scene by saying that the last I saw my Aunt, Uncle, and cousin was around 6 or 7 years years ago.  The last time I saw my other family relatives I was shitting in a diaper and gurgling as a means of communication.

Also travelling from North Carolina to New Zealand  takes a total 18+ hours by flight, and since I traveled by myself I had to be babysat by airline workers during that time.

Essentially my parents shipped me halfway across the world to live with a bunch of strangers.

And the first couple of months I reacted as such, aka like a spoiled brat in an odd hostage situation that nobody wants to be a part of.

 

But that’s not what this chapter is about! It’s about hormones, and puberty, and the budding depression that would truly start to develop.

When you start going to school in a different country, in the middle of the school year, you sorta stick out. I also had a southern accent which did not make me as popular as I thought it would.

It was during this time that I experienced for the tween girl bullying for the first time.

And while I was in New Zealand it was always the same pattern, almost every year for the two and half years I lived there.

I would befriend a girl and we would become really close. Said friend would then hang out with whichever group of girls was the most “popular” at the time. The “leader” of said group would then isolate me from other friends and then bully me. And even to this day I still have no idea what the hell I did to earn it.

First year (10/11 years old): My “best” friend stopped hanging out with me and then I started getting bullied through my hotmail account. That’s right boys and girls, back in the day people would send mean emails telling you to kill yourself and you couldn’t block them because they would just make a new email account.

About a year later, the friend told me the girls who had been emailing me (I had to get a  new email address because of it) were her new friends and that they had eventually turned on her. I said good and moved on.

Years later when I was back in the state’s she actually messaged me on Facebook and apologized for everything and I forgave her cause I can’t hold what she did when we were kids.

Second year (12/13 years old): My new “best” friend started hanging out with some girls at school, and I was not a fan of some of them because they were just so mean spirited. The “leader” would make jokes about how my friend was fat and needed to stop eating, and she’d be prettier if she was skinnier. My friend was (and still is) fucking gorgeous and it pissed me off to see “friends” talk to each other like that. I had also noticed my friend had started to show signs of an eating disorder because sometimes I would have to bargain with her to eat her lunch. I didn’t know anything about resources or even thought about telling her parents because I thought that would break her trust in me.

The new friend then started hanging out with her new friends and because I wasn’t down with what they stood form, up went the harassment. Like following me around during lunch and saying shit at me, harassment. To the point that I remember asking my aunt and uncle to not go to school one day because those girls made me not want to go to school, and I LOVED school. I have never asked to not go to school unless I was sick.

Obviously my Aunt and Uncle asked me why, I explained the situation, and essentially they told me to brush it off and go to school. So I did. The harassment didn’t though.

(Side note: It actually got slightly worse and bled over to the school’s sports teams I was on, because some of the girls that were in the friend group were on the same teams as me.

I remember traveling with the team and recording some of the girls making fun of me at night because they thought I was asleep, and then letting the coach listen in.)

In hindsight, I know that the not going to school was my cry for help that I wasn’t sure what to do. And that I just wasn’t all to happy.

I didn’t know what to do because even though I was taller and stronger than almost all of the girls, they isolated me friends so I didn’t really have any actual friends to turn to.

(Other side note, I did befriend this group but our bonding was making fun of this one kid and maybe it was roasting cause he hung out with us, but to be honest it was bullying and I’m not proud of it. The guy and I have talked about it, and we’re all good.)

I just felt like I didn’t have any control over my life.

I remember not having any energy and being constantly tired if I tried to do anything, from school to sports practices (which I now know is a sign of depression).

And then I found the magical powers of energy drinks. It was the perfect solution to my problems, I could get more involved with sports and extra curricular activities to avoid the fact that I I felt like I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t feel like I need to eat as much food because I still had energy, and I started to lose weight. I felt great. I felt like I had control over my life.

One bottle, turned to two, turned to more.

I eventually would drink at least three energy drinks every day, like meals. I would swing by the convenience store on the way to school, grab as money drinks as I could afford, and keep them in my backpack and under my bed so no one would know how much I had.

I never realized I had a problem, until one day I forgot to buy a bottle. When I missed my “hit” became super agitated in class, and didn’t settle done until I got one.

I went home and thought about the idea that I had become addicted to energy drinks. (To be honest at least it was energy drinks and not drugs or alcohol, but it could have been. I knew at that age that addiction is addiction).

I decided to stop drinking energy drinks, cold turkey.

Let me tell you, that was hell.

I had the sweats, I was all over the place for around two weeks while I weaned my body off the drinks.

I remember thinking I would feel so much better with one sip, one drink every three days or so, but I stuck with it.

And then eventually the sweats went away.

And during that whole time, no one in my family had any idea what was going on inside our household.

Because even though I was crashing, to everyone else I was thriving academically, athletically, and “socially”.  I had come out of my introvert shell, really putting myself out there and trying new things.

In hindsight, I realize this was the first time I had could hide my flaws through my successes.

I had learned that as long as I excelled, no one would question me.

I had learned to maintain a facade of excellence.

Chapter 2: Running Away From Problems Exposed The One I Had, We Just Didn’t Know What To Call It At The Time

When I was around 9 or 10 I ran away from home.

I know that this was probably one of the scariest moments of my parents’ lives.

The reason I believe this, is because I left them a note which I think my Dad still keeps in his Bible (he keeps all of his important notes and memorable documents there).

I can’t remember verbatim what I wrote within this note, (I don’t want to ask my Dad if I could read it) but I remember saying along the lines that I was sorry I was a bad daughter and was hoping my parents would be happier without me in their lives.

Fucked up, right?

In hindsight, I believe this act of running away was the earliest example of attempting suicide. I say this because I thought if I disappeared, my parents’ lives would be so much better,  and at that age I just didn’t know I could kill myself. The closest thing to that in my mind would have been getting snatched and murdered while running away (I’m not actually sure if those thoughts did cross my mind, but if they did I was probably scared yet felt like I deserved it anyway).

The truth is, is that I believe that if I had known what suicide was, I would have attempted it.

Here’s how I know:

Almost every day my parents and I went for a walk in the late afternoon/early evening. Earlier that day or the day before, my Dad and I had gotten into a bit of a pickle, about what I have no idea. Either way I was angry because I felt like my Dad got way too mad at me, while at the same time upset because I felt  like a shitty daughter.

(TIME OUT- This is a constant theme while I was growing up. My Dad and I are now much better at communicating with one another. I will again reiterate that my Dad and I have a great relationship, and we have ALWAYS loved each other, but communication has been majorly worked on through the years.)

I was tired of the arguing, feeling like I was unhappy to go home, and just walking around the house as if the floor was made out of eggshells.  I thought my parents felt the same way as I did. In my irrational thinking, I thought my parents loved me, but were getting tired of me.

But overall there was just this sense that they would be BETTER off WITHOUT ME.

So somewhere in my tiny human brain, I decided that I should remove myself from the picture by running away.

That day when my parents asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with them and I said no thanks. They thought it was because I was upset and sulking; I knew it was because I had decided that that was my time to leave. I knew how long the walks usually took so I timed it where they would have been down a couple of  roads, and I took the opposite roads to run away as to make sure we wouldn’t have crossed paths.

But before the I left, I wrote my parents a letter, telling them I loved them so much and that I was sorry that I was a disappointment. I remember being apologetic for my downfalls.

If I wrote that same note now, it would be a classified as a suicide note. Reliving the memories now, I know in my heart that running away was my way of saying I didn’t think that I belonged on this world anymore because at that age my family was my world.

Honestly, I can’t remember what my plan was after leaving. I think I was going to try and live with a friend. My tiny human brain was not good at planning things out, it just told me I had to go.

The only other thing I remember was that a off duty officer picked me up and brought me home probably around 2-3 hours later. There was a cop car at my house and I remember my Uncle being the first person to see me. He grabbed me, hugged me and told me never to scare my parents like that ever again.

I remember my Mom and Dad crying and hugging me. I felt confused, because their reactions were so unexpected. I had never thought they would feel that upset that I had left. Sad, yes, but hysterical, no. It was weird cause the pain I felt from my parents didn’t match the indifference my thoughts told me my parent felt towards me. It was almost a shock, receiving that much love from my parents.

And then things were different.

Because of the note.

Because my parents then knew something was *wrong* with me.

But had no idea what?

Our house felt like eggshells more than ever because it was like the smallest thing would send me over the edge again.

My parents reassured me things were okay.

But I could sense they weren’t.

I could sense that they were worried and confused about what had happened.

And I think they blamed themselves, but they weren’t sure what for.

Because they never talked about that day ever again (even to this day).

And then a couple months later my parents told me they were sending me over to New Zealand to stay with my Mom’s side of the family for a bit.

My parents said they had been planning this, and maybe it was just a “coincidence”?

But it felt too perfectly timed.

Like we all needed to “run away” from that day and the underlying mental illness it uncovered.

–  Alexis

 

 

Chapter 1: Always a Little Bit Sensitive

Before I get into this series, I want to preface that I love life, MY life, right now. I have great relationships with my family and my friends. I am currently not stressed out, I have a full time job, I am living my life.

With that said, that wasn’t always the case, and that is what this series is about. It is about looking at my life through much more aware lenses, looking for the subtle signs that something  was*different* about myself.  That little something that would eventually develop into my anxiety and depression. Maybe she’s born with it (I was).

Some of these moments will involve people who are very important in my life, and who I love very much. I will never say anything malicious about these people. I will never “call out” these people for certain situations when we were all misinformed about mental illnesses. In these particular cases, do not try to comb into things I may leave vague. This journey is about me, and I’m not trying to drag anyone else into it. With that being said, where do I begin?

When I think about the first sign that I may have had anxiety and depression, I remember being little, like around 5-6 years old, and crying instantly whenever I would do something to make my Dad raise his voice. I remember he would say the usual, “Why are you crying, I’m not even yelling at you?” He would then get irritated with my responses of, “I can’t help it”, mumbling while I was trying not to start the true waterworks. Every time, I would try so hard not to cry, and every time I would fail, to both our frustrations.

Thinking back, I remember feeling like the shittiest kid on the planet whenever my Dad reprimanded me. I felt like he didn’t love me anymore, it was an irrational fear that he would just give up on me because I was a bad kid, and he would leave. I took everything he said at face value, and felt like a liar. Being the “perfect” child in social gatherings and then not listening to my parents over the dumbest things, I felt like I was living a facade. But then things would be okay, until the next time I did something wrong.

(I’ll take this moment to say, that I truly deserved those reprimands and never had any form of “extreme punishment”. Remember the key thing to keep in mind is my “irrational” thinking from a young age.)

These irrational thoughts would plague me.  I was always worried something was wrong.

Once, I couldn’t fall sleep after listening to “Where is the Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas on the radio. I had to ask my Mum if  everything was okay in our lives because that song made me think that things weren’t. I had heard that song in the afternoon and it just stayed in my mind.

I just *felt* things harder.

I felt things and no way to explain how I was feeling without being “too sensitive”.

Why was I always so sensitive?

In hindsight, an exchange between my Mum and I year later, gave me the clarity. My Mum says that this incident was the moment she realized I was a good person. For me, it made me realize that I just *felt* emotions more than the “average” person. The moment in question, happened when I was young (around 6 years old).  I was watching the film Radio (Mike Tollin, 2003) in the living room. I went to go see her in a different room and I was crying. She asked me why I was crying, to which I responded something along the lines of, “I don’t understand why people have to be so mean to each other?”

I was crying in response to the scene where some of the football players told Radio that one of the girls needed help in the women’s locker room. Radio knew it was wrong, but the players made him believe it was important. Obviously there was no emergency, Radio got in trouble, and did not tell the football coach which football players told Radio to go into the locker room.

As someone who has studied film, I know that the reason I was crying is because I empathized with Radio, putting myself in his shoes and hurting like he was hurting. But I wasn’t like Radio, a misunderstood person, who just wanted to make the people around them like them? Or was I? At 6 years old, I resonated with this character.

But looking back, I resonated with a lot of characters who went through some sort of hardship.

And that was just the way my life went.

– Alexis