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 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