Don't Panic

I haven’t thought about this in a long time. 

Someday I will have to explain my mental illness to my son. 

I don’t even consider myself mentally ill. I haven’t been to a doctor for it in years. I haven’t questioned whether or not I should cut myself in years. I only relapsed once at 19 after the official end to my cutting habit at age 18. I never really think about it anymore.

I used to after my son was born. I would worry about the day my son would ask about it after seeing the scars on my arms. He did finally ask one day around 3 years old. I don’t even think he remembers now. I know someday he will ask me for more details. When he was first born I thought somehow I would just never tell him about the depths of my depression in my teenage years. 

That is a silly thing to think looking back on it. 10 years later at 28 years old I still have many prominent scars. I realized today what made me stop finally, what was different about that last person who found out. They asked me to stop. That person spoke to me openly and without judgment and said, it makes me sad when you hurt yourself, will you promise me to stop and I kept it from that day forward with one relapse the summer I was 19. 

It’s still hard for me to quantify what it was all about. Maybe proof that I wasn’t crazy. To me it was proof that no one really was paying attention to me. 

I feel like an uninhibited person. There was, and is, definitely a part of me that puts it all out there. I’d focus on the pain instead of focusing on fear and anxiety and do really brazen things. Eventually I just became that overtly confident person without the cutting behavior. I didn’t want to explain myself anymore so I conformed. My cutting behavior went away. I would never even consider doing that and explaining it now to my son or his friends’ parents or anyone I know. To me it doesn’t make sense and I was there in my own head. 

But the old scars remain. It seems as though they might never fully go away. You don’t realize as you’re experiencing your childhood that every little thing is going to affect you for the rest of your life. You think you will forget and that will save you from whatever happened to you but mostly that just makes it worse and elongates the process to dealing with your history. 

I treat myself like a person without an anxiety disorder because that is how I see myself and also no one has ever acknowledged I have an anxiety disorder. I eat away at my fingers and bite my lips. I cried every day on the way to kindergarten. Before I left my job I cried every day on the way to work. And yet I would keep it all together and act like a normal person when I was around other people and no one was any the wiser. I have to be aware of my history to realize that these things have causes and I am not entirely at fault as I feel I am after having a panic attack as a supposedly in control adult running a household.

I wouldn’t say I am afraid of other people but I am. I don’t understand why they are so mean. I don’t understand why they don’t pay attention. I can’t stop paying attention. I can tune out everything in a room if I am reading or watching something. A defense mechanism I developed somewhere along the way. But if you have my attention I am listening and will remember what you said. People said as a kid I was overly embarrassed. Now I think I was sensitive from verbal and emotional abuse that manifested in an anxiety disorder. 

I went through a phase as a teenager where I handled my anxiety by being the biggest personality in a room. If I commanded attention I was in control. I constructed a persona that also kept people from feeling they have the right to put their hands on my body. Worked out well for me, I am still in the 2/3 of women who haven’t been raped. 

The me I was as a teen met the me I am as a mother this winter as I read my journals. Teenage me wasn’t as dark as I thought she would be. She was as hopelessly optimistic as she remains. The primary theme was loneliness. Broken family all around in so many ways and friends so broken they couldn’t form trusting relationships. 

I knew in high school that my group of friends had little in common. We all were smart, but also we all came from broken homes. Not all in the traditional sense of divorce although that was some of it. Other families were torn apart by other things like staying together without being in love, addiction, or mothers competing with their beautiful teenage daughters for attention. Alcoholism touched almost every one of us. 

I’ll admit I didn’t come up with cutting on my own. I was 15 when I started and I had the internet and there were plenty of pop culture references to death by suicide by then. Teenagers are obsessed with death because they haven’t had much real experience with the grief it causes. Unless you have, sometimes that is enough to not want to be suicidal. Sometimes it isn’t. Death is different when you are young because you are farther away from it. 

Better to be alive and struggling than dead, can’t fix anything when you’re dead. It seems like an easy escape but it only is for you. The people you leave behind have it that much worse because of the extra painful early severing of ties. I may not entertain the thought these days but I can remember how it comes up. I can hear the thought but I know for me it would never even be a considerable option. I want to see as much of the global story as I can before I go. I know even when I do, all the mysteries that make me curious won’t be solved. In reality the human life span is rather short. 

I was having a writer’s block for some time. I could write in my journal but not to the world. It is hard to open yourself up to judgment. I am trying to share more of my story for the people that care and have asked. No one is eager to open themselves up these days because there will always be someone full of hate there to share with you their disapproval. 

The holidays are coming. I hate them. I hate the pressure to buy terrible processed food, this year I will be because we are on the “whatever is on sale” diet. I hate the pressure to spend money on things we don’t need for people we care about instead of just showing them or telling them that we care about them. 

I always used to give out stuff for holidays in school. I never thought it was weird at the time. Sometimes I wondered why kids were so excited. I didn’t know other people’s parents didn’t celebrate every holiday with their kids just for any reason to celebrate. I’d give out M&Ms for Valentine’s Day, key chains at Christmas, flowers for Veterans, ribbons for breast cancer, or carnations for no reason sometimes. I remember people trying to convince me not to be that way. They were wrong, as an adult atheist I think we should use any excuse to celebrate life. We just don’t necessarily have to spend money on plastic shit made in a factory in China or Indonesia to do that. 

Now I don’t like to spend a lot of money on people and I don’t like them to spend a lot on me, but small tokens of friendship, from a faraway place, a handmade bracelet, or a found crystal ball are deeply meaningful. Those things were a way to keep our friendships and connections alive with people we met along our life's travel before there were photographs, phones, or Facebook to feel those connections were still real. We should reevaluate our beliefs on what is of value and get rid of the rest of the clutter taking up our minds. 

Without the feelings of isolation and lack of real connection I felt as a child and teenager life never seems like it is worth giving up on. My family makes me laugh every single day. My household is full of hugs and kisses and signs of affection. The world forces us to build walls to protect ourselves. Sometimes we build them so tall and so strong that the connections we need to survive as social beings are severed. Even if you can’t change the past or perfect the future as long as you have those connections it is worth it to be here experiencing life. 

Be My Friend