Seeking Normalcy

Mercy

 

 

For a very long time, I had resigned to the fact that by the time I turned 21 I was going to be dead. It’s almost as if I had made some unconscious promise to myself that I wasn’t allowed to go any further than 21 years as a miserable human being.. I look back at those thoughts, and some decisions I made, and wonder how I’m still here and how different everyone would be today if I wasn’t.
I grew up very suicidal… But, I don’t think I ever acted on those thoughts until after I was 13… I struggled very hard to fit in with anyone for the entirety of my childhood up into my adolescence… When I was 13, I was adopted, and this was a new kind of struggle to fit in. I looked very different from everyone in the family, they were blonde hair and blue eyed… I was brown hair and eyes, tall and gangly, just all around super awkward.

I had a small circle of friends. But, I was bullied very frequently from middle school through senior year of high school. I was on a god awful amount of psychiatric medications that were changed out frequently. I had so much trouble feeling anything but absolute numbness and it was very hard to deal with my thoughts during that time…
I started experimenting with self-mutilation. First it was just hitting myself, then scratching and biting. I moved towards cutting, burning, and electrocution in high school… I had to keep upping the amount to feel anything after a while…

The 2nd semester of my senior year things got rough. My Adoptive parents had kicked me out (to this day they claimed I left all on my own against their urging…) after having me home schooled the majority of my first semester… I had to drop out of high school, to sit at home and fight with my parents all day every day… It was rough… My 2nd semester I went back to school. I caught up on all the classes I missed my first semester while taking all of my second semester classes…
I started drinking heavily… And this is when I realized that the subconcious promise I had made to myself to not live past 21 was going to be achieved… I was literally just going to drink myself into an eternal rest… I started heavily medicating myself with drugs and alcohol, quit taking my psychiatric medication and putting myself into situations that should have gotten me killed, pregnant or with a strew of std’s… My first attempt at college was spent screwing anyone I met (online or in person) and drinking every day while I avoided going to any of my actual classes… One time, my roommates boyfriend was having a party out of town, not sure why I was invited, but whatever… So, I went… Got drunk, and slept with I believe 4 people… However, 1 doesn’t count… I remember all of them specifically, except for their names… I remember crying at one point and thinking I was only invited because they all thought I was some kind of slut… And them telling me they didn’t feel that way about me, they knew I was just experimenting and finding out what I liked… “That’s what college is for” they said…

I was hospitalized a total of 4 times in my life… both involuntarily and voluntarily…
I remember when I met my ex husband… Telling him I didn’t want to make it past the age of 21 and I was going to die… That I wouldn’t allow myself to live past my 21’st birthday… He accredits me still being alive today to him… However, that’s not the truth…..

I think I just kind of gave up on trying… I had, quite a few times, in high school, swallowed massive amounts of my psych meds (some of which doubled as blood pressure medication), I tried swallowing legitimate chemicals and even burned off 90% of my right cornea, I cut off chunks of my skin, I did drugs before track meets to try and make my heart explode… Nothing worked… I always woke up the next day, the cuts always stopped bleeding, the drugs did practically nothing to me… I have even drank so much that I should have died, and literally just ended up sober…
I know that sounds odd and farfetched… But I had gotten to a point where I was no longer throwing up, I was drinking for days straight and then I would realize that the alcohol wasn’t doing anything anymore and I was lucid in my thought, speech and action…

I cried many a time, wishing to be normal… Why I had to be so goddamn broken and fucked up… What was wrong with me… Why did this happen to me… I feel it was very selfish of me to think like that… But, I couldn’t stop… I didn’t want to have to heavily rely on medications to keep my behavioral issues and my anxiety at bay… I didn’t want to be exhausted all the time… I didn’t want to worry about what the meds were doing to my body, let alone my chemistry…

 

And then recently, I got diagnosed hypothyroid with a non-alcoholic fatty liver and immediately after that diagnosis I lost my state funded medical for said “life sustaining medications” due to the combined incomes of Adam and myself being TOO much for state, but not enough to actually afford any real coverage through providers…

I stopped taking all my meds… I really struggled… I couldn’t get out of bed, I didn’t want to leave my room… I struggled to make myself go to work… I spiraled hard into a deep depression.. One of which I had never had the likes of before and hope to never have again… I had assumed it was due to coming off all my medications at once… But it lasted nearly 5 months…
In July I started taking my thyroid medications again and a few weeks in I self-adjusted the dose due to experiencing symptoms still… Not to mention I had hopes that it would help me lose weight quicker. I basically started overdosing myself in hopes to vamp up my metabolism in a reach to see if I’d lose weight easier, but not die…

I started feeling really good on the higher dose… I wasn’t crushed with depression, my anxiety seemed manageable for certain parts… I wasn’t just sitting in the house or sleeping all day… It was pretty awesome…

until I started realizing that I found MY “normal”… I still struggle with depression that cripples any motivation I have to get out of bed and experiencing super high manic days where I will have the energy to rage clean my entire house, really get hygienic, maybe do some makeup video shooting/editing, blog, read and still have tons of energy… But I also crash really hard from the manic days… I can go from super hype about cleaning and hygiene to demotivated and depressed in a matter of minutes… and sometimes I won’t even notice it… I’ll just be sitting down watching YouTube or scrolling through social media and then I’ll look up and realize I’ve been staring at my screen for 4 hours and I don’t usually perk back up until Adam gets home…

 

We were watching a documentary on Jim Carrey for his role in “the man on the moon”… And in that documentary, Jim Carrey mentioned that he never wanted to seek any kind of help for fear he would lose his creativity….
And that kind of snapped something in me… I’ve been getting so frustrated lately because I’ve lost so much interest in things I used to be so good at and loved so much.. I used to be an artist, I used to be an athlete, I used to be creative and had awesome coping skills… Did I lose all of that when I found my “normal”? I can’t seem to work up a decent sketch anymore these days unless I trace an outline first from something else… I obviously can’t run/walk much these days due to it being cold, me being fat and the pain it causes me… I used to play guitar for hours at a time… I was never super good at it, but I loved it… I learned songs and I wasn’t super critical of the way I sounded… I used to write poetry and it was pretty damn good…

Now, all I have left as far as creativity goes is some makeup sometimes and the occasional blog I write that isn’t based on my actual life… Adam says I’m just out of practice of all that stuff… And, maybe he’s right…

I’m always going to be suicidal… It’s something you never quite get rid of… Like I’m always going to be a self-mutilator and an alcoholic…My “normal” was in accepting that…  I don’t act on the urges anymore… In fact I’d say I have pretty good self-control these days… I may often catch myself thinking some dark things in the heat of the moment… But, I utilize a different kind of coping these days… Almost as if I fixed whatever was broken, losing my creativity in the process, but gaining a whole new form of self-awareness and control that I never thought I’d be able to attain…