I’ll remind you all that the point of this is to figure out where to go next in therapy. I’m trying to find a couple more things to do in Exposure Therapy. What memories are the most vivid, the most traumatic, the ones that give me the most nightmares? So far, most of my nightmares are about my childhood home. The yelling, the literal shitty living environment, and the stream of random molestations. Maybe it’s because of the autism and my issue with breaking promises. “Promise you won’t tell” sort of thing. I had made no such promise about the rape when I was 15. I don’t know why that one was so vivid compared to the rest. Maybe it was because it was a group instead of a single person. Maybe because I had already been victimized so many times and it had been so long since the last time. I don’t know.
I left off having living with my aunt and uncle and the shit I had to go through with them. I was told I had to go to church every Sunday and I had to wear skirts and dress nicely and all that. I got my Patriarchal blessing during this time. I threw it away a few years back having decided it was pure bullshit. I thought I was supposed to be filled with the spirit because that’s what everyone said would happen. I no longer get filled with the spirit because I call that feeling joy or elation or compassion or happiness or goodness or Zen. My Patriarchal blessing said I would get married to a wonderful husband and have kids and be a great mum and was just filled with broad generalizations that would fit most women. Well, it turns out I can’t bear children to any husband because I’m an infertile lesbian on birth control. (My mum has said that if I had stayed in the church, the blessing would have been true. I got really upset. It is not my fault I have endometriosis and there is nothing wrong with being gay. Fuck you too, Okaasan. Bitch.)
I felt alienated and alone. There was no one to talk to except a tree. And then we all moved, as in, my aunt and uncle and their 5 kids and my mum and my brother and me. In the middle of the school year. It didn’t affect any of their kids, only my brother and me. The new school district didn’t have an orchestra and I was thrust back into main stream school again. No more small classes for me to hide in. I got in trouble a lot. Once for not standing at attention for the pledge. Once for wearing a hat around my neck (it was a nice bamboo hat that I got from the cultural fair). A few times for skipping and staying in the library. I was put in remedial maths. I failed remedial maths. I didn’t like the teacher and she never helped me so I refused to do the work. Child logic.
I made a few friends. Far more friends than I had before. It was nice. It was also this time that I got introduced to Emo and Punk and Goth cultures. I fell in love. It was all about being able to express the sad and be with other people who were supposed to be sad with you. And I got to wear black and dress how I wanted, not how other people wanted.
Then came high school. Ah, high school. I still sucked at maths. I never passed geometry. I excelled at everything except doing homework and also gym. And mostly maths. All the other classes were basically reading and then writing about what you read. Maths was not. Maths was reading and then writing about something that seemed totally irrelevant. German class was easier. I took German because my brother took German and we used to converse with each other.
We were still living with my aunt and uncle. My behaviour worsened. I know now that I got worse because everything changed and I was given no privacy because my mum and my brother and I all had to sleep in the game room downstairs where the computers and video games were set up. There was a space under the stairs that I would hide in because my mum was too fat to get to me. She would throw things at me. She broke the light bulb that was in there one time with a shoe and it was suddenly dark and I just closed my eyes and started crying. I hate the dark. It is fucking terrifying.
We moved out the end of 9th grade into our own place. My brother and I promptly went back to our old ways of doing what we wanted and my mum continued to do what she has always done and neglected us unless she was beating me. She never really hit my brother. My brother never really got hit at all. I was hit. I hit my brother a few times, sibling squabbles, you know. He hit me back. We’d laugh about it later.
My brother spent a couple of times in the hospital. He overdosed in front of me just like my dad. Except, with my brother, it was behind my back while I was on the floor watching tellie. My mum yelled at me later for not noticing and hit me. The last time he overdosed, they put him in a group home. He was great there.
I had contact with my dad during this time, and he kept making promises and breaking them. I would get my hopes up and then he would crush them so brilliantly. I knew my parents were never getting back together. I just wanted my dad to love me. I already knew my mum didn’t and I thought living with my dad would be okay except then I would be back to living in filth and I would have to move and lost all my friends again. I could deal with the yelling and the beatings and threats and the drunkenness. I could never deal with being ignored. The indifference and anger my mum has had toward me, like everything in her life is my fault, that I’m a nuisance.
Then the rape. And I started doing drugs and cutting. Then came the miscarriage, which I still haven’t told Charon about. I made a new friend in Bitch Face. If you all remember, Bitch face is this highly manipulative and abusive person that I met in high school. I had a huge crush on her and she was my best friend. She would hit me and tell me it was my fault because it was the only way I would learn. She had me do her homework. She would mock me and bully me. I was hopelessly in love and very cringey about it. Ah, high school.
I also have had random bouts of eating disordered behaviour throughout my life. My mum found out about the bulimia and hit me across the face and just really started wailing on me for wasting food. She has probably forgotten that. I thought that if I was skinny enough people would love me. No one loves a fat girl and I was called fat my entire life.
During high school, I joined an RPG site and made friends online. I lied about having a twin sister so I could have two characters. I don’t know why I didn’t just ask. I’ve since confessed that I don’t have a sister. I ask myself what the fuck was I thinking a lot. I met Kuma-chan and MamaBear and Cthulu Bait on that RPG site. Kuma-chan is my bestest best friend ever and MamaBear is my other best friend. I love them. They are the best. Anyways.
I got heavier into drugs when I had my wisdom teeth removed. They put me on Vicodin and I had had a huge fight with Bitch Face and the lovely feeling Vicodin gave me was wonderful. For those wondering, her grandparents met me at a thing Bitch Face invited me to and thought it would be nice if I came with her next time she went to visit so she would have a friend to hang out with. So she got mad at me because she thought I was trying to steal her family because she knew how much my family sucked. Anyway, my mum had Percocet that I stole a few times too. When Bitch Face finally stopped being such a Bitch Face, she started nagging me to give her a few pills. I ended up giving her a few and told her to take half of one and she took all 3 that I gave her. I got suspended when the school found at and she got in school suspension for 3 days. I got a 45 day alternative placement sort of suspension. I liked the new school because it was smaller and I could work at my own pace. Any other kid would have been expelled. I was deemed not fully responsible because it had been proven that I was an idiot when it came to people and easily manipulated. My school case manager really stood up for me. That was nice of him.
High school ended and I was working at the Big Blue and still friends with Bitch Face and going to college full time and suddenly everything became too much. I couldn’t handle working over 30 hours a week while being a student so I stopped working even though my mum and I relied on my $8 an hour job because she refused to work. I ended up having a complete breakdown after Bitch Face threatened to kill me because I was diagnosed with a dissociative disorder and she thought I was copying her. Several months of being in and out of the hospital for suicidal shit later, I get on SSDI because I clearly couldn’t function. I was on a dozen different meds for mental shit at one point.
I didn’t have the same support system set up in college that I had before, so it was rather hard for me to do the work and figure out what the fuck I was supposed to be doing. I tried to get the disability services to help me, but they said my diagnoses weren’t enough to let me get the accommodations I wanted, which was a quiet space to take tests and help organizing my schoolwork and making sure the teachers knew that sometimes I just needed to not be in class to revel in quiet, people-free spaces. Stuff that had been on my IEP since elementary.
I got back into drugs. I got suckered into another abusive relationship with a random girl that I met on the internet who said her homelife was far worse than it really was. I let her stay with me rent free for over 6 months before she moved on to the next poor sucker, who ended up being my Exacerbating Ex.
I got ankle surgery shortly before I met Exacerbating Ex. I had done a few summer courses and failed art, but got A’s and B’s in the online courses I got and was praised by my Anthology teacher for having such a good understanding of the work, especially in an half-term super hard class. Because I’m just that fucking awesome.
Anyway, I ended up moving in with Exacerbating Ex because homelife with my mum was unbearable. She was just horrid, even though she had stopped hitting me because I had threatened to kill her. Living with my ex, I was in and out of the emergency room trying to score drugs for her and me because she said she would love me if I did. I originally was supposed to go to rehab. That obviously never happened. I became a drunkard. Not an alcoholic, just a drunkard. She was/is an alcoholic and a drug addict. She beat me worse than anyone else ever did and she was far more abusive and she forced me into sex with her a lot. But I was in love and figured she was better than my mum because at least she paid more attention to me.
This is the lady who poured boiling hot water on my arm so we/she could score drugs. She got most of them. I had emergency gallbladder surgery. She got most of the drugs. I ended up getting half a dozen surgeries on my pelvic area and got diagnosed with the endo. She got most of the drugs. I was on Xanax 1mg 4x a day. She got most of them. I ended up feeling so hopeless and helpless because if I stayed with her, I would continue to live in fear and walking on eggshells. If I left, the only place was with my mum. Neither prospect appealed to me so I took half a bottle of the Xanax and an entire bottle of Viibryd. I had no way out except death.
I woke up 3 days later after being put into a coma. The first thing out of my mouth was “I wish you had let me die. You should have let me die.” I was in the hospital for a month until they placed me in an IRTS facility, which is like a group home for adults but more mental health oriented. Exacerbating Ex kept stealing money from me so I couldn’t pay them and I got kicked out to the homeless shelter.
The homeless shelter where I was constantly molested by the men and verbally abused by the women and no one seemed to want to help me except the wonderful case manager I had. I left after 3 weeks because I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. I moved back in with my mum because I figured she was the lesser of the evils. I ended up hopping from my mum’s to Exacerbating Exes for a while, still getting abused from the Ex and still dealing with the shit from my mum. Then came the day that Exacerbating Ex stole drugs from one of her neighbours with a heart condition (which I later took one klonopin from because I was afraid she had overdosed because she was nodding off). She got pissed off at me, tried to get me to confess at an AA meeting, got home, stole the entire bottle from her neighbour, got Her ex to drop me off at my mum’s while I was crying and trying to figure out what the fuck just happened, and then later I find out that she had told everyone that I stole from the old man. I may be an addict, but fuck if I will steal drugs from an old man with heart problems.
And then I started seeing Charon. I was so difficult at the beginning. I mean, I’m still difficult, just not as difficult. She’s a nice person. I have a lot of really personal questions I want to ask her that I won’t post here because they are really personal and I don’t want to broadcast my suspicions about her. But she’s cool. Really patient. Super patient. A surprisingly patient person. I’m talking like patience is her Super Power. Legit. She’s got a goddess’s amount of patience. Seriously. She’s helped me become a better person and understand myself better. She tries really hard to get me to figure shit out. I did DBT group and learned all the cool stuff it has and I’m starting to feel that I should take a remedial course because I’ve forgotten half of it except all the bits I translated into Drop Bear terms. Trying to be mentally healthy is hard work.
There are things I’ve left out. Getting made to give blow jobs and hand jobs to guys who worked at Big Blue with me. (They would tell me they would drive me home and then park at some secluded spot until I did so.) Getting expelled in 4th grade. Getting raped again when I was 17. Being forced/coerced into giving a taxi driver a hand job 2 years ago. Recently being told by a group of middle schoolers that they were going to rape me in the ass and kill me. That creepy guy who followed me to the store. There’s loads of stuff I’ve left out, now that I think about it. What I’ve written is just the most impactful. The stuff I remember most.
I’m not sure which I should work on or if I should just lay it all out for Charon to help me out with or what. Maybe I’ll just see what nightmares I have today and let them decide.
That is it for today. Have a good night and I’ll try to remember to post an update tomorrow.
-The Sarcastic Autist
the sarcastic autist 