I have a story to tell. My story. I was emotionally and verbally abused as a child, as a young child all the way until seventh grade. This abuse caused me to hate myself, I hated everything about me, but mostly I hated the fear, the fear that I held over everything. I thought I was incapable, worthless and that I would never survive. I almost didn't.
I was diagnosed with severe social anxiety in fifth grade. I hid my depression and psychosis away, not wanting to be thought of as the sad or crazy little girl. I was in the therapy until the middle of sixth grade. Then I wanted out of therapy, I wanted to be better so I pretended to be.
I often think back to why I held such hatred for my mental illness. I contribute it to my father. His family and him didn't believe in me, being mentally ill or anything that made you less than perfect. He made me think I was weak, I was disgusting. So I pretended to be better. I fought my own. I wanted nothing more than to die and some days I wanted to self harm. Some days I did.
In seventh grade my father came close to hitting my mother, not the first time physical violence had been seconds away, but the scariest. We were about to leave for school. I was trying not to be sick already. My mother drove us to the bus stop and called my uncle to get rid of him. He was gone when I got home from school.
In eight grade I had what I refer to as my official mental breakdown. I admitted everything. How I threw up at least once a day from being scared. How my body shook with terror after I left my house. How I didn't want to be alive. I was put back in therapy and given medication.
Things went downhill. I had to try harder and it yielded less results. Schoolwork began to become torture. Sometimes. I would have black outs for an entire class period. Other times I would throw up until the bell rang. Some days I hid in the bathroom and cried, pretending not to be there. There were days where my body couldn't leave my bed.
Friends started to scare me as well as strangers. Crowds made me dig my fingernails into my wrist until it bled. Men though, men were the worse. Whenever I was around a man my body was ready for a fight, for an argument, ready to cower in fear or ready to throw a punch. My body became a constant warzone. I felt like I was being attacked when I wasn't.
Adrenaline became almost like a drug, a constant factor. My bodies nerve system was in use almost every second and I would shake for nearly four hours. Fight or flight response was my automatic response to any social interaction I had.
I survived for as long as I could. But then I couldn't. In february 2015 I took an unhealthy amount of Ibuprofen while locked in my bathroom before school. I waited for fifteen minutes, once my brain was in control and I wasn't terrified for my life I threw them up.
I went to the. Hospital for awhile after that. They had all these nurses and counselors that pretended to know what they were doing. It didn't help. They were just as lost and scared as us patients were. When I was released I was considered fragile, people tip toed around me and did things for me. I was never pushed out of my comfort zone so I never got better.
One day I woke up and didn't feel as shaky as normal. I know that it was partly my medications but I felt okay in a long time. I asked to go out that day, we went for lunch. I ordered my own food. No one commented on it, I thought I could be normal again.
That feeling, that 'okay', lasted for three and a half days. I was in the middle of walmart when the terror came back. I was in the middle of a sentence when my breath caught. My heart wasn't beating right. There were to many people. I was in danger, it felt like the closest thing to dying then anyone could ever imagine. Instead of running or hiding I stood still and cried it out.
Now here I am, two years later. I'm not okay, not all the time at least. But now with my bad days and my okay days I get my good days. I still have the urges to run or to self harm but I know they'll pass.
In fifth grade I thought I would die before I turned fifteen. In seventh grade I thought I wouldn't live to see eight grade. In eighth grade I almost died before I got to live. I'm in eleventh grade Now, at age seventeen. Some days I don't expect to make it to adulthood. Some days I don't want to live to be eighteen.
But when I'm twenty and I look back at all this I'm going to cry because I'll finally be able to say I did it. Maybe when I'm twenty I'll still have my bad days more then my good ones and maybe I won't be happy, but I'll have made it to that point.
Author's Note :
Good afternoon. This article was made 4 years ago. I want to share with you my experience of having an anxiety. Hope you liked it. 😊
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