Hit hard from an early age with no safety net in sight

by AM

[Trigger warnings: references to/descriptions of suicide attempts, self-harm, sexual assault, addictive behaviors] 

In my late teens, I found a journal entry I’d written at 11, “Sometimes I’ll be happy, then BOOM 1 bad thing + I wanna scream ARGH!!” [sic] I don’t remember writing it or when exactly I began to develop my mental illnesses but they started young and take up much of my early memory.

I suddenly became painfully shy in the middle of elementary school. I don’t remember any precise cause and was told by family and friends that I had been a loud and outgoing child in earlier years. I had my first panic attack in middle school while babysitting. I couldn’t understand what was going on and had no idea who to ask about it. I tied the feelings of the event to the children I was watching and refused to take care of them again, making excuses when the parents called. I’d already developed insomnia and some little rituals designed to calm me down as I often felt uneven or somehow off. I always worried excessively about whether people liked me (which isn’t something that particularly attracts people to you) and would easily feel betrayed by friends who hurt me. I often even felt left out or targeted within my own family. My brother has always been likable and fairly popular, and my sister has always had her own more obvious problems. As middle child, I’ve often wound up as the mediator and the one left to deal with things on her own.

My problems only worsened when I hit high school. A totally new environment full of strangers combined with the changes of adolescence hit me hard, and I began to self-injure. I thought I’d invented it, as it was before the idea of self-harm was as commonly known as it is now, and I’d never heard of anyone doing it, so I assumed I must be completely screwed up and hid it well. I would scratch my thigh until it bled, and when that wasn’t enough, I moved onto actual cutting. Much of it was based on a feeling of depersonalization where I didn’t feel completely human or alive. I felt like I might not have blood inside me somehow. I knew these thoughts weren’t true but it felt true and I like I needed proof.

It was years later before I found out that these were symptoms of severe mood disorders and not some bizarre, unique-to-me aberration. I was terrified of confrontation and hated the thought of someone being angry with me. Self-injury seemed like a reasonable outlet for all the anger I had and couldn’t express toward other people. I also continued to procrastinate and was basically incapable of studying, but I got by with good grades based on a good memory and lucky genetics. I was occasionally called out for my inability to pay attention in school but, because I wasn’t distracting anyone or failing any classes, no tests were done.

During my freshman year of high school, I began an online journal and wrote obsessively about how much terrible I felt. It was so hard to describe my feelings and yet they consumed my thoughts. Whenever I felt happy, I would be instantly brought down. I was convinced that I shouldn’t be happy unless I had a reason for it and that I had no reason to be happy since I was a generally fat, ugly, unlikable person. I was sure that every moment of happiness was a fluke and that enjoying it would make the moments of depression that followed even more miserable.

I started to believe something was really wrong with me beyond loneliness and started researching mental illnesses online. I found the diagnostic criteria for major depression, and the illness fit me like a glove. I went to my then best friend and confessed what I’d been feeling. She told me it was teen angst and said that I was just a statistic. Luckily, I was stubborn and told my mother anyway, and she got me an appointment with a psychologist, which led to a psychiatrist and various medications. I began to get hypomanic that year and would stay up all night or be unable to stop moving or would talk so fast my words would slur. We blamed it on the SSRI I was currently using and switched to a new one. The cycle would repeat. I started cutting again. I started to abuse Oxycontin I had left from some orthopedic surgery, eventually trying to overdose on it. I realized how depressed I was and started to see my doctors more often. Things improved until a year later, my boyfriend dumped me, and I lost friends in the break up. I fell apart, but I made it until graduation and left for college.

In college, I was again in a completely new situation with even larger, new group of people. Worse, there was alcohol available constantly. I didn’t drink in high school and took to it easily. As long as I could remember, I’d been socially anxious and awkward and nerdy. While drunk, I felt cool and sexy and fun. It seemed like people liked me, and I was having the college experience. I felt like I could reinvent myself and get away from my past.

Instead, I rushed into friendships and relationships looking for affection and felt completely betrayed and devastated when people weren’t who I wanted them to be. People felt suffocated by my desperate neediness and could see my obvious fakeness. I never felt quite at home anywhere. I felt like a loser with the partying crowd and a slut with the smart crowd. I signed up for trips during breaks to visit new countries but didn’t fit in with those students either. After the second, I found the students were posting insults about me together on Facebook. On the third trip, I was sexually assaulted, and the other students didn’t seem to notice or care.

At 19, I wrote, “depression is such a strange, vague feeling, so hard to describe. there’s this blankness inside of me. learning about it in classes is so bizarre too, realizing what behaviors and thoughts i had were merely symptoms, finding out i had some delusions, et cetera. but, god, this emptiness, i feel so numb, so hollow, the delusions are back, i think. my body doesn’t feel like my own.” [sic] When I turned 21, my drinking went from bad to worse. It became even more acceptable to drink. I could be open about it. I could buy it on my own. I had a steady relationship by this point, but it ended, partially due to my drinking. He told me it wasn’t how much but how I drank that was the problem. I once again fell apart. I cried frequently, I drank constantly, I slept around, I missed classes, I clung to my sexual assault support group and its members. I managed to graduate anyway and moved back in with my parents.

I got a job and a boyfriend. I muddled through until I got a new job so I could live with my boyfriend. Things were mostly going well but I was lonely and he worked late. I started joining clubs. After a night out at bars with friends, I drunkenly wound up hooking up with a friend. A horrible downward spiral from there ended with my trying to overdose on wine and my medications. I told my boyfriend I felt sick and went to the ER. They made sure I was going to live and sent me home with a list of alcoholism treatment programs.

Three months later, I became extremely manic and did some things I regret beyond measure. This led to my becoming extremely depressed and withdrawn and being sent by my therapist to the ER (I made sure to go to a hospital with a psychiatric department). They sent me to a partial hospitalization program for a few weeks. I spent 6 hours a day, 5 days a week with therapists and psychiatrists.

I had made revelations before but hadn’t learned to apply them to making changes in my life. I realized that I was addicted to alcohol and possibly sex but also felt like I couldn’t quit. I was so focused on keeping people from worrying about me that I felt like they didn’t actually know me. I was drinking as a way to deal with anxiety and poor self-image, but it led to worse anxiety and a worse self-image in the long run. I believed that I deserved to be unhappy and have bad things happen to me. I drank alone to make drinking feel safe since so many bad things had happened to me while I was drunk. I had always invested my life entirely into the person I date and fallen to pieces when things had inevitably ended. I didn’t feel like a whole person or that people would like me if they knew the real me.

At this outpatient program, I created a WRAP. I did cognitive-behavioral therapy worksheets. I got the courage to talk honestly with the people close to me about what my symptoms are. I told my boyfriend I’d cheated, he forgave me, and we worked through it. I met other people with similar problems and got new perspectives on my life. I came home every day with pages of notes and, after a few days, a feeling of excitement about implementing my new life plans.

After one more terrible night drinking beyond my limit, I quit for good. I’m now almost 10 months sober. I have a therapist I see weekly and a psychiatrist I see every month or so. I have a regimen of medications I feel good about. I still have trouble with moderation sometimes when it comes to food or cleaning. My physical health and mental health are still intertwined. When I feel anxious, I feel physically sick, but I no longer go to the ER or doctor for my symptoms immediately.

My mental illnesses are interconnected, and each can exacerbate the next. I get frustrated easily, and I’m very sensitive, both emotionally and to external stimuli, but I’ve learned to better cope with it. I’m much better at spotting early signs of my illnesses now. I started to feel depressed this winter and took the Beck Depression Inventory and brought in my WRAP. It turned out I was in the earliest of early warning signs and my doctors and I were able to turn things around there.

My official diagnosis is somewhat debatable. I may have depression or bipolar II or borderline personality disorder or ADHD or PTSD or alcoholism or some number of the above. I’m coming to terms with the idea of borderline personality disorder because it does fit my reality, and it’s not the death sentence people imagine it to be (although I sobbed when it was first suggested because I had only heard the stereotypes). I think ADHD, PTSD, and alcoholism are parts of my experience too.

I am Mental Illness – and what that means depends on the day, month, year, or decade that you ask me.

[AM is a 20-something living in the DC-metro area. She’s an atheist, a science enthusiast, and an avid user of the internet, and she blogs at her tumblr site, Psych Privileges.]

Image credit: ”Falling Man” (Simon Palmer) / CC BY-SA 2.0. A piece by Antony Gormley (of Angel of the North fame) in Tout Quarry.