About me

Before you read a page out of my book it’s important to know a bit about what to expect from me. I am not an inspiration. My writing is not going to empower you to overcome anything simply because I do not believe people should have to constantly stay strong and fight. My writing offers quite the opposite atmosphere. My words shed light on reality rather than false hope or fake social media scripts. This blog is a place for you to break down without feeling so alone in it. You are allowed to be angry, hurt, heartbroken, and hopeless. You are allowed to struggle with acceptance of anything and everything under the sun. Life can feel impossible to survive through and sometimes we need to allow ourselves to process everything we are experiencing. Do I fight constantly? Yes. Have I overcome a million stupid hurdles and kept going like everything is fine? More times than I can count. My actions do not, however, always align with my beliefs and I do not view these forced survival traits with any amount of positivity. The grief that this is the way I must function is profound. My brain is an absolute disaster.

If you continue reading my posts you will eventually learn my story, but to share a brief overview with you- I am a passionate writer. I began finding more interest in serious writing shortly after my dad died when I was 10. Throughout my life, I have found writing to be the only support I have in dealing with my past and ongoing trauma, so I continue writing. It is a way for me to document what is real when I am bewildered by what is happening to me, and it has been an extremely helpful tool in processing my experiences in order to heal.
I grew up poor, in an abusive home with broken windows and doors. My mother was a hoarder after my dad died, my twin brother was heavily abusive both physically and psychologically to all of us at home. My mother struggled with coping, so she mentally checked out often, and my younger sister and I had to fend for ourselves a lot. Things were bad at home and I knew they were, but it was one of those situations where you know that others have it worse, so you have to sort of brush it off when trying to explain things to others because they would never understand anyways. My younger sister and I acknowledged things weren’t fine, but there really is no help for people in complex situations like ours. Anytime we did voice our stresses, outside people didn’t believe us because my brother was always, “so nice to them.” There was no conceivable way in their mind that he could be that horrible at home. We were never taken seriously.
At some point during high school, I developed CPTSD symptoms which consisted of emotional flashbacks, an overwhelming amount of self-hatred, shame, and rage, physical symptoms of panic, self-harm as a means to end the panic and rage so that I could neutralize myself and disengage, and an occasional full blown panic attack. Although at the time I had no idea that was what was happening, I thought some of this distress was reasonable given my circumstances, especially since continued incidents with my brother were something that often started the whole emotional cascade. The panic symptoms grew more obvious with him, and I realized even hearing his voice caused me to physically react (shaking, heart palpitations, hyperventilating). He did not have to be cruel or angry or yell for me to feel this way. It was purely the sound of his voice, the cadence of it trapped me in a corner where there was no escape and no one to help me.
Because of my emotional outbursts and sadness my mother thought there was something wrong with me and insisted I take medication to “chill out.” Maybe treating me was an easier task to tackle than acknowledging the damage she could not stop. Maybe she just wanted to take some kind of action and could only do so much to help my brother. Maybe she genuinely thought I was wrong and pathetic and irrational. I really don’t know. She did not have any ill intentions, but medication was never going to help me, and it only resulted in further damage. I was her only child holding my life together at the time despite falling apart in frequent spells at home. My straight A’s and perfect attendance in junior year turned into C’s and D’s, with large absences during the start of my senior year with all the trial and error on meds. Everything gave me side effects-some of them rather severe, and when one finally “worked” my mother was over the moon at my sudden lack of humanity. She hated my writings, she hated that I was hurting. I am not sure why I was expected to not be, but she blamed me for it. Why couldn’t I just be more positive? I was a problem. I wasn’t good enough. She was not the only one that believed that.
My negativity made everyone in my life hate me. It’s not fun to be around someone always sad and hurting. People hate pessimism. People hate things that remind them of reality and people run far away from those that are suffering purely because it interrupts their peace and joy. No one wants to help someone carry the weight. People want to pretend there is hope and things are fine. When voicing my understanding of the world, I was always met with heavy judgement by everyone that could not relate. I lost best friends over this. I was alone. And the truth is, this was proof to me that I would never matter enough. People would always put themselves first and leave me to drown. Being sad doesn’t gain you attention like people fake and strive for all over social media. It does the opposite.
No person wants to actually feel this way. It is torture. As for me in my specific situation, no one in my life had ever heard of CPTSD then. People barely know about it now- I didn’t know. Only those closest to me witnessed the flashbacks, and because of them they believed me to be psychotic. The pain I felt was the only thing I really knew. And so, like everyone else in my life, I thought everything bad that happened was my fault. I thought I was mentally ruined (which I was) and that I should never have existed. Things were only like this for me because I wasn’t loveable enough in the first place. I deserved this. I was damaged far beyond repair before I had a chance to even be a person and what came of me was clearly repulsive to every person I encountered after.
My emotional flashbacks continued into adulthood despite moving out of my mother’s home and being “safe,” away from my brother. Suddenly, my relationship with my then-boyfriend, now husband, became a new trigger for them. And with neither of us knowing what was wrong, the story that I am innately unworthy continued to be my only truth, perhaps drilled into me much deeper by our extremely opposing emotional dynamic. To him, I was toxic, psychotic and borderline abusive. He didn’t recognize most of my emotions. I was illogical and so he automatically believed I was a liar. He believed I was manipulating him because feeling any of the things I felt was a foreign concept to him. No one could possibly feel that way. This resulted in continued rejection of what felt like my entire self. Again, I was not believed or understood in the slightest. I could not be loved. I just needed someone to care enough about me to actually see me, but still, no one ever could. Outside of my emotional flashbacks our relationship was okay, but with all of this continuing to compound against me things got messy for me. I believed I was the problem- me and my stupid, damaged brain. It got to a point where I thought I needed to end everything, not the relationship, I mean end everything, in order to save those around me, desperate to prevent others from suffering the way that I do. I didn’t put any of it together until last year. I have known and understood for exactly one year out of my 32 lived. In that one year, I think I have healed the most. Since discovering the problem, my flashbacks have been reduced significantly. If not for all the writing I did throughout though, I don’t think I would have ever believed the truth.
In the end, no one was ever going to have the power to save me. People just do not possess that capability. There is no genuine comfort to be found in those that cannot comprehend this type of learned misery. I am just as foreign to them as they are to me. This blog is a documentation of my journey in healing and fighting to save myself. It isn’t happy. It isn’t satisfying. It is heavy- full of grief, pain, and impossible contemplations. If you struggle with similar themes in your own life, I hope some of what I have learned helps in some way. If you have never, but are curious to read my thoughts, have at it. I hope it intrigues you. I hope it widens your perspective or gives you new things to think on. Life is a complex experience for all of us. Here is my unique “adventure.”