I knew my childhood was different than those around me, but I didn’t realize how different until later…much later. I slept on chairs or in the booths at the bars. I never knew where my next meal was coming from. My brother passed away. My mother wasn’t there. My father was drunk, high, and chasing women. I was half deaf. The list goes on. However, it turns out that’s not what made me different.
I learned in my 20s that not everyone slept in booths or on bar chairs pushed together. It was then that I learned talking my first punch at 8 from my father while driving down then freeway wasn’t what everyone went through. It was during this time that I learned all of the nasty things my father said wasn’t what every father said to their daughter. But again, this isn’t what made me different.
It was in my 30s that I learned I was broken. Undeniably unrepairable…ànd had been my whole life. There was no fix. There was no cure. There was this disease that I cought somewhere in life and it wasnt about to let go.
Those voices, the ones in the back of my head or the ones calling me from another room or the ones that talked to me at night coming from the shadows walking across the wall of an already pitch black room or the demons in the static or the two girls judging or the cackling that comes from the tires as cars pass on the freeway or the sing song rythm and rhyme of a Disney cartoon for every thought that goes through my head or maybe it will be more like a Roger Rabbit movie.
Then there’s the the blue laughing bull on the wall or the blue baby dragon bobbing it’s head on the bathroom floor or the tree across the street with the aged face he was blessed with by father time that hangs out with the clown who points to the chain link that is really a spiderweb waiting for it next victim. In case that’s not enough, the zombies come up from the ground while driving, the shadow people aren’t always shadows and they are not afraid to stop you in the middle of the road, but their king he is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
It was all there as a kid, but mental health wasn’t a thing, just a cry for attention. It was there, but it didn’t matter because how could I do this to anyone, how could I embarrass them like this, what right did I have.
If only I could be normal.
Instead I have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type with anxiety and hoarding.
Welcome home
I grieve for your lost childhood and pain Iam because NOBODY deserves what happened to you. IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT. YOU DID NOTHING WRONG. I AM SORRY THIS HAPPENED TO YOU. You may be broken but I think incredibly brave to post your story. Thanks. Unfortunately you are not alone. I am broken and scarred too. I think you should consider changing your name to Iam and leave the NOBODY behind so the world knows you are a survivor. And you are somebody to me.
It makes me sad to know that there is someone else out there who I can relate to more than anyone else I have meet since joining. It makes me incredibly angry to read that another little girl was denied all of the things, we see in the movies, that are suppose to happen to little girls when they are young, trusting, innocent and vulnerable. And even angrier to read that you and I suffered in silence, alone, thinking that somehow what was going on had to be normal or why else would it be happening. SOmeone would have done something to help it was so bad or wrong or not normal. Wouldn’t they? It wasn’t a state secret. Everyone saw the acting out behavior. When the topic was skirted around the edges in hush tones in the extended family the blame always fell on the wrong shoulders.
Iam your mental health was never the real embarrassment what was done to you was and their fear of what that said about them.