Mom

My therapist has asked me to write a letter to you that I will not send. She says I should address things that you have done that have hurt/angered me as well as recent events.

It’s been a few weeks since she asked for this and I’m just now doing it. I’ve tried twice and got too upset to continue.

So. Here are things you did to me and how they still affect me:

1) You made me afraid of you. You would scream at me for anything – now that I look back as an adult I realize that the things I did that made you so angry were just normal kid things. I didn’t deserve to be punished harshly for them, and I certainly didn’t deserve to be screamed at/hit for them.

2) You screamed at/punished me for things I *didn’t* do. You did not trust me – if you decided that I did something then it didn’t matter what I said to try to convince you, you would not believe me.

3) You moved us all around. We rarely stayed in one place for a full year. And we never had much notice for it. I never felt like I had a “home.”

4) You stopped parenting me. When I was 11-13 you go more and more into drugs and partying. You were high/drunk most of the time. You stopped buying/cooking food. You had your “friends” over all the time and there was never any peace. I was afraid of many of them and they were not the sort of people that should have been hanging around where a child lives.

5) You didn’t believe me when I told you that R tried to make me put my hand down his pants. You told me to “stop causing problems.” When he made me do other stuff, I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t believe me. So I just put up with it.

6) You tried to kill yourself, in front of me.

7) You left me for several weeks, and I had no idea where you were.

8 ) You gave me an ultimatum – either go with you or lose you forever.

9) When I was 15 you wrote me a 5 page letter all about how you “forgave me” for “abandoning” you.

10) During my teen years and early 20s you came in and out of my life. You would be around for a few months and then disappear.

11) You lied to me, about your drug use, about all sorts of things. You made me not be able to trust you.

What has this all done to me? Well, I have an anxiety disorder, and while I don’t know for sure that these things are the source, it’s hard to believe they didn’t cause it somewhat. I have nightmares about you dying – there is nothing I am more afraid of then you dying, and yet being around you, even talking to you on the phone – throws me into an anxiety attack.

I hate myself. I feel like there’s something wrong with me – and that it doesn’t matter what I do, I’ll never be able to fix it. I regret that I never really stood up to you. I regret that I left you because I know that you moved in with M and he abused you for the next howevermany years. I regret that I let you go because now I don’t have a mom.

And there’s little things – that I’ve only found out by going to therapy. Like how I get super paranoid when I think someone is accusing me of something I know I didn’t do. Or how I have such a hard time trusting people – even some of the people I call friends. How I lash out at people because I’m afraid they are going to hurt me. How I never really feel at home anywhere. How I feel so lost all the time.

For years, I did not talk much about any of this. I couldn’t. I felt like I just had to keep going. But then at J’s wedding, you were there, and everyone was interacting with you like nothing had ever happened, and part of me just wanted to scream at them, and at you. But I wasn’t going to “cause problems” so I just got drunk and had fun instead.

It wasn’t long after that I started having anxiety, and went to a psychiatrist, and then to therapy. And then the nightmares started coming. And it’s been all downhill from there.

I hate the idea of blaming you or anyone else for my situation today. It is not all your fault – or anyone’s. Who knows, maybe I just happen to have a tendency toward mental problems. But I spent too many years pretending that my past – and your role in it – didn’t affect me. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t change the past but at least I can be honest about it.

I wish you would too. I wish that you would get to a place where you could take responsibility for the things that you did to me, and K, and granny and grampa, and the rest of the family that you hurt. I can not promise it but I think that maybe if you could do that then I would feel more comfortable with being in contact with you again. Until then I’m going to have to ask you to stop sending me things in the mail and contacting me.

You’re lying to yourself.

If you think that you’re not affected, you’re lying to yourself. If you think you aren’t sad, you’re lying to yourself. If you think you aren’t hurt, you’re lying to yourself. If you think these are just a series of events from a long time ago that you can just turn your back on now that you are all grown up and 500 miles away, then you are lying to yourself. If you are telling yourself that you are not angry then your pants are on fire.

How it works is, I don’t know what to do with all these emotions. How it happens is I just keep going because it’s what I’ve always done. Except it’s not working anymore. I have found the things I was looking for. I have security. I have stability. I have people who care about me. I don’t need to seek those things out anymore. So there’s nothing to distract me from this monster inside.

No, it’s not a monster. It’s sadness. It’s anger. It’s hurt. It’s worse then a monster because a monster can be slain. It’s emotions and the only way to make it stop is to not make it stop at all.

Tonight at therapy I went from talking about why things are hard to talk about to actually talking about things. At some point of my ridiculous attempt at articulating Things I Don’t Talk About ™, I was silent and searching my mind for the right words and my therapist reminded me to breathe. I laughed a little and said “I’m okay, I’m not even anxious.”

She smiled and said “Well it’s just that I noticed you were holding your breath.”

How disconnected I am from all of these emotions is I can stop breathing without even realizing it.

What I’d like to be is unaffected by it all. What I’d like is to have my shit together. To be sane and rational and emotionally in control and be able to say “well yeah, I had a troubled childhood, but who didn’t?”

To be able to laugh at the absurdity of it and wear it like a badge of honor. I’ve been through shit, I’m like, deep, or something.

But that’s not reality. Reality is emotions. Reality is sadness and hurt and anger and loneliness and fear. Not fear of becoming my mother but fear of really losing her. In my nightmares I’m not her, she is herself and she is dead. She’s dead and it’s too late. I don’t have a mom. Not even a crazy drug addicted abusive one. I already don’t have a dad so that makes me an orphan.

If I let myself feel these things, what will happen? Will I go insane? Will they have to lock me up? If I say the words out loud, My mother abused me and neglected me and abandoned me but I still have spent every single day since then wishing I could go back in time and not lose her will it become too real for me to handle and will I lose the ability to function?

I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to handle it, but I think I have to try, because I’ve run out of safe places to hide. All I’ve got left is self-destruction and as tempting as it is I really don’t want to go down that route.

I wrote about anxiety here.

This is about depression.

I’ve been here before.

It’s a blur – four years ago? five years?

I lived in Albany which is this tiny one mile square city in between Berkeley and El Cerrito. I lived in a studio apartment. It was the first time I’ve ever lived all by myself, without a roommate. Just a small studio, with a kitchen and bathroom. The carpet was horrible so I had rugs everywhere. Both the kitchen sink and the toilet leaked. The hot water heater was in the kitchen, completely out in the open, and one morning I woke up and there was water squirting from one of the pipes. It was a Saturday which meant I had to deal with it until Monday because the landlord never answered his phone on the weekends.

I worked in Richmond which is the ghetto. I worked six days a week – Monday through Thursday 4pm to 12am, and Friday and Saturday 12am to 8am. My only day off was Sunday when I got off work.

I made ten dollars an hour, and paid $750 a month for my shitty studio apartment.

And I was fine with this. I had moved there from Southern California, with no job prospects and $185 in my bank account. The fact that I wasn’t homeless was a sign of success.

But then the depression came.

It’s not like anxiety – it’s much more subtle. It doesn’t start off as sadness, it starts off as exhaustion. Then apathy. Then fuck, what am I doing here? What am I doing with my life? Every single thing sucks. I hate this apartment. I hate this little city. I hate my co-workers. I hate myself. I should get out of my apartment for awhile, go to Berkeley, go to The City and see my friend… but, meh. I’ll just sit here. Fuck it. I’m tired. I can’t sleep, I don’t want to sleep, but I’m tired.

When I’m depressed, I can’t be bothered with cleaning my apartment. I’m not lazy, I’m just preoccupied. Preoccupied with nothing.

When the sad comes, it’s not sudden like anxiety. It’s subtle, and sneaky. It starts with thoughts. Self-doubt. Remembering every single mistake I’ve ever made. Taking every social interaction apart and questioning everything about it. Feeling guilty for everything. Everything is my fault. I can’t do anything right. Everyone is going to leave me because why would anyone want to be around someone like me? And then the meta-thoughts – Why am I having these thoughts? God I’m so pathetic. I’m like some angst ten or something! I was depressed about being depressed. And ashamed of it all.

I started isolating. My circle of friends shrank and I spent more and more time alone. Which made me feel worse because it added loneliness to the list of symptoms.

Depression brings on insecurity brings on isolation brings on more depression.

Suicidal ideation, for me, is like a pressure release. The fact that I know someday I’m going to die, means there’s an end to this. It means the pain will end. The idea is a tempting one not because I actually want to die, but because dying would mean the end of the depression. It’s an escape route.

It’s tempting, but it feeds into the spiral.

The only way to really beat depression is to stop the spiral.

The only way to stop the spiral is to do things that depression makes it hard to do, and stop doing the things that feed into the spiral.

The only way to do those things is to just do them.

I’m not so sure I can do this.

I have an appointment for another ultrasound (read about the last one) next Thursday night.

This is an appointment I’ve rescheduled twice already.

I know I need to do it.

I know it’s for my health and it can give my doctor information that could save me future pain. I know it won’t hurt, or harm me. But I also know that I’m going to have a panic attack when it’s over.

The other day at work my boss came into the phone room where I work and laid into me. She had gotten a patient complaint call from someone who had yelled at me and then hung up on me, without giving me a chance to get the information to help her.

“You turned away a patient who was having asthma problems who had gone to the ER and needed to be seen.”

I stopped her, very calmly. I tried to explain what happened.

Wait. Let me tell you what happened. I did not turn her away. She did not tell me all that. She did not give me time to find out anything, she just yelled at me and then hung up on me. Even if she had just yelled at me, once I knew what was going on I would have helped her. I don’t take it personally when patients yell at me. I certainly do not deny them care because of it. But she hung up on me. I had no way to help her.

My boss did not listen to me, she just argued with me more, and made her accusations. Accusations of something, that in the six years I’ve worked at the clinic, I have never done. And I would never do. Yet here she is – not yelling at me – but talking to me firmly as if I was one of her kids – telling me what I did wrong. Right in front of my co-workers.

It pissed me off. I said this. I kept saying it. This is pissing me off. This is not ok. You are not listening to me. That is not what happened.

I was so angry that I had to leave the room. I went to the restroom and calmed myself down and then I went back.

Here’s the thing: I like my boss. This isn’t the first argument we have had, but I genuinely respect her. She’s been under a ton of stress lately, and she reacted badly to this situation. Not a huge deal – everyone does that sometimes. So, my predicted reaction would be to be pissed of for awhile, and then get over it. But I didn’t. For the next few hours until my lunch break I felt horrible because of it. During lunch time she came over and talked to me, and after that I felt okay. But before that, it sent me spiraling. And I couldn’t figure out why.

Now I realize that this is the same shit my mom used to do to me, except she did it all the time. Something would happen, and she had to have someone to blame, and so she’d make accusations without even trying to understand what really happened. And it didn’t matter how calmly and reasonably you tried to explained reality to her, she just wasn’t hearing it. I remember laying on my bed after she would do this, and just feeling horrible inside. Just crying and crying and then I’d calm down and then it would come back in my head and I’d start crying again. Normally if I got in trouble I’d get over it pretty quickly – but when I knew I had done nothing wrong it made me feel sick inside. It felt like she was punishing me, not my behavior. I didn’t do anything bad, I was a bad person. I felt so powerless. Following the rules wasn’t enough to avoid punishment, I would have to change who I was, and I did not know how to do that. I kept trying, but it never worked.

My boss is nothing like my mom – she was just having a bad day and having to talk to that patient was the straw that broke her rational mind and she took it out on me. I can forgive that, because she’s not usually like that. She’s usually very fair about things, and even when I have made actual mistakes or bad judgment calls, she always corrects me in a very patient and kind way. But I think what she did brought me back to how my mom was. I felt powerless again. I felt like a bad person (someone who would turn someone away who needed medical care), and I felt inadequate at my job. And I felt angry at her for making me feel that way.

The truth is, I’ve felt like that a lot lately. So much of the old stuff has come back. So it’s not like she woke up something that is living dormant inside me. She just reminded me of something that is sitting right below the surface.

Now back to the ultrasound stuff. If you didn’t read the entry that I linked, the too lazy; did not read, is that getting my last pelvic ultrasound triggered the hell out of me. I kept it together during, but as soon as I was alone after, I had a panic attack. And every year that I get a pap smear, the same thing happens. It has happened that way since the first one I’ve ever gotten. And there are reasons why, and I have written about them here, and I have even talked about them, out loud, with my therapist. But for years I did not. Hell even at the time I wrote that entry, I had not. But now I have and it’s all spilling over into the rest of my life.

Last night I read this post on reddit.com, and it sent me spinning. Tonight, walking home from my weekend job, I walked past the liquor store and the usual suspects were hanging out on the corner, and I felt fear in the pit of my stomach and quickened my walk. And on Thursday, when I am getting my pelvic ultrasound, I’m sure I will feel it as well.

This is not unusual. This fall-out. This is what happens when people are abused. This is what happens when people go through trauma. The past isn’t this place far away, it lives inside us and if we don’t deal with it, if we can’t find a way to cope with it after the fact, it sticks around, and it finds ways to steal our attention. I know this. And I’m trying to do the right thing – trying to give it the attention it needs and deal with it, and it can stop interrupting my life so much.

I am trying. I am doing this. But fuck, it’s hard.

Friday night I spent with friends at the bar. So much fun.

Saturday I was supposed to go to my Granny’s house but I over slept so I just stayed home. I slept most of the day. I decided to be okay with that.

Saturday night I drank entirely too much vodka and soda.

Sunday I woke up hungover and uggh but I made myself get up and get out of the house. Went and got coffee… wandered around downtown… went to the Art Fair on 5th street, then went and saw the latest Pirates movie at the 3 dollar theater.

Went to bed sometime after midnight after taking a trazadone. No nightmares. Slept well.

Woke up on time this morning… A bit early even… had time to make food for lunch today.

Feel pretty ok except dreading therapy, but that’s an every Monday thing.

If things stay how they are now, I will be quite content. But I’m worried about becoming content and then crashing again. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust myself.

I’m making a list of good things.

• My friends (and family, but I count the family members that I like the most as friends, because you get to choose your friends!). They are on top of this list for a reason.
• Art. Drawing, painting, computer…art…ing.
• Music, especially live music. I love going to concerts

There is more… it’s more “the little things.” Hanging out with The Motherfucking Kyoti and The Stoat in downtown Santa Rosa, and that I get to do it again soonish. Going to the Atmosphere/Rhymesayers show and meeting a bazillion just as excited fans. Going to the reddit meetup with Serena and luring her into the cult of reddit. Hanging out with my youngest cousin and teaching him how to make awesome lego robots. Buying my god-daughter a batman costume, despite her parents objections. Watching this guy’s videos. Spending 15 minutes on the phone with a scared/worried/upset mom (while at work) whose daughter just found out she has diabetes, and had no good health insurance, and bringing her from tears to laughter and hopelessness to hopefullness by the end of the conversation. Having patients ask for me by name and refer to me as “the smart one in the front office.” Getting big smiles and hugs from the medical director. Making my manager laugh at the end of a stressful day. Playing Scrabble with my granny. Doing – well, just about anything – with my cousins Bryan and Jessica, and my sister.

When the depression comes – and lately it comes often and with a vengeance – that’s when I forget all of this. I forget about all of the good things. They are zapped from my brain. The only part that I do remember are the people. The best thing in my life is the people I love. The worst thing that could happen to me would be to lose them. When I’m stuck in the spiral, all I can think of is the worst thing that I can imagine. I feel alone, I feel scared, I feel desperate to hold on tight but terrified that I deserve none of it, and that everyone is going to figure that out and “come to their senses.” I feel like I have no value. I’m just this thing that exists by some sort of accident. I feel shameful, repulsive. Like the plague.

My thought process gets all distorted. Why would anyone want to be around someone who is the plague? Why would anyone stick around if they knew how bad I am? They’re going to leave. They’re going to figure it out and they are going to leave. If they leave – when they leave – I’m going to be all alone. I’m going to fall apart. It’s going to hurt, and I’m not going to be able to handle it. This spiral leads me to hopelessness. It leads me to frustration and more hopelessness and uggh. The idea of dying – just. So. Tempting. Well, not the dying. But making it stop. How every single thing will stop. All of the depression. All of the fear. All of the pain. All of the memories.

But all of the good stuff would be gone too. I’d never get to see any of those people again. I’d never get to paint another picture or watch another awesome youtube video or make another person laugh or help another person or go to another live show or even listen to another song again. I’d hurt people I care about and I’d miss out on whatever I would have gotten to do. I’d be gone, and whatever my life has been up to now, would be it.

I don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s what has gotten me this far, but it isn’t really enough. It stops me from acting on the thoughts but it doesn’t make them go away. I need to remember the good things. I need to stay alive because I want to, because I have good reason to. Because depression sucks, and it’s a very big thing, but it’s not the whole thing.

I’m a broken human being. I wish I could stop existing now.