My third post… second time today… too many feelings… This will be long.
Some say that you can see the light best when you finally hit the bottom… I wonder if this isn’t the bottom of the pit; how much deeper am I going to sink? I am so beyond overwhelmed. Let’s just lay it all out. I want to kick and scream and yell and honestly I wish there was something I could break if it would help me get out of this feeling of despair. I am so tired of telling my story, to every new friend, to every new place I try to find solace, especially when it all breaks away. I wish I could write it all out publicly. I have no idea why I don’t, maybe because I know the parent I am left taking care of is still ashamed of everything they went through. Which… is my mom. My mom was abused by her family growing up and then she married my, now deceased, father thinking she could find someone who cared, someone who would look after her and notice what she was feeling and thinking. Dad was an abusive awful man to her. He was abusive to his kids, my sibling and I, as well though what mom lived through was always much worse than what we ever faced. I feel guilt about my lot as far as dad. My sibling was physically abused on top of what we all face because of Dad. Although as I am writing this my sibling probably did not face the emotional neglect I did because my dad preferred my sibling over me. I still remember numerous occasions of my dad egging my sibling on to make fun or me and put me down. To them I was stupid, I knew nothing about anything so I was not allowed to give input to the conversations they had though I was always forced to go on every freaking outing with the two of them. Mom was the only one who defended me and stood up for me, when she wasn’t able to go out with us because of work they made sure to take their digs at me. I always felt secure when she was around. She was always the reason I didn’t have body image issues because she taught me not to care as my father was always saying I was too skinny, I was too fat, I wasn’t eating enough, hated the clothes I wanted to wear, belittled me when I was trying to pick out clothes for school. To this day I HATE SHOPPING FOR CLOTHES!
I held all this in for so many years. I think the only person I’ve talked to about it thoroughly is my bf. Not even my best friend of ten years has heard any of these stories. Usually, when I hung out with her it was about what she wanted to talk about, whatever boy she was excited or in turmoil about and maybe there was time for whatever current thing I was going through. Really, very few people in my life now have heard the story of my past. Opening up to him has been the start of a lot of healing and he’s been hellishly busy since late last year with his work and other things he has to deal with that I will not address here for various reasons. I feel like everything I think of when something goes wrong just adds and adds and adds to all the anxiety and fear I have about my future. When will it get worse, is all I can think.
My dad left when I was 16; he came to me and said he was leaving in a month. Two weeks before the supposed day he was to leave my sibling and I came home to a half empty house. We thought we had been robbed, my sibling calls my dad in a panic wondering if we should call the police and my dad says “I moved out.” At that point my sibling and I were left to piece together the financial mess that dad left upon my family. All the bills unpaid for several months, just enough to keep the lights and utilities and the cable from being cut. My sibling helped at first, I can never be sure why. Maybe compassion for my mom on the verge of a break down, maybe self interest because soon enough it was only me helping mom sort it all out. In a few months we thought we were out of hot water until dad broke his part of the separation agreement and refused to pay the second mortgage on the house so we lost our home and half our things and were forced to hastily and haphazardly move into the crappy apartment I live in now.
As soon as my sibling was in college the family wasn’t their concern. Mom was struggling more and more to make ends meet and not even able to handle most of it emotionally. More and more fights started and more and more I hid myself away in my room, more and more I was becoming numb and depressed and unknowingly hating myself. Once I was in college, after dealing with issues that my father caused which led to me not being able to get a license I started working to help make ends meet and I started failing classes way before that point.
I had no books the first semester I was in college cause I had no money and no one was there to help me figure out how to apply for financial aid and get things done on time despite my sibling having already done so for two years before me with my father’s help the first year. I would see kids with their parents in lines in the financial aid office and wonder why they were too childish to get things done on their own. it never occurred to me that it’s usually a part of life that parents are still helping their kids become adults. It never occurred to me that I was mostly raised by my mom and my sibling. My depression was probably at its worse my second semester of college when I failed almost every class because I felt too weak, sick, tired and unmotivated to get out of bed. The only reason I did get out of bed was because I knew mom would come home and find me in my pjs and wonder what the heck I did all day, maybe call me lazy and put me down. So I would quickly get dressed and make it seem like I had gone to all my classes or at least try to make one. I assumed it was the allergy pills I was taking for the first time, under no supervision from a doctor because I haven’t had health insurance since my dad abandoned us. I switched the type of OTC allergy meds I was using and then started having panic attacks, again I assumed it was the pills so I switched brands again.
I have no clue how long things kept going as they did. I started working my second year of college but only during the summer, for a time, my financial aid checks where helping to pay rent. My sibling who had their own car and was able to work easily wasn’t helping at all. More and more fights about how much their habits were not helping us save money when money was tight. Eventually I started working during the school year and changed majors my second year for my own spiritual reasons at the time. I wanted to write like one of my favorite writers and help people like me, like one of my friends at that time and teach as well so I could keep kids from feeling unloved and forgotten. I have always wanted to help keep people from feeling unloved and forgotten.
In 2009 my sibling decided to move out and it kind of felt like a burden was being lifted though I blamed myself for them hating mom and I because I was tired of them buying expensive video games and toys like the Playstation 3 while I had to sell my friend’s piano that she let me borrow so we could pay for rent and not end up homeless. By then I had changed my major a third time and I was close to being done with my Music Education degree. I no longer wanted to write and thought music would be a good tool to help kids not end up like me, or worse because of poverty and abuse or neglect. By then I had racked up a lot of debt to pay the bills because the jobs I had weren’t cutting it so I took out student loans. Months after my sibling left they cut my mom’s hours at work in half. That fall was the first time I knew I had anxiety issues because I had a full on panic attack as my mom was driving me to work. I had taken on a job that my friend had promised to take me to because there were no buses to get me there but it was a guaranteed job after I had been laid off from a work study job I had in school, which that work study job is why I had to take out loans so I could take summer classes the two summers before so I could keep working and help mom pay the bills.
Mom forced me to quit after that panic attack for my own health. My anxiety was so bad that the months and months of practice for my recital was not paying out. Every voice lesson was like I had never seen the music in my entire life and my voice professor chewing me out for not “working hard enough.” My accompanist who was another professor giving me her services for free (something we had never been required to pay for in the past because all the other professors knew how to play piano and didn’t refuse to play for lessons) started putting me down for helping mom pay the bills saying she was a rotten good for nothing mom for “making me work.” I chose to work because I was watching mom slowly fall apart physically and emotionally especially after my sibling abandoned us and refused to speak with her more and more over time.
My aunt was diagnosed with cancer that fall, I chose to be faithful to my studies in stead of taking an opportunity from a lady from our church to go see my aunt for the last time. Shortly after my mom got back I was forced to push my recital behind to the next semester Spring 2010. That following semester they cut my financial aid. School was done for me as were all my wishes to do what I felt I was meant to do in my life. I held on to hope and decided to work full time and help mom and save money on the side until I could go back to school. It took this summer to get a full time job, mom was still part time and we had been on and off food stamps by then, and we had been shamed and used by our church for needing financial assistance. I was at that job for 13 months. We were almost out of the financial hole we were in at that point and I was planning to save once mom’s car payment (the car she purchased out of need years before they cut her hours at work) had been finished.
I had been promised a temporary position that would be permanent once the hiring freeze was lifted, they out sourced our position over seas, and soon hundreds of temp employees, including myself were laid off. I was jobless and we were on food stamps again til the beginning of 2012, unemployment took months to process and I got a part time job by the time they started paying me so I stopped the unemployment help.
By the end of that year I had found a full time job, with in months mom and I were getting to a stable place financially and I was making plans to pay off my student loans that are now defaulted and start saving for school again. That was when they laid my mom off and I became the bread winner of the family. Mom consistently could not find work because in the 13 years she was at her last position they had moved that industry over seas and the places she tried turned her away time and time again because of her age and claiming she speaks no English and her self esteem plummeted even lower than it was left from the years of hearing “you’re worthless,” from my dad.
I had that job for three years struggling to make ends meet the whole time. I was making a wage well below the poverty line but it was too much to get government aid. Eventually I was injured by the work I was doing and I could no longer draw or paint or write without sever pain. At one point the pain in my spine and shoulders was so bad I could not get out of bed and my manager forced me to go to urgent care after I went into work barely able to lift my arms. The doctor there said my scapula had separated from my clavicle that was probably caused by the work I was doing daily, and ordered me to rest my arm which they only let me do for a month because the specialist said it had nothing to do with my work and said I had tendinitis, the xrays that doctor took were not as sever as when I went to urgent care because I had been resting my shoulder for a while by the time I saw him.
When they put me back to the same work passive aggressively threatening my job if I did not comply the pain once again got worse and I started losing hours cause I had no more PTO left and they lead to me missing work from having migraines from not eating well and they started writing me up for things I was not doing. They then fired me which for a brief moment felt like a relief because the isolation I was facing at that job was causing my depression to be horribly sever. My friends soon enough stopped talking to me and I had no one really except some new friends I had made online. They were the only people who stuck with me. Poverty and stress made my depression worse as I faced a year being jobless and we completely burned through my mom’s IRA bit by bit. The last conversation I had with my father was him telling me I was worthless for being in the financial situation I was in because I “did not work hard enough.” Saying he was so much more successful at my age rubbing the things that made my childhood an awful one in my face as if they were trophies of what a hard worker he was and what a worthless lazy human I am.
When I finally got the job I have now at the end of 2016, a year after of being unemployed I was in danger of losing that job because I was having panic attacks and issues getting to and from work because my home life has become chaos and my depression was full blown and still undiagnosed. Which about a year ago I did get an official diagnosis from a volunteer therapist online, who is certified and she was going to help me find help but because she helps so many people for free I stopped going to her for help. I was feeling better once I knew I have depression and sever anxiety and I started finding ways to cope. I am not sure why but all the hard work I did from that diagnosis crumbled when my father passed away this January. Money is still a struggle and now as I mentioned in a previous post my music, the last thing I have to give life back to the world and do the very thing that I feel I was made to do, is now being threatened. I bought my laptop last year to help me create things for my music. My bf who I met online and my best online friend who I met a little before my bf had encouraged me to finally take my music seriously which I decided only a little before getting fired, ironically. They’re both unable to help me cope right now for various reasons and they’ve been the only people to take on the burden on my depression along side me since I met then in 2015. I feel like I’m too much for them. I feel like they shouldn’t have to handle me anymore and I feel like I don’t want to go through saying all this history to someone else, but here it is in a long, long post.
I started opening up to people when I started streaming feeling like I was at a place in my life where I could give again but I found out in a very bad way that I am not ready yet and I am still fighting to love myself. I am scared of losing my bf over this. I love him so much, and I am scared of losing my closest friend as well who I haven’t talked to for days because I am shutting down after a fight I had with my mom which led to a fight with my bf cause he wants me to abandon her, no one in my real like knows about him. He might have said that cause he is stressed himself right now. I’ve had no one to really talk to after my dad passed and it’s only served to stir up all the pain and lies I have believed about myself since my childhood. Dad’s family was completely awful to me. I found out about his passing second hand through a text in the middle of my work day. No one really told me what was going on until I was able to contact a very distant relative whose connection to my family isn’t even clear because of the degrees of separation. I was promised help to go say good bye and no one came through with money nor helping me find answers. I couldn’t even go because I had no one to look after mom who can’t even bring herself to eat some days because she is so depressed. I feel like things will never get better. I feel like things will never end. I feel like I will never find a way out and a way to do what I love and really be able to love myself and love my mom, my best friend and my bf as they deserve.
The fight with mom felt like a breaking point because she is causing me to not be able to stream and though she went back on what she said saying she said things out of spite I am afraid to trust her and I feel like all the support she showed me for years has all been a lie. I want to trust her. I want to stream and play music again. I want my body to no longer be in pain from simple day to day tasks. I want to have a working computer so I can do the things that bring me joy and a sense of fulfilling my purpose and dreams. I want to not be afraid to hope in the future and see a light at the end of all of this and not more and more fear and despair and self loathing when I need help. I hate asking for help cause it’s been thrown in my face so many times. I don’t want to feel weak, and worthless and pathetic! I worked so hard to keep my family happy, as happy as possible and I feel I am failing cause I cannot even get mom the help she really needs, the help I really need so we can be a healthy family. It breaks my heart everyday and I get angry when it seems like she thinks I am out to hurt her just because I need help saving money. I am sick of not living and only surviving! I’m crying now and I think I’ve said everything I can think of wanting to say right now.
Here is a song that broke me last weekend that I hope can help other people. If you’ve gotten this far thank you for reading and I’m sorry it is so long. I’m tired of telling my story and feeling like I am trying to make excuses. I just want people to understand why I feel like I am falling apart when something “small” happens. My bf told me once “tomorrow is promised,” and that seems like a struggle everyday cause I keep surviving and I am tired and I feel I never get enough rest for my heart and soul. I can’t help anyone. I can’t do what I dream of doing. Everything feels wrong… I fear tomorrow. I want to believe.
