My Story By:Anonymous

My story.
All of my life I was taught to overlook the bad things in life and just move on. My family never spoke about emotional problems, we never dealt with them. When I was in 7th grade my mother’s husband decided he wanted to leave. After 8 years the only man who had played the father figure role in my life packed up his clothes and left. The entire time he was carrying things to his car I watched from the couch. He didn’t bother to say bye. Shortly after, my step-mother who has battled with diabetes since birth, died from kidney failure. The last time I visited her in the hospital she hugged me and told me to take care of my little sister.
That summer I moved in with my father because I wanted to be there for my 8 year-old sister. I fell into such a deep depression I can’t remember most of that year. I know I lost 30 lbs in about a month. I would come home from school, and help my sister with her homework as my dad left to go to the bar. I’d fix her dinner, make sure she showered and was in bed by a decent time, and then I’d clean the house. This was actually the happier times I lived there. It didn’t get bad until my father began to bring women home. I would walk in from school and find women sitting on the couch who looked somewhat surprised to see me. They stopped coming around when they realized my dad had kids, which he made sure to tell me that was the only flaw in their relationship. Then he started bringing older women home, and told my sister that he was going to find her a new mom. He threw out all of my stepmother’s pictures, clothes, and personal things and pretended she never existed. He would leave us at strange women’s houses and we would spend the night with them. He made us pretend to be a family.
He eventually moved one of the women into our home. Everything changed after that. There was a strict list of rules I had to follow all of a sudden. He expected me to change everything because he wanted this woman to stay with him. When they would argue, he would tell my sister and I it was our fault.
I began to come home from school and go to bed, which my father found completely unacceptable. He would yell and threaten me by saying if I didn’t contribute to the family I couldn’t live there. So I would clean, sit silent at the table, do the dishes and go to sleep. On the weekends I would sleep until he forced me to get up.
Eventually they decided to take me to a therapist to see why I was so defiant, which my father made perfectly clear that it was a complete nuisance that he would have to take me to a doctor. The entire time I didn’t speak to the therapist. I listened while my dad fed her stories about how I steal money and take his car. He told her about how I was either depressed or angry for no apparent reason. The only question the doctor asked me was how I would kill myself. I had given up trying to rationalize any of it by that point, so I laughed and told her I’d slit my wrists. I was put on an anti-depressant which pretty much just got me high. I was ridiculously hyper and unlike myself until it wore off, then I’d cry myself to sleep and feel more depressed than I did in the first place.
Once the summer came they decided that I couldn’t stay at the house by myself. At 14 I didn’t want to be babysat, so I decided I wanted to move back home with my mom. As my father drove me home he spent the entire 2 hours telling me about how I’ve ruined his life. I didn’t talk to him for a year after that.
I can’t remember how it started, but I began cutting. It wasn’t anything much, just tiny cuts on my forearm. This went on the same way for about 5 years. I never thought much of it. People saw the marks but they never said anything to me. Of course there was the occasional ‘emo kid’ remark, but no one addressed me about it. Last spring I had an accident. I was upset and was trying to get rid of the emotions without crying about it, so I took out a new razor and I went too deep. My arm split open and all I could see was yellow tissue, then the blood started to seep out. I grabbed a washcloth and wrapped it around my arm, thinking that would somehow stop it. My mom and her boyfriend drove me to the hospital and I had to get 10 stitches in my arm. That night in the E.R. was the lowest point of my life. My mom was holding my hand, crying and telling me she loved me. Across the room there was an old man who didn’t know where he was begging people to help him. A bald woman with cancer was carried to a bed as she vomited. And there I was, lying on a bed with a self-inflicted wound. I felt like the biggest piece of shit in the world. I haven’t even thought about cutting since then.
I still suffer from depression. I still have the thoughts, but I deal with them in other ways. I write and I try to talk about it. I still have a lot of difficulty dealing with it, but I’m making progress. I’ve never had much experience with talking about emotional problems, but I’m finding out that it really does make me feel better. It’s embarrassing to feel so weak and vulnerable, but dealing with it makes me stronger. That night in the E.R., I found out that I have hypothyroidism which can apparently attribute to depression. So I’ve been taking medication for that and this fall I’m going to start seeing a new therapist. It’s a very slow process, but this is what I have to do.
I want to share my story because I know how it feels to think you are completely alone. I know how it is when you feel completely helpless and like it doesn’t even matter. I want people to understand that they are not alone and that there is always hope.