I wanted to write something eloquent. But fuck it.
In my therapy, I am uncovering decades of hurt, beginning from even before my earliest memories. My counselor asked me the most incredible question I think a therapist could ask someone who is suicidal.
“How old do you feel when you want to kill yourself?” Dr. Sarah asked.
Silence. It only took a few moments before I blabbered out, amidst snot and tears, “Five.”
As a five year old child, I wanted to die. I couldn’t articulate it quite in that way. But I remember vividly thinking things like “I don’t want to be here” and “I wish I wasn’t alive” and “I don’t want to be me.” What on earth was going on in my environment to make me, a vulnerable, innocent five year old, want to die?
My mother holds the answer to so many new questions I am forming with every counseling session I complete. I am conquering this. We clearly have generational trauma, especially the women in our family. And it stops with me. I’ll be the scapegoat. I’ll take the blame. It can all be my fault. Because isn’t it always? So might as well put it to use and make a real difference for my family heritage. I’m the damn dam. 🙂
I’m writing about my journey into hope. For a writing contest. And to be honest, I’m not feeling very hopeful. My mental illness is just this constant battle I am facing. It never takes a rest. Like, give me a day, bruh. I mean, I do have good days…”rad” days…but lately, since I’ve really been focusing in on my therapy, my mood tracker is looking mighty bleak. It’s really hard to talk about how my mother failed to nurture me in my most influential years and then go have a rad fucking day.
I had a virtual appointment with my counselor last week during the work day. I just excused myself and went outside and thought I would be fine. By the time the session was over, I was in no place to be out in public. I was depressed, feeling even more empty and useless. So I went to my office, grabbed my belongings and just left without saying goodbye.
Therapy is uncovering so much – like, I often question myself if these are actually revelations or make-believe….but something is fucking aligning like never before, something is happening, some part of me is finding healing. Thank God.
And to my mother, who likes to randomly call me and leave me a voicemail saying, “Hi Kristin! It’s your mom….” My response. Until you, Candy,
I have nothing to say to you. The list is a million points long, but it’s mostly about taking ownership that you weren’t this wonderful mother. Yes, you put food on the table. You put a roof over our head. Albeit, I had to share a bedroom with you and your boyfriend, as a child. A pre-teen is a child. You always said I was older than my age, and I was an independent child, and I realized, during my last therapy session, the real question I have is, “Where were you?” When I was being an independent five year old, playing alone in my room, for hours upon hours on end, interrupted only to be told to eat my next meal, and eventually told “go to sleep.”
I was hiding. Hiding from your rage. Your outbursts of throwing Joel’s racquetball trophies at him to throwing away my favorite Barbie I forgot to put away, you were a fucking maniac. And the messages you gave you. I’m not good enough. I’m a bad child. I’m a bad daughter. Then, once the sisters came, I’m a bad sister. I’m a bad role model. Everything centered around me being defective and not able to meet some kind of standard of “goodness” and “wholeness”. I was less than. Never enough to you.
So, boy did I go searching for that feeling of being wanted. And in all the wrong places. Namely, with boys. Boys don’t want girls. Boys want sex. The girl is irrelevant. So when a boy would show me attention, and tell me nice things about myself, I would fall head over heals and think this is the person I’m going to spend my life with. And the boy would agree we had such a connection and I felt wanted and loved and gave away the most sacred part of myself. Time and time again.
I never learned my lesson. I fell for it every time. The feeling of being wanted and loved, finally, fucking finally after never being enough to my own mother, was just too enticing to pass up. Each time was different. Until it wasn’t. One of the guys I had a long-term relationship with. We were engaged actually. He proposed our senior year of college. And he’s who I thought I was going to marry. But we had the most volatile, unhealthy, toxic, crazy relationship you could imagine. I was very jealous and always afraid he was going to leave me. Because, isn’t that what everyone in my life did? My father left. More than once. My nurturing mother never showed herself to me, so in a way, she left me by not even being there to begin with. I was broken. I was broken trying to make a serious romantic relationship work. And it wasn’t working. The ending was terrible, followed by an encore! And by encore I mean I reappeared to him and his friends wasted and really seared in everyone’s mind how crazy I was. That night has haunted me, as I attempted to end my life later that night when I returned home from drinking. But, with my recent counseling revelations, I see that was the five year old me acting out. A vulnerable, lonely, abandoned five year old living in a twenty five year old’s body, in an adult world that I have no clue how to navigate because my mother never taught me. God, I put that boyfriend through hell. He’ll be in the book.
The interesting thing about that relationship was him and his family thought they were gosh darn perfect. And I thought they were perfect. I thought, “This is what a family is supposed to look like.” So I really pushed my family away while I was in that relationship in favor of the perfect family. (They weren’t perfect, but they were a healthy, supportive family.) Well, as it turned out, this healthy, supportive family genuinely loved me. But I just couldn’t accept it. Not me. I’m too broken. Too defective. Too ugly. Too gross. Too less than. So I resisted that relationship, that love and acceptance. After much self-sabotage, the relationship was over-over. No contact ever again over.
And to address the healthy, supportive family reference. I’m not saying my family has not supported me. I’m not saying my family hasn’t been there for me. What I am saying is during crucial moments in my life they have failed me. When I told Joel that my brother told me Pap-pa molested him, he said, “Did you have an abortion in high school?”
After I was sexually assaulted, my stepmother told me over dinner, “You haven’t included us in anything.” Well fuck me. How could I not have anticipated your needs during this trauma I am experiencing. I mean, I was told I was a bad daughter. This is just further validation. While trying to heal from being raped, I inadvertently forgot to include you in……….what? The police interviews? Physical exam after physical exam? Having all my church friends turn their backs on me? I was put in in-patient shortly after that conversation after my mother asked me if I ever thought about killing myself. A bit ironic as I could have said, “Yeah, my whole life. And it’s because of you.” But I was only fourteen at the time and it had not yet been revealed to me that my suicidal ideation is rooted in my five year old self. The only thing I know for sure is I was raped and I’m all alone and it is never going to get better.
Just days before she asked me if I ever thought about killing myself, I went into the kitchen and got all of my mother’s prescriptions and brought them into my room. It was a mix of pain killers, thyroid medicine, maybe high blood pressure meds. I had gotten down to about 90 pounds, so it wouldn’t have taken much to at least fuck me up in some kind of way. I just wanted to end it all. And I picked up the phone. And I called my friend Robbie. And I never told him this story or reminded him of this phone conversation. We don’t talk anymore, a common theme among friends from long ago. But, I called Robbie. And I’m crying, barely able to speak, so scared, but ready to end it, I felt the courage in my veins.
“It’s never going to get better.” I cried out.
“Yes, it will. Yes, it will,” he repeated. And repeated and repeated. That’s all he said. We hung up some time after and I put my mother’s medications back in the cabinet and went to bed, only to face another putrid day over and over and over again.
Now, the night I made my Encore appearance to my ex from college, I did not put the pills back in the cabinet after the phone conversation. I called my once future mother in law – said God knows what – told her that her son is an addict – then swallowed full bottles of Wellbutrin and Seroquel. I wrote a note before going to bed for what I hoped would be my last time. “It was never enough.”
Another instance of the five year old, brokenhearted child inside of me.
More on this to come….
Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash
