Thursday, July 21, 2011

I'm coming out of a bad childhood and i have all sorts of issues now...How do I deal with this?

I am a 20 year old female by the way.Things were good for me until about the age of eight when my family moved to Florida. I had three older brothers at this point, two of which were becoming more and more rebellious during their early teens. They brought drugs and porn into my household, and introduced my family to tasteless "hip hop" music, all of which i was exposed to at an early age and could not fully understand. Our neighbors all hated my family because of my brothers, so therefore i did not have many neighborhood kids to play with. Also we moved around a lot so it was hard to maintain friends . The cops were showing up at my house at least a few times a month because of domestic violence issues, drugs, or some other problem. My brothers would get high on whatever they could find, come home in the middle of the night and start fights with each other and with my parents. They would also vandalize the house by breaking windows, punching doors, breaking stuff...etc. Both of my parents were working full time so they could not be there to control what went on in my home.These situations were all traumatizing to me....i cannot stand the sound of screaming and yelling or the sight of violence because it reminds me of those times in my childhood. Random people would be coming in and out of my house all hours of the day and night to buy and do drugs. So this type of living situation persisted into my pre-teen years, which were some of the hardest for me. I began to have problems with anxiety and depression. I remember being like eleven years old and praying to god that i would die in my sleep because I hated my life so much. Because of all the stress i was dealing with at home i fell behind quite a bit in school and since my parents were working full time, they could not be there to discipline me to do my work, this caused me to have to repeat 6th grade. Around the age of thirteen my parents and myself moved into an apartment without my brothers and things were calmer, but i was still having emotional problems that just got worse...I began cutting myself, and i'm not talking about little scratches. These cuts are deep, and i still struggle to hide my scars. I am 20 years old now. I though about suicide a lot, i had problems with my peers. I would bully people and be bullied. I did not care about school either. I ate a lot, mostly out of boredom so i gained weight. I hated myself. No confidence whatsoever. During all of this at the age of 14 my family got a call that my third brother Peter, the only good one, had been killed in a boating accident. He was the only one i had anything in common with. We both liked art and the same music, he was quiet and shy like me. We were friends as well and brother and sister. After my brother died i continued to struggle with my depression and anxiety and was still cutting myself, but a few good things started happening for me. I made some really good friends in my last year of middle school and was able to stay in the same high school for four years and maintain my friends. The high school i went to specialized in the arts, so i felt very luck for that opportunity because during this time i realized my passion for art. I also improved my grades in school, but since i missed out on some very basic things it was hard to catch up and still is. Those four years when i was in high school were my best so far and i have my friends to thank for it...Even though during that time i dealt with anxiety and some depression, my friends distracted me from it and i stopped cutting myself. I did not get into the florida schools i wanted to go to and i did not want to go to community college so i went out of state to Tennessee where a lot of my relatives live. I was devastated to leave my friends and still am, but was hopeful about making new ones. Since coming to Tennessee, it did not take long for me to realize that i do not like it here. For one, I am having a very hard time making friends....also, my depression and anxiety have come back ten times worse than i ever remember. I am having thoughts of suicide, I feel so alone. My anxiety had turned into more of social anxiety. I feel inferior to everyone and like everyone is happy while i am not. I cannot relate to anyone, and shoot myself down constantly because of my looks, weight, lack of intelligence..I also have a hard time opening up to people, especially about my childhood. I feel like when i tell someone how things were for me, they cannot relate, and then i regret telling them. That's always how it is for me. I refuse to take medication because it stifles creativity, and most of the time i feel like art is all i have...I'm having a hard time summoning up the courage to talk to a therapist because of my anxiety (and i just hate talking about myself). Anyways, I'm starting to look back on my childhood and trying to figure out how those experiences are effecting the way i am today....sorry i wrote so much..i

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