Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Eleven

You’re probably wondering what happened next.

 

I focused on getting my shit together. I went to the sessions with my therapist. I went to sessions with my ARHMS worker. I’d meet with my Case Manager once a month. I’d meet with my doctor every six months to make sure the psychiatric meds were still working.

 

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

 

In 2011 my ARHMS worker planted a seed in my head. She knew that it had been a goal of mine for, long before we ever started working together, to go back to college and get my degree. However, I had given up hope of that ever happening. Obstacle after obstacle had occurred in my life and I had accepted that I had blown my chance of ever graduating from college. She had faith in me, however. It was her determination that I could get my degree, along with a combination of her charm and charisma that encouraged me to re-enroll at the local community college.

 

I had tried going back to college in 2001 and failed. Between attending classes, a part-time job, attending group therapy, and one-on-one therapy, it was too much on my plate. Something had to go, so I chose to withdraw from classes versus quit my job.

 

In the fall of 2011 I participated in the Pathways to College Success, a program designed for students who had been out of college for a long period of time. The following spring I was enrolled in classes and have been taking classes since. It hasn’t been easy. There have been times where I have had to withdraw from classes due to my mental health, but I keep working at it because I’m determined to graduate.

 

Am I cured? No. There is no cure for mental illness. There is no cure for Bipolar Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder. However, with the right combination of medication and therapy, it can be managed so that my symptoms aren’t as severe. So that’s what I do. I keep taking my meds and I keep going to therapy. Yes, I still get depressed. Yes, I still get manic. But my highs and lows aren’t as severe as they are when I’m not on my meds and in therapy.

 

As long as I keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll be okay. I’ll keep surviving. I’ll graduate from college and get my degree.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Ten

In 2008, two years after I moved out of the group home, and one year after I moved in with my fiancé, I started a new regiment of psychiatric medication on the condition that if the medication made me gain weight or messed with my cycle, we’d switch to a different medication. It was a game of trial and error, finding the just the right combination of psychiatric medications I could take that would stabilize my moods without causing me to gain weight or mess with my cycle.

 

While all of that was going on, I found a new therapist. I had contacted the therapist I had previously worked with when I lived in the group home, but she was no longer taking doing one-on-one therapy, so she referred me to another therapist. I started attending weekly therapy sessions.

 

Around the same time, one of my best friends, a former roommate from the group home, suggested I start seeing an ARHMS worker. ARHMS service had been a lifesaver for her, and she felt working with an ARHMS worker would do wonders for me. So arrangements were made for an intake and diagnostic assessment at Accend Services, where I was paired with the very same ARHMS worker my best friend had been working with.

 

With the help of the medication, therapy, and ARHMS service, I started feeling more stable. A year later, all that changed when my mom called to tell me that my dad’s cancer had returned. Up until then, my dad had been in remission for several years. His tests had been clear for such a long time, I was beginning to wonder whether he’d been cured of cancer. I got my answer when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer and then a few months later, his lymphoma returned.

 

All the fears I’d struggled with during high school, college, and when I lived in Rochester came flooding back. Is he going to live? Is he going to die? No one could tell me.

 

My moods began to cycle again. I fell into a terrible depression, followed by an even worse manic that caused me to do something that I will always regret and nearly cost me my relationship with my fiancé. I won’t go into detail because I spent months of sessions with my therapist and ARHMS worker to deal with the guilt I felt after doing what I did. As Rafiki once told Simba, “The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it.” I learned from my mistake, and that’s all that matters.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Nine

That’s where two of my friends came in to play. They were a young couple that originally lived across the hall from a guy I had dated while living at the group home. The three of us got along famously and became fast friends. It wasn’t unusual for me to go over to their apartment and hang out with them when the guy I was dating wasn’t at his. When they found out they were pregnant, I was in the delivery room when their daughter was born, and named Godmother. A year later when their son was born, I was once again in the delivery room. They treated me like a member of the family. I was like an older sister to the girlfriend, and a younger sister to the boyfriend.

 

When I told them how I had been feeling, how I was afraid of living in the group home for the rest of my life, the boyfriend declared that he and the girlfriend had been planning for some time, to ask me to move in. They were afraid if I lived there any longer, I would never leave. So, plans were made, and I moved in with them.

 

I lived with them for about a year. During that time, I got engaged to my fiancé and we started making plans for our future. Also during that time, I was off my medications. Truth be told, I’d been off my medication well before I had moved in with my friends. I had stopped taking them while I was still living in the group home because I felt like I no longer needed them and I didn’t like what all the years of taking them had done to my body.

 

What the doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists tend to gloss over is that psychiatric medications have common, adverse, and rare, but severe side effects. When I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder back in 1999, the nurse practitioner prescribed Lithium as a mood stabilizer, Paxil as an antidepressant, and Trazodone as an anti-anxiety/sleep aid. Lithium caused me to gain weight. Over the course of the six years I was taking it, I gained 100+ pounds. It also caused me to develop hypothyroidism. Which affects my metabolism, thus causing me to have difficulty regulating my weight and makes me tired whenever my thyroid levels are out of whack. It also caused hair loss. I had already experienced stress induced hair loss during those last few months when I was living in Rochester, and the Lithium only made it worse. Although I had been taking birth control to regulate my menstrual cycle, Paxil interfered with it. I went from getting my period every month, to going three to six months without getting it.

When my psychiatrist told me he wanted to increase the dosage on meds, I told him no. I told the staff I wasn’t going to take them anymore. It was my body and I had a say in what happened to it.

 

In hindsight, going off my meds was, well, a fucking stupid decision. It didn’t take long for my moods to go out of whack. Within a year of moving in with my fiancé, I was an emotional train wreck because my moods were all over the place. I would burst into tears if he so much as raised his voice, and if he did, I would feel attacked and yell at him in defense. If he didn’t want to have sex with me when I was in the mood, my mind told me it meant he didn’t love me. If he didn’t say, “I love you” back to me when I said it to him, same thing. If he didn’t respond to me when I was talking to him (he’s legally deaf, 90% of the time tells me to speak up, the other 10% he tells me I don’t have to yell) my mind translated that as meaning he was pissed off at me and avoiding me.

 

I was a whirlwind of rapidly cycling moods until one day I wanted it all to stop and took a kitchen knife to my arms, legs, and breasts. I had gone through seven years of therapy and spent seven years on medication to straighten my shit out and I was a mess again. I made an appointment at the clinic, I needed to get back on meds and get my ass back into therapy.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Eight

Living in the group home was a journey I will never forget as long as I live. Not only because it built the foundation that allowed me to take responsibility for managing my mental health, but also for introducing me to a wealth of resources available in the community that inevitably allowed me to live independently.

 

The closest thing I can describe life at the group home would be the 1999 film “Girl Interrupted”, a wide variety of women living together in a renovated Victorian style house. The majority of the women were like me, diagnosed with some form of mental illness. Others, however, were fresh out of rehab for substance abuse, or recently released from jail, or they were elderly, but not old enough to live at a nursing home.

 

Mornings consisted of receiving prescribed medications at 8 AM and 10 AM, with staff checking to insure residents didn’t tongue their meds or hide them in their pockets in order to throw them away or flush them down the toilet. Where afternoons consisted of group therapy sessions such as DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), one-on-one therapy sessions with psychologists, sessions with psychiatrists to discuss whether the current round of medications were working, or routine appointments with doctors, dentists, and ophthalmologists.

 

Or the afternoons were spent participating in recreational therapy, where staff or volunteers from the community would lead a group activity. We would paint, mod podge, we learned how to crochet; we did a lot of gardening. But the one activity the majority of the women loved participating in was bingo. A staff member would pick up some items from the dollar store and give them away as bingo prizes. Nothing too extravagant, bars of soap, shower poofs, bottles of scented shower gel, bottles of scented body lotion, and on the rare occasion, candy bars.

 

Dinnertime was the big social event, with all the women cramming into the dining room. Although there was no official assigned seating, all hell would break loose if someone sat in the wrong spot. To the point where place mats, plates, utensils, and glasses were at risk of flying off the table if said resident didn’t get up and move to a spot that hadn’t been claimed. When it came time to clean up the dinner dishes, more drama would ensue if all three of residents assigned to clean up weren’t there.

 

Evenings were more relaxed, for the most part, that is. Although there were a total of four televisions in the house, only three of them had access to cable. As a result, there was a lot of bickering about who got to watch what and when. The elderly women absolutely had to watch their game shows and the news. The middle aged women had to watch their sitcoms and dramas. The rest of us, the younger women, either gave up trying to watch our shows, or staff let us watch them on the television in the staff office.

 

It was similar to living in a dorm, a crazy, insane dorm. The dorm I lived in at college was less chaotic than the group home, that’s for sure. There was no privacy because at any given time I would have two roommates. Although I got along with many of my roommates and am close friends with a few of them to this day, there were times where I was ready to drop kick many of them out of the window. I had one roommate I perpetually wanted to smother in her sleep because she wouldn’t stop snoring. Or drag another one into the hallway because she kept screaming in her sleep and constantly waking me up. Or those times I would nearly crap myself when I would wake up to find my elderly roommate leaning over me quoting scripture because she was convinced I was the devil reincarnate.

 

I had a lot of stuff stolen while I lived there, particularly clothing. That was a massive issue that bothered my parents and it angered them that staff wouldn’t do anything about it unless they caught the resident in the act of stealing. They lived an hour and half away from the group home, would drive up to visit me, take me shopping, and the next day the brand new outfit they bought me would turn up missing. I’d be in the living room waiting for the bus to go to the mall, go to the bathroom, and when I get back, there would be money missing from my wallet.

 

After six years of living at the group home, I started to get restless. I had completed the DBT program, twice. I was no longer doing one-on-one therapy. I hadn’t had an incident of self-mutilation in years. My moods were stable. In a sense, I felt like I was cured. Like all the therapy and medications I had been taking for the past seven years had done their job. For the first time in a long time, I had mental clarity.

 

Perhaps that’s why I felt so stagnant, like a bobber floating up and down in a lake on an afternoon when the fish aren’t biting. I had moved into the group home a few months after my 24^th birthday and my 30^th birthday was slowly creeping up on me. It had dawned on me that the bulk of my 20’s had been spent living at the group home and I didn’t want my 30’s to be spent living at the group home as well. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life living there. I didn’t want to end up like some of the elderly women who had been living there since the 80’s, but I didn’t know what my next move was. I just knew that I didn’t want to be there anymore.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Seven

The next day, my parents were in Rochester and helping me pack up as much of my stuff that could fit in their SUV. The rest of it was left in the garage of my dad’s cousin’s house. They drove me to Spencer’s so I could say good-bye to my boss and my co-workers. They drove me to my friend’s house so I could say good-bye to them.

 

The next few weeks were spent in a bit of stupor. I remember waking up at night crying and screaming from nightmares in which my ex-boyfriend would try to rip my heart out with his father’s machete. Each time it happened, my mom would come flying into my bedroom, often with my dad standing at the doorway, while she hugged me, consoling me, telling me I was safe.

 

I don’t remember how long it had been after leaving Rochester, when my parents took me to Social Services in my hometown. All I remember is meeting with the man who would become my very first Case Manager. Next thing I know, I have an appointment for psychological testing. After a few days, or weeks, I don’t remember, at some point after the New Year in 1999, we learned I have Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.

 

My Case Manager hooked me up with a therapist and a nurse practitioner, which prescribed my medications, in my hometown. Once a week an outreach worker, or something or the sorts, would come to my parents house to help me with realistic goal setting. Slowly I started to stabilize. The combination of the therapy and medication was doing its job. My Case Manager encouraged me to get a job. If anything, just to get out of my parents house during the day and be around people. I would spend all day alone at my parent’s house while they were at work. Both my Case Manager and therapist were concerned about how the isolation was affecting my mental health and recovery.

 

I started working at an hourly childcare center at the casino. With my previous experience as a nanny, I knew not only would I be able to nab the job, since I was over qualified, but also that it would be a piece of cake. I had a lot of fun working there. My boss was great, my co-workers were great, and the kids were hilarious.

 

Although things were going great in the work place, things were growing increasingly more difficult at home. My parents were struggling to understand exactly what it meant to have a daughter with Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, and I was getting fed up with being treated like I was a child. All that frustration would manifest itself in the form of self-mutilation. Yet another symptom of mental illness my parents couldn’t wrap their head around that caused great alarm for them. I still remember the look on my mother’s face when I took my arm warmers off to wash my hands while we were in a public restroom and she saw the cut marks up and down my arms.

 

I wanted out of my parent’s house. I wanted to go back to college and go back to a life of independence. But I was broke, Bipolar, and didn’t want the stress that came with being responsible for paying bills, considering I had a history of impulsive spending.

 

My Case Manager suggested a couple group homes, one was in Duluth, and the other one was in Brainerd. I immediately shrugged off the one in Brainerd because it was too close to where my parents lived. He took me to Duluth to check out the group home. It seemed like a decent place with plenty of women my age. So, in the spring of 2000, I packed my things and moved in.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Six

When summer ended and fall came flying in like a bat out of hell, I had this weird sense of dread that I couldn’t place. At first I thought it was because my boyfriend would be heading back to college, and in a sense, leaving me. However, that September also marked the first academic year the youngest would be attending full days of school, versus half days like he had been previously.

 

Before the school year had started, the parents had assured me they weren’t going to discontinue my services. However, it wasn’t long after the kids were back to school, they changed their minds. Just like that, I was without a roof over my head, a mode of transportation, and a primary source of income.

 

I called my boss at Spencer’s and informed her of what happened and she offered me full time employment. One of my friends from Spencer’s; had arranged for me to move in with he and his family for the time being. So began my adventures of couch hopping. I stayed with Big Man for a bit. Then I moved in with one of the Assistant Managers for a bit. When that didn’t work out, I moved in with one of the other Assistant Managers.

 

I was living out of a suitcase, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor in someone else’s house, wondering if I would ever be able to save up enough money not only to go back to college, but also to find my own apartment. I was popping caffeine pills to stay awake during my shifts, popping sleeping pills to sleep at night because the depression, stress and anxiety was keeping me awake. I wasn’t eating because I was nauseous all the time; my hair was falling out from all the stress and anxiety. I was miserable. I felt alone. I felt like I wanted to die. My only solace was knowing that my boyfriend would be coming home for winter break.

 

While at work one day, I overheard one of my co-workers asking another co-worker to hook him up with some weed. It had been a while since I’d been high, and I figured that was just what I needed. So, I asked him if I could buy some from him. He agreed, but on the condition that I pick it up from him at his place. I didn’t have access to a vehicle anymore, so I convinced one of my friends to drive me to his place. When my friend realized that he had driven me to someone’s place to buy weed, he was livid. Not only because I had an illegal narcotic in my possession, but also because in the backseat of his car was the younger brother of a friend of his.

 

Now, what a lot of people don’t realize about Bipolar Disorder is that when a person is in the midst of their highs (mania), their judgment is completely fucked. I never took a moment to think, “Hey maybe it’s not a good idea to do this” because during the manic phase of Bipolar Disorder, it’s like the brain is having an orgy. You don’t think clearly, and I didn’t think about the consequences of having my friend drive me to my co-workers house to score some weed.

 

My friend told me I needed to tell my boyfriend what happened. I didn’t want to. The bulk of my friends, including my boyfriend, were anti-drug usage and I didn’t want to disappoint them. However, I didn’t want to lie to my boyfriend either. So I called him up and told him what I did. He was angry, as he had every right to be, and told me he needed some space.

 

At which point I freaked out. What nobody ever tells you about being mentally ill; is that you’re always afraid. Especially of being abandoned by those you love and care for. So when my boyfriend told me he needed some space, my brain translated that as meaning he’s going to abandon me. I called up my friend sobbing, the same one who had driven me to get some weed, and he and some other friends, drove me over to my boyfriend’s house.

 

In hindsight, going over to my boyfriend’s house was a mistake. I should have just given him space to calm down as he had requested. But I was in panic mode. He came out to talk to me, shit hit the roof, and that was that. He broke up with me.

You’re probably thinking, “This can’t be good.”

 

It wasn’t.

 

Now, before I continue, I need to explain that one of my friends in Rochester was this guy who was very good with butterfly knives. And when I say he was very good with butterfly knives, I mean he would take this butterfly knife out of his back pocket, and whip it around like a dance. When I started riding the bus to and from work, he encouraged me to buy a butterfly knife for my own protection. So I did, and I would keep it in my coffin shaped purse.

 

My heart had just been ripped out of my chest, shattered, and pissed on by the very guy who used to bring me bouquets of flowers at work. So, I took my butterfly knife out of purse and used it on my wrists. My friends, who had taken a walk to give my boyfriend and I privacy while we were talking, came back in time to stop me before I caused massive trauma.

 

I still don’t know why they took me to one of my friend’s house, instead of to the ER. I suppose they figured since I didn’t have medical insurance and wouldn’t be able to pay for a trip to the ER, it was the smarter move. Or perhaps they figured all I needed was a bit of TLC. Whatever their motive, my friend’s mom calmed me down enough for my friends to take me back to the place I was staying.

 

I couldn’t sleep that night. My mind kept replaying the events of that night, including the conversation I’d had with my friend’s mom. About how I needed to get help. I tried calling my brother, but his girlfriend couldn’t wake him up. I didn’t want to call my parents, especially since it was so late at night, but I called them anyway. I cried the entire time while talking to them.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Five

It was a lot work. It was 40+ hours a week at minimum wage. After a year of working for the parents, I realized I’d failed to save enough money for college tuition. Course, it didn’t help that I did a lot of retail therapy whenever I was experiencing highs or lows. I must have spent a fortune at Suncoast Motion Picture Company with the amount of movies on VHS I purchased from their store in Apache Mall. Let alone the fortune I spent at Barnes and Noble with all the books I purchased from their store in The Galleria Mall.

 

I picked up a part-time weekend job at Spencer Gifts in Apache Mall in the fall 1997, and my life in Rochester was never the same. Now, I didn’t have any friends in Rochester, up until that point, because the majority of my time had been spent with two children. Working at Spencer’s changed all that. Not only was I working at a really cool store, with people who were closer to my age, but also, I’d managed to become friends with the majority of my co-workers.

 

One day, out of the blue, one of my co-workers, a guy I’d worked several shifts with and become fairly good friends with, invited me over to his house for a little get together he was having for his birthday. I thought it was kind of odd that this high school aged guy would want a 21 year-old crashing his party. However, this guy had always been nice to me, and always came off as a genuinely kind person, so I figured, why not go. While there, he introduced me to his friends. They all seemed pretty cool, and they were. I ended up being friends with pretty much everyone there. One particular guy, however, caught my eye.

 

He was a year older than the rest of the guys there, in the middle of his freshmen year in college. We hit it off immediately, and after a crazy courtship that took place over the rest of his freshmen year at college, ended up dating.

 

That summer of 1998 was one of the greatest summers of my life. My boyfriend would show up to Spencer’s with bouquets of flowers for me, as I gushed about how wonderful he was to my co-workers, while my boss rolled her eyes at our public displays of affection. He would pick me up after work, and we would meet up with the rest of the guys for a night of crazy shenanigans. We would hit up the Perkin’s South, cram into one of the booths, steal all the bowls of coffee creamer from the other tables, and shoot them like they were shots of vodka. Why we did it, I don’t know. We were a weird and wacky bunch. We were the O.L.M, the Original Lazy Men, we would have been gangsters, but we were too lazy. We would cruise down Broadway, listen to metal bands at Pla-Mor, and wear the latest Goth fashions, laughing at the way people would stare at us.

 

While all that was going on, my boss at Spencer’s would frequently ask whether I had been test for manic-depression. She was the first person to notice the highs and lows, and how rapidly I was cycling through them. All the more so after what would happen next.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Four

Needless to say, I didn’t return to college for my sophomore year. My grades had been terrible; I’d failed a few classes, and ended up with an alcohol violation. My parents refused to put money towards tuition if I wasn’t going to make an effort to get decent grades. I was a 19 year-old college drop-out living with her parents because I had been incapable of managing the symptoms of a mental illness I wouldn’t find out I have until years later.

 

I wanted to go back to college and finish my degree, but I didn’t have any money to pay for tuition. I’d never had a job before in my life, but if I wanted to go back to college, I would have to get one. At some point, during what should have been my sophomore year in college, I ended up getting a job at a factory in my hometown where I would attach tags to clothing using a tag gun that would poke the crap out of my fingers if I weren’t careful. It was menial work, extremely boring, and murder on my knees and legs from standing in the same spot for hours. Often times I would fake a sprained ankle simply so I could have a stool to sit on. The rest of the time, I would stand at a table for hours and repeatedly stab the tag gun through the seam of clothing and attach tags. Every once in a while a co-worker would ask me how my dad was doing and then one of the supervisors would proceed to yell at the both of us for talking. Where upon I would disappear into the bathroom and cry for 10 minutes.

 

Around the time my dad’s doctor placed him on a medical leave from work in 1996, I quit working at the factory. I applied at other places around the town my parents had moved to, with no success. Course, I didn’t expect anyone to hire me, I didn’t grow up there. Nobody in the town knew me like they did in the city I grew up in. During a dinner party my parents held one night, where my former high school principal was a guest; she recommended I become a nanny. Initially I scoffed at the idea. Then I remembered how my college roommate had been a nanny for a family in Colorado one summer. I figured if she could do it, I could do it.

 

So I did. I moved out of my parents house and moved down to Rochester to become a nanny for a couple who were doctors at the Mayo Clinic. It was rather fitting that I ended up with a family from Rochester, considering my dad has family who live there and also work at the Mayo Clinic. It was those family members he and my mother would stay with when he would go to the Mayo Clinic for his chemotherapy appointments.

 

I thought being a nanny would be just like what I saw on television and in movies. Tagging along with the family on European vacations, days spent lounging by the pool, and a huge paycheck that afforded anything I could possibly want. I was in for a rude awakening.

 

Being a nanny was like being a parent. It was waking up at 6:00 AM, and waking the children up at 7:00 AM. It was helping the youngest get dressed. It was making their breakfast, making their lunches, and cleaning up the breakfast dishes. It was reminding them to brush their teeth after eating breakfast. It was making sure they have all their homework and any permission slips that had been sent home for their parents to sign. It was driving them to school, and picking them up from school. It was driving them to after school activities and picking them up afterwards. It was making their beds, washing their clothes, caring for them when they were too sick to go to school, and taking them to doctor appointments. It was waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of the youngest standing at the foot of your bed crying, carrying him back up to his room, rocking him back to sleep, and gently laying him back down in his bed.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Three

By the time I had graduated from high school and moved onto to college in 1995, that’s when the real chaos started to begin. I started the academic year at my parent’s alma mater with an act of self-mutilation that landed me in the campus guidance counselor’s office. Great way to start off my freshmen year at a college where my grandparents once worked at, huh? Now, I wasn’t at the point in my life where I was ready to get help. Even though I knew there was something wrong with me, I didn’t want to believe there was something wrong with me, because half the time I felt fine. So, I just sat in the guidance counselor’s office and fed him a bunch of lies to get him off my case.

 

Much like high school, I didn’t fit in with my classmates at that college. I’m a tough pill to swallow, so I didn’t mind. As bizarre as I behaved, I ended up making friends anyway. To this day, I don’t know how they tolerated my behavior when they could have easily just told me to piss off, like so many others have throughout the years. Unfortunately it’s pretty common for people with mental illness to struggle with interpersonal relationships. Whether it’s friends, family, or partners.

 

But I digress.

 

I slept a lot. Which is ultimately why I ended up missing a lot of classes. I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed and walk across campus to the buildings my classes were at. When someone is depressed, simple tasks can be a massive struggle because there is little to no energy to do so. Even just getting out of bed long enough to use the bathroom is exhausting because depression can cause physical aches and pains in the body. When a person is depressed, the neck, back, and shoulder muscles, along with other muscles in the body ache, because stress is typically stored in those muscles.

 

Sleeping too much wasn’t the only issue I would struggle with at the time. I also had a lot of trouble focusing and concentrating on my homework, and this too affected my grades. I would suffer from severe stress and anxiety. I worried all the time. I worried about my dad’s health. I worried about my grades. I worried I wasn’t making my parents proud. I worried I wasn’t making my grandparents proud. I worried I wasn’t making my community proud.

 

At that point in time, it had been a little over a year and half since my dad had been diagnosed with cancer. A lot of things had happened from the time he’d been diagnosed to the time I walked through the doors of my dorm room. The summer before my senior year in high school, my dad suffered from a blood infection that caused his body temperature to soar so high, he nearly died. During my senior year in high school, he was hospitalized twice. Once for another blood infection, the second time when he came down with shingles. I spent that entire year waltzing around as one big ball of nerves wondering whether he was going to live long enough to see me receive my diploma. To add to an already stressful situation, two weeks before I left for college, my parents sold the house I grew up in. I would have felt more secure heading off to college knowing that when I came home for breaks and during the summer, I would have been coming home to familiar surroundings and faces who were happy to see me. Instead, I came home to a house I had spent two weeks living in, with no friends in sight.

 

By the time winter break arrived, I had failed a couple classes. One part of me didn’t care about the fact that I’d failed, they were mostly subjects unrelated to my major. Another part of me was freaking out because I had let my parents down, a classic “Whatever” versus “Oh my God, I’m a terrible daughter” scenario that happens when I flip between moods.

 

It was during my time in college that I started drinking more. Not as much as I would later on, but definitely more than I ever had while in high school. The college I attended was a dry campus. Alcohol wasn’t permitted, but that didn’t stop students from sneaking it onto campus, or drinking it off campus, and that’s exactly what I did. I had friends who lived off campus, so I would hit their place up, and indulge in a few adult beverages. Alcohol is a depressant, after all. When I felt crappy, which I did the majority of the time while in college, after a few beers, I wouldn’t feel anything at all.

 

I also started experimenting with drugs. Nothing too hardcore, mostly caffeine pills and weed, but drugs nonetheless. The caffeine pills gave me the kick I needed when I felt depressed, as well as the energy I didn’t have, to get through the day. The weed, on the other hand, would mellow me out when I felt like I was being too obnoxious.

 

I didn’t realize at the time, that I was self-medicating. I was using drugs and alcohol to control the symptoms of my mental illness. It was a pattern of behavior that would carry over for several more years.

Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords: Part Two

As I previously mentioned, I was just a kid when I began having symptoms of mental illness. I knew even back then that it was abnormal to be that young, feel depressed, and feel like I wanted to die. I never said anything about how I felt back then to anyone, because I was scared. Scared of what my parents would say. Scared of what my parents would think. Scared of what they would do. What scared me most of all, is what other people in the small community I grew up in, would say or think. My parents were high school teachers, highly involved in the church we were members of, and respected members of the community. I can’t remember a time when I would do something wrong and they would say, “What would other people think?” So, the concept of telling them this deep, dark secret, and having other people find out about it, felt terrifying.

 

I suppose that’s why the kids I grew up with always thought I was pretty damn strange. I always behaved differently compared to the other kids I grew up with and, at times, was either antisocial, excessively sensitive, or obnoxious. I remember crying a lot in elementary school, especially when other kids made fun of me. I remember walking down the halls of the middle school and telling kids to piss off after they would say hello to me. In high school, I constantly flipped between wanting to kill myself and wanting to be the center of attention. One could never tell which face I would be wearing when I would walk through the doors.

 

During the spring of my junior year in high school, when my mother broke the news that my dad had been diagnosed with lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system), all the previous behaviors I had struggled with slowly began to intensify. What had previously been mild depression, hyperactivity, and suicidal ideation, switched gears and began to rear its ugly head in the form of major depression, mania, and self-mutilation.

 

Self-mutilation, over the years I’ve often been asked why I started cutting and why I kept doing so for such a long time. At first I started doing it in the hopes that I would cause enough trauma to actually die. It seemed the easiest and most accessible way to go, after all. After a while, however, it became a coping mechanism. Whenever I was angry, cut. Whenever I was sad, cut. It was the primary way I processed the negative emotions I would feel.

 

Sure, people noticed. Classmates would ask why I had bandages on my wrist and I would nonchalantly explain how I had accidentally cut it while helping my mom chop vegetables for the previous night’s dinner. I always had an excuse, and whatever I said, they would believe. Either they were naïve and didn’t know any better, so they believed whatever I would tell them, or they didn’t want to believe the alternate.