Catching you up (1)

(Written March 2008)      

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I've spent most of my life trying to piece together the puzzle that is me -- everything from introspection to formal education to academic research. I’ve never been sick enough to warrant hospitalization. Never been depressed enough to consider suicide. Never been paranoid to the point where I couldn’t leave the house. Never been anxious enough that I couldn’t breathe. Never been angry enough to hurt others. Never been shy or awkward enough to be antisocial. If mental well-being were simply a game of hide and seek, I would be world champion, training since I was 10 years old.

So I must have been simply.. unlucky.

It’s a terrifying project, to look back, and refrain from thinking that it could have gone differently. My life has been a series of unfortunate events, and I feel as though I slipped through the cracks of human reality as a 10 year old girl. I want to shake every adult that passed through my life and ask them why they didn’t help me. I want to tell them, each one, “that girl needs your help” .. her vocabulary is better than yours, but no 10 year old should have to rationalize long-term abuse on her own. She is a good, smart girl, reading and discussing modern cancer research with you, but she hasn’t learned a single thing about love. And her trust in you is slipping, slipping away.

I want to yell back at my father. No, scratch that, my father’s father. Or maybe his father, whichever father started the tradition, whichever family couldn’t cope and passed on the violence and stress to their children. I want them to seek therapy, so I wouldn’t have to, now.

It would have been okay. I could have been okay, if it were just my dad. If my mom were more confident, if I hadn’t been forced to move and start the grieving process anew in several schools. I would’ve been fine, maybe just unlucky, except my peers passed their own anger on me, too, and suddenly the only safe place was the library.

Would so many years be anything but empty, if I had just broken down, once? If I had been crazy enough, violent enough, angry enough, depressed enough, once? How is it possible that I made it to my late twenties, married with a successful career, and I still feel the same 10 year old girl, torn between innocence and disbelief?

This is me breaking the ice, and in my case it’s pretty thick. I never said a word about any of my trauma. Not a single thing, not to anyone, and it gets harder everyday, especially the good days, because all of us know, we just want to move on. But I can’t move on, while I’m still terrified of passing IT on, like my father passed IT on, my teachers and my peers.

Read on the NHS Choices blog.