I Have Depression, Anxiety, and Self-mutilation Issues
This Story Is Why I Have Depression, Anxiety, And Self-abuse Issues
By:
JessicaC777
Written on April 27th, 2012
When I was in elementary school i remember I had some friends but I never felt like i was close to them, i never felt like they accepted me, or wanted to be my friend. On the first day of sixth grade in middle school, i felt some hope that my social life would improve; my mom let me dye my hair blonde and get a perm, and new clothes, and i felt pretty for once in my life so far. But that first day, a seventh grade boy named Jerry asked me if i would be his girlfriend, and i said yes without thinking about it first, because I knew it would help having someone to talk to and help me make and keep the friends i had. Well, it didnt go as planned, i didnt know that that very same day, my best friend Kristin was walking around with a group of all my other friends looking for Jerry because Kristin had a crush on him and was hoping to be his girlfriend, so when she found out that i had already agreed to go out with him, she and all my other friends were upset with me, and instantly they started making fun of me, mostly my image, my jaw to be exact, because i had just started to develop an underbite, which is where the lower jaw grows too far out beyond the upper jaw. I wasnt aware that it was so obvious until they pointed it out to me. I left school that day feeling lost, scared, and self conscious, it was only the beginning of my downward spiral.
After a few weeks of dating Jerry, which consisted of innocently holding hands, pecks on the lips, and going to football games and everything else preteens do, i began to be pressured to have sex with him, which shockingly enough all my other friends had already lost their virginity. But i was scared of that, i wasnt ready, even though i had already learned plenty about it, and i learned to satisfy myself at a young age, (i cant believe im saying that, lol) but i kept making excuses to get out of having to go farther than a closed mouth kiss with Jerry. So one day him and i went to a football game at the high school, and we went behind the bathrooms with another girl and her boyfriend to "make out", and i kept getting nervous whenever he tried to get to second base or put his tongue in my mouth, so i kept pulling away and laughing, it was really awkward to say the least. So then suddenly he walks off and when i finally found him i saw him walking with his arm around one of my "so called friends", apparently they were already going out, that quickly he dumped me, without telling me, just minutes after he made out with me and ditched me, and with one of my friends! I was hurt, but i realized that i didnt really want that pressure on me anymore to do things i wasnt comfortable with, and i didnt really feel like i liked him enough to be his girlfriend anyway. So i cried, wiped my tears, and asked him if he wanted to throw around a football for a while, i guess i wanted to make him wish he hadnt dumped me, but instead i ended up breaking my pinky finger when he threw the ball a little too hard to me, hahaha, yah, the joke was on me i guess.
The next two years of my middle school life consisted of being asked out by guys and then dumped for a friend when i wouldnt go farther than kissing them, one even dumped me a day before the valentines dance in front of the whole school, and i had a guy tell me i ate like a cow in front of the whole cafeteria, pranks pulled on me at slumber parties, and endless amounts of accusations from old friends that had nothing to do with me, and soon i lost all my friends, and felt like i had to hide in bathrooms or in the library between classes. I even transferred schools in 7th grade to a different middle school, but because i hadnt started out with those kids, i couldnt seem to get them to want to hang out with me, instead i ended up being made fun of, ditched, and ignored. I went from getting straight A's in the 6th grade, to barely passing classes in the 8th grade. Not to mention the whole time i had to compete with my twin brothers popularity which made my mom look at me like a loser, and treat me like one too. I developed OCD, ended up staying in my room making sure everything was perfect, shoes measured in a line on the floor with a ruler, my clothes color cooridated with my hangers, my books and papers in alphabetical order and in sections of subjects, my bed made so tight u could bounce a quarter off it, and before i left the room, even for a minute, i had to not only turn off, but unplug everything in my room, even my clock wich i had to reset several times a day. I even had a check list on my wall so that i could make sure my room was perfectly clean and organized, it was consuming me, but it was the only thing i had control of at the time. I became really depressed, started gaining weight, started cutting myself to ease my emotional pain. I was becoming a mess.
By the time i got to high school, i didnt know who i was anymore, i didnt know a single person i could call a "friend". I thought i had a friend, this girl that i had hung out with in middle school, but she became a cheerleader and would then tell me to meet her for lunch somewhere and then never show up, i finally got the hint that she didnt want to be seen with me. i felt like my mother and brother and sister were embarrassed of me, and my dad didnt say anything to make me think he was disapointed, but he didnt say anything to make me feel better either, no one did. I tried making friends that first year, i would go up and talk to groups of kids and they would totally ignore me or look at me like they didnt like me, and i didnt know why. Then i would go home and have to put up with cruel comments from my family, like "your ugly" "your stupid" "your fat" "you need to lose weight" "you need to wear more makeup and do your hair better" "you need to act cooler, talk cooler, be cooler, be popular" "you need to play sports" "you need to have a boyfriend, but you wont get one with the way you look" things like that were said to me everyday, sometimes id hear them talking about how fat and ugly i was through my bedroom wall which was next to the living room. That first year i tried to look good, i tried to act like the popular kids, i played softball and was made fun of by my team mates and benched most of the time, i tried to do everything i could do to be what my mom wanted me to be, and what i thought would help me be accepted and make friends, but nothing worked, it just got worse and worse until i ended up gaining more and more weight cuz i didnt want to eat in front of anyone, cuz even if i didnt eat all day at school, id get home and go to the kitchen to eat something and my mom would look me up and down and raise her eyebrows and say "do you really think you need to eat right now?" or "your eating again!", even if i hadnt eaten at all, so id pig out whenever i was alone, and then i started hiding in the bathrooms and the library between classes and at lunch, even the freaks and geeks wouldnt talk to me or look in my direction, i felt like a disease, in fact in P.E. we played volleyball my junior year and some guy kept trying to hit me with the ball and called me "the cancer of the team", and he was one of the popular seniors at that time.
So my senior year i really wanted to change my looks and try and have a good last year of high school. So every time i ate, when no one was looking of course, I would then go to the bathroom and throw it up, then eat a handful of peanuts to stay energized, and i ended up losing 45 lbs that year. My mom suddenly noticed and started buying me clothes, which she hadnt done in a long time, especially after i got a job when i was 16, i pretty much took care of myself until i quit before my senior year so i could focus on my social life and passing my classes so i could graduate and go to college. All of that wasnt enough, some people were nicer to me after the weight loss, but it was too late to make friends, especially when i found out that my brother had been spreading nasty rumors about me in the locker room to the football team! I found out about that on my last day of my senior year, but he denied it, and my mom defended him, as usual. I didnt even go to prom, because i didnt have anyone to go with, and no friends to hang out with when i got there, so i spent that night hearing cruel comments from my mom telling me how stupid and pathetic i was for not going to prom, after she watched my brother go with his friends in his nice tux.
So by the end of my last year of high school, i had become severely depressed, started cutting up my arms and legs even worse than before, I became bulimic, and had started wishing i was dead, even tried to kill myself by taking asprin and sleeping pills, which just made me sick and tired. I was at the end of my rope, i couldnt even concentrate when i took my SAT test so i got low scores and couldnt get into a university (i wanted to become a veterinarian). So i had planned to go to a local community college to get my associates degree and transfer to a university later on.
That summer after i graduated high school was really hard on me, i was scared, i felt destroyed, i had been hurt so much that i didnt think i could ever get close to anyone for any reason. I spent that summer jogging three miles a day, working out in my room, working on my looks and trying to figure out how to be accepted when i got to college. I ended up losing another 30 lbs on top of the 45 i lost my senior year. So i finally felt like i looked decent, but whenever my mom or brother or sister saw me, they had nothing but mean comments to say about my looks. They did a lot of things to me at that time that hurt, like stealing my journal and passing it around so they could all read how pathetic i felt, and learn all my embarrassing secrets that they could use against me. My sister would break into my email account and send stupid emails to my online friends to make them not like me either. My brother would abuse me mentally and physically every time i tried to stick up for myself, and my mom was starting to get physically abusive on top of her constant mental abuse, and my dad just looked the other way. So within the first two weeks of college, i had met a guy in one of my classes and started staying with him as much as i could, we called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but he was 25 and i was 18 so we didnt have much in common, it was more like a close friendship than an actual relationship, cus we didnt have sex, we just made out once in a while and everything else was what friends would do. Until one morning i woke up and he told me that when we go to the mall he feels more attracted to others girls than to me, and that he felt like he was stealing me from my family, so he didnt want to hang out with me anymore. So he took me back to my abusive family, where i had to withdrawl from all the pills and alcohol i had been doing with him because hed offer it to me constantly, and i wanted him to like me, so i took whatever he gave me. I became severely sick from the drugs and being bulimic, and ended up in the hospital almost dead, and was sick for several weeks which made me miss my midterms. I was miserable, i hated myself and the world, i wanted to die, and so i set a date, Jan 30th 2003. I was determined to kill myself when that day came. So in the mean time i went to school, and walked around like a zombie, dead inside, no hope, no faith, no help from anyone. Luckily, that month, on the 15th, i was walking up to the smoking section at the college where i usually smoked between classes, and i saw a tall, skinny, pale, dark haired guy with glasses, and something was drawing me to him, so even though i had a lighter, i asked him for a light, and he looked into my eyes as he lit my cigarette, and smiled, and we started talking and i realized that he really liked me. I went home that day and i couldnt stop thinking that he, his name is rick, might be what i need in my life. So we started dating, and it wasnt long before we both said "i love you", he said it first on valentines day in a sweet card he gave me! So then i knew God sent me an angel, because he made me feel like i was the most important thing to him, and we were both virgins, so even though i had been afraid to have sex with anyone before, i suddenly felt determined to make him my first, haha. Eventually his mom let me move into her house because i hated being at home with my family. About a week after i moved in, my mom left a message on their answer machine saying she would of kicked me out anyway cuz i lost my scholarship because my GPA was too low from missing classes when i was sick. And when rick took me out to my moms house to pick up my stuff, my mom and i got into an argument and she grabbed me by the hair and threw me down on the ground and started kicking me and dragging me out the door by my hair, and i almost got up to fight back but my dad stepped in between us, so i left, and the next day i found out that my twin brother had moved out that same night because of how my mom was treating him too. My sister had already moved out earlier that year, so my mom didnt have any of her kids left living with her, and im sure she was happy, but probably shocked that me and my brother left the same night because of her.
Anyways, It took me years to trust rick, and years to forgive my family for how they treated me, and im just now starting to have a better relationship with my mom, sister, and brother, my dad and i are closer too, but we all dont talk about the past, mostly cus they deny everything they ever did and said that hurt me. But i felt better letting go of that anger and resentment, it was easier to carry around forgiveness.
I still have a lot of issues from all the things i mentioned and from experiences that i havent mentioned that happened before, during, and since all that has happened. I suffer from severe anxiety and depression, panic attacks, and low self esteem. But so far, ive survived, so i have hope that ill get through my worst days, and i try to enjoy the good days. Life is short, and theres a lot of things i havent done that ive always hoped to do, im 27 now but i feel like my life has only just begun, because the first 22 years of my life were spent in hell.
After a few weeks of dating Jerry, which consisted of innocently holding hands, pecks on the lips, and going to football games and everything else preteens do, i began to be pressured to have sex with him, which shockingly enough all my other friends had already lost their virginity. But i was scared of that, i wasnt ready, even though i had already learned plenty about it, and i learned to satisfy myself at a young age, (i cant believe im saying that, lol) but i kept making excuses to get out of having to go farther than a closed mouth kiss with Jerry. So one day him and i went to a football game at the high school, and we went behind the bathrooms with another girl and her boyfriend to "make out", and i kept getting nervous whenever he tried to get to second ba
The next two years of my middle school life consisted of being asked out by guys and then dumped for a friend when i wouldnt go farther than kissing them, one even dumped me a day before the valentines dance in front of the whole school, and i had a guy tell me i ate like a cow in front of the whole cafeteria, pranks pulled on me at slumber parties, and endless amounts of accusations from old friends that had nothing to do with me, and soon i lost all my friends, and felt like i had to hide in bathrooms or in the library between classes. I even transferred schools in 7th grade to a different middle school, but because i hadnt started out with those kids, i couldnt seem to get them to want to hang out with me, instead i ended up being made fun of, ditched, and ignored. I went from getting straight A's in the 6th grade, to barely passing classes in the 8th grade. Not to mention the whole time i had to compete with my twin brothers popularity which made my mom look at me like a loser, and treat me like one too. I developed OCD, ended up staying in my room making sure everything was perfect, shoes measured in a line on the floor with a ruler, my clothes color cooridated with my hangers, my books and papers in alphabetical order and in sections of subjects, my bed made so tight u could bounce a quarter off it, and before i left the room, even for a minute, i had to not only turn off, but unplug everything in my room, even my clock wich i had to reset several times a day. I even had a check list on my wall so that i could make sure my room was perfectly clean and organized, it was consuming me, but it was the only thing i had control of at the time. I became really depressed, started gaining weight, started cutting myself to ease my emotional pain. I was becoming a mess.
By the time i got to high school, i didnt know who i was anymore, i didnt know a single person i could call a "friend". I thought i had a friend, this girl that i had hung out with in middle school, but she became a cheerleader and would then tell me to meet her for lunch somewhere and then never show up, i finally got the hint that she didnt want to be seen with me. i felt like my mother and brother and sister were embarrassed of me, and my dad didnt say anything to make me think he was disapointed, but he didnt say anything to make me feel better either, no one did. I tried making friends that first year, i would go up and talk to groups of kids and they would totally ignore me or look at me like they didnt like me, and i didnt know why. Then i would go home and have to put up with cruel comments from my family, like "your ugly" "your stupid" "your fat" "you need to lose weight" "you need to wear more makeup and do your hair better" "you need to act cooler, talk cooler, be cooler, be popular" "you need to play sports" "you need to have a boyfriend, but you wont get one with the way you look" things like that were said to me everyday, sometimes id hear them talking about how fat and ugly i was through my bedroom wall which was next to the living room. That first year i tried to look good, i tried to act like the popular kids, i played softball and was made fun of by my team mates and benched most of the time, i tried to do everything i could do to be what my mom wanted me to be, and what i thought would help me be accepted and make friends, but nothing worked, it just got worse and worse until i ended up gaining more and more weight cuz i didnt want to eat in front of anyone, cuz even if i didnt eat all day at school, id get home and go to the kitchen to eat something and my mom would look me up and down and raise her eyebrows and say "do you really think you need to eat right now?" or "your eating again!", even if i hadnt eaten at all, so id pig out whenever i was alone, and then i started hiding in the bathrooms and the library between classes and at lunch, even the freaks and geeks wouldnt talk to me or look in my direction, i felt like a disease, in fact in P.E. we played volleyball my junior year and some guy kept trying to hit me with the ball and called me "the cancer of the team", and he was one of the popular seniors at that time.
So my senior year i really wanted to change my looks and try and have a good last year of high school. So every time i ate, when no one was looking of course, I would then go to the bathroom and throw it up, then eat a handful of peanuts to stay energized, and i ended up losing 45 lbs that year. My mom suddenly noticed and started buying me clothes, which she hadnt done in a long time, especially after i got a job when i was 16, i pretty much took care of myself until i quit before my senior year so i could focus on my social life and passing my classes so i could graduate and go to college. All of that wasnt enough, some people were nicer to me after the weight loss, but it was too late to make friends, especially when i found out that my brother had been spreading nasty rumors about me in the locker room to the football team! I found out about that on my last day of my senior year, but he denied it, and my mom defended him, as usual. I didnt even go to prom, because i didnt have anyone to go with, and no friends to hang out with when i got there, so i spent that night hearing cruel comments from my mom telling me how stupid and pathetic i was for not going to prom, after she watched my brother go with his friends in his nice tux.
So by the end of my last year of high school, i had become severely depressed, started cutting up my arms and legs even worse than before, I became bulimic, and had started wishing i was dead, even tried to kill myself by taking asprin and sleeping pills, which just made me sick and tired. I was at the end of my rope, i couldnt even concentrate when i took my SAT test so i got low scores and couldnt get into a university (i wanted to become a veterinarian). So i had planned to go to a local community college to get my associates degree and transfer to a university later on.
That summer after i graduated high school was really hard on me, i was scared, i felt destroyed, i had been hurt so much that i didnt think i could ever get close to anyone for any reason. I spent that summer jogging three miles a day, working out in my room, working on my looks and trying to figure out how to be accepted when i got to college. I ended up losing another 30 lbs on top of the 45 i lost my senior year. So i finally felt like i looked decent, but whenever my mom or brother or sister saw me, they had nothing but mean comments to say about my looks. They did a lot of things to me at that time that hurt, like stealing my journal and passing it around so they could all read how pathetic i felt, and learn all my embarrassing secrets that they could use against me. My sister would break into my email account and send stupid emails to my online friends to make them not like me either. My brother would abuse me mentally and physically every time i tried to stick up for myself, and my mom was starting to get physically abusive on top of her constant mental abuse, and my dad just looked the other way. So within the first two weeks of college, i had met a guy in one of my classes and started staying with him as much as i could, we called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but he was 25 and i was 18 so we didnt have much in common, it was more like a close friendship than an actual relationship, cus we didnt have sex, we just made out once in a while and everything else was what friends would do. Until one morning i woke up and he told me that when we go to the mall he feels more attracted to others girls than to me, and that he felt like he was stealing me from my family, so he didnt want to hang out with me anymore. So he took me back to my abusive family, where i had to withdrawl from all the pills and alcohol i had been doing with him because hed offer it to me constantly, and i wanted him to like me, so i took whatever he gave me. I became severely sick from the drugs and being bulimic, and ended up in the hospital almost dead, and was sick for several weeks which made me miss my midterms. I was miserable, i hated myself and the world, i wanted to die, and so i set a date, Jan 30th 2003. I was determined to kill myself when that day came. So in the mean time i went to school, and walked around like a zombie, dead inside, no hope, no faith, no help from anyone. Luckily, that month, on the 15th, i was walking up to the smoking section at the college where i usually smoked between classes, and i saw a tall, skinny, pale, dark haired guy with glasses, and something was drawing me to him, so even though i had a lighter, i asked him for a light, and he looked into my eyes as he lit my cigarette, and smiled, and we started talking and i realized that he really liked me. I went home that day and i couldnt stop thinking that he, his name is rick, might be what i need in my life. So we started dating, and it wasnt long before we both said "i love you", he said it first on valentines day in a sweet card he gave me! So then i knew God sent me an angel, because he made me feel like i was the most important thing to him, and we were both virgins, so even though i had been afraid to have sex with anyone before, i suddenly felt determined to make him my first, haha. Eventually his mom let me move into her house because i hated being at home with my family. About a week after i moved in, my mom left a message on their answer machine saying she would of kicked me out anyway cuz i lost my scholarship because my GPA was too low from missing classes when i was sick. And when rick took me out to my moms house to pick up my stuff, my mom and i got into an argument and she grabbed me by the hair and threw me down on the ground and started kicking me and dragging me out the door by my hair, and i almost got up to fight back but my dad stepped in between us, so i left, and the next day i found out that my twin brother had moved out that same night because of how my mom was treating him too. My sister had already moved out earlier that year, so my mom didnt have any of her kids left living with her, and im sure she was happy, but probably shocked that me and my brother left the same night because of her.
Anyways, It took me years to trust rick, and years to forgive my family for how they treated me, and im just now starting to have a better relationship with my mom, sister, and brother, my dad and i are closer too, but we all dont talk about the past, mostly cus they deny everything they ever did and said that hurt me. But i felt better letting go of that anger and resentment, it was easier to carry around forgiveness.
I still have a lot of issues from all the things i mentioned and from experiences that i havent mentioned that happened before, during, and since all that has happened. I suffer from severe anxiety and depression, panic attacks, and low self esteem. But so far, ive survived, so i have hope that ill get through my worst days, and i try to enjoy the good days. Life is short, and theres a lot of things i havent done that ive always hoped to do, im 27 now but i feel like my life has only just begun, because the first 22 years of my life were spent in hell.
By:
JessicaC777
Age:
26-30
,
Female
