Serious trauma dump ahead you’ve been warned.
I feel like from 2019 on, I’ve just continuously living in hell sometimes.
And this is coming from living with the worst heap of literal human garbage since 2015 before that. At the very least, when he was here, I found my path and my anger in my depths of desperation and abuse on so many fronts.
I also had solid support that I could lean on through the friend circles that I’d found myself within at the time.
But, 2019? The floor fell out from under me. I fractured mentally in ways that I -still- to this day have not recovered from, and I don’t even know where to start. I tried to reach out and access therapy but even with my insurance it’s out of my means financially, and I just can’t justify begging for help for it. Not when I’m still alive after self managing this beast within me since I was a teenager.
Even before this, though, I felt like I was grasping at straws. Seeking validation where I could find it, even if it was unhealthy. I felt like I was on the outside looking in with my friend circles, slowly being nudged out. My abandonment issues were already starting to get triggered on.
The worst started in late March. My father, in all his infinite wisdom, volunteered me to care for a friend’s kids, house, and dogs. Literally... This was a paintball friend that he had met, that HE knew. Not me. I knew -NOTHING- about this woman or who I would be driving out to Kansas with.
I knew her -boyfriend-. That was it. And that was from ONE conversation while drunk at the paintball field about our shared faith in Norse Paganism.
Every alarm went off. My intuition was SCREAMING at me that nothing about this felt right. She gave me no information. No address where I’d be, no emergency contacts, no solid plan on when I’d be going home, nothing.
Not to mention, I was monitoring health issues with my cat at the time, and I knew that my mother was gearing up to throw David out of the house.
I tried to back out. I expressed discomfort to both this woman and my father, only to get screamed at by both of them and lectured about holding up my end of agreements.
For all the spine that I’ve created for myself.. I crumbled under the weight of it and agreed to go.
A week before the trip, I slipped and fell badly enough to cause myself significant damage to my back and tailbone while feeding the horses. I was in physical agony. I couldn’t stand straight or sit for long periods of time, and I was mostly in bed taking as much tylenol and ibuprofen together as I safely can just to function.
Needless to say, I was still in pain when they came to get me.
27 hours, driving cross country, with them laughing at me thinking it was funny that I wanted to cry while sitting on a pillow.
They had the nerve to ask me to drive a leg of the journey to save time. I refused.
So we get there. I’m informed I will be there until the week of my college graduation ceremony. Maybe longer if they can’t get me home.
I’m also informed that I won’t have an operational vehicle. But that’s okay, her friend will be picking up and dropping off the kids from school.
Somewhere in my mind I register that I was there for about a month. Two weeks out of the stay, I was alone with everything, caring for a 6 year old and a 12 year old when I have -no- experience whatsoever caring for children.
I was fucking terrified. I was worried about everything back home. I didn’t want to be there.
While outside with the kids on my first day alone, I was approached by her neighbor. He barked at me, asking who the fuck I was and where their mother was. I explained.
His tone changed -immediately-. Apparently, this dipshit had not even told her neighbors she was going away again. So.. Strange person, outside, playing with your neighbors kids? I don’t blame him for a second for being alarmed.
He also informs me that he’ll be keeping an eye out while he’s home, because the army base that I was on had been experiencing security issues and having base housing broken into and shit stolen.
So yeah. That didn’t help me any either. Neither did the fact that I had forgotten to bring my entire bag of medications with me in my whirlwind of trying to get ready to leave reluctantly.
A week in, I was physically ill in ways I -should- have gone to get seen for, from both my stress levels and likely the painkillers I was still taking the maximum amount of just to function. But, I had no transportation. I didn’t have anyone I could call. And even if I did, who would get the kids up in the morning?
So I suffered. Through this, I also started having severe tooth pain, in the end resulting in one of my teeth cracking from my wisdom teeth shifting again.
Through this, my abandonment anxieties raged. Never in my life had I ever felt so alone and abandoned. There was one point where I had a dream that a very close friend of mine had reached out and stated he wanted nothing to do with me anymore.
I woke up and cried for three hours straight until the kids came home. It was the deepest, darkest, most miserable hole I felt I’d ever fallen into, and my ideation raged so badly that I would have gladly let anything take me out at any moment.
I had a very short list of people who checked on me. Made sure I was okay. And how -short- that list was, was legitimately distressing.
The end of week two, her husband came home. And I was a captive audience to his drunk ass who just wanted to celebrate coming home from a deployment.
He wasn’t bad, or mean. Just annoying and boisterous playing League and having a good time. But when you’ve just lived with an abusive drunk for four years, it does make you a bit jaded about these things.
The rest of my time spent out there is a bit of a blur. I wasn’t sleeping well when I wasn’t the only one home, ironically, because at least then I had a real bed to sleep on. The rest of the time?
A leaking air mattress that was usually mostly flat by the time I woke up. And I couldn’t even afford to just buy myself a new one out of desperation for sleep without feeling like someone beat the fuck out of me every night. Because I wasn’t paid for a single minute of this.
Flash forward to a week before I was due to go home. My mother calls me in tears, telling me that she had to rush Mith to the vet because she went to check on him and he was just laying lethargic in my chair and not himself.
They kept him overnight, with plans to operate in the morning. And after only getting two hours of sleep, I was woken to the phonecall that he’d passed.
That moment shattered me. It broke me mentally, and shattered me in ways I’m still to this day not fixed in yet. Until that day, -that moment-, any idea that I had of what a mental breakdown feels like was completely changed and made a hundred times worse.
I barely remember that day. Only snippets. I cried until I couldn’t in a corner of their daughter’s room where I’d been sleeping.
She came home that day. At one point I went down to talk to her, and she told me “You’ve done really great, you know. I think you’re going to make a great mom.”
I looked her in the eye and told her that I would rather be sterilized.
In the same breath as being unsure how to respond to that, she also told me “Well, you’re free to stay a couple more weeks until I can fly you home.”
This, was Sunday night. My graduation ceremony was on Wednesday.
I lost my shit at her. She didn’t feel like driving again, and she hadn’t booked a flight for me. Getting me home on time was an inconvenience to her, as if the hell that I had just lived through while I was at her house wasn’t an inconvenience to me in the slightest.
She told me it didn’t matter. Someone who just took a course here and a course there as she felt like it, and never graduated herself.
She just didn’t get what this meant to me. What it meant to my parents.
I dropped out of High School. While I got a GED quickly soon after, I still chose to work in the horse industry through my 20′s instead of going to college.
This meant everything to me. And she didn’t give a fuck, because it was inconvenient for her.
We drove out the day after. I’d had three hours of restless sleep and I was exhausted, but couldn’t bring myself to sleep in the car while she was driving.
Indiana boarder. We stop for gas. I’m so fucked up in whatever state I was in that I had near completely zoned out and disassociated through most of the trip.
“Alright. You’re driving.” I was uncomfortable with it. I hadn’t slept. I was delirious. I tried to argue with her, aside from just -not wanting to- and not feeling safe doing so, and all she did was shout me down and tell me to shut up and grow up.
I don’t remember going in and getting an energy drink in a futile attempt to keep myself awake. But I fucking did it anyway.
I had maybe an hour or two of highway experience before this. I was fucking terrified. I got lost at one point, and trapped in the loop at the Indianapolis airport.
(At the very least.. I could laugh at that one.)
That aside, I don’t remember driving across two states. Snippets here and there, but not much. I completely zoned out and disassociated through this, and genuinely, I don’t know how I didn’t get us killed because looking back I realize I fell asleep behind the wheel more than once.
We hit Dayton. Between the GPS and the highway itself, and not to mention my state, I got confused and hit an exit ramp instead of merging. I pulled in to a parking lot and woke her up, and told her I needed to stop. That I just made a really dumb mistake and I didn’t feel comfortable continuing.
“Just keep going a few more hours. You’re fine.” Well... No, I really wasn’t, but she slept through the whole thing since the Ohio boarder.
So.. Like a moron.. I let her bully me. Again. I was just so beaten down and exhausted, mentally, physically, and emotionally, that I didn’t fight with her.
We were nearly to Columbus when I had to merge again. Between shitty conditions of driving rain, my speed I was going, delayed reaction time from my state, and the road itself, I spun out and went off the road, and down an embankment about 120 feet. Nearly landing us in a pond in the process.
All I remember was letting the car go where it was going to go and not trying to overcorrect. Debris, mud, and grass flying over the hood and spinning lights disorienting me. I felt the car go onto two tires at least three times. It was like slow motion - I register in my head this was over in the span of maybe 30 seconds, but it feels so much longer in my head.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about how if it had been my C-RV, I would have fucking rolled.
She woke up halfway through it. And then? Once she realized there was no damage to the car other than a tire blown off the rim?
She laughed at me. Again. And gave me a nickname.
She lied to the insurance company and said she was driving. We were there for three hours waiting for a wrecker capable of pulling us out because of how far off the road I had gotten us.
Eventually I got home. But everything about this - From the setup of them both yelling at me, to us getting home, stripped from me every ounce of control that I felt I had over myself and my own life.
I barely remember the next day. I barely remember my own graduation. I look back at the photos that my mother took that day and I can’t help but notice how fucking broken I was and forcing myself to act like I was alright.
Weeks that followed are a blur. They run into one another. Still, I was alone. I was taking care of the house, animals, -everything- for my mother because she had fallen into her own hole after throwing David out of the house. She would wake up at 6 PM, sit down, and game until 9 AM, then sleep.
And in the process, everything was left onto -my- shoulders alone.
I couldn’t heal. I couldn’t mourn. I was angry, depressed, and doing my best but never felt like I got anywhere.
That summer as a whole was a blur. My neighbor wrecked our only registered vehicle and we had to fight with the insurance company to even get a claim. My father had his truck, but he fucked off doing what he wanted and enjoying his retirement in July.
This also involved him taking my mother on road trips to get her out of the house and spend time with her. Again... Leaving me alone and abandoned for stretches of a week at a time to take care of the house and animals.
My mother recognizes my pain and what I’ve been through to the best of her own ability. My father? Does not. Not once, in my entire life, has my father ever recognized or taken the poor state of my mental health seriously.
During one of these stretches, I came down with a tooth infection in the one that had broken in Kansas. I was seriously physically ill from it, and it scared me. I have no local friends. I have no local help or support. I was stuck on a waiting list with a new dentist to have it seen to.
I made a list of contacts, and who to reach out to if something happened. Passwords and unlocks for my phone and important accounts. I was legitimately concerned that this was going to take me out, because of the pain and how sick I was.
And the saddest part of it all, was that I just... Accepted it. I was so tired, so worn down, that I would have gladly gone to sleep and not woken up. I embraced the thought of it, even.
Things started to get better once the insurance came through and we had a car again. If only slightly. My father again took off, moving himself and all his shit down to North Carolina with this grand plan that he was going to find himself land and build a house on it for us.
At 55. With no savings. Shitty credit. And a mountain of debt. And only a fraction of what he made while working for his pension.
Through all of this, online, I was gradually feeling nudged farther and farther away from my friends and support. I know I wasn’t the best person at the time, I was isolating myself and compounding the issue, but the distance still hurt me at a time when I was so desperate for any support and comfort that I could find, because my life was fucking hell.
Then, I lost my main writing partner.
It gutted me. After everything that I had been through already that year, it just fucking tore my heart out of my chest and gutted me. And it coincided with a visit from my father that went horribly, with him treating me like fucking garbage before taking off for the final time.
All I could do when I wasn’t shut down, was just lay in bed and cry. And I was angry and embarrassed that my boyfriend had to witness every second of it.
Moving forward, I only felt more nudged out. More isolated. I legitimately felt like the people around me only tolerated my presence because they couldn’t tell me to just fuck off and leave yet.
Multiple times I wanted to just ghost. Just leave. Say nothing, delete my characters, scrub my online presence with my Syana persona, and disappear while only keeping contact with three people at most.
Then, the -real- kicker. While already still feeling like life and my very sense of control were slipping through my fingers, I lost my Thoroughbred Jackson.
It was a freak accident. An accident that only a Thoroughbred could have, too. I did what I could and I tried to save him, but in the end, I couldn’t. I had to let him go.
And again - I felt like I barely had time to mourn him. I had to find someone with an excavator to dig the hole. I had to be present through the entire process. I had to handle every step of it alone, because my mother couldn’t deal with it in the depths of her own depression.
That was in November. And it was the start of the darkest winter I’ve had with my mental health in as long as I can remember.
I still felt like an outcast. I truly felt like no one in my guild wanted me around. RP situations were had where there was serious bleed of IC and OOC on their part that I could -see- and -feel from someone that I had trusted, and one of the people on the very short list that had actually checked in on me while I was in Kansas.
So I isolated more. Why bother, when no one wanted me around because I was so miserable? That was legitimately how I felt, and while now I realize that it was only my own depression making me feel that way, that sense of abandonment again kicked into overdrive.
Multiple times my ideation became a monster that winter. I wanted -so, so- badly to just disappear. Multiple times, I envisioned myself in that hole with Jackson while he was buried.
I just wanted something to happen. Just pass in my sleep. Something, -anything- to end it all so I could just sleep forever and not have to deal with myself or my own depression or emotions anymore.
Nearly all winter, I felt this way. And I will fully admit that my boyfriend and my best friend are the only reasons why I pushed myself to keep going.
Come early 2020, I was trying to pull out of my shell a bit. My anxiety remained a monster, however, and I was still near terrified of my own guild feeling like they were just waiting for me to leave.
An IC interaction happened that triggered me horribly. Repercussions for IC actions - I get it. My character fucked up and she had to pay the price. But at the same time, I felt like the IC/OOC bleed was happening again with this person, because I hadn’t been around much since the IC event happened.
I whispered the person and tried to state that I was uncomfortable and needed to bow out. Their response was to talk down to me and belittle me, but the exact response they gave is lost to the ether. I shut down and freaked out, and lashed out in the depths of the anxiety attack they’d sent me spiraling into.
The next day, they messaged me on Discord. For the next few hours, they proceeded to tear me down and rip me apart so badly that I questioned who I was not just as a writer, but as a person as well.
They told me that I was a shitty person for getting triggered over IC events, and that I was even more shitty for trying to back out of it because I got uncomfortable.
At the time, and given the fact that they hadn’t said this to me right away when I’d gotten upset, I was convinced in my head that this verbal lashing that they gave me had been with the okay from my Guild Leader.
Spoiler - It wasn’t, I found out months upon months later. But what this person did to me pulled the rug out from under me when I was just trying to find it under me again. In that moment, every single anxiety from the year before when it came to my guild, came true in my head.
It was all true. That I wasn’t welcome, just tolerated. That no one actually wanted me around anymore.
All delivered by a person who, at one time, I had mistakenly put my trust into just so they could stab me in the back not once, but multiple times after they had what they wanted out of me.
I spiraled horribly. I was thankful for the fact that I had the opportunity to shut everything out and spend time with my boyfriend after this happened, as we were scheduled to go to PAX East together.
Moving forward, however, being torn into impacted me so deeply, I couldn’t even write my own main character anymore. I felt I would never do her justice again, and my muse for her just escaped me completely.
Looking back - I will never forgive them for this. For hurting my so badly, that they took her away from me for so long. For making me question who I am as a person, all because they didn’t like how RP transpired and that I got triggered during an intense scene.
While all of this is the worst, admittedly - It’s not even everything. I legitimately wonder some days how I’m even still here.
I’m still struggling. I still have my bad days, and today has been particularly hard with this rabbit hole I’ve fallen down in my own feelings and emotions.
I’m nothing if I’m not a fighter. But I shouldn’t feel like I have to fight so hard through every battle I’ve faced, just for a clap on the back for how well I’ve taken it all.
I don’t want to keep fighting. I just want things to go the way I need them to, so I can move past all of this and be better for it.
