My Humble Submission for #GiveLoveToday
[This is long, but it has to be to understand the scope of how much this person has made such a HUGE difference in my life. The reason I’m still breathing.]
Seven years ago I had two people who I relied on as my best friends. At the time I was severely depressed. I’d attempted suicide several times, I’d been sexually assaulted several times by people I knew and people I didn’t know. The most recent, at the time, was someone who had drugged my drink and kidnapped me 45 minutes away from the club and raped me and wouldn’t let me go back home. I actually had to find a way out and I had to hide and see if my friend could find me using google maps. (GPS wasn’t a big thing, yet.)
I self-multilated. A lot. I have an estimated 100,000 scars on my body because I was bullied severely by the other kids in my school and a majority of teachers, including the administration. If any of the other kids did anything, anything at all, whether I was in attendance that day or not, I got blamed for it. For example, a student wrote a bomb threat on a boy’s room stall door on a day I was home sick from school. The police still called me in to the office to interrogate me, told me everyone they questioned said it was me, and they actually started screaming at me in my face. And I laughed. It was my only response to how absurd things were, because this was nothing new. I was always everyone’s scape goat.
I was abused by my parents and my brother. My mother ignored me, physically abused me, told me she wished I’d kill myself, she starved me over a summer until I was eating cat food. My dad also abused me physically, and also sexually. And at that point, just seven years ago, I had gathered nothing but negative experiences with other people. Mental abuse, emotional abuse, people used me, I was raped, I was molested, I was blamed for all the wrong in the world, people told me they wished I was dead, that I’d kill myself, and I was trying very hard just to remain kind to people. If I saw anyone in need of money, I gave what I had. If I saw someone whose birthday was coming but their parents weren’t having a party, me casa es su casa, I threw them a party. If I saw someone getting bullied, I put myself between and chased them off. But no one seemed to appreciate it. By the next day, they were back to blaming me for things. I can’t even tell you how many kids I played with because they seemed lonely and bored, who turned around and told authorities or the principal that I (and I’m not joking), had burned them and sacrificed their soul to Satan, or that I was sacrificing babies (REALLY???) in my basement to the devil.
Still, I tried. I still try. But it had come to the point where I was broke, I had no money, I was no use to anyone so they threw me away, one of my best friends stopped talking to me because she got what she wanted, I felt dirty and disgusting from being kidnapped and raped in ways a shower could never cure. I can’t even explain the level of disgust I had with my own body in being violated. And the people around me insisted I wanted to be raped, that it was my fault because I’m too smart to get raped and therefore I planned it all. (Ah, yes, the best support system one could have.)
I was a shut in. I never left the house, I never spoke to anyone, I was disgusted, I wore only bulky clothing, I didn’t take care of myself anymore, I couldn’t afford food, and my best friend said she was going to visit me. Good news. And she did, with her girl friend who HATED me. But we went out to dinner at a buffet. From not eating very much, ever, I was full fast. I got a plate of dessert, piled it up, and finished what I could. And then my friend’s girl friend looked up at me and said, “She’s cute. Look how adorable she is.” And there I am, with my mouth stuffed full of cake, looking between them, confused. My friend said, “Yeah, I guess?”. But her girl friend, Kayley, just kept staring at me with this stupid smile on her face.
They took me home, I had snuck cupcakes into my purse for later, although Kay kinda crushed them. She was apologizing profusely when I said, “I don’t care. I’ll eat them anyway!” And I did. We had pretty much nothing to really eat. We were too poor to really afford food and no one was hiring me in our teeny, tiny little town where all the stores were family owned and only hired friends and family wherein everyone in the town hated me. A month or two later, I saw Kay again when my boy friend (we got back together) took my friend and I to see her at a convention. And… I broke up with my boyfriend then and there at said convention because he said, “Choose either your friends or me!” which made it an easy choice. He stranded us there at the con and Kay let us stay in her hotel room until my friend’s dad could come get us. But all the while, Kay was really supportive of my decision to break up with him once and for all. He’d raped me twice, even, and you’d think I wouldn’t have gotten back together with him. He was extremely manipulative, saw me as arm candy, and hated me for being smarter than him (his parents mocked him openly when they saw my IQ scores while trying to dig up dirt on me to kick me out of their house), and because I was braver than him to actually try to move out, to try to get a job and live on my own. He was 12 years my senior and couldn’t do any of that. And I got punished for it by being degraded and mocked. But Kay comforted me and insisted I did the right thing. I really did.
Fast forward to July of ‘09, my mom was making my clean our three story house top to bottom, three times a day, insisting I was lazy and useless. I had a migraine, I told her I wanted to vacuum the couch again later because I was close to throwing up, but she made me do it anyway. I’m vacuuming the couch, head throbbing, about to throw up, when she starts saying things to me like… I stole her husband away from her. My father molested me and had planned to rape and murder me before he was arrested. And she’s sitting there blaming me for not having a bread winner, acting like I wanted those things to happen, and calling me a whore and a slut. That’s when I had it. I blew up, she retaliated, she called me a whore for living with my boy friend, I called her the same for cheating on her husbands. Both of them. More than once.
I stormed up to my room, splintered the door, and called my “best friend” in Indiana. “I can’t help you. Maybe ask Kayley.” “You sure? She hates me.” “Well I can’t help you, I’m hours away. She’s not too far from you. Call her.” And I did, and there was a lot of, “Hold on. SHUT UP MOM! Go on?” and so forth, but I was able to crash on a friend’s couch for a week until Kay was able to pick me up. I was inches from being homeless. Which is worse being in a Northern state, because it gets really cold, really fast. And in such a small town, there aren’t homeless people. Everyone knows everyone else, and everyone crashes on someone else’s couch. But I didn’t belong there, I didn’t have that, and I was facing washing myself up in the river at night and sleeping under a bridge. But Kay came and helped me pack some of my stuff up, and saved me.
I moved in, I cried a lot, I was depressed, I was suicidal, I was still probably at the lowest I could arrive at. And my best friend? She told me I was talking all of Kay’s attention from her, she cheated on Kay, and then when I told her to tell Kay the truth, she did… and said she wanted to keep cheating… and Kay broke up with her. And I was blamed for it for telling her to be honest. So I had no friends any longer. I was alone. No friends, no family, no money, no job, most of my stuff was in my mom’s house, including some of my pets. I was still disgusted by getting raped and I was sick all the time and I wouldn’t get out of bed for much of anything or stop crying for anything except… to cook. Kay would ask me if I was hungry, but I wasn’t, but I wanted to help cook. Her home had a huge kitchen and she had all the ingredients we needed to make stuff from scratch. Her mom was paying rent, so I wasn’t being charged. My duty was to keep Kay busy and cheer her up. “Well that’s ironic,” I snorted under my breath. How can someone this sad make someone else feel better when they already said they HATE you?
But we cooked and baked constantly. We’d eat lunch and dinner out on the patio. I still had some wild turkey from months and months ago I was saved. We drank some. We cooked with some. And for once I was able to laugh. Laughing didn’t happen so easily. It was typically crying. Probably non-stop. Unless we made food. She’d lost her job and I didn’t have one, so money was really tight. Through the winter it got harder. We were scratching around, getting whatever change we could find. Laundry, couch cushions, sidewalks, whatever change we could find just to afford sugar and flour and milk and butter and bread and eggs. We’d used tomatoes, through the spring, to make handmade pasta sauce to go with the handmade pasta. Pasta became a staple because it was cheap to make. But it was good, it was always good. And then I had found a message Kay sent to a friend. She said that she wished I’d kill myself already and get it over with and she’d punt my cat outside into the cold.
She got slapped for that. Twice. And I stormed off to cry. When I finally returned, I was still crying and I said to her, “You know, maybe I don’t mean anything to you and you think it’s okay for me to die, but what about anyone who might like me? Maybe there are people online that enjoy talking to me? And you’re going to say stuff like that to callously make them LOSE me? How DARE you! HOW DARE YOU!” To this she had me sit down and I laid my head down on the table and cried. She talked to me, and I listened, she apologized, I accepted it, and her whole attitude toward me changed. She rubbed my leg comfortingly and that’s when I hissed in pain. She asked what was wrong and looked to see blood on my pajama pants. “Oh god.” She took me by the hand, led me into the kitchen, sat me down, and tended to all the self-inflicted wounds. And there were a lot. She wrapped it all up after cleaning them and it was fine. But no one ever did that. I had been hurting myself for years and years and years and everyone chose to ignore it. No one ever fixed me up like that before. And she didn’t scream at me, either. The struggle continued, we saved up all of our change and made due.
Over Christmas, before my sister decided to cut me out of her life, I had spent Christmas with her and my brother-in-law and niece. My sister’s in-laws gave me $90 to go “buy myself something nice from the mall”. Little did they know, the $90 went toward basics of sugar, bread, flour, eggs, etc. for the next three months. And Kay’s mom dropped a bomb on us. We had two weeks to move out. She was moving to the other side of the country, short notice, and leaving us there. We panicked, but we managed. We moved and we made due. We walked to our college classes and back. We were both frustrated with our college for not accommodating us and our disabilities. (She has OCD and depression, I have depression and severe anxiety.) We did the best we could, and my mom surprised me. She dropped off my cat. And enough money to buy myself a used car. And I did. And… we moved back toward the closest city to my hometown. Over the past seven years, although I still have depression, a lot had happened. But… Kay has always sacrificed for us, has always done anything to keep me happy. She taught me a lot.
I cried less often. I contemplated suicide a lot less often. When she asked me where I wanted to eat, we actually ate there. I always said, “I don’t know. I don’t care. Where would you like to go?” because no one ever gave me an option, never asked me opinion, if I gave it, it didn’t matter to them. When we got to a restaurant she’d ask me what I wanted to eat. And she didn’t pick for me. And I told her. And she ordered for me, instead of berating me in front of everyone for not being able to speak up and order for myself. To her, my opinion and what I liked or didn’t like MATTERED. It never did before! She also asked what was wrong when I was clearly upset. And typically people asked because they felt obligated to ask and they’d give up. So I wasn’t too good with expressing myself verbally, but she started me out with text messages, and although I’m still not perfect, she helped me to be able to verbalize what was upsetting me most of the time, when I was convinced I shouldn’t say anything because it didn’t really matter to anyone I was upset.
Recently I’ve gotten a lot sicker. We’re not sure what prompted it, but my depression has been a lot stronger, my anxiety a lot more debilitating. I lost my job after six months for calling off and being late. I’d call off because I was depressed. No, Kay would call me off. Because I was too scared to call. She makes all of my calls for me, now, because if she doesn’t, nothing will get done. I’m too scared to use the phone to call anyone for any reason, so she calls pretending to be me so things won’t go wrong. I’d come home from work after simply driving in to the employee parking area and then leaving again, just crying. I find it hard to even run errands, now, because I’m too scared to deal with cashiers or other shoppers. I end up doing pick-up-in-store whenever I can, just to avoid any further human contact.
Sam’s done everything she could to get me medical, and has made an appointment for me. After being in and out of the ER for suicides, after being in and out out psychology clinics and other places like them, I’m finally going to be able to start getting therapy regularly. I’m going to get to get better. And Kay’s dealt with a whole lot of stuff, herself. Her OCD is getting worse, too. She was in a car accident about 2 years ago and has two herniated discs in her back. Doing regular stuff is really painful to her. But she’s getting an appointment, too, to work on her OCD. But all this time that I’ve been out of work, she’s worked. She’s taken all the hours she possibly can, she’s worked as many hours as they will give her, and she’s looking at working two jobs again, or getting a higher paid job, plus a second job, just to take care of me.
When everyone else has turned their backs on me, when I haven’t experienced very much goodness from the human race, when people ignored me, spat on me, kicked me down, and I tried to stay up… Kay has always held me up. She’s taught me a lot about love and trust and has given me a reason to stick around. She cries often because I’m depressed and she feels it’s her fault, like she could do more, but what she doesn’t understand is that my depression is entirely my brain. That before I met her, I was being treated like dirt and I NEVER stopped crying. I was constantly bawling and constantly planning my suicide. I was constantly cutting myself, hurting myself, I wouldn’t eat, I rarely showered, I didn’t take care of myself, I didn’t care if I was alive or not. And it’s not like that anymore. In the last five years, I’ve only cut twice, which is a whopping improvement over 3-5 times a WEEK.
If it wasn’t for Kay, I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t know what it was like to be happy. I’m still struggling with depression, but although my brain makes me sad, my heart makes me happy. And I have Kay to thank for all of it. For being patient, kind, caring, for treating me like a human being, for treating me like I matter, for sacrificing for me, for sacrificing WITH me, for doing all we can, supporting each other, and doing our best to understand each other. She’s my family. She’s everything and she’s made up, on her own, for everything everyone has done to me. And that feeling of disgusting I had after I was raped that would not go away has gone away because of her. She has fixed everything and now I don’t feel helpless or hopeless. I feel like someone finally has my back and I feel safe and I finally know what it feels like to be treated like a human being. I absolutely love her.
So I nominate @smarter-winchester (Kay aka Sam) for this. For being the kindest person who has changed my life more than words can even explain.
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