I feel like my life can be divided into many different aspects and eras. I feel like I need to get some jot notes written down about this, because I feel like it's distinctly correlated to my mood difficulties. So let's run through some of the eras of my life.
Ages 0-8 (2005 to 2013): The earliest era of my life. My memories from this time period range from nonexistent to extremely foggy. There's not much I can say I remember about this time period, to the point where I don't even know what the first book I ever read was (even though I knew I first read a novel sometime in the later half of this era).
Ages 9-14 (2014 to 2019): My memories of this era are getting vaguer with each new year, but I know more about this time period than I do about the one that preceded it. At age 9, I would have been in Grade 4. I was getting bullied by a girl half my size in my grade, who accused me of staring at her. She made other kids not talk to me, she pushed me around, she stepped on my things, etc. She was a menace, and nobody stopped her. My teacher even implied my father had babied me, and I needed to just toughen up. That trauma still lingers today.
I almost left my elementary school because of the bullying, but I toughed it out for the few teachers who were nice to me. I started wearing noise cancelling headphones to school, to block out the words of my bully. I got glasses, but refused to wear them at school (thinking they'd be used as fodder for more bullying). It was a tough time for me. I still wear the noise cancelling headphones at school, all because of this habit brought on by childhood trauma.
Ages 10 to 14 aren't as memorable to me. Grades 5-8 of elementary school had me suffering the ptsd effects of being bullied so severely in grade 4, but I still had a decent time. Read a lot, fell into a comforting routine, had normalcy in my life. But then I went to High School when I was 14. That was stressful. But I got through it. It was touch and go, since I never saw anything at school (refusing to wear my glasses, I was blind as a bat when it came to distance text).
But this era was one where I had a severe regression, and then I slowly had to advance myself back to where I was pre-2014. Some would argue I would never be the same after my bullying, but I was slowly recovering and getting ready to open up to people again. But then COVID hit. So now we hit our third era.
Ages 15-17 (2020 to 2022): This was a really tumultuous time period for me. COVID hit, so I started doing online schooling. I would stay online for this entire three year period. I got really used to it, so heading back to in person school for 2023-2024 was a real shock. But beyond schooling, 2020 to 2022 was a time of great tumult for me.
In 2021, I ended up creating a social media account online. Sometimes I worry having social media access makes me more lazy and sedentary online, but I can't actually prove that to be true. It's just something that I feel like i've been suffering from. And the thoughts all started back around 2022 or so. But on top of this, my mom died in 2022. And I also lost an old tablet around that time. Losing my mom meant losing one of the few people I was close to, and losing the tablet helped intensity those feelings of laziness mentioned above. So a whole lot hit me in 2022, and I'm still struggling with the aftermath today.
Ages 18-20 (2023 to Present): Out current era in my life. So far (if i had to pick an objective term), I would describe everything as being very much a recovery period. Things have all been in flux since my mom died. I turned 18. I (technically) graduated high school. I start college next year. Event after event after event. There's never much time to process everything. I don't know if processing time would actually help me, but I just don't feel I get much time like that. But now we're all caught up. I've successfully recounted and abbreviated my life story, in only 9-10 paragraphs.
