My Story In Seven Chapters: “Underneath The Marks”
Ch.1 Flowery Sheets
Sometimes late at night I’d pretend to fall asleep on the bottom of my mom and dad’s bed just so my dad could carry me in with his strong arms and warm heart. I remember my childhood as an old movie playing on the screen of a projector dropping in and out of my consciousness. Growing up in a large family I was often overlooked, and quiet, so if you could imagine it was easy for me to feel invisible. From a young age I’ve learned to pretend, to disconnect, to venture into a world of my own. I had imaginary friends who were fairies that followed me everywhere. I hid under books, and stuffed animals as my older brother shot up heroin and older sister got drunk in the upstairs attic.Cop cars lights were a common presence in my driveway but I didn’t mind because at least my brothers and sisters would be safe from the drugs that way. On the hard days, I remember the flowery pink sheets I kept myself in, the silhouette of my own hand comforting my soul. I remember holding my bunny tight as my mom sang me Amazing Grace as I fell asleep. I remember begging my brother Jeremy to open the bathroom door when he was shooting up Heroin one time, and the day he stole my babysitting money for drugs. Then, came the day I asked where he was and my mom freaked out because she had forgotten about him and suddenly... he was gone. Actually gone. I was twelve and didn’t know much about death (I mean what twelve year old should), but I knew that he had been sick for a really long time and that he was finally finally free and that made me happy and sad at the same time.
Ch. 2 Scratchy Beards
When my dad told me he got sick with Cancer, I sort of thought it was okay because that meant he’d be at home more. That meant he would actually make us real dinners instead of having hot pockets every night and cold burnt spaghetti. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I filled my life with making origami, twirling, and writing songs about pretty girls, fairy dust and sunshine. I hated when my dad came to my school because he had to carry around this huge oxygen tank with plastic wires creeping out of his nose, and I pretended I didn’t know him. I still feel bad about that to this day. The most iconic thing about my dad other then him being secretly gay (which I didn’t know about until now), was his scratchy beard and large tattooed forearm. I miss his hugs most of all, maybe that’s why hugging people feels wrong at times--no one’s hugs are quite like his were. My mom and dad left for Europe to seek alternative cancer treatment the last year he was alive. This just so happened to be when my sister got sober. As she was parenting her own baby boy out of wedlock, she also was supposed to be parenting me. In a flash of an instant, me and all my siblings gathered around his hospital bed and sang Amazing Grace to his subconscious mind through the rumbling of the machines keeping him alive. Walking out of the ICU each of us said “see you later’ because we all knew it wasn’t goodbye. I guess, not really. On the Christmas morning before tenth grade, he had left us and I felt my heart shatter into a million pieces. I had told myself a few days before that if he didn’t call me beautiful one last time, then something just something was wrong with me. I knew exactly how I was going to change that.
Ch. 3 Safety Pins
I forgot to mention, that while my mom was saving my dads life in Europe I had decided to try to change my own, in the only way I knew how. I decided to stop being the good invisible quiet christian girl and become someone who was seen. At the time, I believed I just wanted to make friends, yah know..be a part of something-- but in a desperate need to distract myself from the losses I endured I had to find a way to become alive again. I self harmed for the first time at fifteen and didn’t think much of it, I thought it was cool and something other people in my friend group did. I didn’t know safety pins weren’t all that safe, I didn’t know hurting myself would become an addiction I’d struggle with for the next six years of my life. I thought that if people saw the pain on my body they could hear me asking for help. Even as I hid under long sleeves and smiles and laughter I started to feel the deeply distant darkness pull me away from myself. Even though I thought I didn’t want anyone to know about it, I felt as though I was screaming yet I wouldn’t allow any sound to come out.
Ch. 4 Porcelain Bowls
A few months after my dad died my mom ran off to Florida every weekend with her new but old boyfriend whom she had been with before my dad 30 years earlier. At the cost of losing my dad, and subsequently losing my mom, I found solace in toilet bowls and diet colas. My friends and I had sort of made a game of it, we’d talk about dieting and then talk about feeling bad for giving into the diets and then feel bad for feeling bad. What started off as a game between friends, began to become a dangerous game of Russian roulette. I remember high school as a blur of calories, cheese puffs, and washing my hands in sinks. I kissed boys that I pretended to like behind tennis courts and eventually began treatment for my eating disorder and self harm during my senior year of high school. I got better ( or so I thought), but beneath the perfect recovery girl I created, laid a deep fear of still not being seen, still not being heard.
Ch. 5 False Safety
I went to college and fell in love with a girl I didn’t pretend to love and went to therapy twice a week.This is a time in my life I like to call “False Safety” because although I felt somewhat okay, I was relying on others around me to take care of me, I never learned to do it myself. I ran around college from club to club pretending to be the recovered girl I thought I had to be, but others couldn’t see what was truly underneath. During therapy I was being seen and loved and everything felt okay... but outside of that small room I believed I was alone. I mean, I thought things were better, and they were... yet I continued to run from the pain through self harm. I craved so much attention from my girlfriend that if I did not get to be her world, I felt I couldn’t be with her at all. I was so scared of her leaving me like my mom did, I left her before she got the chance too. Back when I was ten, I waited for hours and hours for my mom to pick me up at camp and as each car passed by and it was not her my disappointment grew deeper. In my adulthood I learned to instead stop waiting for her--or anyone, I decided to run away and never be found because then I wouldn’t have to face being abandoned.
Ch.6 The Pink Room
It was a month or so after the breakup and I hid behind doorways so I wouldn’t have to see her look away from me. I hid in bathrooms during panic attacks and cried into my cereal in the back of the cafeteria. My world stopped when my therapist told me she was moving (leaving me is what I heard). I had completely attached myself to her and I felt that the one person in my life that truly saw me was leaving. Leaving. People are always leaving me I thought. I decided to fill up the hole she left with alcohol in coffee cups and pills and more cuts and more fake smiles and more “recovery” articles and speaking engagements. It wasn’t enough. None of these things were ever really enough. In the week my therapist left me, I decided to get as drunk as I could and pretend to be happy and flirt with boys I didn’t know because that would make everything better right? I didn’t know the boy with black hair was seven years older than me. October 13th October 13th October 13th. I didn’t know he’d be so mean and when the drinking game got out of hand I didn’t have the capability to say yes or no. I didn’t know walking drunkenly into that pink room, he’d hurt me the way he did. It wasn’t rape, but it was terrifying, violent, awfully painful physically and emotionally. He was a giant dog playing with a glass doll and he shattered me into a million pieces, he shattered my fake smile right off my face.
Ch. 7 Letting Love In
From October 2017 to May 2018, everything was a blur. A blur of multiple treatment programs for depression, anxiety, and the sexual assault. The Eating Disorder came back stronger and more powerful than ever and this time I was determined to run as far away as I could from that pink room and from the therapist that left me. After a week in the psych ward I thought I could get better on my own with the eating disorder, I thought that I could control my out-of-control-ness. In February 2018, I told my mom I was going to go to treatment, but would wait until Monday. Suddenly, I had a thought, an urge, a quiet voice in the back of my head telling me to go that Friday instead, which I did. I entered treatment for the millionth time and was quickly rushed to the ER for low potassium. It was late at night and no one in my family was picking up the phone. I was in an unknown ER, half asleep, half dead and I still didn’t feel sick enough. There was an IV stuck in my arm and doctors telling me my levels were life threateningly low and I still didn’t feel like I was ‘that bad’. I don’t know if I’d be alive right now, if God hadn’t told me to go that Friday. He truly saved my life. From that point on, I started listening to that quiet voice. A month or so of running from God, one suicide attempt and many family therapy sessions later I decided to go to Selah House. I finally decided to give up the demons that had become my identity. I decided to let love in again. I decided that I could only be free if I let myself be. I could only get better on God’s terms. I know now that I had to fight the ED, Depression, Self harm, PTSD, Anxiety, and Addiction with God by my side only. I know now that what went on in that pink room was not my fault, and I don’t have to be ashamed of it or put blame on myself in any way. Here at Selah is where I’ve found hope. Here, I’ve found healing. Here, I’ve found love. Love between God, others and myself. I know now that it was never actually about the food, the numbers, or the marks. I know that I have a future, a future of helping others heal in the same ways I did. A future full of laughter, crying, heartache, touch, and love. All of my life has really been what’s in between. In between moments of exhale, of tears running down my face, of dad hugs, and Real smiles. These things are all a part of my story but they are not at the core of who I really am. My life was never meant to be a sad story because I’m not that girl anymore. I am healing, I am tough skin made of scars, I am endless nights crying and glorious mornings shining like nothing bad has ever happened. I am becoming free, becoming Real and I have so much yet to learn about the spaces in between.