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Colorful and hopefully optimistic but maybe hateful occasionally

I rescued a snake while the snake was fighting me, but then the snake let me pick her up.

A woman across the way screamed, "You're crazy, woman!"

Instead of freaking out that she called me a "woman" (I can't even bring myself to call people here "women" or "men"), I yelled back, while holding this snake who was giving me a funny look, "Thank you!"

She called back, "You're welcome!" without any hesitation.

The snake was happy when I put her down in the grass. Her bum was injured, but I think with time she'll be okay. I couldn't bring her home. My service dog is terrified of snakes.

I have brought home pigeons numerous times though. I have a cockatiel, so service dog knows to be careful and also try not to get bitten. :p The first pigeon got my dinner of mashed potatoes, peas, corn, and butter, along with some gravy. I knew he wasn't going to survive. He was a juvenile who had been grabbed by a hawk. No saving him, and wildlife rescuers were refusing to come meet me for that reason. So he got a great meal and then hung out with me until it was time for him to go. He wasn't conscious for it.

Another pigeon had been shot, but somehow survived. I took him in, and begged a wilflife person to come help me. I ended up driving an hour (well, a friend drove me) in a rush to drop him off at the resuer's house. It was Halloween evening. When I knocked on the door, a confused man opened the door and handed me a bunch of candy, before he saw the pigeon and asked me if his wife had sent me.

That pigeon had smelled like death, literally. Service dog was very troubled when he waddled over to her bed and got cozy. She couldn't roll around on dead animal if it wasn't dead. (Also, she was legitimately concerned.) He wouldn't eat or drink, probably because of the pain.

But he lived :)

Stuff like that makes me feel better about myself.

Pigeons are birds that live on cliff edges, but they have adapted to live in cities. They were later domesticated, and made into hundreds of breeds, like dogs. Smart, useful animals, just like dogs.

It confuses me that dogs got to be the popular pet, because pigeons are much gentler -- even a vicious one will never bite -- and they need way less food and way less exercise.

They do need more attention, though, but so do dogs. Both require reassurance that they belong in the pack/flock.

But if you catch a wild dog, sometimes you might get bitten. If you catch a wild pigeon who has just been shot? You might get wing-slapped, maybe, because they forget they have beaks.

Dogs and pigeons both have a reputation of being nasty. Rats do too, but to be fair, rats haven't been domesticated until more recently. Even hawks were domesticated earlier -- although hawks are very independent and will never quite be "perfectly" domesticated.

Humans have been friends with dogs longer. And cats. Our species would not have advanced without them.

But we did okay without pigeons. But pigeons need humans now.

Seagulls have grown to depend on humans as well, which is why many can be seen at not-the-coast anymore. Humans have changed the world in a lot of surprising ways.
 
Sometimes I think of memories to put in here, but then I instantly get overwhelmed by ten other traumas.

(Warning: medical trauma ahead)

Since I won't have a therapist appointment for another two or three months, though, it might be nice to vomit out another one.

I'm bothered about lying to my mom, first of all.

It was in the very middle of being with Brandi. I had sort of accepted things, and at home, things had not improved for me. My dad was gone, and I was under an order of protection, but he was still stalking my mom all the time. And my mom wasn't doing anything about it, because she didn't want him to not be able to see his kids.

Not sure why it mattered...?

I know her mom had forbidden her once from being allowed to talk to her father, who was abusive. But I've met him. He had been in a major war (maybe two?) and seen some very serious shit. He had grown up in an orphanage and called an "inmate" while his sister lived happily with his mom, and wondered why he had been rejected. When he was 89, he got a letter that the head of the orphanage had literally hidden in a locked box, from his mother, saying, "I will explain when you're older, but please know that a mother always love her son, and I love you." His entire world was flipped on its head.

He grew up in a time when his generation was called a lost generation, one sent off to war and coming back not quite right, with no future, no help, and no understanding. And for him, no family. He felt lost. He told my mom when the conversation came up of him being her father, "I did my best. It wasn't good enough, but I did my best."

There's a dragon in Skyrim who says of himself, while helping the protagonist, "What is better? To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?" He would have like it, because he said something similar to this once. I feel it would have made him feel validated, that he tried.

But my mom must have hoped that my father would try to overcome his evil nature.

But my dad is a weakling.

At the same time, I had just been banished to living in the garage, as my dad had made my sister do once. Talking about this is particularly hard... My dad had used cleaning as punishment, and I was becoming scared of my sister. She was a legal adult and therefore was allowed to say and do whatever she wanted.

My fish are all dead. She killed them because she didn't like fish, and couldn't see why I was attached to them. When I tried to reasonably stand up for myself, she told me, "Don't you care about our mother? She needs a place for her CPAP."

I left the room. My dad used my mom to control me. I didn't have the tools I needed to deal with this.

I was left to my room, where I was expected to clean out literally everything by myself, with no breaks, or I was lazy and stupid.

When the storage unit was closed, all the stuff in it was put into my room. My room had been the cleanest, and therefore I had been letting other people in the house use it to store things while other rooms were cleaned. It immediately became the worst room in the house. It stayed that way for ten years. I couldn't handle it, and my mom acted as if this was my fault.

So did my family. When I had a breakdown and moved my bed to that room Sister was forcing me into (so my mom could have the room), they all acted as if I had overreacted, and they all began to make fun of me. I can't even describe it, because it was so painful. I remember yelling out the window that I could hear what they were saying about me, and then I stormed into the house and tried to tell my mom why I was upset, only to have her say, "They aren't wrong."

I got hospitalized soon after, completely against my will, because my doctor noticed I was acting extremely, "dangerously" depressed. I just wanted to be dead.

Shit, I'm trying not to cry while typing things because it gives me the worst headaches, but damn. You'd think after the actual psychopath left, I would be safe, but no. I wasn't. Not at all.

The nurses in the hospital were cruel. Place callled Rolling Hills. I watched them abuse other patients, and let them encourage other patients to come to my room and bully me, and outside my window were bars and a field with a barbed wire fence. It felt like I was still at home. I tried stopping one of them once and showing them that in the rule book they gave me, it said, "No bullying allowed." They told me I was being too sensitive and needed to get over myself.

They said that when a patient came into my room and pulled an IV out of my arm like it was the starter of a lawn mower. I had that IV because I had been left in an isolation room for so many hours that I became too dehydrated to stand up, or even have blood drawn from me. They opened the door after a long, long time, and light came in and I looked up, and the nurse said, "Come out if you want food. The more food you eat, the faster we'll let you leave this place." I couldn't get up. She closed the door even though I was panicking.

I have lived in a cage before, when I was 1-4 years old, but I had my twin brother and my little brother, and I had cats raising me. I had a psychologist tell me once, in a really damaging way, that I clearly see gender the way cats taught me to see it. But in that "safe place" at the hospital, I was completely alone. I think I started going insane after I got thirsty enough. At one point they told me that my blood pressure was 60/20 and then they had me walk back to my room, and I fell, and they had me get back up and then they stuck the IV in me and then the other kid who was my age came in.

A kid who was 17 and a father of a two-year-old liked me okay. And an autistic girl who kept drawing pictures of her killing the other patients. The nurses realized she actually got along with me and moved me into her room later, where they then sent kids to come mess with us.

It got worse when she screamed and suddenly the power went out. They started calling her a witch for some reason. Even though she clearly hadn't done anything.

And they started comparing me to her. So to survive, I had to realize that she could handle herself, and I had to start acting like I didn't like her either. In our room I didn't act that way, but I felt like such a... I didn't deserve to be alive.

But I protected her when the nurses would go after her, because they did, all the time.

In Vanderbilt the kids had told me that I wasn't like them because I was "better" than them. Not here. I wanted to be dead, the entire time, which allowed them to tell insurance that they couldn't release me. So I started hiding the pills they were giving me in my cheek, and pretending to swallow them, and I hide them in part of the wall in the bathrrom, behind the sink, and stopped eating, and then I took them all in one big giant dose. I did it after the full week of not being allowed outside, because I "deserved" to stay in my room, all day, every day, with nothing to do, because all teenagers were bad.

All teenagers were bad, evil, and lazy, like my sister's husband said of me, which is why my mother hadn't helped me when I started to break down. And being idle was dangerous for me already -- my dad would go after us if we looked too idle. Make us clean.

Or we'd be in cages, idle.

But after the isolation room, it got so much worse. I was pacing like an animal, not even sure how big my own room was because I kept seeing dark walls in my vision, literally. I was trying to memorize which nurse was which, because some of them were much nicer to me. At my job now, my boss arrives earlier than me with a long, overwhelming list of things to do, because I get so nervous when I'm idle. I get so nervous that I look for things to do, and at first she called it impressive but then she started getting a little nervous when she would go on vacation, unsure of what I would be up to.

When I dissociate, I have been told that I start humming classical musical, usually Mozart. I remember doing that in the isolation room, after they said I could have food if I came out. I told her, "I can't get up," and she just closed the door. I was alone for another full day and I knew then that I was going to die, and I accepted it so well that I started trying to make it happen faster. I wanted them to put me down so I wouldn't suffer. I already had PTSD. Diagnosed at 13. I knew this was just going to kill me. I didn't even want to survive, because I knew what surviving bad things did.

One day I said "I can't get up" to the right nurse, but didn't know it for a full twenty minutes. She said, "I'll be right back," and she came back for me and then I was led back to my room by other nurses. But then the IV thing happened.

I remember that the desert was assorted fruit and it tasted so f*cking amazing.

The doctor wanted to "experiment" with my synethesia. and I haven't told a professional about my synethesia since, unless it was my therapist. He kept giving me drugs that were dimming the effects of it and making me severely depressed. And then I couldn't get out of the depression because I was blind to voices, and to my own emotions, and then I started panicking and getting paranoid because I couldn't tell who was who and I couldn't even tell if I was real.

When I got out of the hospital, my sister wouldn't talk to me. She was angry that I had overreacted and made the entire house uncleanable, and my brothers and mom were mad too. It was my fault that my sister had to back off and leave the hosue dirty.

The house got so bad in the next few years that it had literally never been worse. Even with my psychopathic father there. I started missing him.

My mom wasn't paying the hospital bill, and made fun of me when I told her she had to do something or at least answer the calls, or she would get sued. Said I was a funny inexperienced teenager.

She got sued.

Later, when I tried to tell her what happened in the hospital, I started off by saying that they "treated me abusively," and she replied dismissively, "Well, I wish you would have told me that before they sued me" as if I were in trouble. I've never told anyone about it since, even therapists. I just go mute with terror.

And I see eyes getting stabbed. Caleb stabbed out his eye with a pencil, sitting right next to one of the nicer nurses, but the one that told me to get over bullying, and I just sat there staring at him.

I remember Sobrina, a lesbian who told me I better be less than her because I was the most disgusting thing she had ever seen. Brandi had said similarly so I just went with it.

Caleb wrote me a poem about how I was nice to him and his friend, and I still have it. He had a severe caffeine problem and used to drink from soda machines after breaking into the back of the eating area, and nurses would literally beat him off of them. He was mentally retarded, so they said he wouldn't remember it.





So... all that was going on. And Brandi and the shadow people were just so much better than reality now, and I just stopped caring that she was making me do anything because it was becoming pleasant to be evil enough to manipulate her into letting me escape from reality, and I truly felt like I was the one making her believe it. I needed it at this point though. And my mom started to question me on it, because a doctor had brought it up.

I told my mom a shadow person had helped me move a microwave that was more than twice my weight (it was old) up several stairs. She was confused because that made it seem weirdly real, but she also started treating me like I was her crazy schizophrenic brother who poured boiling water on her once. And I started getting upset that she wasn't believing me. So I didn't let it go. I told her that they were real to me, and she said "I believe that you believe" and I felt so invalidated for something that wasn't f*cking real. I finally told her that maybe someone was trying to corrupt me through her and then she acted more believing and I just felt like total shit.

One time she asked me if I was lying about the pedophile raping me. I was so spooked by this that I couldn't even answer. It turned out later that what she meant was, "Are you sure you aren't scapegoating him, because your father was actually the one who raped you?" And I was like 16 and too terrified to answer such an awful question, even after I understood it. Just mute.
 
I thought that if I could support a pedophile, and protect my little brother from my psycho sexually abusing "father" who literally wanted him dead, I could do anything.

But when I think of this and how I stood up to nurses who weren't psychopaths like my father was, I just feel so small.

And I just keep having flashbacks of my little brother cutting himself so deeply that I saw the inside of an artery, and I had tried to tell my mom but she just didn't believe me.

I really wish crying didn't hurt me so much. It really hurts. But i'm sure as f*ck not going to go sit in a dark room after that memory.
 
I stood up to a psychopath as a 13-year-old. I stood in front of him after he threw a weapon at my little brother and told him to clean up his spilled drink the weapon had hit, and I told him while making eye contact, while he was holding a knife, "Clean it up. You made that mess."

It was a lesson in pain but he started to be wary of me. And my little brother thanked me. I was always more powerful than an evil shit.

But those nurses weren't supposed to be like that.

The pedophile hadn't originally wanted me. He wanted my sister, the one my dad hated the most, which is why my dad tried to get her kidnapped instead of me, first. She was 16 at the time. But something didn't work out, she nearly died and was blamed for it. Courts even took away her licence to teach her a lesson. She almost died. Pedophile had her drink so much whiskey that she almost died, and she was fine with it because our mom was dying, and my dad wasn't her dad. And then he ended up with me, who he hated because I was a blonde white person, with green eyes, and so ugly compared to my sister.

Even though he apparently changed his mind after raping me a few times (I smelled anesthesia and a hint of marijuana when I said that) and felt bad enough about it to start trying to stand me up in front of a mirror and say what was pretty about me, it won't stop bothering me.

My sister is destroying her skin to stay dark skinned now. Tanning beds. She married a Native American who is an alcoholic and she controls him so much that his only way to retaliate is to be a dick. Neither one of them are in the right.
 
somerandomguy said:
I'm so, so, so sorry you had to go through all of that
Click to expand...

Thank you.



Just going to add one more thing. Getting it off my chest.

In that hospital, after I got out of the isolation room, managed to get food and get hydrated, and before the suicide attempt, and during the confusion with my synethesia being messed with (maybe that has something to do with my guilt at having experimented on various animals, plants, fungi, protists, bacteria, etc.?), I remember staring at this wall by the front desk when I kept going to go ask for more drugs.

I was asking for drugs -- acetaminophen and ibuprofen-- to pretend to take them, but I really was in pain. I was stashing most of them away to make my concoction later. But I was also there because this one nurse who had my sister's name would talk to me, and after being in isolation for that long I was desperate to have constant conversation.

But there was that wall I kept staring at. It had a notice on a large plague thing that said that this hospital prided itself on ethical care, and displayed a phone number to a government office to report malpractice if anyone encountered it.

I would stare at it and I thought about memorizing the phone number. Didn't occur to me to call 911 until I was going over the memory like four years later. It wouldn't feel right now days either. It didn't with the pedophile. But then I would get to the phones when I was allowed to have my phone call, and the nurse would move the phone away and dial my mom's number without even asking if that was who I wanted to talk to. And she'd keep the dialpad where I couldn't reach it.

While I was on the phone with my mom, the nurse would stare directly into my eyes the entire time.

So of course I didn't say anything.

But I tried to send a coded message to her. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I guess I felt like I had to try. So while we were on the phone, I said, "They moved me to a new room." (They hadn't. I had gotten out of isolation.) Then I said, "My new room has bars and I feel like I'm at home, and my dad is here. And you know how my dad doesn't feed me." Then I said something else about how there was a nurse with the same name as my sister, and it was bothering me.

She was quiet for a minute. I hoped she had picked up on something. But then she said, "You know, your sister wasn't trying to bully you. She wanted to help."

The worst part is that it sounded like she meant it, and she was concerned. And I just felt dead. Heartbroken.
 
(1) I feel ashamed at having admitted all that. And afraid.

(2) my back brace came a month early, and I feel so much better now :) physically.

(3) I’m not getting over that memory/memories of the hospital well. I didn’t when I had to be hospitalized later in 2016 or whenever that was — dissociated a lot. Nurses loved me though. Kept warning me who to stay away from.

But I just keep getting this awful, strong feeling that I wish I hadn’t survived that. I wish I had died. Not because I don’t like my life now... which is why it’s so... odd. More like, I just want someone to have cared. I feel that no one cares. And if I had died, they would have. So I wish I had just died there.

I don’t really know how to word that in a less edgy way.

My back feels nicely supported right now, tho
 

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