D
Deleted member 20978
I find it difficult to write this, and am also concerned that I'm being surveilled so am disclosing a lot of personal info to some who may use it against me. Unfortunately I cannot explain the latter, so please don't ask.
My life has recently fallen apart. In a very short period I suffered a very scary trauma which led to losing my job, against a backdrop of my marriage falling apart (we're still together but it feels tenuous and unhealthy). Amidst all the fallout of all this, I recognized that I had in fact been dealing with decades of PTSD symptoms, never really diagnosed as trauma.
Over the past many years I've become increasingly avoidant of social connections to the point of feeling I have no friends, no network. Because I've now lost my job, feel my career may be hitting the end of its run, and my marriage may be nearing an end, I am absolutely overwhelmed, not knowing where to start to pick up the pieces. In some ways I feel like I've been outside of real life for most of my life, hiding. So it's hard to understand what "recovery" would look like. I feel like an outsider who's now hopelessly out of touch with what most people take as givens.
What's hardest is giving specifics here. Again, I feel publicly exposed and wanting to be anonymous, but the details feel unique... I'm going to try to give the non-detailed bullet list of my life.
I am an only child. When I was not yet one year old, my parents separated. I was raised by my mother, herself an only child. In one year, she had me, her father died, and her husband, who she'd known through high school, college, and grad school, left her.
For reasons that have never been completely clear, we moved constantly. By first grade I was in my 4th residence. I was never in a single school more than 3 years (that long only once), so was unable to form any roots.
When I was 6-7, my mother went through a period where she repeatedly threatened suicide to me. She often expressed this as in reaction to how difficult I was. This was terrifying, as it implicitly threatened my own life as well, and broke any trusting relationship with the only person in my family and the only consistent person in my growing up.
My father saw me for visits 1-2 times a month, and I liked him, but he was very distant. He would leave me to watch TV or roam the woods outside his condo while he read or graded papers. I remember asking him if my mom was going to kill herself, and he actually laughed and said she was surely joking. It was not a very emotionally nurturing relationship.
In 3rd grade I first noticed being ostracized. I wasn't exactly bullied yet, but kids would call me names or girls would tease each other saying "you like Jemini!" I was aware of being the butt of jokes in some way, but not socially developed enough to process this. I just had a message internalized that I was defective in some way.
For a few years 3rd grade through 5th, my mother moved us in with a guy who had two kids of his own and we lived in a big house with a dog. It was the most I ever felt like I had a real family. Hs son, adopted and with a fair amount of emotional issues having come from a war-torn region, was a year younger than me and we played a lot.
One day this "brother" and I got in some fight, and I shoved him, just as his father was coming in the front door from work. He came over and hit me. I don't remember it being very hard, but I believe this precipitated us moving out, into another tiny apartment. Years later, when I would ask why we moved out of that family, my mother would tell me it was because he, her boyfriend I guess, couldn't stand me.
In 5th and 6th grade I started experiencing more overt bullying. It was organized - a little gang of bullies would taunt me in the classroom and push me to the ground in the playground. In 7th grade my mother announced we were moving "back" to the Boston area. Having been away for 4 years, and basically living in a sort of dissociated fugue for longer than that, I had no idea where that was. It was just time to say goodbye to everyone I knew. Again. I had at that time for the first time in my life built a little circle of friends, so it was hard to move.
I got to experience the horrible wars of puberty twice. In Philly, this had largely happened in 6th grade (which was there the first year of middle school, and that school would be the largest and most diverse student body I'd experience until college), but had started settling down into more mature cliques in 7th grade, which I got to experience for just one month of the Fall semester. In Boston, when I arrived into the school year, I was shocked that everyone seemed an inch or two shorter. In this school, the middle school began with grade 7, and the population also was barely diverse. Whatever the reason, puberty hadn't really started, and so I got to relive it. My hormones went nuts. No matter how much I showered, my hair was always very greasy and I had bad acne.
Instead of a select group of bullies, now it was virtually everyone who taunted me, called me names in the hallway. I was like a running joke. They made fun of my hair, and my clothes. I could barely dress myself, switching between a couple of dingy sweatshirts every day. I was skinny an awkward and probably staring at the floor everywhere I went. Though I didn't get physically beaten up, this was constantly threatened.
At home, things were rough. I fought with my mother, who I experienced as invalidating and dominating. I wanted nothing to do with her, but she would force me to talk and on occasion get very hurtful.
I thought I could write more but this is tapping me out for now. Maybe I will come back and add more later.
My life has recently fallen apart. In a very short period I suffered a very scary trauma which led to losing my job, against a backdrop of my marriage falling apart (we're still together but it feels tenuous and unhealthy). Amidst all the fallout of all this, I recognized that I had in fact been dealing with decades of PTSD symptoms, never really diagnosed as trauma.
Over the past many years I've become increasingly avoidant of social connections to the point of feeling I have no friends, no network. Because I've now lost my job, feel my career may be hitting the end of its run, and my marriage may be nearing an end, I am absolutely overwhelmed, not knowing where to start to pick up the pieces. In some ways I feel like I've been outside of real life for most of my life, hiding. So it's hard to understand what "recovery" would look like. I feel like an outsider who's now hopelessly out of touch with what most people take as givens.
What's hardest is giving specifics here. Again, I feel publicly exposed and wanting to be anonymous, but the details feel unique... I'm going to try to give the non-detailed bullet list of my life.
I am an only child. When I was not yet one year old, my parents separated. I was raised by my mother, herself an only child. In one year, she had me, her father died, and her husband, who she'd known through high school, college, and grad school, left her.
For reasons that have never been completely clear, we moved constantly. By first grade I was in my 4th residence. I was never in a single school more than 3 years (that long only once), so was unable to form any roots.
When I was 6-7, my mother went through a period where she repeatedly threatened suicide to me. She often expressed this as in reaction to how difficult I was. This was terrifying, as it implicitly threatened my own life as well, and broke any trusting relationship with the only person in my family and the only consistent person in my growing up.
My father saw me for visits 1-2 times a month, and I liked him, but he was very distant. He would leave me to watch TV or roam the woods outside his condo while he read or graded papers. I remember asking him if my mom was going to kill herself, and he actually laughed and said she was surely joking. It was not a very emotionally nurturing relationship.
In 3rd grade I first noticed being ostracized. I wasn't exactly bullied yet, but kids would call me names or girls would tease each other saying "you like Jemini!" I was aware of being the butt of jokes in some way, but not socially developed enough to process this. I just had a message internalized that I was defective in some way.
For a few years 3rd grade through 5th, my mother moved us in with a guy who had two kids of his own and we lived in a big house with a dog. It was the most I ever felt like I had a real family. Hs son, adopted and with a fair amount of emotional issues having come from a war-torn region, was a year younger than me and we played a lot.
One day this "brother" and I got in some fight, and I shoved him, just as his father was coming in the front door from work. He came over and hit me. I don't remember it being very hard, but I believe this precipitated us moving out, into another tiny apartment. Years later, when I would ask why we moved out of that family, my mother would tell me it was because he, her boyfriend I guess, couldn't stand me.
In 5th and 6th grade I started experiencing more overt bullying. It was organized - a little gang of bullies would taunt me in the classroom and push me to the ground in the playground. In 7th grade my mother announced we were moving "back" to the Boston area. Having been away for 4 years, and basically living in a sort of dissociated fugue for longer than that, I had no idea where that was. It was just time to say goodbye to everyone I knew. Again. I had at that time for the first time in my life built a little circle of friends, so it was hard to move.
I got to experience the horrible wars of puberty twice. In Philly, this had largely happened in 6th grade (which was there the first year of middle school, and that school would be the largest and most diverse student body I'd experience until college), but had started settling down into more mature cliques in 7th grade, which I got to experience for just one month of the Fall semester. In Boston, when I arrived into the school year, I was shocked that everyone seemed an inch or two shorter. In this school, the middle school began with grade 7, and the population also was barely diverse. Whatever the reason, puberty hadn't really started, and so I got to relive it. My hormones went nuts. No matter how much I showered, my hair was always very greasy and I had bad acne.
Instead of a select group of bullies, now it was virtually everyone who taunted me, called me names in the hallway. I was like a running joke. They made fun of my hair, and my clothes. I could barely dress myself, switching between a couple of dingy sweatshirts every day. I was skinny an awkward and probably staring at the floor everywhere I went. Though I didn't get physically beaten up, this was constantly threatened.
At home, things were rough. I fought with my mother, who I experienced as invalidating and dominating. I wanted nothing to do with her, but she would force me to talk and on occasion get very hurtful.
I thought I could write more but this is tapping me out for now. Maybe I will come back and add more later.
