The Victor

Is it a blog? No.

Is it a story? Kind of.

Is it an autobiography? Almost.

The truth is, I'm not really sure what it is at all, but I have absolutely no shame in saying that it is literally all about me. It's more like my mental health journey than anything, so please be aware that there are a LOT of things that could set some people off, including ED's, depression and suicide, verbal, physical and emotional abuse, anxiety, sexual assault and some violence.

If this were a movie it would probably be rated a soft R. As in, you could probably let your kids watch this but you might wanna cover their eyes at certain times.

This story will be made up of different chapters, which are not scheduled. I will still try to write other articles based on the modern world, but I will mostly be focusing on this.

This story is about my life starting in the second grade and moving all the way to the present. As previously stated, it is mostly about my mental health journey and all the people who were key players in this ongoing journey.

As a reminder- it is important to seek out help for those of your loved ones that you may be worried about. This includes yourself. You are not responsible for anyone else's mental state except for your own. It is also important to remember that these are my own personal experiences, thoughts, feelings, and actions and should not be taken as valid criticism, but rather an observation of what I was feeling, thinking, and doing at that time.

All the characters in this story are real and true, but names have been changed for their privacy. If you know me, pretend like you don't. Read it like a book you took off of the shelf that was written by a woman that you don't know. Read it like this person is completely separate from me. Do not search for who the characters are or try and call them out for occurrences in this story. That is not the point of this story. The point of this story is to show how the ups and downs of mental health can be damaging for anyone, even those who seem to have the upper hand. This is also a testimony to help those who feel especially alone in their own life, and whose future looks bleaker as the days go on. You might be tired of hearing this part, but it really does get better. Please know that there is one lowest point in everyone's life- no one is exempt from that low point. You are not alone.

This is how I ended up at my lowest point, and how I was pulled out of it.

Please enjoy and feel free to leave a review after every chapter.

Chapter 1:

A lot of people might be mad at me for this, but I no longer feel like it is my responsibility to care about whether other people are angry at me or not.

The day that I graduated high school, it was like getting on a rollercoaster that had a very hard time going upward, and as soon as it gained the slightest of heights, it would go plunging back downward. Here I am today, a year and a half later, almost at the very bottom of the roller coaster. There might be one more thing that hits me before I start on my uphill climb again, but at least I won’t be back in the misery of waiting in line on solid ground. In case you got lost in the metaphor, solid ground is my depression, the lowest you can get on a roller coaster, which festered in my high school years like a forgotten plate of food. That is the lowest of lows.

Was.

That was the lowest of lows.

I began writing recreationally when I was fourteen. The first poem that I wrote was about a man walking over a bridge where he once thought of committing suicide. It was called “The Victor,” to represent the power that you feel after the deepest depths of depression, the high that you get when you realize that whatever was holding you captive in your depressive state has finally released you. In my case, it was school.

The bullying began when I was in the fifth grade. It doesn’t really matter why I was being bullied, and even if I knew the real reason, I wouldn’t tell you anyway. It probably had something to do with the fact that I was the only girl in a class of seven boys. At recess, I didn’t want to hang out with the younger girls because they were strange. The older girls all seemed to have some sort of god-complex about themselves, so I avoided them when I could. The worst part of the day was the fifteen minute break that we got immediately after our first class, when my grade would go out by ourselves. The boys would play basketball, but I personally hated basketball and I was terrible at it anyway. So I sat on a little slope just off the parking area they used as their court, by myself every morning. Sometimes I would read. Halfway through the break, the sixth-graders would come outside.

Adam Hanks was my first crush, first kiss, first best friend, and first love. It is notable that I had hated him from the moment that I met him, but that only lasted until I was in the sixth grade.

Our introduction was brief.

He looked at me, leaned over, and whispered something in his friend’s ear.

I rolled my eyes in true second-grade fashion, “You think you’re funny but you’re actually not.”

With equal sass, he turned to me, “Okay, and?”

He and his friend resumed their previous conversation.

And so our friendship began.

It was about halfway through my seventh grade year when my parents finally decided to take notice in my depression. I shouldn’t blame it on them, they are the easy target. But I refuse to believe that it was my fault for not showing them the gory details of my deepest thoughts.

My father came home early from work. He usually never came home early, and by the time he did, I was usually done sobbing and screaming. I would usually be at the kitchen table doing homework, but this was no usual day. He came home early to finish the remainder of his projects online. It should be noted that this was not a reason to be home early, because whether he came home at 5 or 8:30, he would still be in the kitchen long after the rest of us had gone to bed. It was like that for a very long time, but began when I was in the third grade.

This day was an ordinary day for me. I was laying on the kitchen floor, screaming at the top of my lungs for God to take my life from me, with tears flooding in little pools next to my face and my eyes so blurry I couldn’t see the ceiling I was staring at. It was lucky I took a very deep breath when I did, otherwise I wouldn’t have heard the car door slam. I shot up and sprinted to the bathroom, wiped my face and combed my hair, ran to my room, got all my books, then ran back to the kitchen table. By the time he walked in, I was pretending to get up to go to the pantry.

“Hello, Abbs.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“How was your day?”

I made the mistake of walking from the pantry toward the refrigerator, allowing him to see my face. I’ve never seen the man look more shocked. “Are you okay? Why are you crying?”

He closed his mouth, then he pulled me into a warm embrace. It had been a very long time since he had hugged me like that. Before I said anything, he pulled away.

I told him about all the bullying and how I didn’t have any friends, how I hated school and it was like a living hell for me. He stared at me in what I thought was anger at me, but looking back, I think it was directed at my classmates. I remember thinking over and over again, “I shouldn’t have cried today, I shouldn’t have cried today, I shouldn’t have cried today.” When I was too terrified to speak another word, he simply stepped around me and asked why they were bullying me. When I didn’t have an answer, he became frustrated, “You said they are mean to you but you can’t give me an example of how? Just tell me what they say!” But I couldn’t think of anything specific they would say to me. They were just belittling.

The berating continued until my mom came home at 4:45.

“Hey, guys! How are yo- Oh, honey, what’s wrong?” my angel of a mother immediately picked up on my stress, and when she opened her arms I began to sob.

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, but I do remember that my seventh grade year, I started running track at the nearby public school. It didn’t stop the depression, but I no longer sat in the tub with a razor to my wrist, threatening God with ending my own life if He didn’t fix it.

That had been happening for a year and a half.

That same year, I told Adam that I had a crush on him. We were already good friends at this point, in fact he was one of my best friends already, but we both liked each other. We “dated” throughout my sixth and seventh grade years, and I think we only broke up because he graduated. On the day of his eighth grade graduation, I met him in the breezeway. We were alone. I told him that I was gonna miss him and he was one of my best friends, and that if he didn’t stay in touch with me I was gonna kill him. He told me he was going to miss me too, gave me a long hug when I started tearing up, kissed my forehead, and watched me walk away. I cried later that night. Not only because I would miss him, but also because I had a very bad feeling about my eighth grade year.