The Entire Time

It has always been so natural, so easy to misconstrue the meaning of life, and the value of being alive. There is so much that I have not learned, but came to terms with, in the miniscule amount of time that I have been here. The blinders that many people subconsciously wear come from places of fear, pain, inexperience, and most of all, ignorance. Most people come with blind spots, like the inability to only see the good or bad at certains moments, but it is most important to accept that they are a package deal. On the outside I am a charismatic, goofy and perhaps, even a seemingly innocent, young woman. To most people, even the people that know me best, this is how I am perceived. This is how I prefer to be perceived, it always has been. Most even find me to be presumptuously inexperienced and sheltered, but you see, this is because the human eye is one of the most deceivable things on earth. I have always known that I can put out whichever image I choose for people to see; how I act and what I look like has always been effortlessly malleable. There are very few people in this lifetime, if any, that I have allowed to see me for who, and what, I really am. I don’t believe that most people deserve to know the real me, nor would they want to.

On the inside, I was formed and conditioned by occurrences of darkness and pain. Now, before you assume that I am doing myself any form of injustice, just know that I do not look at any of these qualities in a negative light. To most people that I have met in my lifetime, they find life much easier to live if they consistently lie to themselves. I see through the human facade and it is almost as if I see through people entirely. Human life is, in all actuality, constantly grasping at straws. Why is it that sadness and heartbreak come so naturally, so effortlessly, while on the other hand, we are constantly fighting against the universe, and chasing happiness, only for it to slip through our fingers like grains of sand?

I have always said that we, as people, do not realize that happiness is a single moment. Happiness is always fleeting. Just as soon as you start to feel blissful or happy, that same feeling is fading away. Happiness will always come, but it is guaranteed to go away. Happiness is a ray of sunshine shooting from the clouds, but the clouds are always moving. I recognized the inevitable temprarity of happiness at far too young of an age, in most people’s eyes. To me, I have been lucid dreaming while everybody around me is stuck in a comfortable sleep paralysis.

There is no set quantity of good or bad in any life. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do to “control” the things that your life consists of. I have lived only 21 years and accumulated a life-time of lessons. Each important life lesson that I have learned has come with a cost; some of them end up being overpriced but many were taught to me at below value rates. Keeping this in mind, I have come to the realization that the most valuable lessons were the ones that initiated an internal war that I would have paid a fortune to avoid...at the time.

I come from a big family, that isn’t really much of a family at all anymore. I am one of seven in my family, jam-packed right in the middle. When I was around age seven, my older sister showed me a “game”. You might even remember it. They called the game ‘Bloody Mary’ and I was engulfed with fascination and pure horror once my sister told me how to play. It is based on an old ritual, in which you call for Bloody Mary while looking into a mirror in the dark, while walking backwards down a flight of stairs. It’s said that if you see her in the mirror behind you, then death would find you long before true love ever could. ‘Bloody Mary’ fascinated me because it was a game that played upon the emotions that came with my biggest fear. “Nobody will ever, really love me?’, I thought this constantly. I could not seem to get Bloody Mary out of my head for years and years on end. I avoided mirrors like the plague, but I don’t think that it was Bloody Mary’s reflection that I was afraid to find leering back at me.

I raised myself, and my younger siblings. My parents were...well unavailable, and after they had me, they went on to having Caleb just nine months later, Arthur five years after that, and then Marie five after him. I don’t know exactly when I realized that I had to step up to make their childhood better than mine, but I held myself accountable for responsibilities that weren’t even legal to be found in my hands. Nobody stopped me, my parents never thought to themselves “Maybe three years old is too young to take care of an infant” or “We probably shouldn’t tell our seven year old about the heat getting shut off due to our addictions”. I think maybe they just didn’t realize the weight that was being piled onto my shoulders, due to the lack of accountability that they held on their own. Two decades went by before my trauma was ever considered, two decades went by before my parents decided that I deserved a childhood.

The way that I was raised and the conditions I was raised in are far from traumatic from an outsiders point of view, and I know I could have had it so much worse. Yeah, I had to worry about what my siblings and I were going to eat for the day sometimes, and I wasn’t able to eat at school most of the time because there was no money on our lunch accounts. I wondered what was wrong with my mom and why she slept all the time. I was terrified of my dad coming home after work because I never knew if he was going to be drunk or not. I have never felt important to anybody; like they would choose someone or something over me at any chance. This taught me that I must always choose myself, put myself first and make myself happy at every chance I get; but it also left me with an unsettling amount of trauma and abandonment issues.

My parents had really high hopes and expectations for me, my parents did. I was a straight “A” student, I parented their offspring, I kept my room clean and my closet color-coded. While I was doing all of this, I had friends, played multiple sports and had hobbies as well. How remarkable! Right?..

Well...once I received praise and recognition, it was like a drug to me. On the outside, I was seemingly perfect, and I made sure of that. Day and night, I ran laps in my brain until my mind began running laps around me. Obsession, control issues, perfectionism, anxiety, and devouring darkness took over my perception before I was even 12 years old; or maybe I gave my hope away to these things at the time. Obsession and control had warped into this sense of having absolutely no control of my life; I could not even control my own thoughts from spiraling me into complete mental breakdowns. Once the crying would start, there was no stopping it at the time. Out of nowhere, I found myself lost in an ocean of depression.

Perfectionism, anxiety, and despair had evolved in the blink of an eye and they had evolved into many different qualities that controlled my life, my thought process and my outlook on life. I started to recognize self-hatred and it terrified me. The same adrenaline that I used to hunt for in the mirror, had shape-shifted into its own evil being that resided inside of me. I remember the first thought that I had ever had about hurting myself; it was the same day that I indulged in the addicting act known as self harm.

Growing up, I slowly began to recognize what I was feeling was not only depression, but impulsiveness as well, on top of OCD, chronic anxiety, and Bipolar 1. Almost all of the traits that I was once praised for, manifested into traits that came close to taking my life on multiple different occasions. The worst part being, that I was secretly living my life to make other people happy. All of these toxic and potentially fatal habits and feelings had started out as simple actions that I, as a little girl, felt that I must do in order to be loved. Doing these things never made anybody love me. Doing these things had conditioned me to blindly participate in self-destructive acts on a daily basis, without the ability to recognize that I had stopped loving myself the very second that I started pretending to be somebody else.

Oh I know, how sad this must all sound to an outsider, because I thought the same thing for a long time, but my story is not sad. I am still here, alive. I’m not just surviving anymore; I am beginning to feel like I am thriving as well. Going through my many adventures, I have experienced how rewarding it is to be a caretaker for one that cannot take care of themselves. It made me realize that I am important. I have lost the most important people and things of my life over and over again; this taught me to NEVER take anything for granted, not even for a single second.

I made it past the age nine, and age 12 and then the ages 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. I even made it past the age 19 and despite my very best efforts not to, I even made it to 21. I felt hopeless for so long and had almost no support system at most times. I would push my friend’s and family away and then wonder why I was all alone. I have so much figured out and have been force-fed lessons that people twice my age wouldn’t understand. The battles that I have won thus far, were battles that I didn't even want to fight...but I did and I will continue to do so everyday.

Looking back on my history, I don’t recognize the dark and gloomy girl from my memories anymore; I don’t recognize the girl that promised herself she wouldn’t live a day past 18. I finally feel optimistic and excited for my future, although sometimes I do think back and my past fills me with sadness. Falling back into old patterns can be a toxic cycle, it’s so easy to feed. I have done things that I am not proud of but every step of the way, I was on a path to living life in a way that makes me happy and healing the wounds from the past

I am now 21 and the wisdom that I hold inside of me is of the greatest value. There are far too many things that I could go into depth about but I want to share parts of my life that people can learn from, parts that will force people to understand mental illness, parts that will encourage you to be more forgiving, parts that will explain the good and the bad. At some point in your life you will go through a point in which you are somebody that is just trying to get through the day.

I am not scared to look in the mirror anymore because I don’t care who is looking back at me in that gloomy piece of glass, I love her. I have won so many traumatic battles in my life that I am proud of, because of the lessons that I learned after making it out of them. In life, there will be a part in everybody’s life in which you must fight internal battles that were caused by external variants. These battles are the most frustrating because they are not justified; which is what makes them some of the most important parts. Today I am still here, I am still alive and I am filled to the brim with excitement because I realize now that I was not only surviving, I was teaching and also learning. Every single thing that I went through wasn't a blessing in disguise, but a lesson in disguise.

Today, I looked back on my life and I realized that who I am today, is exactly who I was born to be. Today I sit here and I ponder the thought that maybe, just maybe, the experiences that we go through are made special, just for us. And perhaps, all of your experiences, good and bad, are made to shape you into the person you are meant to be. These are only a couple of the reasons that I am here today, showing you exactly who I want you to see; and that is a woman who will from now on, always be unapologetic-ally me. It is crazy to think about; this is who I was supposed to be the entire time...