Everyone loves story about a person that goes from rags to riches. Most of us dream big. We all love to see people like ourselves or even those that are worse off than us defeating the odds and making something of themselves. Everyone loves to see how that child that grew up with abuse and poverty go off to college and help the very same type of person that they used to be. Perhaps this speaks to the very core of what it is to be human, to rise above the barriers of adversity, self doubt, and complete hopelessness. Maybe this sparks hope in us; it makes us believe that even we can step up to heights in the world that we never thought we could reach. It’s as if we feel that if someone suffers enough, they are worthy of great things. If someone changes themselves so completely from the person they were we believe they deserve help. I am no different from the average person when it comes enjoying these sort of miracles. I do enjoy the unrealistic Hollywood movies that make it all seem so easy.
I never saw myself as worthy of anything. In fact, it seems I still feel I am not worthy of anything good, only suffering and pain. No one expected anything of me so there really is no reason for me to feel I’m not worthless. I have no dreams, only nightmares. I dream of the horrible fate I will face, or the hopelessness of my situation. I believe that I will never amount to anything or do anything with my life. I believe I am worthless, stupid, and doomed. I don’t believe in myself and I never have. Thoughts of how worthless and hopeless I am run through my brain constantly, literally. I am in a constant state of anxiety unless I am distracted. I pick, cut, and burn my skin. I suffer from social anxiety so badly that I have urinated in a trash can and starved just because I was too afraid to leave the bedroom and see my boyfriend’s parents. I hate myself and am full of that much shame sometimes.
I think it is time that I got what I deserve, what everyone deserves really. I want a chance to thrive. I want to be that example that shows everyone that it is possible to conquer your own self hatred and doubt to go on and help others do the same. I want to dream and I want that dream to come true. I know my dreams are possible but I don’t believe in myself enough to even have any serious ones. I greatly admire scientist and especially neuroscientist; however I know I don’t have a chance in hell of ever becoming one. Sometimes too many odds are stacked against you. I know that I’m a black female from a poor upbringing, with too many mental illness to count, and bad genes, case closed. Welcome to my personal hell.
Nothing touches me more than survivors of the holocaust. As a child I’d lie in bed and imagine myself suffering the same fate as holocaust victims. I’d shake with tears of sorrow and pain as I imagined being burned alive in the ovens. I wrote reports about it, poems, all accompanied with a strange fascination with the horror of it all. In seventh grade the teacher read my poem out loud in class, and also told my English teacher about my report and he gave me extra credit. Of course I was embarrassed about this and wanted to disappear. Then I never knew that those teachers actually cared about me and saw something special in me that I couldn’t see. Even now as an adult I imagine myself experiencing even greater horrors I didn’t even know of as that young child. After finding out that some Jews met the horrible unimaginable horror of being operated on while fully conscious, I imagined myself to be lying on an operating table. I imagined all of the graphic details that don’t exist and have never been spoken of.
I don’t know why human suffering has always haunted my mind. Perhaps it was my religious upbringing as a child. It was well known that Jehovah’s Witnesses were placed in concentration camps. In fact it seemed to me while growing up as if they bragged about it as a rite of passage as the chosen religion of God. This could be the reason why I still make myself suffer with the most horrid of thoughts. Or perhaps, I feel if I suffer enough I will finally be worthy of something good. I have not suffered anything close to that of the victims of the holocaust, or even many other people that suffer with mental illness. Maybe it is my mental illness itself that leads me to think this way, to believe that I need to suffer in order to relieve my guilt. Or perhaps like many, I believe if one suffers enough, they are worthy of good things. Maybe I think that if I suffer enough, I will actually believe I deserve better.
My childhood was one full of isolation and suffocating depression. Jehovah’s Witnesses are discouraged from associating with non Jehovah’s Witnesses. So I grew up with no real friends in school. My family was also poor, my father was permanently injured at work and we survived on his disability check. A family of seven surviving on $1,000 a month isn’t pretty. My mother used to work but was asked to stop by the church for reasons I’m to bitter to face. So of course in combination of being the weird kid that other children picked on I was also the poor kid that was picked on. Jehovah’s Witnesses are also discouraged from getting a higher education and even valuing education. The reasons for this are very obvious. If someone were to simply investigate on the history and logic of the religion they would fail to see the truth in it. They would also see the negatives which are great. I had no guidance as a child; no encouragement to do anything but exist in misery with the idea that paradise would be here before I was an adult so there was no need to focus and do well in school. Very little studies have been done on Jehovah’s Witnesses and mental illness, but the few studies I have read about show a huge above average rate of mental illnesses among members.
I won’t get into this, there is too much to say, too much pain and regret that rises inside of me to bear without sounding bitter. All I can say is that it has had a profound effect on who I am today and the mental illness I fight against daily. I believe it aided in my diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I do not consider this to be the sole source of my suffering. Anyone that has taken psychology 101 will tell you that it is a combination of genes and environment that makes us who we are. I can say that I got stiffed on both accounts, giving faulty genes and an unstable environment as a child due to many factors.
My entire family is mentally ill. My sisters joke about the abuse and neglect that occurred. I recently sat across from my therapist describing some of the happenings. She had a hidden look of disgust and pity in her eyes as I giggled while telling the story of the flying block of ice cream hurled at my brother and how my sister was shaken to the tune of the Flight of the Bumble Bee song. My sisters used to tell guests about how they made a clay monster equipped with a voice recorder bellowing a scary voice to scare me when I was around five years old. Thankfully they left out the part about how they did it to try and scare me out of masturbating, something forbidden by Jehovah’s Witnesses and many other churches I assume. I used to imagine demons coming to get me for masturbating. My mother referred to it as ‘tight legs’. I’ll let you decide the reason for this nickname.
By far my brother received the worst abuse out of all of us. My father used to have bible studies and abused my brother when he got something wrong. To this day I have no relationship with my brother because he isolated himself from the family before I was born to avoid my father. I have literally not had more than 1 conversation with him that I can remember, and I lack the courage to try to start a relationship with him now. He lived in the house with us but never interacted with anyone other than my mother. My only friends were my sisters, who were depressed and suicidal. I remember the suicide pact we all made, if we weren’t married by age 25 we would kill ourselves.
My sisters hated being black and hated black men; I remember the Ken dolls they used to teach me that black men were ugly and that marrying a white man is the ideal. My older sister tormented me with constant nastiness, insults, and put downs. She purposely played games with me just to watch me lose so she could call me stupid. This inevitably was her way of releasing the flack that my two older sisters gave her. I remember them telling her about how they once planned to kill her and my mother. In the end we were all close and had each other, my brother had no one. I feel so bad for him, for my sisters, my mother, even my father. My father grew up in foster care and was also handed bad genes. I watched him die a painful death from cancer with no support or acknowledgement of the reality of it all. No one deserves to suffer as he did. They cycle is hard to break and if he had love when he was a child it wouldn’t have been this way.
I was embarrassed to tell my therapist about how truly pathetic I was. I did tell her about the time that I went on a date with a coworker that told me he systematically raped his ex girlfriend over a period of three days without a care. I also didn’t care that after getting mad drunk he tried to force me to perform oral sex on him. I felt I knew what he was capable of so I had no right to complain about anything he did and that I would deserve anything he did to me. I sometimes fantasize about being humiliated, tortured, and raped, and it isn’t an attempt at sexual satisfaction. It’s as if at least I know I’m wanted if someone tries to rape me. I am fully aware of my complete lack of self-esteem; I often use it as a defense against my failures in life. I see it as the reason why I was unable to accept the love that my first boyfriend gave me and the love I continue to avoid. He was simply to caring and compassionate for me to accept. I had to go and find someone as broken as me, someone that would treat me like the piece of crap that I was.
I haven’t worked in two years, I spend my time playing World of Warcraft and sleeping. I’m on medication and it does help, but it doesn’t cure. The only thing that makes me feel better is marijuana which is illegal and by many of the ignorant masses demonized. Although I feel it should be okay for me to smoke if it stops me from feeling depressed, suicidal, cutting, and burning myself, others beg to differ. Not to mention the side effects of the medications, some causing Tardive dyskinesia, flu like withdrawal symptoms, and even death yet still fail to yield the same relief as marijuana. I just chalk it all up to money, politics, ignorance, and corruption; an inevitable part of our society. Unfortunately I am highly affected by what people think about me, even if they don’t know what I’m doing. I am haunted by what ifs and if they knew what I was doing. Perhaps I’m afraid of my family who are still Jehovah’s Witnesses finding out about my exploration into drugs and sex.
I was once disowned by my sister. I don’t blame her for what she did; she was conditioned by the religion to look down on others that weren’t members of the church. Coincidentally my attempt at suicide that night brought her said expulsion of me to a teary and guilt ridden end. I am lucky; my family has accepted me for the most part, or those parts of me that I have exposed to them. Many ex Jehovah’s witnesses are disowned by their families and sadly some of these situations end in suicide.
Currently I am in an abusive relationship. He was upfront and honest about his drug addiction from the start. I think this is what attracted me to him; that and the fact that he was a very handsome white male. Here was someone I couldn’t disappoint; someone that had low self esteem like me so he wouldn’t leave me yet was everything I was taught to go for minus the addiction. I hate to go down the list of the things he did to me but I guess to get the full idea of how bad my depression and mental illness is I must. I remember telling my therapist about the things he’s done so she could also get an idea of how messed up I really was. I told her about how early I our relationship he was addicted to cocaine and stole and conned me out of over a thousand dollars. I wrote bad checks so he could supposedly pay off his drug dealer who he said threatened his life. I told her about how he held a knife to my throat and told me he was going to kill me. Later he convinced me to take a bunch of pills so I could overdose and die. I don’t believe he expected me to die, but I took the pills while sobbing like a pathetic piece of blubber.
What I didn’t tell my therapist was that the same night he tried to burn my vagina with a lighter because I had had sex with my ex boyfriend and he found out about it. I guess I deserved what I got though the dysfunction in our relationship left little room for a concept of commitment. He went on a spree of degradation of me, he told me how worthless I was, how I was a fucked up nut job with a fucked up cultic family. I can’t remember most of what he said but it was the most horrible things anyone could ever say to another human being. I shave my head due to trichotillomania. I am also black and despise my nappy hair so I just wear a wig. This is a very if not the most sensitive topic for me and a source of self hatred especially since I was made fun of about my hair as a child. He went on about how I was a worthless nigger and ripped my wig off my head and threw it out of the window. He said he was going to wake up his parents so they can see how ugly I was. By this time I was a convulsing piece of humiliated crap on the floor begging for mercy. The sick part is that I wanted more. Eventually he went to sleep and I forced myself to throw up the pills in fear that I would die. At the time he fed them to me I secretly wanted them because I felt so horrible.
I slept for most of the next day. He was still angry at me and I was too drugged up to drive home. He decided he wanted me to go home but something in me wanted to stay. Eventually I decided to call 911. The cops came and I told them what happened the day before. I doubt they believed me because I was so messed up from the pills. In the end I showed one of the cops the mark on my neck from the knife he held to it, she must have seen it but perhaps she thought that I did it myself. In the end I went off to the hospital after hugging him after he asked if I wanted him to visit me in the mental hospital.
I called my ex boyfriend in the middle of the night who came to pick me up from the hospital which was a one hour trip for him. That week I was full of hopelessness, shame, and bitterness. He claimed that no one would believe me because I was a just a nigger and his dad was an important person. I honestly can’t deny this although I don’t want to believe it, but it seems strange that they told him and his family not to let me come back again after I went off in the ambulance if they believed what I said. He also claimed that the cops were notoriously racist, something I don’t want to believe. The worse part is that I came back, and he didn’t tell his parents what really happened. I remember his mother hiding his pills so I couldn’t take them. It hurt me so much that they believed I was some psycho and that they didn’t want me there. His father came to the hospital I guess to see me which made me feel a bit better, but I was too ashamed to even acknowledge him. We had our share of fights, sometimes I instigated them. One Thanksgiving his brother came to visit and I remember the two of us choking each other upstairs. I laugh about it now; perhaps like my sisters this kind of dysfunction seems better when made light of. I find it funny that I’m a black woman dating an openly racist white guy that uses the N word hourly.
I in no way blame him for being who he is. He was taught to be racist by his friends, as I was taught to be racist against my own race. Strangely enough he has actually made me feel better about my hair because now he constantly tells me how cute I am with a shaved head. I know that he is someone that also suffers from mental illness and I wish him the best as should everyone else. I know the lows he has seen and the regret and guilt he tries to drink away.
I hope our society can start treating the mentally ill, and that includes drug addicts, with the empathy they deserve. I include myself in this statement because I have belted out the blows just as he has. After I comforted him after he had a depressive episode he told me I am a beautiful person. He feels as if he doesn’t deserve empathy because of all of the things he’s done. I told him he does and that what he does isn’t his fault. There are better solutions, better methods of dealing with society’s behavioral problems than jailing or punishing. Whether or not they produce a desirable effect in the person in the long run I don’t know. However I do now that according to our own values, if someone isn’t at fault for something they shouldn’t pay, and according to science, no one is in control of their behavior in reality. This is just a fact too scary for most people to accept so they don’t even consider that maybe if we treat people humanely they might return the favor.
If I have learned one thing it is that blaming is useless, however identifying the sources of my suffering has been helpful in my attempt to recover from the scars I still continue to dig into. Blaming anyone or anything is pointless. It does not solve the problem; it even fails to identify the actual source of the problem. Blaming a person is blaming their conscious self which has no control over what happens in the brain. The conscious self is just a tool the brain uses to receive information from the senses that it can process in whatever way it chooses to. Through my experiences in life I have learned that we are products of our environment and biology. We can only work with what we are given, and if we are only given disappointment, anger, hatred, and pain that is all we will ever reproduce. Of course it is human nature to feel the need to blame something and seek revenge, but that doesn’t mean it is the best way to go about things. Bad brain scans and bad genes are only the tip of the iceberg. So many factors including human nature lead us to behave as we do. The cycle is hard to break and usually takes an outside influence to change in cases where change is possible.
I have found that I crave suffering. I search it out unconsciously sometimes, feasting on everything that ruins me. For me to even attempt to change and make myself happy is in itself an achievement. My mom used to say that a dog will return to its vomit. I believe it was a quote from the bible, something I consider to be an enemy to human knowledge and advancement, yet something that sometimes perfectly describes reality. However, I learned all of this from my studies in the behavioral sciences. We do what we know. In order to do something different, we need to learn something different.
I know I am a beautiful person, I just can’t accept it. I know that I am smart enough to know that what I know is true. That is what depression and mental illness is, it isn’t rational, it doesn’t reason. It takes over your mind and distorts your thinking; it changes your behavior and affects every aspect of your life. I know why I am the way I am. I majored in psychology when I was in school. I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel even though I know it’s there. No one chooses to be mentally ill, who would? Murders and serial killers are also mentally ill; their actions horrify us like that of the Nazi doctors that performed surgeries. People are scared of bad behavior so they blame and hate instead of trying to find the source of the problem which is not an individual. It is a vast system of brain processes that makes us who we are and do what we do.
Some people are defective; some are abused, some are taught to hate and develop an undesirable personality as a child. If a child was not shown love and empathy while growing up how on earth can they magically develop the ability to show it? I might not seem qualified to make this assertion, but I guarantee that any neuroscientist would agree with me including the ones that write the books. I am by no means an idealist, the story I have told has made this obvious. I am a realist. Perhaps it’s time society joined me on that front. Perhaps some have to walk in my shoes before they are capable of understanding that hating and blaming are not the way to deal with mental illness in our society. I guess in a way my mental illness has made me a better person. Despite the fact that I may be contemplating suicide tomorrow, am thankful for that.
