Raz Rambles

This could be triggering for some, there is your warning. 

Well since age 12 I felt like someone else cuz I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt. 

Actually my mental health took a turn way before age 12. Let’s stroll back to the year 2000. March of 2000 to be exact. That is a year I will never forget. That year my father committed suicide and my sister was born. One life for another. 

I was 5 years old. Kind of a traumatic time for a kid trying to find her place in the world. My life was flipped, turned upside down. We moved from the only family and home I knew 14+ hours away to a family, I have now disowned, I didn’t know. 

It wouldn’t be until 11 years later that I would even know the never ending emptiness and sadness wasn’t normal and I would get my first diagnosis  at 16. I wasn’t even the one to willingly go. My boyfriend at the time was the one who told my mother that something was clearly wrong and I needed help. 

Rewind a bit, back to prepubescent times, I was horribly sad all the time. For as long as my memory spans back, I remember nights of staying up all night to sob silently in my room alone until morning light. I remember just being so sad and having no outlet for it. I would lay against my wall in the darkness and cry as silently as I could until I could see faint rays of dawn approaching. I would dry it up and lay down until I was ‘woken’ up for school. I did this weekly if not more. 

From there and into puberty it progressed into much deeper and darker sadness. I had no outlet for crying was no longer working and on top of it hormones added rage. I would hit our fence or or busted up shed just to feel pain. When no one was home I would head butt the walls and bang my head against them. When that ceased to satisfy, sharp objects became my new friends. It started with scissors and eventually became a knife. I got caught by my only friend at the time in school because of the marks on my wrist so I changed placement to my upper arm, stomach, and thigh. For a while after that no one knew my dirty little secret. 

It wouldn’t be until years later at 16 the truth would come out. From there I was taken to a doctor and diagnosed with depression. I was 16 and it was 2012. No one talked about depression. What even was that besides just being sad? I did what I was told though and took the medicine daily. 

Of course after a short while it stopped helping. I didn’t care though because by that point I was in college. Freedom! Then the sadness, stress, and heartbreak became too much and I tried to take too many pills at one time. One hospital visit later I stopped the meds. 

I stopped them for nearly four years after that. Did my mental health get any better? No. It got worse, much worse. I went back to self harm, this time with a school provided razor. I would freak out and break things and even at one point set things on fire in a pan in my shower. It was a pretty low point. There was even a time I stopped eating. In between that i was blacking out and losing time. At first it was minutes but it eventually progressed into two weeks at one point. 

Eventually I met the person I wanted to spend forever with. I wanted to get better for him so I started trying to get help again. Upon seeing a psychiatrist, I got a new slew of terms, depression, bipolar with mania, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder. I was once again medicated. I tried those meds for a few months until the love of my life left me for he no longer loved me. 

I spiraled and I spiraled hard. For a while nothing made sense and absolutely nothing mattered. But life moves on even when your own world stops spinning. I had to stand back up and face the harsh reality. I sucked it up and once again set out for help. There I was put on new medications that did not agree with me and a councilor who wasn’t too much help. 

Then one day I decided to quit my two jobs and move 24 hours away with a friend and her fiancé. That last about two whole weeks before I instantly regretted that and moved back. The issue being I no longer had a doctor, a therapist, or a place to live. Luckily my boyfriend (a different one) took me and my dog in. 

I set to work finding a new doctor and a job. I was fortunate enough to find both rather quickly. However, my anxiety was rather quick to set in too. The doctor gave me meds for it but all they did was make me tired. Tired and a retail job do not mix very well. The place I was at also never set me up with a therapist so I had so many emotions and no one to help sort them. 

I had to search yet again for a new place. Finally I found one a few months later. They were quick to get me a therapist and a doctor. There another new term was added to the list, PTSD. My new doctor got me started on her regime of medications and treatment took off. Mind you, this is also now the start of the lovely pandemic as well. 

Many med swaps and test later I am now on a grand total of 9 daily and 4 as needed. I’ve had one stay in a psych ward recently due to too much stress and being overwhelmed. I see my therapist bi-weekly and my doctor once a month to change my meds. I’m fearful I still have one more term to tack onto the list before it can be finished, Schizophrenic. 

I say all of this because, well I’m sad and can’t sleep. I have too much on my mind and wish I could shut down. So instead of laying here tossing a turning, I wrote. I wrote something for the first time in weeks. Writing used to by my go to outlet, now I hardly even think about it anymore. It’s the sad reality of mental health. Nothing is fun anymore and everything sucks. 

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a sticker. This has mostly been a ramble about my shitty life. 

Bottoms up, here’s to my shitty life.