Trauma. That bitch who lives in your subconscious, making every decision going forward for you. I've spent years in hell trying to discover what self-love is; what it feels like, this supposed key to escape from sheer addiction's grasp on me. Have I achieved it?
No. I haven't.
There is a void in my life that makes me see, clearly, I was never taught this virtue. I hated myself over the way I felt unheard, ignored and neglected. Not by my parents. Peers. Let us call them peers.
Because I didn't have a horrific childhood. School, on the other hand, was an awful experience being an introvert with social phobia. I wasn't a natural follower. I simply wasn't going to beg for friendships. Upon discovery that this was indeed a hobby of mine, I ended up resorting to writing all day in elementary school class. This was something I truly cherished. No disapproving classmate could tear me down with remarks and unkind scathes.
Now, this was my first addiction. Writing. Poetry, short stories, novels, essays, were like a blissful vacation from the reality of being a fucking loner. My anxiety, channelled through pen and paper, created inspiration for me.
It doesn't sound true at first, but making art is the second closest thing to doing a drug, for a nine year old. Passion, I mean, is like a substance that moves through your body keeping you locked onto a goal. There is nothing more fervent than being in love with something you do well.
It almost brings me to tears how far away I've become from experiencing passion, my brain dulled by medication, or bad habits like over consuming cocaine and ketamine. I wish I remained someone who had longterm goals, cared about their future, and general health. But that all went to shit a few years after finishing high school.
—
18 Years Old
After months of daily cannabis use, I quit cold turkey from losing interest, or forgetting to smoke. Whichever it was, I thought I was turning over a new leaf. I had no idea what true THC withdrawal was like until the moment I found myself paranoid over every single thing in my life. Doctors call it weed-induced psychosis. I call it hell.
How the fuck does one get sick from quitting a drug? Withdrawal psychosis from pot is like trauma's twin sister. One who likes to see you slit your wrist and write words on the wall in your blood, ones you think demons possessing you wrote instead of your own fragile, broken mind. I didn't know what was real, what wasn't; I was delirious mistaking random people for people in my past. I was genuinely sick.
The only benefit to this was accessing clonazepam.
For two months, I ran around a hospital making friends with people I would never see again, manically flirting with every man I saw; I even called it home by accident at one point. God bless the sympathetic people who did not make me feel a thousand times worse about myself. I was broken. Everyone around me knew.
Due to my lack of proper behaviour, in my manic state, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia instead of bipolar or borderline personality disorder. What a fucking joke. You think you are receiving the best professional help — no, instead they just rushed into inexplicable diagnoses to medicate me as fast as possible.
I believe I fucked up having faith in mental health professionals. It's just an industry, I tell myself now. Antipsychotics in the longterm literally split your brain into halves. Do not tell me this is treatment.
It took an entire year of being on a lousy injectable antipsychotic, gaining weight, having to go on ADHD medication just to reduce my appetite, to which my dad ended up stealing from me in the end. After all of these hoops, schizophrenia was removed from my list of diagnoses.
Back to depression, generalized anxiety, and social phobia. Three things that took me down and kept me down. But it didn't stop me from applying to nursing as soon as I deemed myself ready to take another step in life.
Fast forward to a week before the paying tuition cut off date. Yes I got in. And? It. Didn't. Happen. My parents called the police on me for "being in a manic state" in saying to them I was going despite what they wanted. Remember those ADHD pills I mentioned? My father wanted to take them from my stash box and use them in peace. Which meant hospitalization, again, this time through lies and slander.
I hurt no one.
I do think, had I loved myself, this end result would have never occurred. I would have changed my life for the better. But that remains pending.