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Hard Times
“You are 21, how can you say you have had “hard times?” Your parents’ divorce screw you up
or something?”
I guess you could say that. I was daddy’s little girl until the divorce. I knew he drank and
came home mad at my mother, and I knew he had hit me once, but I was still naive and sheltered.
I had the perfect childhood until the divorce. After the divorce I stopped living for a couple
of years. I simply woke up and did what I was supposed to do without putting up a fight. I
became the walking dead. No personality, no passions, no happiness. My goal in life became
protecting my mother from my father’s verbal abuse that continued. My mother educated me on my
father’s major problems. My father physically, emotionally, and verbally abused me for months
at a time when I had to visit him during the summers. Other negative factors began entering my
life, such as getting raped soon after becoming a teenager. I began burning and cutting myself
while I was thirteen. My first two suicide attempts were by overdosing on pills, and occurred
while I was still in middle school. I never took enough to end up in hospital. The second
overdose inspired me to tell my psychologist I was depressed. I got my first diagnosis that
year as having “Severe, Chronic Depression.” I was first put on Paxil, and then, after a
horrible experience on it, switched to Prozac. I was drinking hard liquor daily and smoking
cigarettes and marijuana on the weekends by the middle of my freshman year of high school. I
handled high school by cutting myself when things got bad, or just ramming myself into a sexual
relationship. When the depressions were too much to take, or when the Prozac left me feeling
numb and in a “bubble,” I would cut my finger and drain as much blood as I could, or cut my
wrist and watch the blood flow down my arm. By my senior year I had a shoebox top that held my
razorblades and dried blood from previous blood letting sessions. An old friend of mine died at
the beginning of senior year, when I was 17... And she was 17... With some other problems
becoming overwhelming such as my father’s unrelenting verbal torture and my high school
sweetheart thinking he had found “the one” in another girl, I went crazy. When I say I went
“crazy,” I don’t mean it in the casual sense (which is how I usually use the term, in the
sarcastic, joking sense), I mean I went completely out of my head and left all rationality
behind me. After a few months of bottling everything up, I began cutting daily. I got addicted
to it, to the blood, to the pain... My friends became worried and I was being pressured to tell
my mother what I was doing to myself. At this point I felt so helpless and hopeless I was going
to my church seeking guidance, and they, of course, pointed me toward telling my mother. One
day I refused to get out of bed on a school day and my mother asked me why. I told her I was
never leaving my bed, I didn’t feel like it. She panicked and told me she couldn’t get me in to
see my psychologist or psychiatrist soon but she was going to call my general physician and get
me an appointment that day. When I got to the doctor’s I showed him my left arm, hand, and
wrist, which were covered in fresh, deep cuts. My doctor took a look at them and said “Did you
do this?” and I nodded yes. He left the room and when he returned he told me he had told my
mother and he had directed her to take me to St Francis Hospital where I would be admitted into
their inpatient adolescent behavior treatment program. I was in the hospital for 8 days and
continued as an outpatient for another 9 days. That was when I was diagnosed with Bipolar. I
was put on Lithium and Zoloft. For the first time I was on medications that made me feel
better, so I accepted them with open arms. The mental problems didn’t stop though. Since then I
have continued to struggle with my addiction to alcohol. I have been prevented from making much
progress in college due to depressions and relationship problems. In continuing my therapy I
found out recently that I have Borderline Personality Disorder. Since that diagnosis I have
turned many aspects of my life around and have been seeing a new psychologist.
That is all I meant by saying “hard times.”
© Kate Biffle, 2004
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