The broken can be beautiful

I wrote this piece for the place I go for therapy, for one of their magazines they put out. I have no idea if they put it in, but I figured it was worth sharing 🙂

If you could title my life anything

I think it would be “One Flew Over the Cukoocoo’s nest 2.0.”

But in honor of a friend I’m calling it “The Broken Can be Beautiful”.

I never really realized how much mental illnesses affect my life on a day to day basis. I’ve always known I was just…off. It has always felt like something was wrong inside of me. Most days I have a racing heartbeat, and trouble with normal breathing. It feels like my heart is beating as if I’d just done 7 lines of cocaine, and my breathing is always labored. The thing is, when I take pills, it stops.

The high I feel when I do drugs is amazing, but it’s not a normal high. I’m not a junkie who shoots up because they need that fix. I’m a 26 year old female who has had a lifetime of trauma, and I just want to feel calm.

My life started off with my father marrying the woman he cheated on my mother with, and leaving my mother a week after I was born. Really dad, you couldn’t decide 9 months prior that you weren’t happy? I don’t blame my father though, the only thing he ever asked my mom was to not smoke while pregnant with me. He walked in and saw her with a cigarette in her mouth, and I wonder sometimes if that’s why I’m so bad at math. Seriously, I’m an idiot savant. I can tell you who was in what movie, what it was called, and what it was about; but I had to take Algebra twice a day my junior year. Screw algebra, it’s the retarded offspring of numbers and the alphabet.

I don’t blame my father for cheating on my mother because all he truly wanted is to

feel appreciated. My father is a wonderful man, who has worked tireless hours to feed his family. He fell through a 3 story attic and broke his back. And even so, he

will still to this day stand ankle deep in water with everything you can imagine in it, at a truck stop bathroom, tiling it so he can put food in my mouth. He drove half an hour each way 5 days a week so he could coach my softball team in 7^th grade. Maybe we only won one game that season, but it was the best season I ever had in 5 years that I played. However, that memory is dampened by the memory of a woman hitting my mother, the only time in my life she ever stood up for my dad, because this woman didn’t like the fact her kid was moved around positions. My dad tried to give all the kids a chance to play, and apparently it was not well liked by many. No matter what, at least I know my mom actually stood up for my dad, even though she hated him for many years.

My relationship with my mother is self-destructive. There is no good in a woman who killed my dog to get back at me for going to live with my dad at age 15. I have stood in the kitchen with a knife, ready to stab my mother because I wanted to end my pain. Being torn apart by this angry woman is by far the most demeaning thing I have ever gone through in my life. It made me into a broken person because she was so angry about my dad hurting her. It taught me how to have a problem with people guilt-tripping me into doing things for them. I’m not a pushover, I just have a hard time saying

no because I feel awful saying it. It gives me this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel like a bad person when I say no. I think this is because I have always had this irrational fear that my mother was going to die alone in her house, so I missed out on tons of holidays with my dad. I feared that no one would find her. This all started when I was seven.

I’ve been told by my therapist here at Touchstone that I have an overactive imagination. I mean it would make sense considering some days I walk out of the house and my brain sends me into this paranoia that I left my hair straightener plugged in and turned on, and the house is going to catch on fire and my dog is going to die. And that’s just if I try to go to work!

I have tons triggers that set me off, like swings. WHO SERIOUSLY HAS PANIC ATTACKS AROUND SWING SETS?! Seriously?!

I have a fear of death mostly due to the fact that my grandpa died when I was 7. I think it made me have a fear of dying because it brought me to the truth about my own mortality. I have Associative Disorder, because my belongings are what hold the good memories for me. That causes me to panic and think to myself “What’s going to happen to my stuff?”. I worry about my dad, grandmother, and dog dying so much it sends me into complete hysteria, and I have to breathe into a paper bag. I worry about the environment because I see all the waste from big corporations, and the disaster of the planet we have so carelessly tossed aside. I worry about all the poor little animals in the shelters. My brain NEVER STOPS WORKING, and the fact that I’m a Virgo means I already analyze everything as it is.

I have taken on the roll of saving the world, and it will kill me because I will die trying. When I was homeless I gave my last dollar to a homeless man because I felt like he needed more than I did. I was living on a couch, in a garage, drinking 3-day old wine that had sat out. All because I couldn’t deal with the trauma I was enduring while I lived there. My “friends” would get me drunk, and pretty much pimp me out to their friends. One “friend” I had to sleep with in order to make sure I had food, and a place to live. He would get drunk, shove me into walls, and locked me out of the place. You do what you have to do to survive. Don’t judge people for that simple fact. The reason I got put through this was because my other friend was stringing him along by telling him she was going to come back to him, and leave her boyfriend for him. She was ensuring a back-up plan in case her and her boyfriend broke up. I got the abuse from his anger. Abuse has been a pattern in my life.

I date men who pathologically lie, stalk me, and use me for everything. They do crazy things after we break up,

like fake car crashes and tell me they have brain tumors. One wouldn’t stay out of the skate park while he was on house arrest, and he cheated on me when I went home to see my brother graduate from college. He got some other girl drunk off MY booze and cheated on me with her. Although there have been many “winners” I have dated, he was the one who taught me the biggest lesson about myself. That I didn’t love myself. I sat in a car when he looked right me in the eyes and said “I’m going to the skate park are you in?” I looked right at him, got out of the car, and left. I realized if I went with him I would be THAT girl. I never knew up until that moment how submissive I was to being treated like shit.

I’m an emotional masochist to the core, and it is most apparent in how I let men treat me. I never treated myself with enough respect to know what I deserved from men. I do deserve a guy who treats me with respect. But instead, I allow myself to be treated as if I were yesterday’s trash. It wasn’t until my ex-boyfriend became a carnie after we broke up, that I decided to re-evaluate my dating priorities. I made a list, and decided that until I meet a man who meets all the criteria, I’m going to stay single. I want to learn how to love myself, and dating the boys I have, I definitely know I didn’t love myself.

Little Wayne has a song called “How to Love”. I insist you watch the Shazaam version. You need the actual video. I won’t tell you why, but it’s the exact story of my life. It is so eerie that after watching it, I cried for 20 minutes on my bathroom floor. I really learned that my mother never taught me how to love myself. I never learned how a man should treat me. The saddest thing I realized was I never loved myself.

I confused the emotional pain inflicted upon me by someone who was damaged and angry, as love. I saw the men my mom brought in and out of my life, and that’s what I thought relationships were supposed to be like. I am not saying my mother was promiscuous, but perhaps that she just was using men to distract herself from the hurt she felt. I chose the same path. I dated guys who I watched cheat on me in front of me, and stalk me. One left me with no job, no car, and no money. They weren’t the worst though, that title belongs to one who I affectionately named DbagD. He, is the true “winner” I loved.

“The Reason Behind my Insanity”, posted on my website is actually the entire story. In a twisted way the cruelty he inflicted upon me is what caused me to start my own blog. Here is a person who left me sitting in a restaurant for an hour after telling me he was coming. He told me I wasn’t “lady-like” so I took him cupcakes in a dress for his birthday. My present? A text 4 days after mine asking “Why are you so mad at me?”. The saddest thing is, I loved him more than anything. I’m an emotional masochist because the worse someone hurts me, the more I love them.

The thing is, I never hated him for those things. He had loved a girl before me, who utterly ripped his heart out. She cheated on him 4 years into their relationship, and then he acted like a douche. She was honest with him about it, but it broke him. He truly loved her, and she crushed his soul. Left him a shell of a human being after she chose to juggle both him, and another guy whom she deemed worthy. It wasn’t all her fault, because he treated her awfully, but that’s what cheating on someone does. It makes them so cold, and dead inside, and the next person to try to love them is treated with nothing but cruelty.

I was the next person.

I took the cruel things he did, because I loved him. I accepted his marriage proposal while he was high on cough syrup on the 4^th of July, because I wanted to show him someone could be good to him. Boy was I an idiot. I knew I was over him, and his treatment, but I stayed because I wanted material. I wanted to, almost 5 years ago, show a girl like me how she SHOULD be treated. I knew what he was doing to me was wrong, but I didn’t love myself enough to be strong and walk away. I didn’t love myself, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t stay to get material to make my dream come true.

I have always wanted to teach women to love themselves, because we don’t as a society. We see these beautiful models, and we’re told we have to be a size 3. We see a society where everyone gets married, and has babies. What about those who want to be different? Should we not follow our dreams?

I’m not a man hater. I don’t hate the men who did me wrong, to a point. 4 years later I have forgiven DbagD, and we actually now are friends. No, it is not self-destructive, which I have explained to my therapist. It’s a healthy connection because it reminds me of what I will never allow myself to experience again.

I will never allow myself to drink 2 gallons of vodka a week to deal with my heartache. Never again will I burn myself with lit cigarettes because my heart hurts so badly that all I want to feel is pain. Never again will I dye my hair black because I think changing who I am for someone, will make them love me. Never again will I tell someone I loved to “go stand in the middle of the road, wait for a Mac truck to run you over, so I can laugh as you die”, all in the attempt to I could hear an “I love you too babe”.

I allowed myself to be treated as though I was worthless because growing up that’s all I believed I WAS worth. I felt worthless. But I am not. Neither are you. You’re beautiful, you are unique, and you are one of God’s creations. To me, we suffer because it teaches us compassion. I am probably the most compassionate person because of my suffering. I went through terrible relationships with idiots because I have a purpose. To make people love themselves. To show them that no matter what has happened in their life, they are still beautiful.

We pick abusive relationships folks, because of what we see. We confuse love with emotional masochism, because it’s what we know. It’s not love. Love doesn’t hurt, love doesn’t make you cry, and love doesn’t leave you with a black eye. The first person you should love is yourself. When you do that you will truly be happy. I took my pain, and formed a group on Face book called TWID, or “The Winner I Dated” because we all have dated “winners”. We pick these sub human pieces of garbage who rip our very core out of our bodies. The thing that really is the kicker, is that 9 out of 10 times they don’t do it. Yes there are some people who are truly evil, but we aren’t evil on purpose.

We get people that we watch cheat on us, and make us into a joke. They tell us we aren’t beautiful, and they leave us more broken then we started out as. It’s a vicious cycle of abuse, that I spend every second of my life hoping that I can end. I will make nice guys stay nice, and understand that the girls who hurt them didn’t mean it. We’re all a little broken, we’re all a little off. If you have story, or something to say come visit my page. Until that time, stop letting what others say tear you down because you are beautiful. You are worth something. You are amazing. ❤