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I wilfully forgot about this forum because I was feeling up for a few days.
I guess I'm getting better at dealing with things, but I'm still constantly depressed. Those few days of happiness I have kind of feel like I've woken from a weird dream I don't want to think about. Then again I lapse into depression, which makes even those moments of happiness feel unreal. I'm trying to change my thought process to be more positive, but it seems like glossing over. It hurts to know that my potential is sooo slowed down by these bouts of inactivity I can't seem to extricate myself from. Seeing a therapist isn't an option for me right now, but I've never had a good experience with one anyway. I'm very focussed on my physical health, I have a very healthy diet etc. It doesn't help that I'm surrounded by people who just want me to snap out of it and cheer up, and they don't understand that black humour is my coping mechanism. When trying to express my emotional situation through irony, because being sad all the time is inherently ridiculous and baffling, I can really make a room go quiet. I'm an art student and though I have trouble keeping up with school, I write poetry, draw and make comics about how I feel.

I'm only glad if I can help

Have you been in contact with any psychiatrist or therapist recently?
How is your journey towards healing right now?
I know sometimes it's hard to even start and then you have to figure out why that is and how to move forward.

I definitely recognize the same overwhelming feeling that you are describing and how it keeps us from living as we have to restrict things that challenge these emotions!

Your reply is so comforting! Thank you! Definitely what I struggle most with is that I fall to pieces as soon as anything goes wrong, my immediate reaction is to despair and contemplate suicide. Because of my family! I'm afraid of just not being equipped to handle anything, and therefor not be able to live the life I desire.
I know that's only true if I make it true, and it's a long slow fight.
Thanks for your support and validation!

Your reply is so comforting! Thank you! Definitely what I struggle most with is that I fall to pieces as soon as anything goes wrong, my immediate reaction is to despair and contemplate suicide. Because of my family! I'm afraid of just not being equipped to handle anything, and therefor not be able to live the life I desire.
I know that's only true if I make it true, and it's a long slow fight.
Thanks for your support and validation!

Kind of weird to be on an old school forum like I was when I was a preteen.
But anyway, I just need someone to tell me if I'm melodramatic or if this is could have caused PTSD or complex PTSD... Because I'm 21 now and I can't stop being plagued by memories and pains over things that happened years ago. Most recently I feel emotional about it because my sibling are getting better and I feel like them being ill is very much part of my identity and role in my family... Like the bar for me succeed is set at "don't be hospitalised for mental illness or drug addiction". I talk to my family about this and they don't take seriously how something that happened to THEM could affect ME so much. This is the briefest possible rundown sorry it's so long!

At ten I moved to another country, had to learn a new language and had a lot of trouble fitting in. My sister was put away for alcoholism and bulimia at 18, when I was about 12. It'd been rough from the start with her because she was constantly flunking out of school and being found passed out on the street. My brother meanwhile was in college in another country. He won't come up in this story for another few years. My sister was in and out of different places, finally being diagnosed bipolar. While she was home life was obviously *, she'd make me enable her in her alcoholism and my home was just not a safe place. I remember once coming home at 4am when I was 15 (my parents where elsewhere) and a man in his thirties in his underwear covered in talcum powder opening the door, my sister was having a little heroine fueled shindig. She'd threaten me with violence, but also give me valium and encourage me to get drunk. Then she used that to blackmail me into doing things for her. My friends all admired her of course, and I was the ugly chubby duckling and she was a hot * up girl all the boys I liked desired. In this she could also be very sweet. My mother was severely depressed. I started having panic attacks and cutting myself, only to be upstaged by my mom who would cut herself too and make no efforts to hide the deep wounds. It was my fathers only mission to help her. Several times mom would come to me late at night, having drunk wine on her sleeping pills, to weep and beg me if it was all her fault. I could feel my heart closing and wishing she was dead. I read her emails and found out she wanted to kill herself, and I was very angry. "Do it." I thought.
I was in a car accident that fractured my skull and scarred my face.
Of course I made friends outside of home and skipped school a lot, later getting into party drugs (with my sisters older friends). I'd leave home for days and go to parties in other states. In this time I treated my weepy parents with the utmost cruelty and disdain, and it makes me angry that they had no idea why. One day my friend (the same guy who answered my door in his underwear) called me telling me something was wrong with my sister. I ran down my street and their was a crowd on the corner, my sister was on the ground in the middle. Paramedics were doing that electricity thing to start her heart. She was dead. So still. A policewoman started leading me away. But no, they started her heart and took her to the hospital where she was in intensive care for a month. She'd purposefully drank an entire bottle of methadone, maybe to kill herself. My friend had sold it to the guy she got it from. I was alone after this and just walked to the beach and had a hallucinatory vision of a blue woman coming out of the sky to tell me everything would be ok. I was 17. I really started to do drugs after that, I didnt talk to anyone about what I had seen. Nobody could listen.
My brother turned out to be a heroin addict too, and he came to stay with us at the height of my drug use.
At 18 I started dating a man in his 30s who is also bipolar. This was accepted by my parents. We fell in love, I stopped doing drugs and it was amazing for awhile. Then he had his severe psychotic manic episode, and it was my sister all over again. He was a danger to himself and those around him and none of his family gave me a heads up. I had to stay up all night with him for days and sneakily take away knives he was hiding in his pockets. Scary for an already traumatised 19 year old. He was ultimately hospitalised.

So right now I'm in college, my brother is recovering very well, I have an amazing relationship with my parents. My sister is still hospitalised but recently seems to be doing better. Still if I try to talk to them about this they say I can't blame everything on them, after all, I was just a bystander.
To this day I feel very anxious around lots of people and like I have a black hole in my heart. If I have a panic attack, pretty rare now, I feel like I'm 14 years old again in my room listening to my mom weeping and kicking down my sisters door. When I feel bad it's like I'm trapped in a nightmare, I'm still that miserable alone teenager. I feel trapped in the past. And now if my brother and sister get over it, how can I justify my pain? How can I justify always reliving these experiences?

I want to be free!