sam145's journal (possible trigger warning: suicidal thoughts)

[sam145]

The worst feeling is the uncertainty. When you're so used to being different, you know that other people's answers don't usually work for you. You have to find your own, but then you ARE on your own in finding these answers. "Am I really getting better?" keeps running through my mind. It's not like I'd believe someone if they gave an answer, after years of having unrealistic expectations and unfair judgments placed on me.

Right now, the only thing I can do is to keep trying. "Get back up when you fall down" is on my daily habits list. So is "try even when you think you can't do it". I just have to keep moving and hope that I'm going forward. It takes patience, which I need to remind myself of very frequently. ADHD doesn't make it easy, but at least I know that I function better when I'm occupied. Whether I'm trying out a new recipe or doing something creative, I fill my life with things that fill ME with life. Even if I'm not "getting better", I'm not lying in bed all day, wishing I was dead while hating myself for being too much of a wimp to act on it.

The self-judgment is tough too. Even though I know I should pick myself back up after a breakdown, I feel like a useless human being who fails at basic life. Especially when the breakdown occurs slowly over the course of several days. I feel like I don't deserve to get back up and be happy. Sometimes I even feel like getting back up and being happy means that I was faking the whole thing. I know that that's not true and that this comes from years of invalidated feelings, but logic and knowledge don't instantly make feelings do what you want them to.

I guess I need trust. If anything, a lifetime of dealing with untrustworthy people has taught me to recognize the rare occasion when someone is deserving of my trust. There are good people in my life: my boyfriend, my grandparents, the friends who still call themselves my friend after life took us to different places, and certain family members from a healthy distance. But the person who needs my trust most of all is myself.

[sam145]

I've been talking to a counsellor now. I never thought I'd be able to, considering counseling is one of my worst triggers. But I found an app called BetterHelp, so I can talk to a counsellor over text, giving me the power to talk about things on my own time. I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere.

It's still hard to accept my diagnosis. It hurts anytime someone says the word "disabled" in reference to my autism. I don't want to think of myself that way, but I can't deny the ways it affects my life.

[Coco]

I'm reading, relating and caring

[Downsideup]

Hey sam. For starters, I personally don't view autism as a disability in the sense that it makes you less able than others. It simply (according to what I know about the subject) is a different way of wiring the brain and processing information. There may be some things you cant handle as well as your "neurotypical" peers, and there may be things you are able to do than nobody else can. If being disabled is a word you don't feel good about, then don't use it! You are perfectly abled.

I understand that isolating feeling of being "different" from your peers. Maybe not in the same way as you, or for the same reasons, but I understand how it hurts. It's good to hear that you are finding creative expressions to keep you occupied, rather than stewing in depression. Your breakdowns do not make you useless, and you are allowed to take as long as you need to overcome them. And to feel guilt after feeling happiness? I can relate. I hope you aren't too hard on yourself in the future. It sounds like you have a lot on your plate. Find your happiness and keep it.
(P.S. Peridot is my fav SU character...next to Garnet)

[sam145]

Thanks Downsideup I've joined a couple autistic communities on facebook, and it's been incredibly helpful talking to other people like me. I realize that disability is relative to the accommodations in the world around us, and being autistic in a non-autistic world made me feel disabled. I just have a different brain, sorta like how some people are just left handed. Also yay SU fan!! I love Peridot, even though I relate a lot more to Lapis.

Journal cont.
I had a sort of breakthrough today. As obvious as it might seem: I realized that I'm very good at surviving in an abusive home. What this means for me is: I'm not a failure at everything in life. I realized that I'm not useless. I'm very good at doing what I need to. I'm just used to needing to do different things, like being secretive to protect myself, or focusing more on other people's feelings than my own. I know how to be completely still and silent until I've read all the possible reactions of everyone who will see me dare to do anything of my own free will. I've always been afraid to upset people, as if their thoughts and feelings are my burdens to bear. Ironically, the same people who humiliated or punished me just for being different were the ones who always told me to "not worry what other people think", as if a child can just "not worry what other people think".

Now it's time for me to not worry about what other people think. It's time for me to make people mad and not care. I'm not a malicious person. I don't WANT to make people mad. But people will get mad. It's part of life. And now I'm finally an adult who can say "* you, this is my life and I'm not hurting anyone so let me just be me. Ok?"

[RubyCatherine]

Now it's time for me to not worry about what other people think. It's time for me to make people mad and not care.

Words to live by. Reminds me of the old Rick Nelson song "Garden Party."

[sam145]

Another update (sorta venting about my current situation but all is well)

For context: my main abuser was my stepmother. Let's call her C. She has a son with my dad (my half-brother, we'll call him T).

So several months ago, my dad and C split up. Long story short, I've been thrilled. Even T was happy that his parents' terrible marriage was ending. I immediately snatched the opportunity to mentally start cutting her out of my life. I spoke my mind to her last time she texted me (she was trying to be controlling of my life and I've decided that I'm done with that $*%&), and I've told my dad that I don't care about her opinions and that there's less negativity in my life without her. Feels good man.

Sometime last month, I went out with my dad, T, and my dad's new girlfriend and her daughter. I was a little surprised that my dad was already dating again, especially since the divorce won't actually go through til at least October. But hey, not my monkeys, not my circus. New girlfriend doesn't seem abusive and isn't trying to take a parental role in my life so she's fine in my book. Afterwards, T texted me about the situation. Sounds like C is telling him bs drama to turn him against our dad, so I didn't feed into it. Decided that I'd talk to him about it if it got any worse and give him some life advice on avoiding petty drama between divorced parents.

Well, my grandparents (dad's parents) are in town this week. They're fantastic. They used to live nearby, but they moved out into the country a couple years ago and now I only see them when they occasionally visit family. We went ahead and made plans to meet up for dinner, and all is well. This morning, my grandma texted me out of the blue to ask if I had a problem with my dad bringing his new girlfriend to dinner. I said no, and then I found out why she asked. Here's what she said:

"(C's mother) said you told your dad, 'How dare you bring your mistress when you should be spending time with your family.'  She said you and T wouldn't go if she went."

Great. Apparently I can't even stay silent about the drama without someone else trying to use my voice to support their petty hate-fueled stance. This really set me off. I'm so tired of C's negativity. I'm so angry that she's trying to speak for how I feel yet AGAIN, despite the fact that I've barely even spoken to her (let alone her family) since she left my dad. Yes, she was the one to leave him. And now she's trying to be controlling over his dating life, but that's just the sort of thing I'd expect from her.

See that's the thing: this is exactly what I'd expect of her. Although I wanted so badly to message either C or her mother to call them out and establish my actual feelings, I realized that it would not accomplish anything at all. C would just gloat about how she got me "riled up" and then invalidate me because I'm young and don't "know better" like she apparently does. I'd just be stirring up the drama that C created.

Instead, I'm gonna go out to dinner tonight with some awesome people and have a good time because C isn't there.  Feels good to finally have the power to distance myself from the people I need to.

[Three Roses]

Ugh! People like C really get me riled up! I'm glad she's on her way to the curb. Kizzie, let's have an emoji of a smiley face taking the garbage out.

The only way I can have compassion for people who are like that is to wonder if they were abused.

[sam145]

Updating again because it's been a while and I need to get some thoughts out 


I get burnt out very easily. Being autistic, people's expectations for me have always been skewed. I was one of those "gifted" kids who was reading at age 4 and always far beyond everyone else my age in math, but there are a lot of "common sense" things that my brain skipped over because I was perfectly content playing with numbers while other kids were developing socially alongside similar-working minds. So through most of my childhood, I was criticized for failing at basic tasks because of how "capable" I was. Because of this, when I fail/struggle, I don't have a clear gauge of whether I'm just not trying hard enough, or if I'm actually incapable and burning myself out with the attempt. Somewhere around middle and high school, I developed a bad habit of just giving up when it looked too hard. In college, I tended to lean more towards burning myself out. In college, I burnt myself out until I literally took a single class one semester and couldn't even pass that. That was about a year ago.

After I burnt out/dropped out, I got a job in accounting, which was pretty amazing. I loved the work (organizing numbers? uhh yeah that's my jam), but I couldn't handle the boss. She was so erratic and disorganized that I could barely do my own job. I learned to tolerate her and do things the way she liked, but then my personal life started piling up on me. Thanksgiving and Christmas are always stressful, but Thanksgiving was especially horrible this past year (not feeling like going into details right now). I felt like I didn't recover from the holidays until midway through January, and then I was already starting to burn out pretty bad, especially since tax season had just started and it was my first year there and the boss was too disorganized to be prepared for it. By February, I was calling out sick at least once a week because my mental health had gotten so bad. I finally quit because I felt like my absences and frequent trips to the bathroom to panic weren't doing anyone there any good.

It's been about 2 months since I quit. I think I'm doing alright. My doctor upped my antidepressant dose, and I've been noticing some changes already. I hadn't really thought about it, but I've been on the same dose for over a year and probably needed an increase. Other than that, I'm just trying to not criticize myself so harshly. It's not doing me any good, and I need to get better if I want to be as productive as I want to be.

[DecimalRocket]

I've been thought of one of those "gifted" kids too, and I'm autistic too. I relate to that skewed perception of being twice exceptional (A term for people who are geniuses in certain areas and disabled in certain mental/neurodevelopmental areas).

I've been praised as a world changer, and socially ostracized as a weirdo. It's common for the twice exceptional or 2e to feel that difference in how they call themselves. People either look at them primarily as "disabled" and could never amount to anything. Other people primarily look at them as "geniuses" and think all their flaws in working are a sign of their laziness.

Yeah . . . I don't think that it's that black and white. Even if they had one condition of either of the extremes, that doesn't mean the disabled wouldn't amount to anything and geniuses wouldn't make mistakes. Anyway, take care, and well, nice to relate to someone here on something like this for once.

[sam145]

@DecimalRocket Thanks for reading and caring  Finding other people with similar struggles has been one of the biggest steps forward for me.

Today I'm here for to vent about counseling and all the bad associations I had with it growing up. (NOTE: talking about counseling is the most triggering thing for me and I'm doing my best to keep myself together and talk about it but it's hard to not get emotional.)

Therapy/counseling was the biggest thing to be ruined for me. The first time I went was pointless. My dad made it part of the divorce agreement (when I was about 5). I went to a lady in a church every week for a little while and we colored and talked about cats. That's all I really remember. I wasn't upset about the divorce at that point. I didn't need to talk about it. She didn't really talk about it with me. That was that.

The second time I went is still a source of my nightly anxiety dreams. I was about 8 or 9 and my dad was getting ready to marry my stepmom (I'll refer to her as C). He pushed for counseling for me AGAIN because he wanted to "help introduce C into the family". All I remember was how she told the counsellor how horrible she thought I was. I had some issues wetting the bed when I was younger, and she thought I was doing it on purpose to "act out". I had an alarm that would attach to my underwear and it was supposed to go off and wake me up when I started to pee, but I didn't know how to attach it properly when I spent the night there and she accused me of PURPOSELY taking it off to "hide" that I had wet the bed. C accused me of so many horrible things (like she did until I grew up and stopped going there). I was crying so much, and my mom's side of the family had trained me to never question adults or tell them that they're wrong, so I felt like I wasn't allowed to defend myself. The counseling stopped suddenly. I didn't even know why until I asked my mom recently about it. She said that the counselor just didn't show up one day and never rescheduled. I'm pretty irritated with my dad on that one for pushing me so much to go to counselors but not following up to see if his desired results were actually happening. He talks pretty openly about going to therapy nowadays and I really feel like I need to say something because he doesn't seem to have any idea how triggering this stuff is.

The third time I went made me truly believe that counseling would never help me. I was about 15, and my mom had started dating a guy after being single since the divorce.  I wasn't taking it well. I felt like my dad had betrayed me by marrying someone who only saw the bad in me and convinced him that I was a horrible acting-out child. I was scared because I saw the relationship moving faster than my mom said she would allow it. She told me that she wouldn't let him spend the night while I was home, but suddenly he had a house key and was randomly coming over before my mom got home from work. I didn't like him at all. I wish I could have just left the situation alone and let my mom live her life, but I was 15 and messed up and lonely and felt like no one really cared about me. I was also in the dark about my ADHD/Autism/Anxiety and had all sorts of issues rooted in the fact that people saw me as "bright-but-lazy". My mom and I started seeing counselors (separately) about the situation, and (based on how she treated me following this...) I think she got told a lot of stuff about how she needed to assert her dominance as a parent or something because she has an "out of control teenager". I got told a lot of stuff about how I just need to accept the situation. I felt broken for not being able to accept it. I felt like no one was listening. The last time I remember going, my mom and I hadn't been talking for a couple weeks. She had sent me to my grandparents, and I was really hurt by that. She only wanted to send me away for one week, but I was hurt and didn't want to see her for at least 2 weeks. My grandparents took me to my weekly therapy, and I ended up being sent into a room with my mother and her therapist, and her therapist broke the news to me that my mom was engaged. My mom couldn't even tell me herself. I guess I could see why... It's just hard to not feel hurt over everything.

After all these experiences solidified to me that counseling just wasn't the best option for me, I still tried it a couple more times in college. People pushed it so much, it felt like the ONLY option for me. I tried going with an open mind, realizing that things weren't going to be fixed in the first couple sessions, trying to be patient. I never found someone I could really talk to. Last time I went, it was right after I got my diagnoses. I thought it would help since I finally at least KNEW what I needed to work on, but the PTSD responses were too bad by that point. I still can't do any sort of meditation/mindfulness practice that focuses on breathing because focusing on my breath triggers panic attacks.

Recently, I've been working on my recovery a lot, and I've realized that most of my techniques are sorta like...do-it-yourself counseling. The counseling/therapy aspect has never been the harmful part for me. It's always been an issue with people not understanding me. I have a horrible time attempting to connect with people, especially over the topics of my personal life and my unorthodox functionality. Getting therapy from another person doesn't work for me, but therapy is still a helpful tool in my recovery. I'm still just a bit irritated with how much it's pushed, especially considering how inaccessible healthcare is in our country.

[sam145]

Putting Together the Whole Picture

Lately I've been very stressed. Very very stressed. And drained. More drained than I should be for someone who quit their job 6 months ago and barely leaves the house anymore. My boyfriend has been telling me that it's my family that messes me up this bad, and I'm finally seeing what he means.

As I mentioned before, Thanksgiving was especially horrible this past year. It took me by surprise, when I was expecting a nice holiday for once, and it was definitely a contributing factor in my burnout at work. In 2016, I spent Thanksgiving with my grandparents out in the country. It was honestly the best Thanksgiving I'd ever had. I was a little bummed that my dad and sibling couldn't make it, but I had a great time with just my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and my 2 cousins. It was the first year that I wasn't living with any family and felt like I could really just do whatever I wanted for the holiday, and it was great.

So then last year, when those same grandparents invited me to Thanksgiving again, I was pretty excited. I'd be staying in a cottage with just my dad and sibling. I didn't realize the whole dang extended family would be there. The whole dang loud and racist extended family. I just drank a lot of wine when we got together for Thanksgiving dinner and snuck off with my sibling to watch dumb stuff on youtube when things started getting bigoted. Long story short, my dad and sibling and I decided to stay in our cottage the day after Thanksgiving because we were all tired of certain people who couldn't seem to keep their bigotry out of friendly conversation (not that it's any better in other conversations but STILL!!). My grandma got real mad at my dad for avoiding the family and just "couldn't understand why everyone can't just get along". There were a couple screaming matches between my dad and grandma. My dad got very loud. Even though he wasn't yelling at ME, I was still terrified. Just thinking about it is hard.

Since then, my dad has kept trying to talk to me. I tried to just stay casual and reply as minimally as possible but he figured out that something was up a couple months ago. I don't trust him. And it's not just because of this incident. It's because of how he always tried to make me doubt myself when I was a kid. It's because of how he married the woman he married and let her treat me the way she treated me for a decade. It's because he has never exhibited a level of understanding to make me feel comfortable coming to him about heavy life stuff. And this incident confirmed to me that he doesn't have the patience necessary to deal with the mess that is me. I have a lot of stuff to work on, and I'm just not ready to try and connect with him. But he keeps texting me. I feel guilty for ignoring him. And I feel stupid for how much it drains me. I mean, there has been other stuff going on in my life to keep knocking me down, but this has been disproportionately painful.

So I realized that family is a trigger for me (um...duh??), but I had never really put together the whole picture of why.

My parents are divorced. It happened when I was very young, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. Everyone tried to make a big deal out of it to me and give me books on it and stuff, and in hindsight, it seems more like they were talking out their own anxieties rather than trying to address what I was actually experiencing. Reading books on having divorced parents is like reading books about puberty: You're being told that this is a normal part of life, but you're also being told that literally nobody wants to talk to you about it because this is an uncomfortable topic. I get that everyone just wanted me to have a "normal" life, but my life was never normal. It's not "normal" to miss out on tons of things throughout my childhood/teen years because a custody agreement says that I need to spend half my weekends with my dad, over an hour away from home. It's not "normal" to switch between such vastly different expectations on such a regular basis. It's not normal to be beaten when I "question authority" or "talk back" for the first few years of my life until I'm completely submissive and terrified of adults, and then to be constantly verbally abused by someone else who doesn't understand why I'm paralyzed with fear all the time. It's not "normal" to have so many unseen issues in life because nobody is paying close enough attention.

My life felt fragmented by all these people who had no idea what was going on in the other aspects of my life. Kids nowadays have it tough enough trying to juggle school and family expectations and friends and their own health/development and sometimes a job. Adding a divorce to the mix just made it so much worse, and I don't think anyone in my family is able to understand just how much it affected me because none of them grew up in a divorce.

[sam145]

Today's update is about the death of a family member and my (lack of) reaction to it.

My great-grandmother (I'll call her G) died yesterday. I stopped caring about her a while ago. I know that sounds cold. She was cold. That's not to say that I want to reciprocate her coldness. I just got to a certain point where I realized that she didn't really love ME, but rather, she loved her ideal version of me in her old-fashioned mindset. I realized that whenever she wasn't complaining about how little I talked to her after I went off to college, she was insulting me or insulting my father or complaining about how her daughter took care of her dog or finding some new complaint-of-the-day. I finally stood up for myself one day and told her how she made me feel when she talks like that. But by that point, her mind had started to go, and she couldn't remember that sort of stuff long-term anymore.

The most forgiving person in this situation was my grandmother, G's daughter (I'll call her M). M talked on the phone with G every single day. She drove up to the retirement home every week to take G out to get her hair done, do some shopping, etc. M did this no matter how grumpy G got, no matter how much she was insulted, no matter how drained she felt after her trips to the retirement home. There were so many times when it seemed like G was just using M as her emotional-punching-bag, and M seemed to internalize it. She did this until she ended up in the hospital for stress-related issues, and she stopped talking to G for a couple months and had my mom (her daughter) take over for the weekly trips and emergency care. G never understood why M stopped talking to her for that time, no matter how much my mother explained it.

So when I heard the news from my mother yesterday, I wasn't really sad. I wasn't even all that surprised. Her health hadn't been great recently, and I was more surprised that she made it this long. I'm not sure what I feel, if anything. But I woke up to messages from at least 3 different people who heard, which is VERY stressful for me, and I guess that made me start thinking about how I'm not feeling any sort of sadness or loss. I don't need consolation. Honestly, I've been beyond depressed this past year or so for a million other reasons, and this barely fazed me. But now people are disproportionately worried about me because they assume that a death in the family must be such a horribly sad thing and I must be so upset by it. Nope. Just stressed by social pressures and everyday life. Sorry.

[sam145]

~ More on "The Big Picture" ~

So I've known for a while that school is a trigger for me. It's where I saw my burnout. It's where I've disappointed people because I'm "so capable!" and "could get good grades if you applied yourself!"

I've also realized more and more recently that I have a lot of issues with authority, and I'm seeing why now. From the perspective of a child, I was seeing that basically any random adult who stepped into my life had power over me. Obviously, this happens with all kids. They go to school, and their teacher is the authority. They go home, their parents are the authority. With me, I also had another category of authority figures: People My Parents Have Sex With (more commonly known as "step-parents").

Yes that's a crude way to look at it. It's a crude situation. Some lady who wasn't my family suddenly became my dad's new wife and had the authority to parent me, which happened a lot since my dad was a very very passive parent. And the fact that she's been married to him since I was 8 seems to give her some sort of entitlement over what I do with my adult life. Some dude who wasn't my family suddenly thought he could punish me when he thought I deserved it just because he was sleeping with my mom and she gave him a key to our apartment so he would just come by whenever he felt like it, which happened a lot after I had gotten home from school but before my mom was back from work.

So I have a huge issue with authority. Today I realized that "parents" are a pretty specific trigger that I hadn't recognized because of how casual/common of an idea it was. I've always been uncomfortable with how much unquestioned control parents have over their children. Being able to procreate shouldn't be the only qualification for raising a completely new human being, but all the time, people default to, "Well she's your mother... I'm sure she's just trying to do what's best for you." Why?? Because she was able to MAKE a person? She's literally never RAISED a person before so are you sure she knows what she's doing??? What about this ding-dong who thinks he can raise a child just because he's DATING a woman with a child?

So yeah between the fact that my parents divorced without ever communicating about how they were trying to raise me and the people who thought the "parent" in "step-parent" meant "AUTHORITY TO TORTURE THE CHILD UNTIL SHE BEHAVES!" I have no trust in authority, especially overly-entitled parents.