Stay Strong

“There are days where I don’t think I can make it. An addiction is an addiction and you are going to deal with it for the rest of your life. You are going to have days where you are going to struggle. I’m not perfect. But now at least I’m honest with myself and everyone around me.”-- Demi Lovato


For those who don't know me, I have struggled with an addiction for the better part of the last 9 years of my life. When I was 14, I started to cut myself  to deal with the emotional trauma that I was dealing with in my personal life at home. Things were awful as I was never allowed to talk about it outside of the family, so essentially I had no one to talk to. In addition to that, I was being abused in ways that no child should ever be abused by a parent. My biological father would hit me, yell profanities at me, slap me across the face, and throw me into walls on a daily basis because he would get angry about something I supposedly said or did/didn't do. But it didn't end there. When I was 14, he was charged with indecency with a child for molesting a close friend of mine while she lived with us. He professed his innocence and we were wait-listed for a trial. This catalyst induced my silence, which came at a lack of personal choice from myself as I wanted so desperately to talk to someone about it while we waited to go to trial for 2 years. So I stayed silent. And in that silence, I was forced to turn to the one thing that would relieve my emotional hurt and pain. Cutting.

By the time we reached trial 2 years later, I was at a point where I couldn't stop myself. There were always little pink lines from fresh cuts on my upper arms and some on my legs where I could easily hide them with pants and shirts. No one knew and no one asked about them either, so I felt safe in my own cocoon of self-harm and escaping the hell that I lived in. During that time, I was also diagnosed with depression by my doctor and put on medication, though shortly taken off afterward when my appetite drastically decreased to nothing. Though I kept my cutting a secret still. After the trial, the truth was revealed as to what kind of monster my biological father really was, so my mother divorced him by the time my 17th birthday came around in September of that year. By then, I had scaled back on the amount of cutting I was doing as things were getting a little better without my biological father in the house to beat me or terrorize me anymore. Yet, I was so entrenched in my addiction that I couldn't completely stop myself. I needed it to function and get through my days where people now knew what my family was like...the truth of how horrible a man my biological father really was. (Even if they still didn't know about the heaps of abuse he threw on me for years before that.) My heart cried out for help to the wall of friends that I had at the time, but I just couldn't bring myself to tell them the truth of what I was doing to myself. I was ashamed and embarrassed that I had sunk so low that I was hurting myself to escape the pain in my heart.

Throughout the rest of my junior year, I hid the fact that I was still cutting and hurting myself from the rest of the world. None of my friends knew anything about it or if they did, they never said anything about their suspicions during that time. It became harder and harder to hide it as I was running out of places to cut that hadn't already been hit before and were too sensitive to touch for a while. Gradually, I just started wearing long-sleeves in the middle of August in Texas. Which isn't normal. But people didn't say anything to me. It wasn't until 2006 that someone intervened and saved my life. It took several months of trying and failure before I was finally able to stop cutting completely. During that time, I was also seeing a school counselor to help me work through some of my problems since I was now allowed to talk about my family life at home. November 2, 2006 will always have a significance in my life as it marked the beginning of a new life for me. From that day forward, I have not cut myself once. Almost 6 years have come and gone since that day and I am still going strong. But I won't lie and say that there haven't been days where I want to break down and give in again. In fact, there have been many days where I have felt like giving up and going back to what helped me through so much turmoil in the past. But that isn't what recovery is about. Recovery is making a promise to yourself that you will fight whatever it is that you are addicted to and keep it at bay when it tries to come knocking again.

Knowing that I am prone to bouts of depression and am not medicated due to lack of insurance coverage and the increasing costs of medication, I know that I have really weak points that I have to deal with now and then. During college, they were fewer and far between, but now that I'm out in the real world and don't see my friends every day, it's much harder for me to sometimes function without seeing or at least speaking to them at some point during my day. They are honestly what keeps me going and keep me strong to fight this never ending battle with depression, self-harm, and feeling like I'm worth something in this world. But my struggles have also offered me a gift. A passion for helping others who have or will struggle like I did and continue to do. We are a world of broken people who are pleading and crying out for help. Who better to help them than someone who has been there and who knows what it is like to be on the other side of the wall? This passion is also something that helps me stay strong and know that I'm worth something. It has also helped me come to terms with what I struggle with and keeps me honest with those around me who know me best about my own personal demons that haunt me even today. But I know that I will overcome. I will keep on rising up and find myself through all of this.