At no older than 8 or 9, I decide I want to test the theory that blood is thicker than water.
Not understanding the idiom, I walk into the woods behind my house with a small cup of water and a razor and conduct the experiment.
I don’t have the words for it at my young age, but I was suffering from severe depression; partially because of my genetics, partially because of my upbringing. Trauma and PTSD hide large swathes of my childhood from me and some of my strongest memories are of trying to find ways to urge myself to keep on living; which are often self-destructive. I don’t think twice about disappearing into the brush and returning with wounds – this is normal to me. This is my survival tactic.
I watch as the red and clear swirl together, refracting the world beyond the glass back to me with a new, eerie pattern. I observe these patterns for a long time, trying to make sense of it. I pick up a nearby stick, swirling my concoction together.
I don’t get it.
What am I supposed to be taking away from this? I think to myself.
That family is supposed to rise to the top?
That family is stronger than anything else?
My cup of blood and water didn’t prove any of that!
I recall the other, similar science experiments I had conducted when I was even younger than I am now. It’s the stuff that, once I’m grown, I learn are the types of activities that normal parents do with their kids all the time. I don’t know that then, though. Every experiment I do with my mother I regard with the utmost respect – because they come so few and far between. Those experiments, which often would only be coaxed out of my mother when a stern teacher and a bad grade was on the line, were shining beacons of truth to me. It was one of the few times I sat down at a kitchen table with an adult so – obviously – they had to be important.
My mom and I had done a similar experiment to the one I’m doing now, where we filled a bottle with oil, soap, and water and watched how the differently weighted liquids interacted with each other.
The patterns I see now don’t seem very different than the ones I saw then.
Blood. Water. Oil. Soap. It’s all the same to me. There’s no proof that one should be held in a higher regard than the others.
I grow up despising that idiom. At 15, I officially refuse the sentiment and leave home. My mother had one too many violent outbursts and addicted herself to one too many drugs and what I called my home was a den of despair and fear. With the constant rotation of different drug-dealing boyfriends she welcomed into our home, I never felt safe. I was hungry for a peace I had yet to know.
With little guidance, I begin home hopping as a teenager in search for that peace. It takes a long time to find me. I’m often distracted, but not just by the things that normally distract a teenager like friends, drama, and fads – I also have to constantly acknowledge and attend to the beast that is my depression.
When I say beast, I mean it literally. As I try to navigate homelessness and high school – and with no parental figure to reel me back in – my grip on my own sanity starts waning. I conjure up a monster in my mind. I turn the feelings that are too big and too horrid for my body to carry into an outward entity. It’s the only way I can imagine fighting it. It a towering dragon with three large eyes, four arms, and two sharp-tooth mouths, stacked one on top of the other on it’s long protruding snout.
Using my pen as my weapon, I cover my many sketchbooks in drawings of myself battling this beast. The beast becomes so much a part of my coping that my friends start to recognize the entity as the cry for help that it is and try to join the battle I’m waging against it. We’re all just children, though. They don’t have the skills to deliver the kind of professional help I’m badly in need of. Not knowing what else to do, they join in the rallying cry I was trying to scream, jumping into the fray and showing me they had my back. They draw themselves punching the creature in the face.
In a fugue state where my options are either act out my insanity or kill myself, I rip down all the posters on the wall of my childhood bedroom. Bands, inspirational quotes, and all of the other typical tween trappings that took me my entire short life to craft and amass are destroyed in an instant. In their wake, I paint a mural of the beast on my wall. It towers above my bed until my family eventually gets evicted.
While being homeless at 15 is hard, there is a part of me that feels freed from the beast when I’m forced out of that house. A young family buys the house and my childhood bedroom takes on a new purpose as a nursery. Between the professional painters covering my mural and my friend’s avenging drawings, I am learning that I don’t have to fight the beast alone: I am allowed to accept help.
Unable to rely on my mom, I had to figure out how to tame my demons on my own. I teach myself how to survive not only the cruelty of the real world, but against the nightmares I had created as well: a testament to how the human mind wants to badly to survive, even in a hostile environment.
Now, as an adult, I look back and think about how important it is to provide children proper mental health services and abuse intervention. So often did I reach out for help – and so often did the adults around fail me, unsure of what to do with someone so young and so hurt.
While this is a hard truth to come to terms with, I don’t blame them. It was my mother’s job to take care of her broken child. It was reasonable that other adults assumed that she’d rise to the occasion. It wasn’t their fault that she didn’t. How could they know she was the one causing my cracks in the first place?
When I’m 13, I self-harm. I don’t want to, but it becomes a self-soothing compulsion. Addiction runs in my family and this becomes mine. When I get older, I smoke cigarettes, do drugs, drink, and party – but none of it becomes more addictive or is harder to stop than self-harm.
As soon as I realize I can’t seem to stop, I go to my mom for help. Ashamed and desperate, I sheepishly enter my mother’s room and show her the damage.
“We all deal with things differently,” she says to me.
“Just don’t go deep and don’t do it on your wrists.”
My mother is an alcoholic and a narcissist who leaves, at different times in our lives, both myself and my sibling homeless. She too was failed by mental health systems. My mom grew up in a household of abuse herself. Impoverished and living in a small trailer under the same roof as a pedophilic father and a schizophrenic mother, she did her best to take care of herself and her two younger siblings. I hear her tales of woe often. For a long time, I make excuses for her outlandish behavior and absenteeism. I’m desperate for a mother and use my empathy towards how she ended up the way she did as a reason to continue to return to my abuse.
It takes me 15 more years, but I finally escape my mother’s abuse. Between then and now, there are many “I can’t take it anymores” that aren’t followed through with and my mother receives more last chances than there were chances to be had. Eventually, I start settling for I.O.U.s Alcoholism is a nasty, evil beast itself. Unlike my depression beast, alcoholism is a mimic – it’s adept at looking like something else. Or, well – it’s very good at convincing you to believe it’s something else.
Family trauma stays with you. Poverty stays with you. But it does not define you. One day – you get to stop running and instead start chasing.
Eventually, I find the hidden staircase I’ve been searching for. I take the steps to quell my demons and handle my mental illnesses.
For example, a few years back I finally reach out to receive medical attention for my crippling panic attacks – another side effect of the childhood PTSD my therapist diagnoses me with within 30 minutes of my intake.
I will always remember what it felt like the first time I take a PRN medication for my anxiety. I feel like I’ve put on glasses with the proper prescription for the first time – but on the inside. Suddenly, the blobs that I once saw as trees had definition and detail I didn’t know existed. Suddenly, my lungs didn’t feel like they were filling up with lead and my heart didn’t skip beats trying to run from me.
This experience is another reminder that I don’t have to fight my beasts alone. Except now, instead of relying on my friend’s drawings – I am getting professional help. Before receiving that help, I had been adamantly resistant towards any kind of pharmaceutical help for my mental illnesses due to my family’s history of addiction. I had seen first hand what it could do. I saw the way my mother guzzled drug and alcohol and told myself “no. I will not end up like her.” By trying to avoid what I secretly believed I was fated for, I turned my back on a tool that changed my world.
Once I opened up to accepting the help of that medication, I reached out to a therapist. My therapist led to a psychologist. My psychologist led to a proper, full drug regimen that quieted the terrible buzz I had been living with for 30 years and reminded me how vibrant life could be. Finally, I find the peace I had started searching for all those years ago.
Some days, I look back at my childhood and grieve for my younger self. I wish I could go back and tell him that things are going to turn out okay; that there are professional beast-slayers out there and, much like knights can be distinguished by their title of “Sir”, I can identify the beast slayers by their credentials, too – “LCSW”.
I want to shake the shoulders of the adults around my younger self and beg them to intervene. I want to tell them that it isn’t enough to assume someone else will be there when a child needs help. I want to rewrite the broken, over-complicated healthcare systems that made it impossible for me to seek my own mental health treatment at a young age. I harbor pain, resentment, and anger towards the “what if” that could have been a happy childhood.
Along with that pain, though, I hold a deep gratitude for my journey. I am lucky enough to no longer be the child my mother abused – the hurt thing ravaged by the beast. I now know secrets that young me didn’t – like, for example, if I can conjure up a beast – I can conjure up an angel, as well.
So many of us have struggled with mental illness. So many of us have beasts, demons, abuse.
Why can’t we live in a world full of angels?
I wouldn’t have been able to escape my past if my friends hadn’t punched the beast, if my mentors hadn’t stewarded me towards success, if my partner didn’t hold my hand through the slog that is navigating healthcare. Getting better is an act of community.
When we see a child without a sword, clearly swinging at a beast, we have to stop and stay with them. We have to call our angels.
In my mind, my angel doesn’t have wings – it appears like a ghost. It is like the mist that expands over a meadow in crisp early fall mornings. It’s a whisper that envelopes me, guides me, and then dissipates before I know he’s left. He’s a powerful figment who, instead of using my own imagination to bear down on me, actively reminds me that it is I who am in power. He’s only there if I call him.
He wants me to never have to call him.
He knows I can do it alone.