by Band Back Together | Jul 1, 2014 | Bullying, Childhood Bullying, Coping With Bullying, How To Heal From Being Bullied, Teen Bullying |
She came to school with a plastic Disney princess phone, and told everyone it was real. I was the only kid who didn’t believe her – I proved to the entire class that she was lying. She hated me from that day on, and made sure that I knew it.
Soon, it wasn’t just her bullying me, it was practically everyone. Elementary and middle school are, for the most part, a haze of half-memories of name-calling, spitting, and hair pulling.
In fourth grade, I had my first major depressive episode. I was up late into the night, curled in my mother’s lap, sobbing hysterically for no reason I could identify. It was confusing. All I knew was that I was incomprehensibly sad, and the kids at school were mean.
I was in eighth grade when the body image issues, self-loathing and self-injury, came into play. At first it was simple things, like no longer wearing tight clothing and digging my nails into my skin when I was frustrated. I was in ninth grade when the periods of going without food began, and when digging my nails progressed into the slicing of skin.
I was in tenth grade when the next major depressive episode hit. I was missing tons of school but I didn’t care. The world was bleak and pointless. I slept almost constantly. When I was awake, I tried to forget about my life by immersing myself in the life of a fictional character. That, or I was cutting. I felt useless.
As my sophomore year came to an end, I gradually started to feel better. The improving weather lifted my spirits. I chose to go on a community service trip to Peru that summer, thinking I was well enough to go.That is, until I got on the plane. As I walked to my seat, I felt panic rising.
I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t handle going to Peru.
What had I been thinking?
I begged to be let off of the plane, but the trip leader refused. Resigned, I sat in my seat and sobbed. On that flight, my depression began sinking to entirely new levels, worsening impossibly over the next few months. I was very suicidal.
In December, a boy I knew killed himself. It hit me hard. I saw what suicide could do to people, and how much it hurt the loved ones of the deceased. After toying with the idea of suicide, I decided I didn’t want to cause that pain, so I arranged to be hospitalized.
Since January, I have come so far. I put my efforts back into doing schoolwork. I saw my friends again. I rejoined the world of the living. I have learned an immense amount about my self and how to be happy. I’m so grateful to be alive. It’s so worth it.
I know everyone says it, but it’s true – it does get better.
by Band Back Together | Oct 12, 2010 | Addiction, Self Injury |
Inside my chest – there’s static. It started when I was small, so small I can’t remember a time I felt still. There’s static in my chest and noise in my head. The kind of noise that reminds me of a Devourment song, but instead of Mike Majewski screaming at me through my iPod, it’s my subconscious screaming at my insides.
12 years ago, I found the thing that made the static stop.
Cutting.
5th grade saw the beginning of my war against self-injury. I started burning myself with my curling iron and scraping the skin from my arms with a craft scissors. The injuring became more frequent over the years, the wounds more and more severe. By the time I was 17, I was cutting everyday. I had a make-up case stocked with scalpels and bandages and would cut dozens of times a day. I couldn’t imagine my life without cutting, couldn’t imagine the next 45 minutes without it. I spent the next two years plastering myself with my pain. The injuring, an elaborate metaphor, the vent through which my fear and anxiety, my blood, flowed. I spent the next two years breaking, and eventually attempting suicide.
Six months after I was released from the hospital, I looked in the mirror and saw the mess I’d made. That day was the day I QUIT cutting.
God, it hurt.
But the hours clicked on, adding up to days and weeks…months. My life changed on September 9th, 2007, the day I’d stopped hurting myself and it changed again on November 24th, 2007, the day I learned I was pregnant. I had an even bigger reason to heal. I used my pregnancy as a catalyst, everyday inspiring a change in my heart, finding a healthy way to ease the anxiety. I was inspired, but there were still bad days. I remember one such day, somewhere around my seventh month, sitting in the bathroom trying to break the straight razor out of a gillette shaver and the glint of metal struck me, lain against the backdrop of my growing belly. I stopped. I didn’t get the razor out. I threw it against the way and screamed. My child was NOT going to grow up with a self-injuring train-wreck for a mother!
I couldn’t let that happen. I’d eliminate myself before I’d let that happen.
It has been 3 years and 21 days since that September night. My daughter was born healthy and beautiful in July ’08 and every day she continues to inspire me. I kept the promise I made to her, I have not injured myself. It’s hard sometimes, I can admit that I’ve had some close calls, but I’ve kept that promise.
I think self-injury is a lot like alcoholism – always recovering, never recovered. But with the support of my amazing family and my miracle-worker therapist, I will continue to beat this thing. The hours clicked into days, then weeks, months, years. Let’s make it decades.
I WILL make it decades.
by Band Back Together | Oct 7, 2010 | Anger, Breast Cancer |
I want to sue Susan G. Komen.
I want to sue Playtex gloves, Campbell’s Soup, Glad wrap, and every single corporation making money on the carnage of cancer. I want compensation for the last 7 Octobers shoved down my throat with pink ribbons and “awareness.”
How dare you. My physical rubble, my scars, my rib cage, my bones remember the day my breasts betrayed my body – I still had a baby at home to hold.
How dare you paint me pink. And to place your pink interpretation of my experience on mundane housewife products? Insult, meet injury. I hear some effed-up patriarchal focus group somewhere, dudes kicking back, women wearing men’s suits trying to live with the fact that they sold out. This is what they are saying to me with every pink ribbon: “See…I even own this; you are a woman and you mean nothing more than cleaning products—and if I can, I will whore you out to make money.”
I thought we’d come a long way, baby?
…baby?
Psyche, join hands with your old friend despair, as we walk through the aisles of life in October and are hammered by image after image of a pink ribbon and the plethora of pepto-bismol shaded products I am supposed to buy. Does a kitchen sponge really make a woman get a mammogram? Is the dog food manufacturer really giving money to breast cancer research? I want evidence. I deserve evidence. I want the lab report on the efficacy of the color pink to reduce incidence of breast cancer. I want evidence that demonstrates that just seeing a pink ribbon on a golf ball increases the chance a woman will do a self-examination.
My body was hijacked by a disease at 36 . Hacked up, hacked off. Nerves cut, nodes removed. Home in time to hold my baby and play with my toddler. Dead tissue, dead sexuality, dead eyes meet mine every time I look in the mirror. Each October, my “recovery” is held hostage by corporations who sell their products with pink ribbons on them. Another invasion. Another intrusion. More and more mocking and belittling by those in power. I have to fight to “survive” October.
Oh October, I am tired of surviving you, and the other traumas of invasion that make me qualified to use the word “Survivor”.
Susan G. Komen, Avon, Revlon–you take one good look at my daughter’s 7-year old face when she sees the wreckage of my body. See her naive disgust, confusion, and fear that it will be her fate as well. See her try to piece together why her mother has no breasts, no nipples, no evidence of being a woman. Look directly into her eyes when she asks if she will “get it,” and I dare you to hand her a pink ribbon.
I want to sue Susan G. Komen.
by Band Back Together | Sep 30, 2010 | How To Cope With A Suicide, Suicide |
The following (edited) post was written as a tribute to my friend on what would have been his 28th birthday this past March:
Today is my friend’s birthday. Was. It was his birthday. Or is it “is”? I just don’t know.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I befriended a freshman named John. He was on the swim team with me and we clicked instantly. We had little crushes, but after 4 days of the innocent hand-holding thing, we decided we were better as friends. We spent hours together. We’d share a lane at swim practice and walk for a bite to eat after school. When I started dating a football player my junior year, I’d go to every game and sit right next to the band so I could hang out with John while he played clarinet. He’d make me laugh with his Elmo voice and hear me out on my issues with other girls. He was my best friend. At the end of my junior year, John tried out for – and won – the drum major role for the next year. He was so ecstatic. He had such a love for music and had so many ideas for field formations and songs the band could perform.
On Labor Day my senior year, I was at home, enjoying an extra day off from school. We had friends over to swim. The phone rang, my friend Jamie told me to sit down. She told me John was gone. My heart broke then and there. He’d taken his own life, his mom had found him. The next days were a blur – the candlelight vigil, the wake, the funeral. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat. My world no longer had light. On Thursday that week, our flex schedule should have crossed our paths between 2nd and 4th period on my way to pre-calculus. He didn’t greet me at the stairs. I burst into shuddering sobs, and my friend led me to the grief counselor that had been brought in just for us.
To this day, I don’t know why he’s gone, but I still miss him when I think of him. I think his passing has impacted me so deeply because he was so young. We were so young. We were supposed to be happy and carefree. On the surface, he was. But deep down, there was a sadness I can’t begin to comprehend. How could a 16-year-old think that suicide was the only way? At his funeral, John’s mom said he’d made a mistake. I believe that – that he’d gotten caught up in some dark place and didn’t see another way out. I don’t think he truly wanted to leave. He had too much left to do, too much left to see.
As I’ve grown up, I’m often reminded of the things that John won’t experience. He never got to drive the vintage VW Bug he saved for for three years. He didn’t walk across the stage on our high school football field and graduate. He never had a college roommate or had to endure finals. He never fell in love. But with all he’ll miss, there is one thing he did do that brings a smile to my face and makes my heart clench and my throat burn with pride and happiness through my tears. I’m thankful that he got to lead his beloved band as drum major for the first game of the season, 2 days before he left us. I remember my last hug, and it’s something I hope I will never forget. The game had just ended, and I went running to find him and congratulate him. I told him I wanted a hug and he said, “no, you don’t. I’m all sweaty and hot.” I responded, “I promise I’ll always want to hug you” and wrapped my arms around him for the last time.
His birthdays always touch my heart. He loved to celebrate birthdays, just as I do. He’d bring his friends balloon bouquets at school. I don’t like to think about his death, though that date is forever etched in my mind. I prefer to think of him on his birthday, and remember him as he was when he was happiest: blonde hair, blue eyes, a mouth full of braces, proudly wearing his fire red and white band uniform. It’s what he wore when he gave me that last hug, the last time I saw him. When he was laid to rest, his mom told us that when we saw a rainbow, it was a smile from above, a gift from John. I don’t believe it myself, but every year on March 4th, I’ve seen a rainbow. He’s the one giving gifts on his birthday. He was always so sweet like that.
–Brooke Kingston, March 4, 2010
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After his death, some of my other friends and I realized that he’d said good-bye to each of us in our own way. He paid compliments, told us how much he enjoyed our friendship, said he’d miss us. We thought he meant he’d miss us over the weekend and though nothing of it. We had no idea he was reaching out, trying to tell us something. We had no idea it was already too late.
But it didn’t have to be to be too late for John, or for anyone. There was somewhere for him to turn, someone who could have been there to listen. To Write Love On Her Arms, or TWLOHA, as it’s often referred to, is a non-profit organization that serves to provide hope and support to those struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. TWLOHA’s mission is a thing of compassion and love.
An excerpt: “You were created to love and be loved. You were meant to live life in relationship with other people, to know and be known. You need to know that your story is important and that you’re part of a bigger story. You need to know that your life matters.”
To Write Love On Her Arms works to “encourage, inform inspire, and also invest directly into treatment and recovery.”
It offers a complete directory of helplines and services for those in need. Donations made to TWLOHA help to fund such organizations as The National Hopeline, Self-Abuse Finally Ends, IM Alive, and Kid’s Helpline Australia.
TWLOHA could have helped my friend, John, and many others. It is my sincere hope that awareness is spread about this incredible and compassionate organization so that others don’t have to lose their friend or family member.
