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Open Your Eyes
Working on this CHAPTER has brought back a lot of memories of being neglected by the system, both the educational and the healthcare. Granted, that is what this story has been about for the most part, but that knowledge doesn’t take away from the Pain of being reminded how fucking difficult it has been to just, you know, be noticed and helped like I’ve needed to be. But I think at its very core, this feeling of being let down systematically by those who were supposed to protect me really focuses on the way teachers and other educators have decided to completely shut their eyes from the abuse.
First Time I Opened Up
When I was 12 years old, my parents took me so see a psychologist for the first time. I was having constant night terrors, not being able to fall asleep, and the fear of being watched by someone unknown in the shadows of my dark room made me chronically paranoid. I heard every single noise in the apartment complexes my parents lived in and thought that it was always someone walking in the apartment when there was no one there except for me and my furbaby. The night terrors got so bad that I started to suffer from insomnia, and that’s when my parents knew they had to step in, and they took me to the family counselor office to see a psychologist who specialized in working with children.
Pills For The Empty Nights
Mental health is a complicated facet of the human existence. You can’t treat it as its stand-alone part of health, but you have to remember that conditions affecting one’s mental health are also something to be considered in physical health. Many psychiatric illnesses also have an impact on the way you feel on a somatic level, and since the brain is an organ that can get sick just like any other organ, it makes sense that there are medications out there to help with the mental anguish caused by the illnesses of the brain.
Cowardice
My elementary school teacher used to come talk to me whenever we would run into each other downtown. Even after several years had gone by since my time in school, she would always strike up a conversation with me when I was still living with my mom. I never particularly enjoyed those conversations for reasons you might be aware of if you’ve been following my journey and the project for a while — this elementary classroom teacher is one of the many adults who are responsible for the absolute negligence of my safety when I was in school.
Life Update: New Year, New Life
As time has gone on and I have continued to work on this project, I’ve made several Life Update posts on the new year that has just been starting. For the longest time, even before the time of Death On A Paper, I have felt like New Years is just another pointless holiday to celebrate for the tradition of it, not for anything substantial that it brings to my life. It is true that through mental illness, disability, and trauma I have become a relatively cynical person: the things other people find joy in have not been joyous for me in ages, simply because I haven’t been able to see the point in any of it.
But now, I am seeing a change of the tides in my life as I can finally see some sort of purpose to the celebration of the new year.
Anti-Bullying Effort
Over the years, my frustration toward anti-bullying labor as we know it has grown stronger and stronger. After indulging myself in a lot of academic reading on bullying as a form of abuse and the multitude of tactics meant to help resolving abuse situations, I have become very aware of the lackluster state of what we call anti-bullying. Having the knowledge on a theoretical level has helped me understand the way I was neglected to hell and back as a Kid, especially by adults who were supposed to be there to protect me where most of the abuse was happening.
Teachers in schools.
Mental Illness? Forget It, You’re Poor!
A lot of extremely unfortunate and downright ridiculous things have happened with the Finnish healthcare system in the last six months. Looking at the state of this country and how it continues to neglect its most vulnerable is becoming more and more painful by the day: I struggle to recognize this place as the beautiful country I have grown to know and love. It genuinely feels like the welfare system is being torn apart right in front of our eyes by the greedy right-wing politicians who only care about making the richer under the guise of “fixing the national economy”.
And Don’t Say It’s The Ward
Very often, I have medical professionals ask me what kind of treatment I am looking for. This has always confused me, because how am I, someone with no training on psychiatry, supposed to know the exact kind of treatment that would help me the most? For the past year or so, this has continued to become a recurring thing, and each time, I am left just as baffled as the last.
But what about the times when I have known exactly what I would have needed, kept asking for it, and instead got turned down and told to deal with the worst of it on my own? Sadly, I have had way more instances of this happening than the slightly annoying question of “what do you want us to do for you”.
“Just Ask For Help”
People have always had all kinds of assumptions about me. For a very long time, I cared a lot about how others perceive me, what they thought of me, whether they liked or disliked me. Over the years, though, this has become increasingly more unimportant to me, as now in the prime age of 25 years old, I have a lot of far more crucial things to worry about. But there is still one thing that really bothers me when it comes to all the colorful ideas complete strangers have of me, particularly in online spaces.
They think I have never done anything to fend for myself, or to help myself with the bullying I faced as a Kid.
Marry The Empty
Over the years, I have gotten relatively used to feeling the way I do. I was 17 years old when I was first diagnosed with depression, and 20 years old when I got the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. It has also already been three years since I was diagnosed with BPD, my main diagnosis to this day. Time has gone on, a lot of things have changed – some for the better and some for the worse – and I have grown sort of numb to a lot of it.