Thief

When I first fell ill and had the massive breakdown of 2022, I felt like everything had been taken away from me. That feeling has since persisted, and it is something I find myself thinking about on the regular. Every time I try to talk about it with medical professionals, they tend to argue against me, reminding me of the good that I still have in life. I know their intentions are pure, I know they think that they’re doing is helping me, but in all honesty, I just want someone to listen and truly understand what I mean.

Imagine you have your whole life planned ahead of you: you’re starting your university studies, you have a career path already figured out, and you’re working tirelessly toward that goal, to achieve the dreams you’ve had since you were a little kid. Everything is going great, you’re making progress, until you start to experience symptoms of some type of a depressive episode. Then those symptoms worsen, you find yourself utterly exhausted, not able to complete the course assignments in time. Gradually, you become recluse, you struggle to take care of yourself, meeting up with people is impossible. And finally, you crumble completely under the pressure of the degree you were once super passionate about but are just not quite there for anymore. You watch yourself lose the very thing that you had planned everything around, and you’re forced to sit there and somehow still find it in you to keep going, to wake up to another day.

backpack.

How could that not be absolutely devastating to you?

At the age of 22, my body and mind gave up on me because of everything I had been through up until that point. It wasn’t the university itself that caused the breakdown; it was the final push I needed to tumble down the hill violently. Over a decade’s worth of childhood trauma, untreated mental illnesses, an unhealthy heterosexual relationship as a gay woman, and a traumatic break-up that confirmed to me and my disordered personality that I was always going to be abandoned in the most hurtful way possible because it was the only thing I had ever deserved from anyone… So when university rolled around and pushed me over to the edge, my nervous system collapsed. It had been through too much at that point.

It was a combination of multiple things piling up at the same time, but at the end of the day, there was only one thing that was the true catalyst for this domino effect.

Facing daily abuse at the hands of my peers prevented me from developing a healthy personality. It distorted my psychological development in a way that is not reparable, because you only get one chance at starting out as a freshly new human being. You cannot redo childhood development once it’s over: you can try to fix some of the issues in your adulthood, but at its very core, you will never be able to repair the damage. 

My trauma is the reason why I have no sense of self. My trauma is the reason I was not able to finish my university studies, why I had to give up on the dream of becoming a Finnish teacher. My trauma is the reason why I need to live off of social security funds while desperately trying to find out who the fuck I am in the first place. People my age have done this in their teen years. I am 25, still as lost as I was back then. 

There is this stereotype in bullying representation that has always bothered me. It’s the bully stealing the victim’s backpack or something else of their possession. It is a classic example of a kid taunting their target, teasing, being a piece of shit just because. I find this stereotype particularly aggravating because it usually serves no purpose in the context it appears in, talking about media and fiction for example. There is no real intent behind the act, it means nothing to the perpetrator. Now, don’t get me wrong, this does happen. But it is not the only way in which kids taunt each other by stealing their stuff.

Sometimes, the bully’s intent is to destroy the item they have stolen from you. Their end goal is to take something from you, preferably something of value, and watch your eyes start to well up with tears as they rip and tear into the item, until you are not even able to recognize it for what it was. And for some reason, this is a variation of this extremely common event that does not get the representation it deserves. 

I imagine my selfhood, my identity, career path, and aspirations to be in the backpack that my Friends stole from me. The backpack they then set on fire, and I watched it burn ablaze, sinking down onto my knees as the tears of resentment and unfulfilled promises streamed down my face. They never gave me my backpack back, not even the charred remains. Because it wasn’t enough to just take it and destroy it in front of my eyes, but they had to keep the ashes too. 

And I didn’t even give them the pencil they asked to borrow from me a week earlier.

With longing,

ichigonya