My story: 1998 – 2015

This is my whole story.

Shortened, cuz otherwise this would take ages.

I’m not really sure why I’m writing it down. I just thought it would maybe help me to figure out some shit in my life when I remember what actually happened. I think it will give me a chance to say goodbye to my past and finally move on. I think it’ll make me able to just consider it as a story that’s told and over.

It all started in 1998 when I was born. My parents wanted a kid, so they got one, perfect little family, we even had a dog and a cat. Everything was perfect and got even better when my sister was born a few months before my fourth birthday. Since then, she had always been the most important person in my life until I got pregnant in 2015.We moved right after her birth and again when I was done with the kindergarten and again when I was about eight years old. My mom is never really happy anywhere, so she loves to move. At that point of time, the cat was long gone and we had two dogs instead and even got two guinea pigs, but they died already after two years because of some illness. We even had a horse later.

On the outside, our family always seemed perfect, but never was.

Hell started when I had just finished elementary school. My father suddenly seemed to realize I was not the daughter he wanted. Since the day he noticed that, he’s never been satisfied with who I am. I will never be good enough for him.

He started to criticize everything I did or said and no matter how good my grades were, they weren’t good enough, no matter how pretty I was, I wasn’t pretty enough, no matter how thin I was, I was never thin enough, no matter how strong I was, I was never strong enough and so on. I assume you got my point.

But something else changed about him too.

His short temper first came up. He suddenly turned into a narcissistic, irascible, aggressive, impulsive, unrestrained, rampant, unbridled, violent person and he’s been like that ever since. Today I still can’t believe how my mother could marry such a person without noticing who he’d actually always been cuz I doubt he just suddenly turned into that person when I was a kid for no reason. He must have had always been like that. I don’t know why, but I assume something went terribly wrong in his childhood, but the only thing I know about that is that his mom never really gave a shit about him. Is that a possible reason for full time irascibility? He should really talk to a professional about that.

I think the thing that I’ve always hated the most about my father is not the fact that everything was always my fault, but that he always acted like we were the perfect family in front of the whole world. He was lying to me and to my mom and my sister and most of all to himself by creating this illusion. Sadly he was even able to keep it until his perfect little daughter finally fell apart when she was twelve years old and had to go to therapy for the first time. When I was ten, I already started to lose my mind, but was able to keep it all to myself for two whole years.

The first illness that came up in my today very crazy mind was my eating disorder.

I was ten and much different than the other kids at my age. I was much more mature and looked and acted like I was years older than them. I spent my time with completely different things and they were all too childish for me. Of course you can’t already be in puberty as a ten years old, but I acted like I was.

Not only I did that, my best friend too. At that point of time, we were like sisters. She actually looked like my twin while my real little sister even had a different hair color.

We did everything together, so when her big sister started to diet and she did it too, of course I also did it. She told me about all the teen shit with boys and weight loss and size zero and whatever and because I was a naive kid, I agreed with everything and suddenly, weight loss seemed to be the solution for all my problems.

Just some pounds and everything would be better! My father would finally appreciate me, I’d be popular at the new school, pretty, perfect, whatever.

And most important: my dad would finally be proud. That was all I had ever wanted him to be. The diet was the solution for everything.

But if it would have been only a diet, I wouldn’t write my story down right now.

It started slowly. No candy, low carb, all the typical stuff. But it wasn’t enough.

And I wasn’t strong enough. I lost some pounds, but right after my eleventh birthday, I lost the control too. And again my best friend had the solution for all of problems.

She had heard that all the models purged when they had eaten too much.

Wasn’t that an awesome idea? We could eat whatever we desired and were still gonna lose weight! The perfect plan! Okay, at the beginning, this plan completely disgusted me and I never wanted to do that. But then, when I had again a huge pack of ice cream with cookie crumbles, I changed my mind and threw up my food for the very first time in my life. Of course it was disgusting, but also so incredibly easy! 

I was really surprised how good it worked, so I decided it to become my backup plan whenever I’d screw up with the diet. Yeah, everything worked out just the way I wanted it to and I was doing fine and no one noticed anything. 

Of course thinking that was fucking stupid. Nothing was fine.

I started to destroy myself without even realizing it.

At the beginning, I purged once a week, but I did it more and more often until I did it every day. Then my bestie realized what I was doing and she said we would never throw up again because she suddenly seemed to get how bad this idea had always been. I didn’t understand her, but because we were best friends, I promised her to stop. She even did it. For her, it was always just a diet, just a part of pre-puberty.

For me it was so much more. I didn’t even realize I had become addicted to my eating (or not eating) habits, I just didn’t want to stop it, so I started to hide it.

I didn’t even know eating disorders existed. For me, it was just my little secret, my way to acceptance and the perfection I was craving for. The eating disorder started to run in phases. Every phase lasted a few weeks. There were basically two types: starving and binging (and purging of course). For some weeks, I dieted extremely, then I lost control and binged every day, but because I couldn’t live with the thought of having all the food inside my body, I vomited again. 

That was my eating disorder, bulimia and anorexia in phases. Sometimes I even starved for some months, but never much longer. I only managed it to have extreme underweight once in my life and honestly, I’m actually proud of it.

My little secret had become such an important part of my life that I couldn’t imagine living without it anymore. But I also started to realize how wrong it was.

I had expected perfection and acceptance, but the opposite happened.

With every minute of my life, the hate I felt for my body became more and more intense. Instead of a thin perfect body I was living in a nightmare and I didn’t know what to do anymore. My whole ‘perfect’ plan was completely falling apart and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I was all alone with my problems.

My mood started to get worse every day and I became depressed.

I started to hate my eating disorder, but couldn’t live without it neither.

And because my father had always thought me everything was always my fault, that was the answer to my problems again that time. It was all my fault.

I hated myself even more. Puberty actually started and I got small boobies and hips and a taille and all this shit and I had no idea how to deal with all the shit.

I just wanted it to be gone. To me, there was nothing feminine and mature about it, it was just disgusting fat I had to get rid of. My mood was getting worse every fucking day. Everything suddenly seemed to be so cold, dark, colorless and senseless.

I started to wonder about my life’s sense and the whole world’s sense and all that stuff and didn’t seem to find any answers. I was acting weird and being moody and didn’t know how to handle myself anymore.

I started to think about suicide because I just didn’t know what to do.

Nothing made sense. I hated life, myself, school, everyone.

When I was twelve, I started to plan my death, shortly after I had found new friends. Friends I loved more than my family at that point of time, but who actually weren’t friends. They didn’t just have a bad influence on me, one of them destroyed a part of me that could never be repaired again. He took my virginity when I was drunk for one of the first times in my life against my will, but I couldn’t defend myself because of all the alcohol. He thought I wouldn’t even really realize what we was doing down there because I was already basically half in coma, but he was so damn wrong. 

I realized everything. My skin felt like it was burning even months afterwards. I started to cut myself because I couldn’t live inside my raped body anymore.

Three months after my 13th birthday, I tried to commit suicide for the very first time.

I had been an outcast at school for a few months until that point of time because I had developed an extreme social anxiety. 

Of course I didn’t die (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this) and was instead sent to a closed psychiatric. A fucking madhouse, an asylum. The weirdest thing about my time there is that I met the best friend I had ever had before or would ever have afterwards in my life. Her name was Leo and from the first time that we talked we spent all our time in the nuthouse together. Until today she is the only person I’ve ever told everything about me. Isn’t that creepy? I mean, I didn’t even know her. I actually had social anxiety, the doctors even called it a phobia which it actually wasn’t (at least in my opinion). But with her, it was so much different. I still believe we were sort of connected. Our souls, you know. Sounds psychic and stupid, but I still feel like that.

We were both released from custody some time later and stayed in touch every day afterwards until I took a flight to Spain for a vacation with my mom and sister about a month later. During my time in the hospital, my mom had finally thrown my dad out and now she wanted to reunion our family. But this vacation would only make everything worse. 

Before I left, Leo and I promised each other to stay strong and not harm ourselves for that whole week. I really wanted to do this recovery thing with her and I thought she wanted it to. But I was wrong. A friend of mine and hers called me a few days later.

Leo had taken a hundred pills two days before. She’d been in coma for about 48 hours until… Until her heart just stopped beating. My hands were shaking so heavily that I let the phone fall. I couldn’t breathe. For some hours, I couldn’t react to that news flash.

I didn’t talk, grief, cry, laugh or do anything else at all. I couldn’t. I didn’t believe it was real. When everyone was sleeping, I got up again and went outside. 

The moon was sparkling on the pool’s water surface and made me realize what was happening: Leo was dead.

I cried the whole night. And every night afterwards for about a week. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. 

Losing Leo caused my biggest relapse ever. I got to know about her death at the beginning of September in 2012 and in the end of the same month, I took a drug overdose to kill myself. I failed again. They almost lost me in the emergency room, but only almost. They called my survival a miracle, I called it misfortune. 

Y’all know what happened then: psychiatric. Again. Closed until the middle of October and open until the end of January. The difference? You’re allowed to smoke and leave the property together with other patients for 15 minutes per day. 

I actually thought it helped me, but it didn’t. Psychiatric hospitals never help. All they do is lock you up and keep you busy to not make you think about your problems. And sometimes they talk to you to make you believe they care about you- which they clearly don’t. I’ve never met someone with real massive mental problems who recovered in such an institution. But I believed those bitches and left thinking everything was gonna be fine. We moved again and you wanna know what happened at the new school? I was the fucking outcast. The weirdo. The one everyone stared at. From the very first day on. I could stand their insults for almost two months every day until I needed something to relief me from the pressure inside. 

I bought some new razor blades and cut deeper daily- at school. In the rest room. Today the scars are still clearly visible because they were so extremely deep. I’m still ashamed of them cuz I’ve never met a self harmer with such deep cuts. 

Once I blacked out in the rest room because I had cut too deep and almost missed a whole class. My bruised legs were shaking that whole day and it wasn’t the last time.

When summer came, I was underweight and of course starved to lose even more pounds until I started to have black outs when I was running. 

Then even my knees were scarred because of all the shitty stumbling.

It was June and I was always cold, but even though I was more desperate than ever, I was proud because my ribs were clearly visible when I looked in the mirror.

But then my mom stopped everything when she saw my cuts one day and sent me back to the open psychiatric in July. Of course it helped me as much as it had before, but at least this time my mom realized that. But the solution she and my therapist had was nothing but bullshit. 

I had to move into a dormitory for teens with mental illnesses. Worst. Place. Ever. They didn’t give a shit about any of the teens there.

I got worse every day and nobody cared as long as I kept going to school.

It went so far that I had to go to a hospital because of cardiac arrhythmias. I had a normal weight, but my body was more fucked up than ever before because I purged ten times per day. So I stayed in there until they had given me enough infusions and injections so my heart would work normal enough so I could like without any risks in my beautiful dormitory. Sorry, but I can’t be objective when it comes to that place.

And it was not nearly as easy as I had thought to get out of there again.

A few days later, I had to go back to the emergency room because I had massively overestimated my body. The doctors in the hospitals had let me go home after they had given me the infusions, so I thought it would be okay to go party with some friends and get drunk, but thinking that was not so smart. My body completely broke down and I had an alcohol intoxication and of course everyone said it was my fault because of my own stupidity and ineptitude. Which was not true because it was my body’s fault and not mine. How was I supposed to know my heart wouldn’t be able to take some whisky? I was 14 years old.

But it was my fault. As always. 

At least that mistake helped me to get out of that place in January 2014 and I was allowed to move home if I would go back to a mental hospital in February.

So I did, but that time I wanted to be the one to choose the institution because the ones other people had chosen before had always turned out as bullshit.

I chose a special ward in a psychosomatic hospital for teenagers and young adults with eating disorders and depression and it was the very first one that really helped me in my life because they have real therapies there and don’t just keep you busy and lock you up. I stayed there until July and when I left, I definitely hadn’t recovered yet, but I was already much better and had even stopped thinking about suicide.

The rest of 2014 was just a bunch of weird ups and downs, but I made it through somehow. I went through days when everything was fine and I was happy and satisfied and sometimes I woke up in the morning and wanted to die. The worst relapse hit me in January 2015 and that time, I couldn’t get out of the shit on my own. All the great skills couldn’t help anymore, so I had to go back to the closed nuthouse for three days to save me from myself. Afterwards I decided I was not ready to live at home yet, so I applied for the psychosomatic clinic again.

Before I got there, something else happened that would change my life forever: I got pregnant. I thought about an abortion first, but knew I could never do that, so I wanted to keep my baby and started to change something about my life. I stopped smoking, eliminated all the eating disorder habits from my daily life, lived healthy and didn’t even take a sip of alcohol. I wanted to be a good mother for my child.

I considered it was a chance for me to change, start fresh, be someone new. 

The stay in the clinic should be the last one ever. I wanted to say goodbye to the sick life, wanted to show Leo there was another way.

I think my child is my cure even though it’s not even born yet cuz I’m still pregnant.

Jamie will be the center of my life and he or she (I don’t know the gender yet) will be my start into a normal, healthy life. A life as a loving mother and not a crazy weirdo.

I will be able to give my child the life it deserves even though nobody believes I’ll be capable of that. I will prove them all wrong.