ZebraGirl13 Member Profile

...See more Hi, everyone. I'm Zebragirl. ^_^ I'm here because I've always kept to myself, and that is clearly no longer working for me. It's time to try something new. My whole life, I've been the strong one. The one who has it all together. The brave one, the organized one, the one who accomplishes an astonishing number of tasks in a short period of time. The "old soul". My friends are impressed by the lack of drama in my life, and when it crops up in theirs, I'm the one they come to for support. Secretly, all of those accolades sent guilty shards into my heart. Because I let my friends believe what they were saying, I didn't correct them. I wasn't strong, I just ignored the things I couldn't fix and pushed them down into my inner bottle. It's easy to be brave when you're not actually dealing with things. It's easy to be organized because my skin starts crawling when there's clutter and breathing is harder when things are out of place. I get so much done because I cannot sit down and relax when there's so many other things I should be doing. There's no drama in my life because I clinically snipped the ties binding me to the people who caused it. I always considered myself to be different, because I could "choose" to take something upsetting and simply...not think about it. "It's not healthy to bottle things up" didn't apply to me. It seemed like I had an infinite number of bottles, and I didn't have to worry about where to store them. My life was on cruise control, my motto "Get over it and move on to the next thing." I was tough, like the single mother who raised me. Until a month ago, when a Bad Thing happened. It wasn't a huge Thing. It wasn't even a Thing I could report to the police. To someone else, it might not have been remarkable at all. But that Thing was too big for my bottles, and it tried one after another until they were all broken. I spent two weeks in a daze, alternating between numbness, paralyzing anxiety and an inability to stop crying. I felt like hiding every single day, even while home alone.The inside of my head felt like a kalaidascope and I couldn't concentrate on anything. My supervisor noted that I looked upset and took me into her office - I told her everything, ugly-sobbing on the industrial carpet. I am so, so lucky that I work with the people I do. She called HR for me and helped me figure out how to find a therapist who would be covered by our insurance. My first therapy appointment was two days ago. It was just a consultation, so we didn't go very deep. But simply telling her the bullet points of my life helped me realize that I'm not just being a crybaby. I have been mistreated. Not just once, but multiple times by multiple people. "It doesn't matter" is a lie. I've had a couple moments of clarity since then, and I don't think I've been fully alive for a long time. I think I've been disassociating since childhood. Waking up feels like pins and needles in my soul. I still feel like I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but multiple people have told me that's not correct and I've decided to try trusting them. I have three weeks until my next appointment. In this thread I intend to post my experiences from the beginning. Some of them might be story format and some might be letter format, but I'll always put a specific trigger warning in the title if necessary. Maybe it will help me get a new perspective, if I kick these memories out of the shadows and onto a computer screen. Maybe it will help me figure myself out. And maybe someone else will be able to take some comfort from my words. Comments are welcome and appreciated on everything that I post here. Thank you so much for reading. :)

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