Shot Into Space
I cried a lot as a child. Up until recently I thought it was just because I was sensitive. Maybe because a kid made a mean comment about me, or I was yelled at, or I had to leave a fun event earlier than the other kids.
“You didn’t cry because you got in trouble,” My dad said when I asked him, “You were just always sad”.
In all my years of therapy, adults kept probing me for key life events that may have caused my inner turmoil. What stimulated my demons to soak up any happiness I possessed like a sponge. What, in fact, are my demons? How did they get there?
I had a list of life events that i’d go through like a well rehearsed monologue, then they would write things down as if I am reading out the lottery numbers and they have to make sure they have the right chemical imbalance formula so they can win that big cash prize: my fathers insurance check. People like me were what was keeping the mental health professions in business. Adolescents with identity crisis and a trauma filled resume that required more than two pages - something no employer likes to see. Then, one day, someone won the prize.
I was sitting in my car coming home from court when my father solemnly announced I was being sent away to California. A nice vacation that costs tens of thousands of dollars and cuts out any communication with the outside world - a sort of mentally toxic community if you will - that is any residential. So I was shot into space, my demons had buckled their seatbelts while constantly undoing mine.
I don’t have the words to describe to you what happened to me there. I could tell you our daily schedule, the basic trauma overview of each resident, I could even tell you what it felt like when the walls were starting to close in on me. But I could not tell you when and how I let 16 years of anger out into the twilight of southern California. I punched the wall until my knuckles bled, I cursed out staff members, I cried, I raged. I was a monster, one that proved very unlikely to ever be more than a ‘crazy and messed up’ kid.
My demons, they followed me. My trauma never left my side. My abusers who were 3,000 miles away kept hitting against me in the hopes I would fall down into the abyss of depression & suicide.
Then, the insurance cut, and I was sent home. I looked at my step father, who I had spent most of my life being mad at, and felt nothing. No anger, no sadness, nothing. I looked at myself in the mirror, and felt ok with who was staring back at me. My demons’ grip got looser as each day passed, my urge to self medicate slowly left, and as the baggage of my chemical imbalance started to fall off, I began to float.
And I won my own lottery.
