My Story

I was born into a happy home with basically no issues; three younger siblings and two wonderful parents…skip forward to when I was about 10-12 and somehow I ended up with depression and an anxiety disorder. I don’t know how or why I ended up at that point; I really hadn’t known any hardship growing up, no intense story about a broken home or life threatening childhood illness. Nothing like that. 

(That was my biggest issue ^) 

At the tender age of 12 I found myself with a huge crush on a boy with a broken past and the best smile I’d ever seen. I believe I spent the entirety of grade 6 and 7 trying to get this boy to notice me. Mind you, this was all pre my knowing what make-up, sex or anything beyond holding hands was but I was creative, I would pretend to get injuries just in hopes that it'd catch his attention, maybe make him worry a little. And I gotta tell ya…it worked like a charm, shortly after my 13th birthday we started dating. In no time at all, he became my whole world (if he wasn’t already) and it was awesome, he called me beautiful, so we dated for over a year. You see, this is the age where girls start to figure out who they think they are, wrestle with self-esteem issues and begin to grow into the person they’ll eventually become; I didn’t do any of that. I “figured out” that I wanted to be this 16 year old’s wife…I didn’t need to build self-esteem because he supplied it for me…and all the growing I did was growing attached to an increasingly negative relationship.

There was a lot wrong with all that played out in that year but it did eventually end. I was left with no attention, nobody who made me feel needed or beautiful and no more emotional maturity at 15 than I had at 12. I proceeded to do what anyone would in that situation, fill the void with anything available and in this case, that turned out to be more boys. Boys became an addiction for me and while I realize how overdramatic it sounds, I’m entirely serious. By 17 I’d had 7 relationships (meaning that we called each other boyfriends and girlfriend) and many other “things” where essentially I just took any bit of attention anyone was willing to give me. I was miserable.

Grade 10 rolled around and I went away. I went on a trip to France; one of the most beautiful countries in the world. This is where self harm became a real issue in my life. I was away from my family, my support network, my friends and was dropped into a situation where nobody knew me, I could barely understand what was being said and I was apart from any romantic attention I knew how to acquire. Add that to an already existing predisposition for emotional self-harm (i.e. falling for someone, getting very attached and then sabotaging it over and over again), friends who had talked about cutting to cope frequently, plus undiagnosed depression and you get a very bad outcome. I was lost and the worst part is that for the moment, it made me feel the tiniest bit better. I was scared out of my pants to tell my family and friends what I’d done. What’s one of the biggest fears anyone has when they have to tell people about their mental illness/ self harm? That those people will pull away, will not want anything to do with you anymore. I lost my two best friends at the time. 

I was so unhappy with myself, my world and everything that I felt was happening to me that I couldn’t function at all. I had maintained no strong relationships with any girls in my life, largely because it was all about who the next guy was and so, while I had friends, I never made them priority. However, after France, I had my first reality check…I found myself with a male friend who didn’t have any romantic interest in me. He was wonderful, good looking, funny as anything and unbelievably smart- practically perfect in every way- and had no interest in dating me. This was revolutionary to me and I am proud to say he’s still my best friend. For lack of a better term, getting close with him was my “Ah-Ha” moment, that is to say that I found out boys could be just my friends. I was worth being just friends with. 

I had learned a fair number of lessons at this point via those relationships though. 

I deserve to be treated well by men.

I don’t need a boy to tell me I’m pretty.

A relationship can’t be built on or aided by lies.

Even so, I still had a long way to go in terms of self-esteem and self-care. I had to learn that being excessively needy wasn’t going to get me very far in real life…twice…plus a few. I had to be dumped and rejected in order to eventually learn that I didn’t need to try and change to be enough. I learned that wallowing all the time wasn’t going to make people want to hang out with me and that I couldn’t expect others to deal with my issues for me. One of the most challenging lessons was having to see that my expectations of people were always way too high, I needed to accept my friends for who they are or decide not to have them around anymore because asking them to change was unreasonable and unfair. That’s just to name a few and every single one of them I’ve had to relearn over and over again.

Then there’s the other kind of lessons I needed to address. I needed to stop hurting myself to cope with the stress and darkness that like brings sometimes; to stop letting the darkness own me. I had to figure out how to communicate with my parents about my illness and what appropriate things to share are. In order to figure that out I first had to get diagnosed and into therapy. I went to see my doctor and was told that I had mild to severe depression and was given a bottle of Prozac to get me started before I found a therapist. This process quickened after I got tired of waiting for the measly 10mgs to kick-in and decided to try and medicate myself into happiness and I found myself in the ER being called “the OD”. 

I can’t say that I got into therapy and then it was all good and I sorted through all my issues. That’s not how it happened, I struggled a lot. At one point I had 4 separate health care professionals trying to sort out my brain, one of which was a family therapist that I attended with my parents. While seeing a therapist with my parents may well have been one of the most frustrating and bothersome experiences of my life, it was also one of the most helpful. I can’t say my relationship with my parents would be anywhere near what it is today without that experience, without learning how to communicate with one another. There was tears, gnashing of teeth and many silent car rides home and we all hated it but not only did it teach me how to express how I was feeling, it taught my parents how to ask and how to address issues with me that wouldn’t immediately send me into “f-this” mode. 

I wrapped up high school (which, by the way, I spent 9 years loathing) with running a mental health support group. I was still eating lunch by myself and still not great at being friends with women. However, it wasn’t because I hated everyone and thought the world was out to get me, as it had been in previous years, it was because I knew that I wasn’t my best self when I was eating lunch and gossiping with others. The support group was brought about by one of the most important realizations of my life…I was not alone. I had been in assembly one day sitting with girls in my house (like in Harry Potter) and somehow the topic of medication came up. Turns out one of the girls that I thought was just so cool and put together, had been on Prozac too and had a similar diagnosis to me. I slowly started opening up to people about what was going on in my life and in no time at all I found out that 25% of my high school also identified as having a mental illness.

I had a few more relationships in that time and learned a few more lessons too, such as:

I am not actually a qualified therapist and can’t behave as though I am.

It’s ok to say “I’m sorry, I just can’t handle this right now.”

 I can’t control how other people act but I can choose how I react.

Then I developed this, The War Paint, my greatest accomplishment. I cannot believe how this has impacted my life. Through founding this, I have made some wonderful friends, I have learned a lot about myself and those around me. I started it just as a place to collect my works on mental illness, then it became a way for other to know that they aren't alone, and just kept evolving from there. Personally, it now is a show of how truly not alone I am and that people really do care what I have to say, what I think.

Now, I go to university and live on residence. I am learning how to, effectively, be an adult. I am working on not making excuses for myself but rather dealing with whatever is going on in a (more, if not totally) rational way. Living away from home has not been easy but has certainly been an educational and beneficial process. I have been completely clean from self-harm of any kind; that’s not to say that I’ve been happy all the time or am no longer depressed, I have just found and am regularly using alternative methods of coping. 

In the last week a friend of mine, who was my age, passed away. I am not good with heavy emotion, let alone dealing with death. Back in 2010 6 people died in my life and in that timespan I entirely shut down went it comes to grieving, I didn’t even attend most of those funerals or any since then. So, when I went to her’s last Saturday, I broke down. I don’t know if it’s because I was already emotionally drained from the last few months prior to that or what but I found myself crying in public…which is one thing I generally refuse to do all together. You know when you start crying about one thing but then it turns into crying about everything? That happened to me, I ended up not only grieving this wonderful spark of light in my life, but 2 other young people I knew who passed away in 2012 and 2013. Now, it’s Christmas time and while I’m still mourning those people, I have never felt quite so…normal? At peace? Something like that, because I finally allowed myself to feel those incredibly dark and upsetting things I had bottled up. I am feeling them, accepting them, and will finally be able to let them go.

I go by many titles; Olive, Nashipai, Yaya, Sparkles, etc. and those are all a parts of me; I am still depressed, I still have anxiety and those are parts of me, too. None of those terms define me entirely though, I am a collection of all those things, not just one. 

This has been story time with Riley. Merry Christmas/ Happy Holidays :)