I've always been angry and it would seem it was a side effect of the toxicity injected into my childhood. There was no alcoholism, no drugs, no rape or molestation, just emotional and verbal abuse, adultery, physical violence, delusion, and deceit.
I was writing nasty things about myself on my skin as a small child, in pen and permanent marker on my belly and my thighs, places that were covered up and no one could see.
I was cutting myself by age 7 and attempted suicide that same year. I would self inflict my first tattoo by 11, and find cocaine in the year between 11 and 12 which relieved much of the feelings of wanting to do harm to myself.
In fact cocaine gave me reason to live. The ecstasy I received from cocaine delivered me into a whole new world. My parents mattered nil. In fact the money that surrounded the cocaine lifestyle left me needing them very little at all.
By 14, I would be virtually on my own. Hustling, going to school, never sleeping, having sex with men in their 20's... I got a restaurant job when I turned 15 and I had legit income and drug money, I was pulling about 1200 dollars a week. My father was out fucking other women, my mother was working and gone about 15 hours a day. When my father discovered evidence of my lifestyle he would "ground" me, but having little control and no support from the other parent, I would defiantly go on with my life as if there were no rules.
I was always fighting or fucking when I wasn't working or in school. I loved the bad boys and I was sure that I would have my chance with all of them (and I did).
At 15 my childhood best friend's older sister would date the baddest boy of em all. I remember telling my friend I was going to have him. She was shocked when 3 years later I would run away with him. But we will get to that soon enough...
At 17, I graduated high school and my mother paid cash for college, my father was long gone at this point. I would be on the highway to hell with drugs, but arrogantly unaware of the signposts on my journey. My college professor and I had a sexual affair which would destroy his career and inflate my ego. The sordid and reckless tale of my "rock star years" would be told in the chapter affectionately coined, my "world tour".
Baddest Badboy would be nearly 21 when we reunited after 3 years. I think he knew I wanted him, but was cognizant of the fact that I was only 15 at the time. Truth is, at 18, he ruined it for other guys for many years to come, 15 would have been just too damn soon to get his hooks into me.
We had a lot of sex, reckless and unprotected, indoors, outdoors, in public, you name it. I was 18 and really just discovering the dimensions of my own sexuality. Although I had been sexually active for 6 years already, I had never had an orgasm and I didn't even know it. Sex felt good and I loved anything that felt good... but then Ohhhh wow, this is a whole different ballgame now, boy. This bad ass motherfucker knew ALL of the moves, hit ALL of the right spots, and was the oral sex MASTER, and THAT was rare in 1991 among the man boys that I'd been playing with.
We happened to be on a crime spree when we were running all over the damn country and Hawaii, so I couldn't get all soft and deal with the sappy part of being in love with him. I needed to show him I was as badass as he was and make this trip one for the history books.
It was, even 20 years later, he's married to a good woman, I sent him a message saying, "Where were you 20 years ago today?"
His response, "Making unforgettable memories and having the greatest time of my life with you".
We were addicts, caught up in the thrill and the rush and the level in which we were both willing to bring it. It wasn't long before I would wind up in prison, he would be engaged, and we would be no longer. In retrospect, everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to. I needed a wake up call, he would get his a few years later. I came home to get with a guy I had been messing with, that was only interested in showing me affection when drunk.
He knocked me up, we made it official, I had the baby, a little girl. This was my chance to put my past behind me. By my daughter's 5th birthday, I was done with her father, he never had a job or any interest in being a family, he worked for beer and didn't draw a sober breath for the duration of our relationship.
I wasted no time getting down with a co-worker and local musician. He played bass in a classic rock cover band. He was "going through a divorce", so I was there to soothe. He also didn't work, but at least wanted to live with me. He would also want to control me and scream at me and beat me. I began to abuse anxiety and pain medication. There were numerous emergency room trips with broken ribs, a sprained wrist, a broken collar bone, and sprained neck, combined with 3 moves in 3 years due to landlord involvement of our domestic issues.
The last apartment had a back door where I would narrowly escape with my daughter under my arm and drive her to my (now retired) mother's house. In the grand scheme this would be a disastrous choice, however the lesser of two evils nonetheless. I did not have the emotional stability to get rid of this madman AND heal from my wounds while raising a kid alone.
I returned to a nightmare beating, and days later the relationship would end with me in a hospital being treated for a broken jaw and he locked up behind bars. Once again everything happened exactly the way it needed to, as he was still married, was never going through a divorce, instead was going to court for beating his wife.
Another signpost I was unable to recognize, that I was pulling this chaos into my life because didn't know how to cope with my own emotional trauma from childhood.
At my emotional rock bottom with no coping skills, no family support, ashamed and embarrassed, a friend came to bail me out of financial ruin by taking over my daughter's room and paying my rent and back utility bills. He was a platonic friend, and a life saver. 15 years my senior, he treated me like a kid sister. But he was an addict too, and not hard to manipulate into bringing home my first and only true love, cocaine.
Reunited with coke, after almost a decade, I had found inner comfort at last. Cocaine brought out the funny side of me, my sense of humor was sick and twisted, I couldn't produce a tear to cry if I had wanted to, I was never shy, I could always make a friend in any setting. Guys loved me, girls loved me, and I was hyper-sexual to begin with. My life felt continuously positive. My career was beginning to catapult, I was a young 30, and vibrant, I was eager to succeed.
Like everything I ever loved, cocaine would betray me. What used to bring me out into the spotlight was pulling me in and keeping me at home more. What I used to look forward to in the evening, I now needed to get out of bed. All that I wanted so badly, I couldn't care in the least about. Fear and paranoia began to overshadow my confidence and self assured appearance. Soon, I would find myself in the depths of my addiction's depravity, barricaded in a bathroom, crawling on the floor, hallucinating, and still wanting more.
In a moment of clarity, I got up can called for help, cocaine wasn't working anymore, the isolation was too loud for me to stand as the only thing for me to hear was the noise in my own head. My mind wanted me dead and for that moment at least, I wasn't wanting to die.
After 90 days of rigorous honesty (as much as one can muster having been clean for the first time in years with no ability to reflect or relate) I was suddenly 7 years old again. Writing horrible things on my body, cutting myself, confused, depressed, terrified, unable to trust or be trusted... homicidal, suicidal again. I would check myself into a hospital and find that I require the safety net of a structured environment. Yet more than a few days of structure and routine only serve to antagonize my psychosis. I've yet to learn how to allow redundancy to penetrate my life without breaking out into a rage.
I deliberately removed anything routine or planned out from my life. I take a different route to work every day, I listen to a different radio station or genre of music altogether. Even the repetitive sound of fire or burglar alarms, car alarms, police or emergency sirens can set me off. I HATE techno music or anything with the same beat pattern or melody that goes on for more than 4 bars at a time. Certain tones, like those which mimic my mother's condescending voice, go right through me. Patterns annoy me, visual and audio, yet I am a whiz at identifying patterns and making proactive analysis from them. Trends annoy me: douchey boys with faux-hawks and white framed sunglasses, sporting Ed Hardy clothing walking around looking like catalog cut outs from a Jersey Shore photo shoot made me want to kick babies. I've learned to let the things that annoy me go, as they aren't going to cease until they've run their course.
I will have to deal with my intolerance of things. I will have to deal with my emotional pain. I will have to face the truth about it all eventually, a day at a time. Things will happen the way they are supposed to, and there will be signposts that I miss, and there will be things that I defiantly cling to or discard altogether. When the pain is great enough, I will buckle down and do the next right thing. Or I won't and I will write more self loathing angry pieces like this one. Because 7 years after the devastating emotional realization that got me to stay clean, I am here AGAIN...
After having rebuilt a portion of my life with the help of DBT therapy, some 12 step programs, and a high degree of internal fortitude dropped into whatever situations which I would find myself lacking faith in.
Today I AM finding friends, I'm having fun, things are good, and then there is guilt, so I'm pulling myself inward again, isolating, feeding my fear, overwhelmed by the noise of my own thoughts, drinking, dreaming of cocaine, knowing it's not something I can do in safety, knowing it's a big lie, wanting to cut myself, hurt myself, kill myself.
I can't live this way, I can't fathom or accept being "broken" like this forever, I don't want to take their pills or be adjudicated a mental defective, I don't want to live among some fucking clan of anonymous rejects. I work really hard toward creating a better life for myself. I just want to be free, I want to succeed, and I want to be loved, is that too fucking much to ask for?
