I sleep with a CPAP machine. Sleep apnea runs in my family, but was probably brought on earlier in life for me due to the medications I have to take to survive my day-to-day with PTSD. Sleeping without the CPAP is like not sleeping- it takes time, but it isn’t restorative. The problem is, I’ve been having a ton of somatic 🤬 going on. If I lie down when I’m not at the point of just instantly passing out from exhaustion, I feel like I’m being pinned down. I vividly remember my tiny child voice screaming in absolute terror, which just encouraged my father to beat me even more because he took it as defiance. I think my dad probably had considerably less emotional control than most people in his social group, but he also was under immense social pressure from that community to be sure to “spank” once a day at the bare minimum (which he often greatly exceeded).
Which, as an aside, their definition of spanking seemed to differ considerably from the mainstream’s. I’m not really sure what the line was that they would have had to have crossed for their behavior to no longer qualify as spanking. Like, would they have gone too far if I’d broken a bone? But there were kids who later described full-on sexual assault on a regular basis and the church dismissed that because the perpetrator used keyword “spanking.” So pinning me to the ground such that it still haunts me at age 35 probably would have been totally acceptable.
Anyway, Dad needed to get his quota, and so he usually went for for one of two justifications. Sometimes, I had honestly not known about the rule I had broken until I broke it. I screamed that I didn’t remember I wasn’t supposed to do that, and the reply was, “Well this will help you remember!” Or, alternatively, the infraction had been an unforseen consequence of something I had done. So say I did X without even thinking and that led to a chain reaction that ostensibly was the reason something fell and broke. I would scream, “But I didn’t try to!” and the reply was, “Well you didn’t try not to!”
The fact that I literally never was doing something that I knew I would be “spanked” for if somebody found out, has caused a ton of issues as an adult when someone is angry, and they believe I should have had prior knowledge that they were going to be angry. Also, the “you didn’t try not to” situation is probably part of what has me in a freeze response most of the time. It’s obviously impossible to think of everything bad that could potentially result from the most minor actions I take in a day. So I’m usually frozen stiff, or just lying on my bed rocking violently. Alternatively, I stare off into the void or spend hours wasting time on YouTube so I don’t have to think or feel. Of course I beat myself up afterwards for not spending the time cooking or cleaning or whatever.
PTSD symptoms have always peaked this time of year, but this year they’re off the rails, partially as we near the anniversary of when I was detained at HBM in Worcester. I honestly don’t want to still be traumatized by that, and I think it’s unfair that I even have to state as much directly. But I’m too “symptomatic” to get EMDR, which seems like the only shot I have to actually help my symptoms, so I’m caught in an infinite catch-22 as my life slips away. In the meantime, instead of EMDR, I get, “Why would you give them so much power over you?” Like as though I’m choosing to have flashbacks 24/7. Not for nothing, the fact that the HBM trauma took place in what was legally considered a “hospital” obviously makes it massively more difficult to get help.
So, I was wasting time on YouTube and got to watching “Extreme Cheapskates.” For example, I watched this one:
…and commented:
Which, I know I was planning on reducing screen time. The main challenge right now is that screen time is uniquely able to hold my attention so I’m not re-living trauma. Like, I can be on YouTube. Alternatively, I can be on the floor with my back to a wall looking up at my dad raging completely out of control and about to seize me. Or tearing up on the phone in the day room at HBM, trying to be quiet so nothing I said would be overheard by “staff.” I don’t even get the courtesy of being able to call these “flashbacks;” they’re “intrusive memories,” as though it’s my fault for not using CopingSkills™️. Which, it’s not like I haven’t been begging for individual suggestions of CopingSkills™️. The best they can give me is that I’m supposed to just basically think about something else when I’m over here f🤬-ing re-living the experience.
Anyway, so I was watching the show, and my parents would have qualified to be on it, at least in some ways. All of our clothes were hand-me-downs from other church members, who probably were quietly worried about us. I didn’t have consistent access to non-spoiled food, safe water, medical care, or really most of the things that are usually available to children of middle-class parents.
The situation was exacerbated by my being homeschooled, because I didn’t get the public education that would have been taxpayer-funded by a society that valued my existence. I remember begging for DVDs for learning Spanish, and my mother would have none of it. But she was fine buying an expensive early version of a GPS for about the same amount of money. So I got a pile of textbooks, which Mom bought on ebay with the corners chopped off. People think that because school is imperfect, I “probably learned more being taught at home.” Like, I’ve worked in schools, did you see my home? I most assuredly was not “taught.” I just spent all day completely alone, trying to decipher textbooks that were never designed to be read without an instructor, and the only thing I really got out of it was it destroyed my love for reading. Now I buy books that I don’t read, but when I was younger I read for fun all the time.
One major issue is that I don’t fit in with people who grew up middle-class, because I can’t relate to most of their experiences. However, a ton of my providers (including everyone working at the group home) have been from various countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Which, I’ve been told directly by people who moved here from Africa and worked in mental health, that I was super spoiled for saying I had trauma because I was white and grew up in North America. And of course I feel bad. The thing is, it’s not like I ended up in these facilities randomly. The average white North American does not end up institutionalized in programs funded by the state, with absolutely no family involvement whatsoever. So, as much as I don’t want to diminish the pain of growing up in poverty (regardless of where you live), it’s a really unique experience to effectively grow up in poverty when your parents/guardians were not living in poverty. People go through all kinds of things, their parents die, etc. I’m not saying that my situation was “worse.” I’m just saying my trauma was different so my current symptoms are different. Because instead of having people trying so hard to take care of me when we were all starving, I had parents who could have taken care of me and chose not to.
Which, that was where I finally figured out why I have this extremely intense core belief that my life is not worth the resources required to sustain it. I remember being sectioned to an actual hospital (not HBM, thank God) and crying that if they admitted me, Medicare would have to pay for it, and my life wasn’t worth that money to taxpayers. I was deadass. I was so serious that I kept repeating this for probably a week, and even tried to independently look up how much it costs to clean up a deer carcass if it got hit by a car and was rotting by the road. My thought wasn’t that I was going to be roadkill, but just that if I jumped off a bridge, cleaning up my body would cost roughly the same as disposing of a deer. This went on despite innumerable people’s best efforts, until a legendary senior social worker told me that disposing of a human costs more than disposing of a deer, because there would have to be a police investigation.
I’ve been doing my best, but it’s still not easy. I was sitting on the bus yesterday on my way home from work, thinking about how much insurance had to pay for my monthly medications alone. Clearly, my life costs more dollars than I am able to earn. Which, honestly, a lot of that is because my work is undervalued compared to that of people who had an easier start in life. It’s not that I’m not working as hard; it’s that I’m working while managing a “disability,” without the same ability to rely on other people for help (because I never had opportunity to do that during my formative years). There’s no such thing as a “self-made person,” unless you were literally dropped in the wilderness as an infant. Even Mowgli technically relied on others (albeit they were forest creatures). People exist in a society, so most of us don’t build our own houses and grow our own food. (If we do, on whose land?) I’m ironically closer to a self-made person than anyone I know, since I essentially educated myself and have survived by myself with limited help from other people. Yet, my same father–who chose not to spend any money on his daughter–is also a Republican. So he thinks I’m essentially a welfare queen because in order to survive with almost no parental support, I’ve had to rely on government services such as social security, Medicare, food stamps, subsidized housing, etc. And I’ve dealt with a ton of suicidal ideation for that over the years. I don’t think I totally ever put together in my mind that many people who don’t rely on these services have financial support from their parents, at least as adolescents and often into their 20s. All this time, Republican ideology has been a huge “trigger,” and I’ve felt like the moral requirement before me was to commit suicide, because that was what the broader society wanted, and it was wrong for me to continue existing when I wasn’t able to earn the money required to sustain my life.
So, I mean, it’s not like I’m fine, but I guess I figured out where this core belief comes from? Like when I figured out that maybe suicidal ideation came from when I was nine or ten years old and my mother literally told me what suicide was and suggested it to me. That’s not fully solved, either. On the one hand, it was an epiphany that it didn’t start with me. On the other hand, I have this irrational fundamental drive to appease my mother. So when I figured out that she actually always wanted me to kill myself, it took away the “protective factor” of not wanting to hurt her.
So, I mean, I’m probably not going to immediately stop feeling the constant need to justify my right not to kill myself. I don’t know how long it will take to address the core fear that someone is going to jump out and attack me because they’re angry that I haven’t killed myself because I’m too expensive. I really wish they’d let me get EMDR instead of expecting me to magically get better so they can do EMDR. All I can say is that living with the intense belief that the vast majority of people want me to just kill myself already, is really exhausting and fundamentally sucks.
While I’m on this blog, I’ve been following these YouTubers because they seem so deeply wholesome (in contrast to my life). They’re a couple and they post videos about their life, kind of like a zillion other channels. But I like watching them. It’s actually a trio because one of them is blind so they have a guide dog. So kind of a different take on the standard YouTube family?
So, Matthew just posted this:
Something that’s hard is that I’ve always dreamed of being the hero like this, and saving my siblings. So my inner self is like, “I don’t know what I was doing wrong.” At the end of the day, my siblings chose to identify with the aggressors. It just hurts to see stories that initially look like mine, but the siblings ultimately came around, especially since I’m still in the stage of learning to accept that it’s unlikely mine ever will. With my parents, I came crawling back to them I-don’t-know-how-many times before I finally got it. Meanwhile, one year for Christmas I sent my niece a blanket that said, “My auntie love love loves me!” I was told she slept with it every night. But other than that, I’m banned from communicating. I’m pretty sure they’re not accepting Christmas gifts anymore because in 2024 they kept “forgetting” to give the kids my gifts and in March I gave up and stopped asking. It would be easier to give up on my siblings, if that didn’t also mean accepting that they have a quiverful of children growing up in that dynamic. They probably think their blanket was a lie. I think my mother is nice to them because I heard she buys them organic strawberries. So maybe they’ll be okay. Seems like my mother is able to (at least pretend to) love just about everyone except me.
