So I have a confession to make! I am the master of blocking things out! I am not claiming that it is good or healthy but simply confessing that this is something I do and have done my entire life. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism to get me through life, but I have come to learn over the past few years that it is not healthy. I have blocked things that have happened to me as a child and things that I have experienced in life. I am also really good at masking my suffering with other things. I am here to say out loud again that…”IT IS NOT HEALTHY!!” I know I have blocked things out because they have been too painful to remember or I have dumbed things down in mind so I can put one foot in front of the other. Now I do agree that you cannot not move forward in life if you are constantly bringing up and re-living the past, but to block it out and never deal with it once and for all, I am telling you is not healthy. Just look at our broken society! There is a mass amount of hurting and suffering people roaming this earth and they are living such defeated lonely lives because of not dealing with their past. The last few years I have been truly blessed to be able to have the scab over my heart completely heal and I hope that after reading this blog it will spark a desire in you to finally deal with what has been keeping you stuck in the mud of life. Well as I promised I would be super transparent with you right? So here we go!
I have a question for you, “Did someone say something super negative to you about you as a child? Or did something really tragic/traumatic happen to you that it has stuck to you so hard that you forget that it is even there. Has it become a part of you? Whatever that is stuck to you, I like to think of it like a super tight turtleneck sweater with tons of holes. Every time you try to put it on, although you think it is keeping you warm, it is choking the life out of you. It is suffocating you! You can barely breath but you insist on wearing the outgrown turtleneck sweater and you keep it around for nostalgia sake, like what you are trying to remember is benefiting you somehow. Or, whatever is restraining you from moving forward is like a backpack unbeknownst to you is full of bricks. You insist that it must go with you everywhere because simply it has been there with you all along and you don’t for one second think you can leave home without it. It has become painfully comfortable to you. You are on the verge of being diagnosed with having a self-defeating personality disorder and the tragedy is that you don’t even know that you are suffering from this.
Another scenario, is that maybe you came out your mother’s womb hating yourself. All you knew your entire life was to constantly have this feeling of darkness, despair, feelings of escapism, suicide, depression and loneliness. You lived your life desiring to end it. You wanted nothing to do with this world because the pain you felt in your heart was so overwhelming that you just wanted to be at peace. You wanted to be at rest. You told yourself numerous times that no one would miss you because how could anyone miss YOU!! You horrible looking, horrible feeling, defeated, sad, miserable piece of flesh! You write about ending your life! You consume your thinking with dying and this to becomes comfortable. You think it is normal for you to feel this way…hopeless, dark and lonely. All of these emotions have led you to contemplate the act of making yourself take one last breath.
Well the latter part of this blog is/ WAS me. I came out of the womb hating myself and not even realizing that I was suffering from extreme insecurity, rejection, suicide and depression. At 7 years old I was quite the poet. The problem was that all of my poetry was about how I didn’t want to live anymore. How I wanted to take my own life and how I felt “utterly alone”, (think Wynona Ryder in Beatle Juice writing at her desk with a black veiled face)- Ha, that was truly me. Now I never wore all black clothing but that is how I felt inside. Black, cold, and lonely! Daily I felt deep down inside that ending my life was the answer. Tormented and tortured I only wanted to escape whatever this I was feeling by either slitting my wrist, hanging myself or taking a pill to get to my peace of heaven. I would think about death or I should I say I was consumed with it.
As I continued for years to write morbid poems about dying, at 11 years of age I tried to slit my wrist with a large kitchen knife. Very unsuccessful Thank God, somewhere deep down inside I knew that ending my life wasn’t right. So I would continue to write, isolate, and put myself in dangerous situations where I thought I could lose my life. Also I was the master at masking everything that was going on internally with a smile. NO one knew what I was suffering from, even when I would try to reach out to my parents or friends at school about what I was feeling but I did it in such a nonchalant way where either people didn’t know what to say and in my mind I took it as they didn’t care about me.
Not thinking rationally (which you don’t at all when you suffer from depression), I was drowning in my own grief! Now I grew up in a nice middle class family on the outside, but the family had seen its share of extreme dysfunction and abuse, but for some reason it didn’t affect me as much as the depression did. It was like I was graced to go through all that I did. I really loved my family despite all the inconsistencies, (remember I blocked a lot of things out), but the depression just outweighed everything else.
As I became a woman depression was like a security blanket to me. It was a snug blanket. I was wrapped so tightly that it was too painful to move but yet eerily comfortable. Depression and suicide had clouded out all rationale thinking and had consumed all of my senses to where I felt like this was how life was supposed to be. My heavy, wrapped too tightly blanket that had blanketed my soul, mind and spirit had me deceived into thinking that it was really secure and safe. My depression was my backpack that I wanted to carry and never put it down. Even if it was just for one second I couldn’t release it. If depression had arms, I would find myself running hard and fast into it hoping that it could and would relieve me of this bitter pit of despair. Backwards right? I ran into the very thing that caused me the greatest pain. Constantly I would ask myself why do I feel the way I do? Why do I hate myself so much? The way I look, walk, talk etc…? I never got the answer I was looking for so I mastered the art of isolation. I held things in so much that a journal could not contain or keep up with what I was going through emotionally and mentally. My backpack of depression that I carried everywhere became more weighed down as I tried to stuff it with things like sex, drugs, alcohol, people pleasing and excessive partying. All of those things deceived me just like the depression did but leaving me even emptier, broken and disillusioned about life and my purpose for being here. I had no identity and had no idea who I was. My thinking was extremely fogged and clouded and I was slowly decaying on the outside as well as the inside. Everything I did to try to self medicate failed me every time. I felt even more inadequate, inept and inferior. Self-medicating only magnified my issues and did not combat my illness but yet enlarged it.
Side bar, before I continue, I wanted to take a moment to explain that this self-hatred, depression, insecurity and suicide I learned, as an adult was a curse.
“A curse? Like someone put a spell on you?”
No, it was a generational curse I had inherited from my family members. A generational curse is a pattern of behavior that has bound your parents or relatives and now you are suffering from the same things. It is a behavior/bondage that if not addressed and changed continues to be passed down from generation to generation. An example would be you seeing generations suffer from alcoholism, molestation, poverty, premature death, depression and suicide. Now I am not at all saying that all people who have suffered depression and thoughts of suicide has inherited it from family members or any other sufferings for that matter. But in my case I have learned as an adult I did, simply because I have seen the same pattern of behavior in my family members. Please hear me, I am by no means blaming them because I am sure they had no idea what they were suffering from could be addressed and healed. Especially in the African American community, we are taught to be strong and deal with whatever life throws at us. It simply is never discussed and I know that so many people are suffering greatly from this and so was I. I was suffering and I had no outlet, no one to talk to and no one that I felt could understand me! I was screaming in my head, “Help Me!”, and my actions in my everyday life were a cry for help as well. I was so broken, but no one cared. I was in so much pain that no one could reach me. As the years went on I became so depressed that I was utterly fed up with myself! One night I had made up in my mind that enough was enough. My heart hurt, my limbs hurt and it took everything in me to put my feet on the floor. This day I decided that I was leaving for good and that no one could stop me, or so I thought!
~To be continued~
The Unveiled Truth 