My Story (part 1)

(trigger warning for SH/SI and Grief and Loss)

Of course I am going to post a second post right after my first but even though I am starting fresh with a new blog I want to share some of my story and a little bit about me, not that anyone will ever read this.

I was born and raised in Southern California. My family is religious to a fault, Christian to be specific. I grew up going to church twice a day on Sundays. I attended a Christian school. I did not know anything else existed to tell the truth, I did not know it was possible to not be a Christian.

I grew up with basically two separate friend groups, my school/church friends (with a TON of overlap) and my neighborhood friends. It hit junior high and a close neighborhood friend of mine started doing things that really confused me, she was doing drugs and having sex. I tried to talk to my mom about it but my mom did not want to believe that it was true, she basically told me that my friend was lying to me and to just go to my room and go to bed. By the end of 8th grade my neighborhood friend was addicted to crystal meth. To this day I do not have a close relationship with my mom. My life, as it tends to do, went on and I graduated 8th grade and moved to the high school campus (another location, but the same school).

In my freshman year I met this amazing girl named Paige. I saw her at school and she was wearing orange converse with her uniforms, she had this funny walk that caught my eye along with the shoes and somehow I knew that we would become friends. We did. Not long after that we met and got quite close. She loved Napoleon Dynamite and whole lunch periods were spent quoting the movie. During the school year we got so so close, and near the end of the year she started getting these dizzy spells where it was all she could do to stand up by gripping on to whoever or whatever was near her. She begged me not to tell her mom. It turned out that what was causing those dizzy spells was a tumor on her brain stem called a Medulloblastoma.

At some point around this time I first "experimented" with self-harm. I was frustrated or angry or feeling out of control about something, perhaps to do with Paige, but I am not sure what exactly it was. Sitting in my room I took the pen in my hand and pressed it hard into my forearm and basically, while pressing quite hard, I covered my arm in black ink. My parents yelled to me to come to the table for dinner and I threw on a sweatshirt and joined my family for dinner as though nothing had happened. I used self-harm as a method to calm myself when I was feeling out of control very often during the time of Paige's illness.

The summer before my sophomore year, a few months after Paige got sick/was diagnosed a new youth leader came to our church's youth group (of which I was a die-hard member). Her name was Laura. I sort of sensed a bond with her pretty early on in our relationship. I talked to her about pretty much everything that was going on in my life (I was dealing with bullying at school, as well as other high school drama) except for Paige and my self-harm. We got close pretty fast, a lot like my relationship with Paige.

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To be continued...

So right now I should head to bed, I am long past due on sleep as it is now 11:16pm and I usually go to bed at 10pm. I know, I know. I am an old lady, haha.

Emily

Starting Fresh

Right now I should be sleeping, but a thousand things are running through my mind. I decided to create a new blog. I have, perhaps, outgrown my old one. I wrote in that blog for a great many years throughout college and even back in high school, plus I post-dated some blog posts which were "poems" written long ago by a child/young woman I only vaguely remember.

Right now I am 22, crazy to think that I made it to this point, though I did not always want to, or think I had the will to, make it this far. I am a college graduate now, and working in the field which my degree in, and I am so lucky to be able to have that, especially in this economy. I have a bachelors degree in social work, and I have a job where I work with kids either referred by probation or by CFS (Child and Family Services, formerly known as CPS, Child Protective Services), and I also work with Military families. I only started my job about 2.5 months ago, but life has been crazy since I started. It was a whole lot of change to get used to. Moving out of my parents home and into a room I rent from a family I barely know, which is located about an hour from my family. Starting my first ever real job and commuting 45 minutes each way to get there and back. Beginning to really put into practice what I learned in school. The complications of making new friends when you are not surrounded by a bunch of kids in a dorm or apartment on my college campus. Being treated like an adult, when I really don't know how I all of a sudden became one. Paying bills. College loans. The list could go on and on. But suffice it to say that there has been a lot of change in my life in the last 2.5 months, not necessarily bad things, but not easy either.

I am sitting here in my room contemplating this all when it is nearly 11pm and I should be sleeping because I have to be up early in the morning for work. (Don't you hate it when your mind refuses to let you sleep with its incessant chatter?)