Dedication: Dedicated to Swan, for being my only supporter during all of this ❤️
I was always an anxious person. From the time I was very little I always worried about everything, in ways that nobody could ever understand. I would cry over things that people would think you would never cry over. My anxiety always was a target for people didn’t understand and would make fun of me, including my own parents. They were never supported me through my struggles and would always scream and even go as far as to get violent whenever I would have panic attacks and cry. I’ve been to so many therapists but they never understood me because my parents would always talk to them first and tell them how much of a bad person I am and how I’m destroying their life. People in my high school would start rumors about me and pretend to be nice when in reality they were all joking about how weird and schizophrenic I was (I am not, and have never been diagnosed with that). This rumor even ended up going as far as to reach a job I had outside of school. This led me to always have my guard up, but not enough.
I used to always try to see the good in people, but I realized it would end up hurting me a lot in the end. I went away to a small college upstate, mainly because it was the only school that accepted me and I wanted to get away from my toxic parents. Little did I know that this school would cause my mental health to start rapidly deteriorating. I met some of the worst people in my life when I was there. I was told multiple times by people in my dorm hall to kill myself. I will never forget the time I took a chance and went away with my roommate during the Labor Day weekend to her hometown. She brought some of our other roommates with her as well. We all started to drink, and soon after one of my roommates decided out of no where to start messing with me and making fun of me because of the way I walked while drunk. I didn’t understand why she was doing this because I didn’t know her. I never had a full on conversation with her and she just decided in the middle of nowhere, where I had no way of leaving, that she would start talking about how shitty I am and how she didn’t like me. She started getting some other people to start doing the same and soon I had a full blown panic attack somewhere that I was unfamiliar with, with people i either didn’t know or only knew for less than 2 weeks. We weren’t even supposed to leave the day after, as we planned to go to a local fair. I remember being so miserable, refusing to take pictures with any of them and going to to the smoke area to cry. I ended up having to switch rooms 3 more times during my stay. One of my roommates would let random people walk into our room when they weren’t there. I tried to explain to her how uncomfortable it was making me to have strangers walk into my own room without even knocking, but she could never listen. I was accused of stealing from someone I thought was friend, was told to kill myself on multiple occasions, was accused of being racist for absolutely no reason, was the only person out of a group of 7 people to be threatened with suspension for something we were all doing, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about how terrible my experience was there.
People always say how college is supposed to be the best time of your life, how you’re supposed to find yourself and the best people you will ever meet. To this day I’ve never met anyone who had a terrible college experience. And I feel like I can never find someone who will relate to this. I wished college would’ve been the best thing for me, but it turned out to be one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life. It was filled with constant anxiety and worrying because I knew I had people out to get me, whether it was to use me for rides/money or try to befriend me in order to gossip with others about what I said.
After I left and came back home I was never the same. I became severely depressed and stopped talking to a lot of people, some friends. I hate the life that I have now, still living with my abusive toxic parents an unable to even move out due to the pandemic. I always think the worst in people now, and I just stopped trying to better myself. I feel like I’m not good at anything in life, and that there’s always better people than me. I’m so terrified to put myself out there in case I get made fun of and ridiculed. I know that I shouldn’t hold myself back but the thought of the feelings I had when I was humiliated everyday somewhere that I lived for almost a year kills me.
I really hate sharing my story to others because people always look at me and say that I want others to feel bad for me. That I’m a drama queen who’s always putting on an act. (I remember even being called one by a teacher at school in third grade, I was an eight year old who was already being told that my anxiety didn’t matter) But that is far from the truth. I hate attention more than anything in the world. I never even post pictures of myself online because I hate people looking at me, and everything about myself. The last thing I’d ever want is attention from people or to have people pity me. But I feel like this is my only shot at sharing my story that has been eating away at me for the longest time. It’s been almost a year since I left this school, but I still causes me a tremendous amount of pain everything I think back to it. I wish to someday be a different person and put it all in the past, but I don’t know how I can ever do that.