Regretfully, Yours Truly

Tw: Suicide, Sexual Assault, Violence

I don’t really know what it means to be vulnerable. Does it mean being an open book, sharing every part of yourself without hesitation? Or does it mean unapologetically talking about all your feelings, no matter how messy they are? Either way, I know I’ve never done it correctly. I’m always too much or not enough, and I never seem to get it right.

So, here’s my attempt. 

This is my first blog post, and it’s going to be heavy—unbelievably heavy. Writing and journaling have always helped me to highlight everything on the inside that I miss in my own reflection. This is journaling I’ve chosen to share, though it’s not very different from the private pages I usually keep hidden. I’m sharing it because there have been moments in my life where I’ve suddenly forgotten how to swim, and all I did was drown. This is me coming up for air in an ocean littered with nothing but my traumas, losses, and insecurities. 

Am I depressed? Yes. 

Have I been—or ever once was—suicidal? Yes. 

But my healing journey has taught me that I never really wanted to die. I guess, in a way, I just wanted the entire world to stop. Everything around me moves so fast, and I always feel like I’m scrambling to keep up. And as someone who gets massive anxiety at the thought of being left behind, I became unbelievably tired. And eventually, just apathetic. I still feel that way most of the time, but I think I’ve just gotten better at hiding it. Every now and then, I’ll get this irresistible urge to ruin absolutely everything. I’ll quit jobs, ruin relationships, and lay in bed for days at a time because, to me, it feels like a reset. When something feels like it’s become too much, it’s not hard for me to throw it all away. 

I think it’s because I hate that pressure. I’ve felt it all my life. And since I can’t disregard the pressures that are actually bothering me, I choose to remove the superficial ones. The ones I can control. This gives me a sort of temporary relief. I say temporary cause that feeling of weightlessness never really stays. I’ll feel a small, fleeting sense of happiness, just enough to convince myself it’s okay to get up and start again. Only for that anxious, gnawing feeling to set in again. I can feel it biting at my heels now. 

But I’m not going to lie, I sort of like my life right now. I’m proud of myself, stronger, more in tune with my emotions. And I’m worried that if I let it win again, it’ll destroy every ounce of progress I’ve made to be a better person. 

I’m the oldest daughter of a Hispanic household. If that doesn’t explain the crushing need to be perfect, I don’t know what does. I’ve always struggled with talking about my life. Mostly because I hated the idea of pitying myself. Throwing all my problems on the fact that I grew up with an alcoholic father and in an abusive home. The truth is, I don’t remember many specific moments from my childhood. I just remember how it felt. 

Lonely. 

My parents never really seemed to focus on me or my brothers. My brothers and I were always home alone or in spaces we shouldn’t have been in as children. And honestly, I think I’ve become so used to loneliness that it’s my default now. Love and respect feel foreign. Being cared for feels wrong. Those emotions don’t fit inside me. And when, in rare moments, I did feel love—when I had friends, when someone cared—it felt so overwhelming and strange I didn’t know how to handle it. I wasn’t used to that experience. So, when people inevitably left, I adopted this false notion that it was because I was unlovable. That no one was capable of ever feeling as deeply for me as I did for them. That maybe what I felt wasn’t real or right.

I didn’t know how to regulate it. 

I figured the way I loved must be wrong—because if it was right, people would stay. I think I hate that feeling more than being alone because at least loneliness is familiar. But that aching fear that no one will ever love me the way I love them keeps me choked up on the inside. I’m constantly afraid that I’m too much. Or not enough. 

At some point, I became so disconnected from my younger self that I don’t even know what she would think of me if she saw me now. I know that we’re the same person but she feels so distant from me. Sometimes, I wonder if she ever really was me at all. 

This strange, complicated relationship with love and emotions has kept me trapped in a toxic cycle of push and pull. One moment, I feel, high—excited, lovable, happy. Then suddenly, I start overanalyzing everything, convinced I’m doing too much. So I pull back, withdraw, and let everything fall apart, because it’s easier that way. Mostly, because communicating my feelings makes me deeply uncomfortable. I’ve spent my whole life walking on eggshells, so now I’m hyper-aware of every little shift—every change in tone, every subtle movement, every unspoken word. For a long time, I expected everyone else to be like that too.  But I’ve since realized that not everyone is as anxious or hyper-vigilant. Not because they don’t care—they’ve just never had to be. 

And I guess that’s an existence I’ll never know. 

My emotional complexity is a muscle. Every abuse survivor knows that—our ability to sense pain before it comes, to read a room before a word is spoken. It’s an agonizing strength. It makes my heart ache sometimes and I can never get it to stop. It never gets any easier to handle either. And the older I got, the more the world threw punches. I slowly started collapsing in on myself, becoming more and more pained by my own existence.

College was simultaneously both the worst and best years of my life. I made amazing connections and learned so much more about myself than I had ever expected to. But I was also forced into multiple stages of character development, ones I never really asked for. Sophomore year, I was sexually assaulted and then entered into this strange, emotionally abusive, and toxic relationship with that same man. And the trauma from that experience didn’t hit me until a couple of years later, when I exploded into a number of PTSD attacks and fits of anger. I was upset that something like that had happened to me. I was upset with myself because I felt like I let it happen. I was upset with my brain because it was confused. I felt a deep sense of longing for a person who had hurt me. 

It felt like the love I had for my parents. 

They left me unbearably alone and sad constantly, but I couldn’t help but crave their affection and warmth. I rationalized it by telling myself they’re their own people, with their own traumas they never learned how to heal. And I convinced myself I could still love them for simply just being my parents. But I think it’s getting harder to feel that way as I’ve gotten older. I grow more and more angry with them everyday. Mostly because I crave a safe place to be, nothing feels safe or like home. And I blame them for that. It’s their fault I don’t have a foundation cause they never bothered to build one for me in the first place. It’s their fault I loved a man who hurt me, cause they never taught me what love was in the first place. 

My final year of college was when it really felt like life went to shit though.

I was nine days out from graduation and writing the biggest paper of my academic career when a man broke my heart in a way I didn’t even know was possible. I cried in my dorm while my roommate, who I had only known for a month (thank you, Lauren), consoled me.

I was anxious, heartbroken, and drained of all creativity. My senior thesis became this giant looming task I couldn’t bring myself to finish.And suddenly everything bubbled up to the surface, the feelings of loneliness, neglect, being not enough. 

I call it my spiral. I abandoned everything and the world turned really gray. If I couldn’t graduate, I’d be stuck on the same campus as the man who had sexually assaulted me for another year. I’d be forced to see his smug face and listen to him loudly berate me in the library again. 

So, I ran home that night, desperate for somewhere safe. Only to be met with more violence. 

I felt like I had nowhere to go to escape anything that was bothering me. School felt unsafe.  There was no love at home. And I worried that all the friends I had made were upset with me for leaving them behind. So I never reached out. I retreated into my bed, put my headphones on, and stayed like that for what felt like months. Eventually, I stopped feeling real feelings and felt nothing at all. It was this burdensome numbing sensation I couldn’t get away from no matter what I did. 

And that’s when I started planning. 

I didn’t think very much about what I’d leave behind. I just knew that I felt trapped, that everything had fallen apart and that I couldn’t see a way out. I thought about ramming my car into a wall. Or a tree. Or falling off a cliff into the ocean. I wanted to go somewhere like Santa Cruz, watch the sunset, and let it be the perfect ending to a life that felt painfully ordinary and unbearably heavy. 

I think my indecisiveness saved me from that fate. It gave me just enough time to realize how much my brothers valued my existence—how much they cared. It made me realize that we’ve only ever really had each other. When things got scary, we would sleep together in my room with the door locked. When they fought, they came to my bed, and I would hold them till I fell asleep. I had this deep aching fear of waking up and them not being there. It made me recognize that love had always sorta been there and just because my siblings and I never really learned how to express it didn’t mean it didn’t exist. I realized we collectively grew up with the same shared trauma and it became upsetting to realize how unfair it would be to let it take me out while they were still here, fighting the same battles. 

If I left them behind, what kind of big sister would I be? 

That’s when my brother took my keys away from me, the gun was hidden somewhere I couldn’t find, and I was evaluated by a psychiatrist. She told me that everything I was feeling was a direct result of everything I had been through. Contributing to diagnoses like depression and CPTSD. She was worried for me. And so, I was placed into this strange, rigid program filled with other suicidal people. 

We showed up in person every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Six hours a day. No exceptions. The in-person requirement was meant to keep us accountable, to make sure we didn’t kill ourselves on our off days. If we missed class, they’d call the cops. And the very idea of that to me was so embarrassing that you bet your ass I showed up every single day for seven weeks straight. 

I’m not going to lie, I kind of enjoyed it. It gave me something to do. I wasn’t just lying in bed all day, staring at the ceiling, feeling like nothing. It felt like a strange, scholastic environment. We sat. We wrote. We learned. We had snack breaks. By the time it was over, I wasn’t wearing PJs all day anymore. I started painting my nails again, doing my makeup again. I wasn’t exactly back but the medication I was on was helping a little bit. At least enough that I could force myself not to look like my depression. 

As I healed, it became ever so apparent that there were still things I hadn’t fully dealt with. Like the feelings I had for my sexual assaulter. There would be some days where he was all I ever thought about, it confused me. Later, I learned about trauma bonds. About the cycle of abuse and what it does to the mind. And I felt so fucking stupid for not recognizing it sooner. Especially because it was something I had witnessed all my life. But when I finally did, is when I understood that what I felt wasn’t love, it was trauma manifested. And that moment is when I tell people I started to “see in color again”. 

I was no longer hopelessly toxically in love with someone who hurt me. I was pissed off. So I gathered myself—admittedly I probably should’ve given it more thought but I did it nonetheless—and I went back to campus. And sat down with two cops and two detectives. There’s much more to this story, but I figure this isn’t the right post for it. I knew the case wouldn’t go anywhere, it couldn’t. There was no evidence. He refused to confess, even though he’s admitted it before. And the cops themselves told me that he was not the kind of man who ever would. But, I wasn’t expecting justice. I just wanted to be mile marker one. Because when he does it again—and he will, because men like that don’t just stop—at least there will be more than one person who ever wanted to hold him accountable.

This is the good part, this is May. 

This is my 22nd birthday and I feel excited about being alive again. This is getting told I got the job, after months of being too depressed to even try. This is meeting new people, making new connections, starting to feel like myself again.

This is June. July. August. October. November. December. 

This is a year later, and even though I’m in a much better place now I still feel that anxious, gnawing feeling creeping in. But the difference now is that I don’t want to keep ruining my life, I think now if anything is when I’d like to build upon it. 

If you’ve made it this far, I honestly commend you. Most people don’t usually read so much into my babble. In this post was everything you’ve ever needed to know about me—and everything you didn’t. I’d like to say I hope you liked it, but honestly this wasn’t for you. This gave me catharsis I didn’t realize I needed. I didn’t really need anyone to like it or read it for that matter. But I do hope it leaves you with something 

I hope that you love as deeply as I know I can now. 

I hope you’re working on the small parts that choke you up. I hope you’re learning to focus less on the things that you lack and more on the space you take up in this world. Because as easy as it may be to forget sometimes—that space matters. 

Thank you.