The Illness is Not Me, and it is Not You Either

I’ve never really liked the rain, it makes me feel cold and sick. What is always worse is when you get stuck in the pouring rain, the thunder is loud, and you are without an umbrella. That’s how my brain feels, everything is loud, cold, raining, and there’s nothing that I can do about it. At least that’s what I thought.

I’ve always known that I wasn’t happy. I grew up with an addict and alcoholic of a father, who was verbally and physically abusive. He would threaten to hurt if we ever got in the way of anything he depended on. Yet, we were demanded to look like the perfect family because we lived in a town of only 300 and everyone would know if there was a crack in the portrait.

When my mother left him, that’s when things really started to go downhill. My biological father turned what used to be the vegetable and fruit drawers to his beer drawers, there was liquor in his coffee mugs in the morning, and the kids at school would tell me about how he was getting in bar fights over the weekend. I was only ten.

When I was sexually assaulted for the first time at 13, it was on a school bus full of kids and nobody helped me. Rather instead, I heard the laughs and I saw their smiles. These laughs still haunt me to this day. It took me over a year to tell someone and over three years to finally tell my mother.

I didn’t tell anyone how I was feeling, I was stuck in this dark rainstorm wanting to die, only holding on because I didn’t want to hurt my mom. I wouldn’t hug others, my personal relationships suffered, and I was a hollow body.

I was sexually assaulted again in high school, I still hear his telling me not to ever say anything but that I liked it. I was a “good girl”. My first year of college my boyfriend of only a couple weeks raped me, again called the good girl.

I became a shell again, my grades plummeted and I struggled with all of my personal relationships. My relationship with my mother deteriorated. My old insomnia came back, as did my anorexia, panic attacks, and another suicide attempt.

It wasn’t until I was taken off of my old medication that my first real feeling of recovery came to me, a combination of merely just clouding up my thoughts in the midst of the storm. I was switched to a different anti-depressant and sleep aid while going cold turkey from what I had been on.

The medication switch when it finally hit me was not the only thing that saved me. The new medication served as an umbrella for me to hold in a way. The love and support that I could finally feel once covered from a freezing rain of PTSD memories I couldn’t control warmed me from the cold I felt inside.  The words of encouragement gave me the strength to keep walking.

Sexual assault, rape, depression, panic disorder, PTSD, and mental health illness can happen to anyone. It effects Frogs around you and you may not know it because it’s not something on the outside, it’s on the in. Those who are struggling lose many friends to the fact that others just don’t understand or don’t want to be friends with someone with these kinds of issues.

But if you take anything away from what I have written, it’s that you are not alone and you are not defective. I have spent too many days in my young life thinking that there is something wrong with me. I have an illness, but the illness is not me and it’s not you either. The Counseling Center has inside and outside resources for help. Here’s to recovery, love and support, and go Frogs.