I'm not sure what to write about today. I have a massive headache. The sinus drainage is slowly improving. I'm pretty sure the headache will go away in good time as well. I'm writing while my eldest child is reading books and my youngest is playing with legos. If I could just ignore the noise of him pawing through the legos, I'd be writing with out my headphones on. I can't, however, ignore that noise because it is like fingernails on a chalkboard.
My children are autistic. They're not so severely autistic that they can not function outside of the home but they still struggle. I worry about them going through the challenges of young adulthood. I have no brilliant ideas of how to help them navigate high school. I have no brilliant ideas for how to help them deal with the emotional upheaval that comes with puberty. I worry that they may develop my bipolar disorder at some point in the midst of puberty because that was when my problem with depressive episodes began. I know what to watch for in depression, because gods know I have enough familiarity with it. I still fear that I'm going to miss something important or pass it off as a symptom of their quirks and be in a situation that a friend of mine was in and find one of them attempting suicide.
Suicide is a terrible world. It is a terrible concept. It is horrifying for so many reasons. Perhaps the most horrifying is the struggles that I have had with it over the years. I know how indisdious it is. I live with suicidal ideation on a regular basis. Intrusive thoughts of 'yeah, this coffee is great but I should be dead right now' come to me just about every day when I am depressed. I've learned to ignore them unless they're really bad. I struggle to keep myself presenting as normal and neurotypical despite the fact that there is a deeply wounded part of my brain that says I haven't earned the right to breath air or take up space. I come off as quiet and shy. It's not because I am excessively demure. It is because I am afraid of people and afraid that if I say the wrong thing the 'bad thoughts' will get louder.
High school was hell because of all the bullying that I had to put up with. It was hell because of the abusive relationship that I was in for half of it and the resulting fallout from breaking up with him. It was hell because of the harassment and regular interrogation that I got at home as to if I was "on drugs" when my problem was that I was depressed and trying to hide how badly I was getting treated by my peers. I wasn't a very good student. I started out pretty well. Then my grades dropped and I went from above average to average because of all the bullying. In junior high, I got harassed by teachers as well. It was awful. I worry that this is going to be the experience of my children.
I developed an eating disorder in junior high if not earlier because I was picked on about food. I sat down with a normal sized cafeteria meal and I got to listen to comments about how I was disgusting for eating. I got to listen to people predict that I was going to go throw it all up as soon as lunch was done. So, I isolated myself at the lunch table and I ate less. It was humiliating. How cruel kids can be to each other is vastly underestimated. It took me years to get into a healthier eating habit because I was severely underweight. Perversely, my mother took pride in this and tried to dress me in what she considered fashionable clothes. I went along with it for two years, because she pressured me about what to wear as I was dating N-. I came out looking like a cheap harlot. So, my peers harassment about that as much as they did about the fact I was so skinny.
I tried to throw myself into the subjects that I loved, like English and Science. When I broke up with N- my clothing choices changed dramatically. I stopped trying to look any form of fashionable and went with jeans and a t-shirt most of the time. By then, the damage was already done. I had people talking about me outside of school declaring me to be a whore. It got to the point that I had random strangers from the college walk up to me asking what the cost of a blow job was. I'm pretty sure that the rumors are part of the reason why a good number of my husband's extended family doesn't like me and didn't particularly like me when they met me in the beginning of our relationship. We don't talk to them very much. Because, if you're going to believe a lie rather than the evidence before your face, I don't have time for you. And things are complicated between my husband and them, partly because of me.
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