I'm not sure what to write today. My confidence is pretty low right now. I'm mildly depressed. I'm quite anxious, which is contributing to the depression. I feel like everything I produce in any creative format is garbage right now. I know this is all a product of old trauma and people who had cut me down in the past. It still hurts. I'm not sure what to do with this feeling. After what happened ten years ago, I'm afraid to write about the 'bad' thoughts that go through my head. I'm afraid that someone will read them and use them out of context to destroy my life. I was going to keep a Burn Book, a brain dump for unhealthy and toxic thoughts which you then tear out and destroy. My fear that someone is going to find the Burn Book and use it against me stops me from even making the first entry.
Ten years ago, I was dealing with a bad case of postpartum depression and psychosis. Ten years ago, I had a psychiatrist lie to me about the purpose of a medication he was putting me on and didn't warn me of the dangers of going off it. He told me the medication was to help me sleep and insisted the reason why I was having the symptoms I was were due to sleep deprivation (because I was having problems sleeping at the time). I was put on a low dose of an antipsychotic medication. It didn't do anything for the hallucinations that I was having. (People screaming at me terrible things from the psychological abuse I suffered through out my childhood and much of my young adult years.) Then, one fateful day, I was out of refills. I called the clinic where the doctor worked. The doctor was on vacation and the LPN on staff wasn't "comfortable" prescribing the medication for me.
Two weeks later, the hallucinations had gotten far worse as did my depression. Not thinking clearly and suicidal, I was terrified. I called the suicide hotline. They hung up on me before I could even speak to someone. I called my therapist, desperate for some manner of help. Not much later a sheriff's deputy arrived on scene. He found me shaking and on the verge of sobbing with the effort to ignore the hallucination's commands that I kill myself and my young children. I was placed under mental health arrest and transported to a hospital in a relatively nearby city that worked with the clinic I was getting services at. During this whole time, I was journaling what was going on in my head and my struggle.
While I was at the hospital, some one from Child Protective Services showed up to interview me. I was desperate for help and for my family to get the help they needed in caring for me. So, when she asked to see my journal I turned it over. She said that they may have to take the children and I panicked. I called my husband and told him what she had said and tearfully asked what I should do. He talked me out of a good deal of my terror and then asked me to hand the phone over to the woman interviewing me. They spoke for a short time and then the case worker told me that my interview was over, handing me back my notebook.
I was in the hospital for a month. It took them that long to get the medications approximately right so that I could function somewhat. That was when hell started. I had to go to court. CPS tried to paint me as an unstable monster in the making because of what I recorded of the hallucinations. They tried to paint my family as indifferent to my plight and my husband as uncaring and ignorant. This was all lies. They tried to say there was no plan to support me after I got out of the hospital. Another egregious lie. When they gave their proposed plan, it was word for word the plan that my husband and the rest of the family had outlined. And then I was to be monitored for a year. Then it was ordered that I was to not be in the home unless I was supervised and I couldn't sleep there. The year passed and multiple agencies came into the picture.
There were a few good things that came out of this, like my children's autism diagnosis and their getting services to help them. But the price was heavy. CPS treated me as a criminal. The judge said that the only reason he was as lenient as he was was because he knew my father in law. I was traumatized by the oversight of CPS and the silent implication that if I didn't agree with their demands I was going to lose my babies. My memories of my children's early years are spotty now. My terror that someone is going to use my writing to destroy me is now even stronger. I'm now suffering emotional flashbacks when I hear small children playing or crying. Going to the park has become an exercise in willpower because of the fact that I encounter children the ages of my boys during that year.
Some of my memories are coming back. It's bitter sweet to finally remember my youngest child's first steps.I don't know how many more memories are going to come back. PTSD makes things a landmine in my head. Spontaneous memory recall may lead to a flashback. It's horrific and saddening. The bitterest part of this is the fact that I am in their database of 'dangerous' people until my youngest son is 28. This means even if I were not disabled, I would have no hope of reengaging my budding career in education. All because I was asking for help and desperately trying to do the right thing. The equally bitter part is I wouldn't be disabled if it weren't for the fact that they repeatedly traumatized me for an entire year and I was unable to do anything about it. I almost stopped writing all together for a while after this.
When I get depressed, the terror that someone is going to use my writing to hurt my family makes it very hard to write anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment