My Journey... Still a work in progress

This post is long. I am sorry in advance, please be patient with me, this is the first time I’ve articulated things like this...

I had a wonderful life for many years, then I met Mental Illness...

I moved from the UK to Australia just before the start of high school... I didn’t realise at the time just how much I would come to regret (and resent) moving.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE this country... But my ENTIRE family, friends and support system are now A VERY LONG WAY AWAY...
It’s just me, mum and dad here...
I didn’t realise for a long time just how isolating and lonely it would become, and how much I would miss what I had...

We moved to a rural area in Queensland, which was a massive culture-shock...
even though I was at a private school, the vast majority of students had never been out of QLD, let alone the country... So when I came along - a girl who had been to 16 different countries before she had made double digits, who had travelled ALONE around the world when she was 9 - I was seen as a liar. Someone who was making these things up for attention...
Unfortunately I also have Asperger’s and Autism, so I didn’t realise that what to me was just being honest and answering people’s questions, to them appeared as me making things up.

Things continued to be difficult at that school.

For the first time in my life, I was too different...

All the other kids seemed to have something I lacked entirely, something that made them gel or connect with whoever they were around... it seemed so effortless for them...
I was lucky to some degree that despite being on the Autistic Spectrum, I was extremely intelligent, so I was able to figure out pretty quickly that my interpersonal experiences were not at all running smoothly and that I lacked a certain ‘something’ that would make me able to survive social interactions...

So I started a “trial and error” system, mimicking what I saw in other kids and their interactions. Needless to say it was mostly error, but by systematically analysing situations and testing out my hypotheses, I was able to eventually (mostly) master the Art of Social Interaction.
- Mind you, this is still a work-in-progress - I am reassessing and updating my skills on a daily basis to this day. I probably always will...

During this time (high school), I found that despite my growth and new skills, the impressions that I’d made on my schoolmates those fateful first days, never went away. I didn’t have a single friend in school until term 3 of grade 11...
It was a pretty horrible place for me...

But being an extrovert, I knew that the best ‘me’ was found in the company of others, so the alienation at school really affected me...

This was where my mental health issues really began.

Since I had nobody to talk to or confide in, and I had no other family or friends on this side of the planet, I knew I needed to find a support system of my own.

With the beauty of hindsight, I’m able to look back now and see that my choices during this time were, let’s say, less than ideal, but hey, I was a teenager...

My home life was tough at this point too. My parents owned a hotel, which our house was attached to, so they worked their butts off 16+ hours a day... We had gone from being an inseparable little unit of 3, to two frazzled parents and an adrift teenage girl.

This final fracturing of everything I knew and trusted led to me making some pretty shady decisions...

Because I was so desperate for company, I would sneak out of the house nearly EVERY night, for years... It got to the point where I was living two completely separate lives. One was the unhappy schoolgirl, whilst the other was a free-spirited, lead-footed, sexually progressive young woman in her early 20’s.

I even stole my parents’ car repeatedly, and drove dangerously and under-the-influence to impress my ‘peers’. To this day I am amazed I didn’t get pulled over, or crash... My life could’ve ended so many different times/ways, but by this point I no longer cared. I was acting irrationally and impulsively as a way to mask the emotional turmoil I was really experiencing.

This double-life was great, in theory... But it was difficult to maintain when faced with things like nightclubs, visiting friends/lovers etc... I was a fiercely independent ‘woman’, but had to try to reconcile that with school hours, parental involvement and overall life experience.

The end result of this behaviour was both positive and negative... It was positive in that I knew what I wanted and wasn’t afraid to go out and get it, but was negative in that I wasn’t emotionally equipped to deal with the side-effects of such a larger-than-life image and open sexuality.

This unfortunately led to multiple counts of sexual abuse, as I had no idea how to protect myself from the ‘wrong’ kind of attention, let alone that I even had to...

By this stage I had (wrongly) started to find my worth through the eyes of my sexual partners. This led to more and more outlandish behaviour and riskier situations. I can see now that I used sex and my ‘sexiness’ as a direct measure of value, so I began engaging in behaviours that suited/pleased the person/people I was with, and slowly moved away from what I wanted or what even made me happy.

This was the beginning of a sharp decline in my self-worth and self-esteem.

The more I became a toy or object for others’ pleasure, the less what I wanted/liked mattered. I engaged in nearly every unhealthy/unorthodox sexual position/scenario you could imagine, including bondage, force and sex with much older people.

I had genuinely started to equate my worth with my ability to bring others’ desires to fruition convincingly... I had forgotten that what I wanted mattered.

After nearly 4 years of this spiralling out-of-control behaviour, my life and I were ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE who I was to begin with.

I became more and more depressed and thus acted out more and more in a pathetic attempt at masking my feelings.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “Murphy’s Law”... Where anything that can go wrong will go wrong...
Well my life is the embodiment of that, to the Nth degree.
Take absolutely any painful or traumatic experience in my life, and, quite aside from the event being traumatic in itself, the manner in which it happened to me, is the WORST possible manifestation. If there is a single possibility it could do more damage or break me more, it’ll happen that way...

For example: I was drugged and assaulted before flying to the US for a few months to stay with my grandfather and aunt... I had no idea anything was amiss until one day I awoke with hard spots on my pyjama top... We have a very tight-knit family and I was sleeping in my aunt’s bed with her... This totally threw me... But I wasn’t stupid... I knew I must be lactating... So at barely 16, all alone, so far from home, I silently researched and attempted to deal with the situation I found myself in.
All the while I had to pretend everything was fine and I was having a wonderful holiday with my family.
Once I got back into the country and got cell reception, I received a text message saying “my friends and I had a great time with you the other night.”
This is when it all flooded back.
I had been at my boyfriend’s house, watching a movie with him and having a beer, when his brother and his friends came home unexpectedly.
I remember that at one point I had excused myself to go to the bathroom and had left my beer on the kitchen counter.
I came back and eventually finished what was left of my beer.
Suddenly I didn’t feel well at all, so told my boyfriend I needed to lie down.
I remember walking to his room, reaching the door, trying to find the handle and falling into and through the doorway...
The last thing I vaguely remember is being face first on the floor of his room, feeling like I was about to pass out.
That text message violated me in so many ways, and despite not knowing exactly what happened, remembering that much and knowing the end result, prompted my mind to run rampant with scenario after scenario of what had been done to me.
It made me physically sick.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I was too far along to legally have an abortion in Queensland, so I had to fly to Melbourne for a THREE-DAY procedure... It gets even worse... I actually delivered my dead baby... And worse...When it was over, all I wanted to know was whether it was a boy or girl, so I could name him/her, make peace with his/her passing and find closure. That was refused to me.
To this day, that destroys me inside more than anything.

I know my telling of these examples doesn’t do them justice as far as the utterly PROFOUND effect they had on my life, so you have to extend me a little faith on that.

Basically my point is that not only have I suffered extreme trauma, it has been trauma-upon-trauma-upon-trauma, in layers of soul-destroying pain. For as long as I can remember.

Unfortunately, shortly after this, school ended for me and I moved to Brisbane for Uni.
To pay the bills I worked as a sex-line worker, in which I had to play certain roles and be certain characters... In my eyes it paid ridiculously well, had hours that allowed me to attend classes, and could be done from my dorm (as I had no transport at that time)... it basically ticked all the boxes for me.
I didn’t realise then that it was perpetuating the slide from ‘rebellious and liberated’ - which was my original goal, to ‘a purely objectified sex-toy’. Who I was no longer came into it at all. I was simply the character I was playing.

Realising that was a turning point to a degree.

Although I had come out to my parents at 15, I decided then that I would identify as a lesbian, and pursue relationships with women. I know now that it wasn’t because I wasn’t attracted to men, but simply that I felt safe with women, that they wouldn’t/couldn’t hurt me like men had.

What followed was a succession of girlfriends who were ‘safe’. But safe didn’t necessarily mean healthy. I found that by choosing women that I believed wouldn’t hurt me, I had inadvertently chosen others as damaged as myself or more.

Unfortunately it has taken me until halfway through this year to really realise the full extent and end result of these choices.

I ended up in a 4 year relationship with a ‘fixer-upper’ or ‘stray,’ who screwed with me so much that I completely lost sight of who I was... She succeeded in making me hate her, hate myself and fall into an almost-bottomless pit of despair and hopelessness.

I also completely lost the ability to be intimate with someone... I couldn’t bring myself to have sex with her (I now know why) but at the time told myself and her that my traumas had broken me... I felt so much guilt about it... shed so many tears...
I realise now that I was simply not attracted to her for a long time, but stayed in the relationship and convinced myself I was in love, because of the irrational fear of being alone I had developed over the years plus the genuine desire to see her become the best person she could be through my perseverance.
I was not someone that would give up on people... often to my detriment... it was almost as if I felt so blessed that I had them in my life at all, that I would consciously overlook any failings or misdeeds, for the sake of keeping them in my life.

Despite all the time she wasted, pain she caused, and drama she incited, those four years weren’t a total waste. Yes I am poorer for them in some ways, but richer in others. I genuinely believe that with my past, I needed something that virtually broke me to realise that my wants, needs and desires are important too... that I shouldn’t censor myself for anyone... and that that WAS NOT real love.
Prior to her I was just desperate for someone to be with me, no matter the fallout or consequences; after her, I am happy to wait to find the person that brings out and elevates what makes me special, not quashes it.

...Now it’s just a matter of remembering who I even am...

I know I need to get back to ‘myself’, but I don’t know who that is anymore. I want to socialise, as that’s where I thrive, but have absolutely NO motivation.
I can’t bring myself to dress up, put makeup on, go out - do any of the things I used to, and it breaks me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I find it ridiculously difficult to even shower or change my clothes... I feel good about absolutely NOTHING in my current life...
Nearly everything just makes me feel guilty as I know what I SHOULD do, but I just CAN’T.

To add insult to injury, as if the depression, anxiety,PTSD and other mental health diagnoses weren’t enough, I was also diagnosed recently with a very rare neurological autoimmune disease that has thrown what’s left of my life into a complete shambles. (And also brought with it a massive amount of trauma of it’s own)

To quickly summarise what I mean, my illness causes paralysis of my muscles, including my breathing muscles... I presented repeatedly at A&E as my symptoms progressively worsened and became more terrifying. I was scared enough to go in for the first time in November last year, but kept getting sent home, not taken seriously, told it was all in my head, that it was psychosomatic because of my mental health history etc, until MARCH this year!

I had to deal with all the symptoms of a stroke - facial paralysis, weakness, speech and mouth failures, vision problems etc; my swallowing worsened through inability to eat solids, then to difficulty with even liquids, to the point where anything at all I tried to swallow would end up pouring out of my nose or bypassing my throat and aspirating into my lungs... I made it 2 days before I collapsed of severe dehydration... And I was STILL turned away...

I didn’t receive help for my illness until I was so profoundly paralysed that even my respiratory system stopped responding. Yep, I couldn’t breathe.

I had gone from a long life-expectancy, to 30 days when I could no longer eat, to 3 days when I could no longer drink, then finally to 3 minutes when I could no longer breathe.

As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, the paramedic who was supposed to be keeping me alive on the 20+ minute drive to the hospital, believed I was faking it for attention and let me slowly asphyxiate, let me fall off the stretcher as I was too paralysed to keep myself upright, and didn’t even bother to put the oxygen sensor on, let alone try to clear my airway or provide me oxygen.
To this end, by the time I got to the hospital, I had made peace with dying... I simply cannot explain how awful an experience that was... I was having massive seizures from lack of oxygen, and suffered brain damage from his negligence. When I was finally rushed into Resuscitation, my oxygen levels were down to 42%... As a reference, they get quite concerned if your levels drop below 95... I was at nearly half that. Plus there had been massive amounts of carbon dioxide that had built up in my body...

I was rushed to ICU and spent the next 4 months in hospital learning ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING from scratch.
I had to learn to stand, walk, hold cutlery, cut food, chew, swallow... every single aspect of living I had to relearn.
It’s been hell.

Flash forward to now.

I am pretty much just struggling to even SURVIVE at this point... the concept of THRIVING has flown so far out the window that I can no longer even imagine what it would look like.

Put simply, I’m drowning.

I know what I want, but don’t know how to get there.
I know what I need to do, but can’t bring myself to even start.

I am a withered husk of who I once was... Even with so much trauma, I used to get by and was proud of myself and who I was...

I wish I could get back there... I really, really do.

Any advice is EXTREMELY welcome... or even just someone to talk to...

Underneath all this is a talented, beautiful woman, who is unendingly loyal and caring... I just need help digging her out from the rubble of these past years...

Thank you in advance and sorry this post was so long...

Love and light,

Phoenix