Forgave But Never Forgot

Introduction

Welcome to my first blog! This is a safe space for anyone seeking advice or just someone to relate to. This blog is about dealing with some forms of trauma. As young as fourteen years old, I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. A lot of people don't recognize the effects of the things they do and say to us that ends up holding a permanent place in our mind. These things take over our minds and sometimes makes living unbearable. This blog is to help anyone dealing with trauma in the relationships that are supposed to be forever lasting.

Family Isn't Always Blood

Sometimes the closest people to us hurt us the most. When I was five years old, my mom walked out of my life and chose the man she was seeing over my siblings and I. Growing up this affected everything I did. I couldn't decorate Mother's Day cakes with the rest of my classmates. I wanted to be like any other elementary school student and make cakes to show my mom how appreciative I was for all the things she did for me, but there was no mother for me to appreciate. I never understood why my mother didn't want me like everyone else's mom. Another event I will always remember was when my dad told me, "You weren't my daughter until October last year." He said this to me November 2022 and I was born October 2003. From the day I was born to this very day, I always thought of my father as my dad and my hero. When my mom wasn't there, he was always by my side. Hearing him say this made me feel so unloved and uncared for. This caused me to view all my relationships differently. I never thought anyone could ever love or value me because the people who were supposed to didn't. Eventually, I realized that it didn't have to be that way. Although one person didn't love you, it doesn't mean the next person won't. People may be unpredictable, but you will never get to experience the feelings of being loved or valued by someone if you don't let anyone do that for you. With these experiences, I also had a hard time letting people in and if I did, I was terrified that they would leave. One piece of advice that always helped me was "No one should ever dictate your self-worth". Every time I returned to this quote, it helped me to remember that no matter if people stay or go, it was never my fault and I should never blame myself for someone not seeing my worth.

Best Friends Forever

Coming from a broken family makes you value friendships as your second family. Growing up in a generation where drugs, alcohol, and mental illness is romanticized, it makes friendships difficult. I had a friend that made everything that dealt with mental illness a competition. I would tell her, "My mom left when I was five" and she would say, "You're lucky you didn't have a mom. My mom was abusive". Hearing this from the person I thought of as a sister made me feel like my feelings and past experiences weren't as bad as I thought they were. It made me feel like I should've been happy that I didn't have my mom because it wasn't as bad of an experience as hers. As I grew up, I realized by comparing trauma stories with my friend, my feelings about my experiences were invalidated and they didn't matter because she had it worse. Anytime I wanted to seek help from someone or wanted to be heard, I could never express my feelings because someone had it worse, so my feelings didn't matter. It took me forever to recover from this mindset. I would always have to remind myself that just because it's worse doesn't mean yours isn't bad. One thought I always returned back to was no matter how deep the cut is, it's still a cut. Even if someone has worse life experiences than you, it doesn't mean that your's weren't bad enough or they weren't important. Everyone experiences and feels things differently, so something that isn't as traumatic to someone else doesn't mean it doesn't affect the way you are now.

Another thing a lot of people deal with is peer pressure. My best friend at the time craved the feeling of fitting in with the rest of his friends. His friends smoked weed, which turned into him wanting to do the same. I never wanted to partake in drugs because of events that happened in my past, but my best friend wanted me to join the "fun". One night, I was hanging out with my friend, my sister, my best friend, and his friend and my best friend and his friend were smoking weed. I decided to hit my best friend's friend's pipe because my best friend told me I should and I didn't want to be left out. I didn't want to continue because I knew my tolerance was low, but my best friend's friend said " Deeana hit it one more time." This turned my best friend into repeatedly telling me, "Yeah, Deeana. Hit it one more time." I didn't want to, but of course I did because I didn't want to be viewed differently by the person that I loved like family. This made me feel so guilty and bad about myself because I told myself I would never do drugs, but I did because I didn't want to lose my best friend. A long time after this, I realized this wasn't a true friend. He knew my stance on drugs and why I felt the way I did, but he didn't value my feelings. It took me forever to learn how to tell people I didn't want to do something or simply just a no, but eventually I realized that saying no or I don't want to shouldn't make you feel guilty or bad because you have reasons and feelings behind these responses. Even though someone doesn't understand or value the way you feel, it doesn't mean you have to feel bad about it or like you should hide the way you feel because humans are supposed to feel the way they do.

Forever and Always

As a teenager going through traumatic things in a relationship, no one ever took it seriously because I'm so young so what did I know about love. However, that didn't stop my heart from the feeling of being shattered day after day. In ninth grade, I started dating a boy that I loved with every breath I took. He was everything to me and I would've gave my life to save his. The three male figures in my life were my dad, my stepfather, and my boyfriend at the time. My dad was extremely abusive and my stepfather was everything he wasn't supposed to be, therefore, I held this boy to a high standard because I thought of him as the only male left in my life that could show me I could be loved. No matter how much I loved and cared for him, that didn't stop him from making me believe love is everything it's not. I lost my virginity to this boy when I was fifteen. After doing this, I was expected to give him my body anytime he wanted because he already had it before. If I told him I didn't want to do anything or I was too tired to do anything, he would yell in my face or tell me,"You don't want to do anything with me because you don't like my body" or "You don't want to do anything with me because you don't love me." He would repeat himself constantly until I was laying there crying because I didn't want him to think I didn't love everything about him. This version of myself gave her boyfriend everything he ever wanted even if it killed her inside. I didn't know how to set boundaries in relationships or tell people no after this event because I didn't want anyone to feel bad or upset, even though it hurt me the more I did things I didn't want to. It took me years to learn that my feelings are valid and I shouldn't have to risk the way I feel at the extend of other people. I had to remind myself every morning and every night that my feelings were worth feeling and I stand by how I feel because no one is worth going to sleep at night feeling like I should've done something I wasn't comfortable with.

Another thing I dealt with frequently with this boyfriend was never being able to voice and express my feelings. If I ever cried and show a slight difference in mood, I would get yelled at for wanting to feel anything other than sad. One time during Covid, I was on FaceTime with this boyfriend and I told him if he didn't treat me better and then we should see other people, and he responded with "You're being so dramatic. You're such a hoe." Growing up in an abusive household where you would suffer more if you cried and you would be seen as weak if you showed any emotion, finally voicing how I felt and that I deserved to be treated better, but not being heard, made me believe I truly didn't deserve to be treated as anything other than just a presence and that my feelings will never matter. I struggled with knowing my self worth and loving myself, even when the people I loved the most didn't care that the things they said and did broke my heart into a million pieces. Every time one person treated me like I was nothing to them, it made me feel like I was right back in that high school relationship. The thought of never feeling like my feelings and myself as a whole didn't matter made me not want to eat or breathe again. It took me years to gain my independence and self worth back. People say that some people aren't meant to stay in our lives forever and that they come into our lives to teach us a lesson. I never understood what that meant until years after him and I had broken up. It took me all those years to feel and actually hold onto the fact that my feelings matter and if someone else doesn't believe that then they're not worth breaking my own heart over. No one is ever worth feeling like you don't deserve to be here. You are here for a reason, whether you believe it's to be a parent, be a teacher, aid people in a medical way, or anything else, just because there's a bump in your path of life, it doesn't mean your purpose in life is just to hurt.

Recovering

One thing I never liked to hear was that everything gets better with time. After years of waiting for things to get better, I grew impatient and I resorted to unhealthy ways of coping with my broken heart. I questioned myself everyday and asked myself, "When will things get better" and "Am I the problem". I never understood why bad things happened to me, but I remember what it was like a workout or doing something physically challenging. Think about if you haven't worked out in months and how sore your body is after you do it again. After a day or two, the soreness goes away and if you did that same exercise or workout again, it doesn't hurt as bad as it did the first time. This is the same as the healing process. It may take longer to recover from than simply working out, but with time, it will make you stronger than you were before.