Let me see if I can consolidate my basic experience all these years. I started seeing a therapist when I refused to go back to high school. She was very nice but she couldn’t get me back into school. No one could but I didn’t feel like the effort to get me back in school was very strong. I thought they all gave up too easily. So at 15 I stayed at home with my grandfather and uncles. I didn’t go out. I had no friends. I cleaned the house, did everone’s laundry and after a couple of years was pressured to get a job. Me, who loved school but didn’t feel I could go. Me who was bright and talented was pushed to get a job and left with people saying they couldn’t believe how I turned out. I was an artist who loved books and school and my schooling was given up on by the adults around me because I didn’t fix my situation overnight. I always felt that people never thought I was worth the effort. They try once but then give up on me.

I cried on the day I was suppose to graduate high school. I missed out on dating. I missed out on the proms. I missed out on friendship. I missed out on being on the honor roll. I missed out on graduation. I missed out on being a teenager. People just let me do it too. I lived with my grandfather and with other men who didn’t always treat me well and I was criticised for not working after cleaning for them.

A fews years after my next door neighbor asked me to go to an aerobics class and that kinda pulled me out of the house to do more outside of my home. For the most part I spent time in the library and fantasizing about being someone else. A version of myself. I never imagined a perfect life with no problems. The only thing different were my connections to people.

Di I mention that my grandmother died when I was 14? It wasn’t long after I found out she wasn’t my real mother.

Dealing with real or imagined rejections from people I continued to imagine being a different version than myself, cleaning the house, barely going out and I also got a job. I did this until my grandfather died when I was 23 and then I was forced to take care of myself completely financially. I lost my home but I will talk about that later and continue this over the weekend.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Lisa.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Lisa.

I would like to post more and summarize what life has been like from my teens till now because I feel it’s important but I want to be able to summarize it well and that might not be until tomorrow. Thank you Anita and Pinch of Attitude for your thoughts so far. ♡

I would like to provide you with more information. I will as soon as I can.

Thank you,

Lisa

Anita I was described as a hyperactive child. I was put on a pill daily. When I was around 14-15 a doctor who took over the practice of my other doctor refused to prescribe the pill for me. I heard him tell my grandfather that it was “speed.” I remember being upset that he wouldn’t prescribe it because I felt I functioned better while on it.

I can be foggy I guess in my thinking sometimes. I do remember people thinking I had a hearing problem because I genuinely could not hear people saying my name while I was watching TV. It does take a second sometimes to absorb information. The only subject in school I struggled with was math but I always felt it was because I didn’t want to do it rather than I couldn’t do it.

I also have a problem meditating. I always wanted to do it but my mind wanders too much.

Alone is definately what I feel and you are right overwhelmed is what I have always felt also. I would have liked emotional support and have things explained to me. I feel I was left to figure it out on my own and I have learned nothing more than to just survive. I am definately just an observer of people who have actual lives. You are right…my life did freeze in time. I was moving ahead until everything got to be too much.

Everything I can/could be I can’t manage to be. I don’t have anything to give it life.

Thank you pinchofattitude.

My parents were teenagers when I was born. They were possibly involved in drugs and drinking of some kind in the late 60”s. They couldn’t take care of me and my mother’s family did not like my father. I understand there was a huge fight when he came around to see me and was told to stay away from me. Hearing other people besides my mother, they had their reasons for disliking him but my mother defended his memory saying he wasn’t the bad person they made him out to be. I also heard that my father had many girlfriends but he seemed to have a “relationship” with my mother. I am going back a little but when I was born I think my mother put me in a forster home in the next state over from where I was born. Strangely that was the state where my father’s family is from. So my maternal grandparents didn’t know where I was for 6 months after I was born. Well I was found and brought back to my mother’s parent’s house and they began raising me as their child. Their names are even on my birth certificate. They referred to my aunts and uncles and my mother as my sisters and brothers and that’s all I knew. I was abused briefly by an uncle and verbally abused by another. My grandparents were a bit old fashioned but despite not having a lot of money were generous with material things, schooling, clothes. My grandfather I believe wanted things to stay as they were but I hear that my grandmother wanted desperately for my mother to mature enough to take care of me. Her lifestyle didn’t sit well with them and I believe they thought she had substance abuse issues and I think often she was not allowed home and they wanted her to create a life for herself but she had problems. The house was sometimes peaceful but sometimes terrible fights among the siblings who were in their teens and twenties by then. I would hide in my room when their fights broke out. Most fights started from one of the sons who split from his wife and drank heavily and who was now home.

I went to school which I wanted to desperately a year late because the first time I took the test to get in the Catholic school teachers or nuns didn’t believe I sat still. I remember all through childhood I had to take a pill everyday supposedly to calm me down. I was a good baby I was told but as I got older would be more prone to tantrums I guess. I also remember having frequent accidents through the night at bedtime which was seen as a behaivoral problem and I was often chastized for it. I am trying to be honest as much as possible as I feel the help I need is imperative. I was also a sensitive child and a target for bullies, often from other children even on my own street. One day one of them and her brother whom I tried to be friends with even though they were mean to me told me casually, Lisa we know something bad about you. They proceded to tell me I was adopted and that my sister was my mother. Apparantly they found out from their mother who was friends with my mother. When I confronted my family with this they said that she was lying. I kept questioning whether it was true or not and I often wondered why I was so much younger than my next sibling up. The go off track for a second the brother of the girl who td me I was adopted was nicer to me than she was and we had a little crush on eachother at that time. I was about 11 or 12. Well he joined in telling me about being adopted and seemed to think it was kinda funny and would even at other times say mean things to me. I didn’t know why.

Well I agonized over whether I was my sister’s daughter and that the woman who I thought was my mother might not be. Meanwhile I became more withdrawn. I was an outgoing kid with an open heart for the most part. In school though it seemed my teachers weren’t overly impressed with me as they were with other students even though I thought I was bright and talented. (In art) I didn’t impress anyone except a few classmates with my drawings. Friends started to withdraw from me. My cousin who the neighborhood boys would somehow compare me unfavorably to once asked me not to tell anyone I was her cousin. I started spending more time in my room where I could create my own reality. I often would pull the dresser drawer open so no one could open the door.

One day I was bullied on school grounds and without going into detail about the bullying, two nuns who saw the bullying made me feel as if I did something wrong and had no compassion for what I went through the next day in school. I was often called a baby or sissy for not standing up to kids that bullied me but my thoughts often went to wondering why they wanted to bully me? When I was told so gleefully about my “adoption” and that I was illegitimate I really retreated into my room. I started getting books out of the library and pretended I was someone else. I also developed a rash that was possibly from rheumatic fever. I know I definately had a strep throat. I finally got the truth out of my mother one day about her being my mother and it upset me because no one liked my mother and I wanted to be liked. They all lied to me from the first time I confronted them with this. I asked about my father and they said he took off. I find out much later in life that my father was still living in my neighborhood up until I was well into my twenties. I didn’t know him. Just before I finished grade school my grandmother died young. I was devasted by her death. I finished my last year in Catholic grade school and spent to majority of my time in my room and not going out at all.

Too much to write. I hope I can continue this tomorrow. I am trying to give an accurate description of my childhood in order for people to understand but too much to write right now.