Survivor or victim?
I haven't yet survived my life.
What is survival if it hasn't been exactly voluntary?
In mental health we speak sometimes about "resiliency." To me, that word means getting through something difficult and coming out on the other side. To me, it's not the same as strength. Instead, for me resiliency has not been a choice. I haven't made it this far because I have wanted to necessarily. I have endured pain, trauma, life-altering grief while being forced into hospitals against my will, hooked up to feeding tubes involuntarily when I wanted to starve myself to death, stitched back together when I cut an artery open, and had 911 called on me other times I've tried to end my life. Good luck? Rotten luck? Sometimes I can't be sure.
But what I do know is that after all these years I don't feel like what people call a Survivor. I don't feel strong or really yet that I have chosen life. I feel I am living halfway, in a kind of Limbo. Alive but not fully living, still lingering in hospital beds or "languishing" as one doctor once called me when I was sectioned to a state hospital (I to wait 6 months for a bed). Sometimes I feel on the cusp of coming alive again. But when you've had severe trauma at such an early age it feels there is no self to go back to. That person was destroyed early on. I need to find the person I want to become or maybe already am in some ways. Stripped of diagnoses and labels, the girl underneath who has loved and been loved, not to be defined by any one event of her life.
What is survival if it hasn't been exactly voluntary?
In mental health we speak sometimes about "resiliency." To me, that word means getting through something difficult and coming out on the other side. To me, it's not the same as strength. Instead, for me resiliency has not been a choice. I haven't made it this far because I have wanted to necessarily. I have endured pain, trauma, life-altering grief while being forced into hospitals against my will, hooked up to feeding tubes involuntarily when I wanted to starve myself to death, stitched back together when I cut an artery open, and had 911 called on me other times I've tried to end my life. Good luck? Rotten luck? Sometimes I can't be sure.
But what I do know is that after all these years I don't feel like what people call a Survivor. I don't feel strong or really yet that I have chosen life. I feel I am living halfway, in a kind of Limbo. Alive but not fully living, still lingering in hospital beds or "languishing" as one doctor once called me when I was sectioned to a state hospital (I to wait 6 months for a bed). Sometimes I feel on the cusp of coming alive again. But when you've had severe trauma at such an early age it feels there is no self to go back to. That person was destroyed early on. I need to find the person I want to become or maybe already am in some ways. Stripped of diagnoses and labels, the girl underneath who has loved and been loved, not to be defined by any one event of her life.
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