The Story of M

But that's the easy way out. There’s more to it than that. Over thirty years more.
At the moment I’m struggling with life itself. Not that I’m suicidal, far from it. I’m too stubborn to give up on living. But there’s a lot, for me personally, that makes even mundane things, like doing the dishes, hard for me.

This is going to be a sob story, only focusing on the negatives. That doesn’t mean I have only experienced negative things. There’s been plenty good experiences and I’m sure many to come. But those aren’t relevant for this story, this explanation.

I will have to warn for triggers, as some people might get triggered by some of the things I have experienced. I won’t go into great detail.

But this is my story, the reason why I don’t get to write as much as I want to.
I guess I can sum it all up under a diagnosis, but I’m going to start at the beginning. The main theme in all of this is: in one way or another, I never dealt with it, never processed it so I could move on from it. I hid it away somewhere and about two years ago it came and bit me in the ass. Big time.

The very first thing to mention is bullying. From age 5 to 9 a group of classmates bullied me and my friends. It wasn’t just words to make me feel bad, I’d get beaten up on a nearly daily basis. One of the classmates even practiced karate kicks on my belly.

I feel lucky that I managed to get pregnant six times, of which I got to keep my two amazing boys. The other four I lost because of the damage the karate kid had caused.

One of my teachers even joined in, by not allowing me to yell him I was getting bullied and punishing me for standing up for myself while letting the bullies getting away with everything.

At the ripe old age of nine I was kept home because I had a burn-out.

After transferring schools the bullying stopped, but it left it’s scars. I had learned that it was not okay to stand up for myself, that I should please everyone so I would be treated like I had a little more value than a punching bag.

I had very loving parents, my home situation was good. They were just very strict and didn’t accept disobedience. Which enforced the “please everyone" mantra. At age 19 I couldn’t deal with their rules anymore, so I pretty much ran away from home, copying my sister who had ran away aged 18 for the same reason.

I ended up living with what would become the father of my two sons. And what turned out to be a narcissist. He verbally and physically abused me, scarred me mentally and emotionally, took away all the self-respect I had left when I met him. He made me feel like I was nothing.

I did reach a point where I wanted to take my life through overdosing on medication. My sons were my reason not to go through wit it. After all, who am I to take away a child’s parent?

During this relationship I was diagnosed with ADHD and ASS, my dad died, and a friend died. He didn’t give me the chance to mourn the loss of these people.

He managed to get the children taken away from us because of his aggression towards me when they were two and five years old. Okay, according to children’s protective services I was mentally handicapped (ADHD and ASS) so I was unfit to raise them. Still haven’t got my boys back and they are 14 and 17 now.

I literally fled, changing cars twice and everything, and ended up at this shelter for people with psycho-social problems. The shelters for abused women rejected me because my case wasn’t bad enough. Yeah well, he tried to strangle me to death, guess I should have died before trying to get into a shelter for abused women.

I came away from that relationship with a reasonable list of debts, most of which he caused. To be fair, I let him. It was that or getting abused. What would you pick?

I ended up falling in love with an amazing man. My sons got to know him during visitation hours and ended up really liking him, so all went as good as possible. Until about two and a half year into the relationship. We heard he had lung cancer and it was too late to save his life. That afternoon we had planned a birthday party for my 10 year old son. So we had to pretend everything was fine. Yay!

He ended up living about ten more months, I took care of him, up to changing his diapers in the end. He died in my living room while I was in the bathroom (I had only been gone for 90 seconds) and due to costs etcetera his body stayed in my living room (I had moved into the apartment little over a year before he was diagnosed) for 40 hours. Basically I lived with a corpse in my house.

The undertaker had done his thing, though no coffin because that didn’t fit up the stairs to my apartment. He was taken downstairs in a body bag, using the stairs as a slide, controlling the speed of course. Let me tell you, you don’t want to see that, it is dehumanizing for the deceased. This was in March 2017. I ended up moving about two years later because of not being able to deal with that.

That same year Christmas was ruined for me by my stepdad. On Christmas morning, I was putting some plates in the dishwasher at their house, he walked up behind me and sexually assaulted me. My mom walked in on it happening. She just said “I don’t like that,” and left the room. It gave me a chance to get away. I couldn’t go to the police because CPS had placed my oldest with them and even at the suspicion of sexual misconduct of one of the adults he would have been taken away. With his mental problems he wouldn’t be able to handle that.

While that was going on I was struggling with the people who were supposed to help me with my debt situation. They ended up making it worse, even decided to not give me money to buy groceries a couple of times about two years later. Which also meant I couldn’t get to my job because I couldn’t pay the bus fare(no drivers license), which meant no income for those days, which meant no grocery money, etc.

I managed to find a job at walking distance, better pay even and the financial people started the same crap again. And they were paid a monthly fee to help me. So, through court I managed to end that contract a year and a half ago. But because they wanted to get back at me they stalled giving back control over my bank accounts and stopped paying rent etc.

It took three months and finding new financial people to help me to keep from being evicted. These people actually help me and in little over two years I’ll be debt free. Money is tight, but I can do everything I need to do.

About two years ago, four or five months after moving to my current address I started having trouble at work. Not with the people, but with myself. I started dissociating.

Other than what is commonly known, dissociating is a symptom of more than one trauma related disorder. Most people know it from Dissociative Identity Disorder, where your body changes drivers(for lack of a better explanation). But, with PTSD you can also dissociate. You just check out mentally for a period of time while your body still is awake and doing things you were already doing when it happens.
No, it’s no fun to “wake up" after finishing your weld. Yes, I’m a female welder and I love it. But it is unsafe for me to pick up a torch because I dissociate while welding. Helium, argon, a searing hot welding arch and not being aware of what you are doing isn’t the safest combination.

I got diagnosed with PTSD just before the Corona pandemic started. And the waiting time for treatment was 10 weeks before the pandemic. Right now, I’ve been waiting for 18 months and they keep telling me soon. I’ll get my treatment soon.

So, here we are. PTSD, ADHD, ASS. Yes, life is hard. There are days that I get up, sit on the couch and do absolutely nothing because I don’t know where to begin. Simple household chores are these massive problems that I can’t solve.

Showers? I hate taking a shower. Fortunately I love being clean more than I hate taking showers. But by now my showers get to last a maximum of three minutes, five if I’m washing my hair.

Writing is my release, my reward for a productive day. On the days that I’m not productive I don’t reward myself. On the days I do get productive I have to catch up on things and often spend pretty much every waking moment doing as much as possible to catch up and do de tasks set for that day. Also because I am slow at doing them. So I have five minutes here, or ten minutes there to spend on my writing. My time spent traveling to my current boyfriend is pretty much the only time I manage to squeeze in 30 minutes or more to write.

I’ve always had a huge imagination and my head is spinning with idea’s and story lines. No idea if they are any good. To be honest, I still think the book I am uploading sucks. Okay, it sucks less than other stories I have worked on. But with the low self esteem I ended up with and am working on to get rid of, I doubt every sentence I write down. And doubt any correction I make.

So this is raw, I am not going to edit or read back for mistakes in spelling or grammar. And I am going to ignore my insecurity and share this as is. As an exercise to help me get over these insecurities.

Is this fiction? No, this is all real. Is this the whole story? No, I kept 99% of the details to myself. But for those of you who wonder why I can’t keep up with a regular uploading schedule it is enough of an explanation.

If you have managed to read to this point I ask of you not to pity me. In all this I am not a victim, I am dangerous. I am dangerous because I am a survivor. And I know that, no matter what gets thrown at me (barring fatal diseases or fatal accidents), I will survive...

Now for the funny detail in all of this, I managed to sit down and write this in one sitting of less than two hours. I wrote pretty much the equivalent of an average chapter in my book Slave Queen.

I really should have spent my time on that instead…