Every Story Needs Told

Anonymous

I've had a lot of struggles with mental health since as long

as I can remember, namely dyspraxia and depression.

 As long as I can remember being the day my mother died, when

I was ten. It was hard, that last year at elementary school. My dad and my

sisters, they struggled to adapt to life without her, looking after me, the

youngest sister by quite a long margin. It wasn't fair to expect my sisters to

constantly be at home, them being off to college and other places, and my dad

couldn't just stop going on business trips. Consequentially, as hard as they

tried, it was inevitable that I was to spend a few hours each day on my own. In

a house full of memories.

 It was there that I inevitably fell deeply into depression.

I would turn my lights off in the room and just sit in the dark, waiting for

time to pass, thinking some really dark thoughts that a ten year old should

never have. Due to the nature of the place I lived in (everybody went to

church, except us. Everybody had some after school activity, we couldn't afford

it) and the circumstances of my family problems, I never had had any friends. I

was the bad influence who all the moms didn't let their kids play with, even if

I had done nothing wrong. I just became this weird little kid, completely

alienated from society, and I didn't care. Needless to say, nobody signed my

yearbook or promised to keep in touch with me!

Who knows what would have been in store for me with middle

school. For all I know, I could have pulled myself back on my own and become

this amazing kid, or... I don't want to think about it. But I don't have to.

Because I'm not living there anymore.

 My aunt and my uncle took me in, and all sorts of stuff

started happening. I was enrolled in a nice school, forced to do a lot of

activities, and took a lot of exercise. That one first year at school? Sure, I

was still learning to be friendly without being creepy or weird (I had never

had friends before, don't blame me!), but it was the best year of my life. I

aced every single test in the end of year exam, and I was, quite literally, the

top of my class.

That's not bragging, though. That's not bragging because it

didn't last.

 I never was an organized person. I never could catch a ball,

or write neatly, and stuff gets lost so often it's not funny. I couldn't even

tie my shoelaces properly. That was never a problem before I started my next

year, where stuff got real.

 Sure, I breezed through the tests, but homework? I did it

fine, but then I put it somewhere, stuck it in wrong, or they simply couldn't

read it because it was too scratchy handwriting. Dyspraxia, full on dyspraxia.

My aunt, being the successful, very organized runner of a business, never

really understood why I found it so difficult to get stuff handed in. I tried,

so hard, but it was like holding a bar of soap; either way I tried to tackle

it, it always slipped out of my hands. My aunt and I got into a lot of

arguments (mainly consisting of her being pissed off at me for a very good

reason while I sat there in tears, thinking of all the ways I could have

stopped it) over this, and she just thought I was being lazy, or I wasn't

caring, or I was genuinely too stupid to understand. Harsh, but you have to imagine;

I still put on my clothes back to front and I can't remember anything she's

told me to do orally unless it's only one simple instruction at a time, and yet

I can ace subjects that I fail at handing most of my homework in on time.

 This fueled my old depression, and it came back big time. I

remember one night being so frustrated and angry at myself, at my mother, at

everybody, that I took off a ring (one my mother had given to me, the only

thing I ever had to really remember her) and threw it out of my window, never

to see it again.

I then began to have sleepless nights, and I started falling

asleep actually in lessons, over and over. But I never wanted to tell them, so

I tried to lie about it and now I've wound up in a gluten free diet with my

aunt on my tail about everything going on at school. People supervising me at

that level makes me feel even worse, and it's just going down and down. A year

it's been of this, and I can't live like this anymore.

 So I'm moving back to America to start high school. And

that's a chapter yet to be explored :)

 I try to keep myself happy, but I crash and burn, and when I

fall, I fall hard. I know, though, that tomorrow can only be better, that life

is worth living for. I just do. So even if there isn't actually a happy end to

this, yet, I will keep fighting and I will keep raising mental awareness,

because it's a big issue. I'm running 10k for mental health, which will be a

great thing, both for the mental health community, and to raise my own self

esteem. I shy away from it a lot, but I know it's not good, the way I think of

myself.