The End of Innocence

REPOSTED FROM THE TRANS-SCEND BLOG 2015


What did finally end what was a very fun childhood was adolescence. Unfortunately for me it came roughly two weeks before my 10th birthday. I remember distinctly when I got my first period. It was in the middle of a storm in 1982 where we went several days without power. We were to the point where we had to boil water to use any and we cooked over a camp stove. I had no idea what was going on with my body and was horrified. Even more horrifying was my mother’s response that there were tampons upstairs with no explanation what-so-ever. I sat there crying as I read the box on how to use them. Even if I had been a "normal" little girl I think the super tampons would have been a little much, for me it was devastating to have to face all of it all at once and all alone.

---

It wasn't, however, the only experience that led me to hate my own body and to start a mental separation from who I thought I was to who everyone else told me I was. Around the same age there were several other events that caused me to lose the grip on who I believed I was. My friends started asking me out, which I thought was odd since I had no attraction to boys at all. I was even more confused when one or two of my female friends kissed me but then didn't want anyone to know. I thought it was normal for us to kiss but soon gave in to their idea that I was a "girl." the same with my male friends only wanting to go out with "girls," it was beginning to sink in that others saw me differently than I saw myself.

One day, while waiting for class, a boy pushed me up against a wall and put his hands on what were developing breasts. I remember him saying something to the effect of me liking it, which I thought was odd. Even odder was as I gazed around me, in almost a slow motion, no one seemed to notice, find it odd or be outraged. I wasn't even quite sure what to make of it myself but I do know that this one event while it never truly haunted me it was the start of my turning in on myself and not expressing much to others, even when I  didn't like what was going on.

All of these things really led me to begin to hate my own body and myself. I was no longer who I thought I was those years leading up to that. I struggled at home and school to gain some kind of identity but everything was changing. I no longer was picked first for teams nor was I even wanted on them. Going from being one of the first picked for kickball and football to that was humiliating in my eyes. I thought it was some cruel joke where they had just yanked my real life out from under me.

I started playing with knives, and started daring myself to hurt myself. I started cutting very early but never did it on a consistent enough basis that my mother figured it out.  Instead I would punch myself or throw myself against a wall or a tree. I would beat myself up and scream how I hated myself in my own head. It became my form of punishment for myself if anything seemed to go “wrong” in my life. A lot of things go wrong when you are a kid and even into adulthood.

Failing grades also came out of this. I was a very smart kid but I didn’t want more eyes on me than necessary so I started asking to be taken out of the advanced classes. One such class had a teacher that one point thought I had plagiarized a book report I wrote, I hadn’t but it didn’t seem to matter. On my report card I received a lower grade for one of my classes than my mother had expected and so between my mother not listening to me and giving me more attention, I thought, in my head because of the lower grade and my own disgust in myself I started not caring about anything and would try and fail just so I would get her anger and what I believed was hate just like I was getting my own.
​
In high school I attempted to take my life several more times. The cutting got worse and I began to do some light drinking and drugs, with more to come in adulthood. None of it did anyone ever seem to notice. My favorite grandparent, whom I would go to for the only love I really thought I ever got when I was growing up, had died a few years before and I just wanted to join her. I started using the phrase “I want to go home.” To me, my grandmother was home and it would be a place where I was loved for who I really was, although at that point I really still wasn’t sure exactly who that was.