When I was 7 years old, I quietly confided in my first ever diary the words “I hate myself and want to die.”
I was the second of four children, and my older sister was extremely abusive to me. My mother taught me that I deserved the abuse. That I was less than all of my siblings. She treated me with derision and contempt. I learned to take the hits with stoicism and shove all the feelings of rage and despair down inside of me.
I was 10 the first time I tried to take my own life.
As I tumbled into my teenage years, I learned to take out my dark feelings on myself. I would freeze myself, starve myself, expose myself to the elements, punish myself with extreme exercise, and cut myself. Anything to translate the unbearable emotional pain I carried into physical pain I could cope with. My parents didn’t get me a therapist until I was 16, but once that therapist communicated what was happening to me to my parents, my mother fired her.
I spent my childhood planning to run away.
My hobbies revolved around plans to go live in the woods, far from any other human beings.
When I was 17, I got sick. My mother failed to get me medical treatment. She viewed me as something less than human. Something undeserving of her attention.
Then I got very sick, and started having what I called pain attacks. I now understand that what was happening was a panic attack induced by extreme pain. These attacks would have me writhing on the floor in agony, hyperventilating to the point where I could no longer move my arms. I would dissociate from my body to try and escape it.
My mother’s response was to yell at me to “just breathe normally”, and then to walk away and ignore me.
We finally figured out I had Lyme disease. But by then, it was late stage Lyme disease. Chronic Lyme disease.
Still determined to escape from my mother, I got myself to college on time, despite having missed 1/3 of my senior year due to illness. And from that day on, I made sure I wouldn’t have to ever live at home again.
After graduate school ended badly due to my chronic illness, I started praying that God would find me a husband, so I could feel loved for the first time in my dark life. And He answered that prayer within months.
I got married to the best man in the world, and had perfect, healthy children. But I was still living with chronic pain and fatigue from the Lyme disease. Every day was a painful struggle.
I thought that enough time had passed, and maybe if I moved close to my family again, they might help me take care of my kids when I was having a bad day. Foolish, naive impulse. Despite moving to CT and living close to family, never once did a member of my birth family show up and help me with my kids. My family treated me with condescension and derision, as though my chronic illness was due to my own failures as a person. My health continued to decline, and life was getting unbearably difficult.
Then I got cancer. One of my breasts swelled up, and I didn’t realize what was happening until my skin started to change. I soon found out that I had stage 3c breast cancer.
Honestly I was relieved at first. I thought now at least my family will treat me with some compassion. Cancer patients usually get compassion, right? I felt paradoxically optimistic.
I started chemotherapy as quickly as possible.
A month into chemotherapy, COVID 19 hit.
Suddenly, my kids couldn’t go to school. I was trying to juggle schooling three young children, keeping a house, and cancer treatment. I cried out to my parents for help, but they refused. My mother reasoned that since I was in and out of the hospital, I was exposed to the virus, and they wouldn’t risk being anywhere near me. I was left to fend for myself. They didn’t even bring food over. During that dark chapter, only my father showed up at my home, and at the instructions of my mother, he wasn’t allowed to come inside.
Then I had surgery. Because of the pandemic, they refused to take both of my breasts at once. I was stuck getting a radical right mastectomy, leaving me with one breast and a perpetually swollen right arm. I felt mutilated. But I wasn’t done.
Next came radiation therapy, and the skin on my now flat right chest turned black and crispy, and peeled off. It was horribly painful. And I had to be at the hospital daily to receive this treatment. I hired a neighbor to babysit my children, because my family was completely unwilling to help.
A month after radiation therapy, I went to the hospital with shortness of breath. They found multiple blood clots in my lungs. Simultaneously, my blood work showed that I had almost zero platelets. I was close to death. I remember the ambulance ride to Danbury hospital, with heparin being administered through my iv, and platelets being introduced through my port. Two opposing therapies, but both equally needed at that moment to keep me alive.
After this near death experience, I started to slip into despair. My optimism had worn off. I was living with chronic excruciating pain. Every day my baseline was a 7/10 on the pain scale. Everything hurt. I was living a nightmare. I had no help. My husband was stretched to his breaking point, holding our family together. 6 months went by like this.
I went to pain specialists and they told me they couldn’t help me. I bounced from doctor to doctor, desperately seeking help, but nobody would help me. I was in despair. After months of trying to get help, I ran out of hope. I ran out of stamina to keep fighting.
I left my children with a babysitter, drove to a remote parking lot, and took all of my pills. Handfuls of various pills.
Then I just waited to die.
I came to in a dark hospital room. And I was so angry to be alive. So so angry. Why wouldn’t God let me escape this perpetual agony? I was hurting so badly, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. The pain was more than I could bear, and now I found myself locked in a sensory deprivation chamber in the hospital. I cried bitter tears of anguish.
Over the next 6 months I tried a few more times to end my life. But all I accomplished was getting myself locked up in worse and worse psychiatric hospitals. Finally, I decided enough was enough. Clearly I wasn’t brave enough to get the job done. So I did the next best thing. I took to my bed. I stopped living. Life was too painful, too cruel, too hopeless to face. I decided being a bed bound mother was better for my kids than being a deceased mother.
For the better part of 2 years, I mostly stayed in bed. I got up and took walks occasionally, but then I went right back to bed. My children got used to coming upstairs to find me when they needed a mother. They became very independent, making their own food during the day, doing their own laundry, taking care of each other.
I hated myself for being such a broken down shell of a mother, but it was all I had left. It was the best I could do. I was mutilated, empty, broken down, emotionally wrecked, hopeless.
That’s where I was when God showed up.
The day after my 40th birthday, I finally got my breast reconstruction surgery. And after the surgery, I felt like a new person. I felt like a page had been turned. As I lay in bed recovering from the surgery, I decided to do something new. I decided to seek God. Instead of watching nonsense on tv, like usual, I looked up Bible study videos on YouTube. And I started watching.
Then I opened my Bible. And suddenly, the words were getting up off the pages and showing me their meaning. My brain felt like it had been lit on fire – in an exciting wonderful way. Then I heard music, in my head. But it was unlike any music I’d ever heard in my head before. It was the Gloria, a routine hymn sung during normal Sunday church services at my church. Except it was 1000 times more brilliant than I had ever heard it sung. I heart trumpets. I heard angelic singing.
I knew I was in the presence of God.
I started praying that God would break me out of bondage. That he would destroy the chains that held me captive, the lies that had me bound up in suffering and darkness. I needed his help getting out of the pit I was living in.
Then God showed me an image. It was an image of a gigantic snake wrapped around my body. Crushing me. On the head of the snake I was able to make out the Facebook logo. One of the things holding me in bondage was my social media addiction.
I deleted all of my social media accounts immediately.
As the days went on, I kept praying that God would destroy the lies that were holding me captive.
The first lie he destroyed was the lie of self hatred.
Self hatred was just a lie I had believed, at a very young age, in order to make sense of how my family was treating me. And hiding behind it, I found other sins I needed to address.
I didn’t fully appreciate this change until I had a bad encounter with my older sister. She got angry with me over absolutely nothing, and screamed at me about how useless and lazy I was. How everyone was sick of me always being sick, and what a piece of garbage I was to just be spending my time in bed.
Only this time, I recognized her hateful vitriol as jealousy and immaturity. I recognized that I did not deserve to be treated like her personal punching bag. I no longer hated myself, so her behavior was simply unacceptable to me.
When I confronted my mother over how she just sat by as my sister attacked me, yet again, she laughed in my face as though I was insane to think she would ever take my side, and then said she was done talking to me.
Not one person in my family came to my defense, or offered words of consolation after the attack. A week later, when I tried to talk to my siblings about why they just stood there and said nothing to defend or console me, they ghosted me too. Except now, instead of taking their derision as evidence that I was garbage, as I had all my life, I knew that their behavior toward me was the real garbage. I knew that I deserved kindness and respect. I knew I didn’t have to accept being treated this way. I stopped trying to reason with them and allowed them to exit my life.
40 years worth of rage spilled out of me over the next month.
It wasn’t pretty. I cried and raged and journaled and prayed and I sought God like my very life depended on Him. Which it did. I went to healing prayer services. I switched my music over to all Christian music. I worked so hard at forgiving my family, a process which I have had to repeat over and over again.
And then I started to pick myself up off the floor. I started volunteering at a local food pantry. Then I did some work as an Uber driver. Then I volunteered at a soup kitchen. After a few months of gaining confidence in my ability to get out of bed and do worthwhile things, I was ready to get a job. I prayed that God would find me a job I was physically capable of doing. And He did.
It has almost been one year since I was born again.
A year ago, I was miserable. Mutilated. Ruled by pain. Hiding from life in my bed. Barely alive.
Now, I have peace and joy and love *every day*. My life is overflowing with love, from my children and my wonderful husband. I have a job that feeds my soul – I am a caregiver for senior citizens. I get paid to show love to elderly people. I am good at my job. I give my clients the love that I so desperately wished for as a child. It warms my heart. I treat myself with gentleness and respect, not punishment.
I no longer spend my weekends having my confidence sabotaged by my toxic family.
I no longer cycle in and out of deep depression. I am at peace every day. I find joy in every single day. I have no urges to hurt myself, and I am no longer living in a bottomless pit of despair. God found me in that pit and He lifted me up and showed me the way to a better life.
I am still on that journey, and God continues to help me uncover and destroy the lies that have held me in bondage. I spend time with my Heavenly Father every day. He is all the family I need.
I feel loved and accepted, just as I am. I no longer struggle to find the will to live. I am thriving.
I learned something: the best revenge for childhood trauma is ending the cycle. Standing in the gap and saying “it stops with me”. And that is what I have done with my children. It is my greatest accomplishment. I protected them from that generational trauma that twisted me up in a lifetime of pain. My children love themselves and they love Jesus. They have joy every day. They treat each other with love and they treat their parents with respect. And that is the best therapy there is.