That's also not all I have to say.

A Terrible Story

I skipped a year of elementary school.  By the time that I was in 4th grade I was staying up until 11 p.m. to try to finish my homework.  My parents did nothing about my stress until I looked in the mirror one day and started screaming because I saw that I had pulled out most of my eyelashes over the past few months and my eyelids were almost bald.  I had stomachaches and was unpopular; none of that was the case before I skipped a grade.  I was in that school system for another 4 years.

We moved before I started high school, and things were not as bad socially, although by my senior year in high school my average bedtime was 1:00 a.m. and a night without a lot of homework was a night when I had about 3 hours of it.  That was in addition to a sport almost every season, piano lessons all four years, a couple of plays and musicals, and choral music festivals in my junior and senior years.  I graduated from high school a month before I turned 17; someone had to tell me that was an achievement because nobody else had.  I probably didn't need to skip a grade, but it wasn't the work or the high expectations that did me in; it was my family's misery.

I did not attend a full year of college until I was 20.  At almost 18 I was hospitalized for the first time, at my request.  My parents and my sister were so excited; I had finally failed.  I don't know if they thought that I didn't know how happy it made them.  Happy and guilty about feeling happy.  That hospitalization was so traumatic that I took an overdose of Tylenol at 18, had to have my stomach pumped, and was told I'd be committed to a psychiatric unit if I wouldn't sign for a voluntary admission.  I lived with my parents for the next two years, working menial jobs and almost never spending time with people my own age.

During my first semester at college, I made a lot of friends right away because I am an outgoing person even when I'm unhappy.  There was a cute guy in our building.  One of my friends dared me to knock on his door and tell him that I thought he was.  Then he asked me for a date.  The date wasn't bad, but I had a feeling that he wasn't the most sincere guy whom I had ever met.

I told the therapist that I had at that time that I didn't have an entirely good impression of this guy.  She assumed that my judgment was wrong and accused me of having low self-esteem.  "It sounds like he really likes you," and so on.  I then threw myself into the situation, when my judgment was the right judgment and I'd been talked out of it by the person whose job it was to help me make good decisions.

He freaked out and immediately lost such interest as he had had.  I, being a pretty sincere person who also didn't want to fail at the straightforward task set by my therapist of setting aside my own judgment so that a freshman guy with girls pounding on his door day and night could like me even while the medication that a psychiatrist had prescribed for me was blowing me up to 150 and then 170 pounds, became obsessed and even more miserable.  I finally moved out of the building for the second semester so that I wouldn't keep going to his dorm room when he so clearly didn't want me there; it was my idea and my decision to move to another building.  I still have some stretch marks from the weight those prescriptions made me gain within a few weeks of my starting to take them. For a while, I was so fat that I couldn't see my feet over my stomach.  I was also so doped up from those prescriptions that I slept an average of 12 hours every day.  I slept like the dead.  I heard nothing when I was asleep and couldn't move even when I was half awake.  The medications screwed up my hormones so that my breasts filled with fluid; essentially I was lactating for 3 years.  (I have told that part of the story before, but it hasn't stopped the conglomerate from its mirthful bullying about my breasts being flat when I'm not wearing a bra under my t-shirt in bed IN MY OWN HOME.)  My periods stopped and had to be induced with other drugs.  I developed acne all over my back.

Did the therapist apologize or take any responsibility for having told me I was wrong when I was right? No; months after having dismissed my initial judgment (of a person whom she had never met), she accused me of being masochistic because I didn't know how to let go of liking him, or of trying to make him like me.

She wasn't even a bad person.  This is how a lot of women are treated by the mental health care system, which has a few good practitioners, not many at all.  It's also why people's mental health and their lives frequently worsen rather than improve when they go to counseling with therapists who like sending them to psychiatrists for medication.

Whose fault does everyone assume it is when a therapist or a psychiatrist makes someone's life worse?  It's not the therapist or the psychiatrist; it's that patient who is then characterized as being so sick that all the counseling and medication still aren't enough.  What then? More medication and more counseling, of course!  For the patient to say "I'm worse now; I don't want to be here anymore and I don't want to take these drugs anymore" is the automatic trigger for the patient to be admonished and treated as if he or she is being irresponsible. 20 or 30 years later, people chortling at the wreckage of your life assume that every bad decision that you ever made was also your fault.  They enjoy the versions of the stories that they hear about you that make them feel that they've been kicking the feces out of someone who needed to be taught a lesson.  They don't enjoy the versions of the stories that make them feel that they are evil and pathetic bullies who have had easy lives despite all of their self-pity and that they have tortured someone for years who had already had a SHITTY life before they had ever heard of her and descended on her like a bunch of locusts, taking what was left of her youth and health and forcing her to carry an immense, horrifying, isolating burden FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE.

That therapist was neither the first nor the last practitioner to assume that her judgment was better than mine about people whom she'd never met or interacted with and situations which she'd never witnessed.  Why did she assume that? Because she was the therapist and I was the patient.  That made her right and me wrong.  That's what most people assume about that power dynamic.

All of the above is a short chapter in a very unhappy life.  There are many other chapters, most of them as bad as that one.  I don't like to spend all of my time, or even most of my time, thinking about how awful my life had already been before the conglomerate ruined the rest of it.  I also don't need other people taking sides about my past and publicizing it.  It's not your story to tell. These aren't people that you knew.  You don't know why they did what they did, and you can't absolve your abuse of me by acting as if you care about what they did.  If you had ever cared about me, I wouldn't be sexually assaulted by hidden, illegal cameras every day now.  You would never have allowed that to happen; you would have had it stopped years ago.

Please stop carousing in my past and throwing it in my face, everyone who is doing that.  It's none of your business.