30Days30Stories

I’m freaking out stomach nausea from eating old hummus ok had croutons and 3 vegi crackers to settle stomach am I ok from eating the old hummus my worries are there and I can’t ca myself down enough to sleep will I be ok or do u die from accidentally eating hummus from late aug I can’t sleep and am scared bc of nausea #PTSD #Selfcare #CPTSD #CPTSDinrelationships #CheckInWithMe #checkinginwithme #Upallnight #Chatspace #Hugs #Friends #BorderlinePersonalityDisorder #bpdawareness #BPDDiagnosis #CPTSDinrelationships #help #BipolarDisorder #Disability #Chat #PinchedNerve #PTSDSupportAndRecovery #PTSDawareness #Fibromyaliga #Fibromyalgia #MyalgicEncephalomyelitis #PolycysticOvarySyndrome #Aspergers #AspergersSyndrome #Spoonie #SpoonieProblems #Spoonies #Aspie #Art #Anxiety #GeneralizedAnxietyDisorder #GastroesophagealRefluxDisease #HashimotosThyroiditis #HypothyroidismUnderactiveThyroidDisease #MightyQuestions #TheMightyTakeaway #MightyTogether #MightyMusic #mightymen #mightywarriors #mightywriters #MightyMoms #MightyMail #mightytoghter #DBT #DatingWithAChronicIllness #ChronicIllness #ChronicPain #Dating #Depression #datingdisabilities #Disabililty #disablity #checkinonme #Walking #52SmallThings #30Days30Stories #30daysofteal #Healthy #SaveMe #Company

In today’s world, bullying is extremely common. I was mobbed in my workplace and it robbed me of my sense of self esteem, my happiness, my self worth, my energy and my sanity. I was taken from my position and mobbed to the point of complete mental breakdown.

I was mobbed because a workplace bully kept targeting me at work, to create an environment so toxic that I would resign. He recruited members in the workplace to assassinate my Character together. He tried to assign me Low priority work. He tried to humiliate me in front of the entire office. He had me disrespected and humiliated in front of a massive group of people.

I was devastated to see my career and my reputation be destroyed this way. Especially as I had done very little to actually clear the situation. I was afraid of being fired because the bully was a Friend of senior management. I was afraid of being targeted by more people. In the end, my own silence destroyed me.

I pray that the bully dies a pathetic death. That he is carved to pieces and humiliated in front of everyone. That he is taken from his position and his career is ruined. I am devastated at what he did and it destroyed not only my experience there, but my whole life abroad.

#Pledge2EndBullying

I felt torn apart. I was made to believe that so many things were not what I thought they were. Things were suffocatingly false. People were suffocatingly false. I felt so betrayed and chewed up. The naive person in the big city who couldn’t even manage to handle herself properly but got herself betrayed and abused at the hands of complete nobodies.

Why was I in this circle? I had worked so hard to stay out of it. I stayed away from people in general, refused to speak to people I didn’t trust and wouldn’t generally keep myself around a person for more than two weeks at a time. It was as if I was being forced open, except the person doing the forcing was also the person who was tearing me apart.

I felt completely destroyed, for the first time in my life. I was at a complete loss as to what to do. Expose this person for who he truly was? For who they truly were? Would I be believed? And what about all the things I had said and done - I had trusted them with some of my worst traumas, and I knew that if they shared those with others, I wouldn’t be able to handle the gossip and the stress which would come out of it.

I felt extremely suicidal. I couldn’t handle how I had wrecked my life like this. I deserved more and I deserved better and I had destroyed it before it had even begun. I was suffocating inside my own cesspool of mistakes and failures. I was not good enough for this city. I would never be good enough for this city. Not with my constant drowning inside my own vomit, inside my own venom. Couldn’t I just do things that normal people did? Study at a better institution? Work a normal job? Try things that were more suited to people who were “normal”? Why did I have to get embroiled in this mess?

I always knew that one day, I would be forced to deal with what I carried inside me. What I didn’t know was that I would have done so in such a toxic, harmful environment. I am a victim of abuse. I deserve a healthy recovery and I am sure, that approaching traditional methods of mental health treatment would also have helped. I don’t think that berating and destroying my efforts in this arena was the solution, which they did when I sought their assistance to recover from depression.

They were very cult-like from the start. They boasted about how they could do all things. About how they were capable of massive recoveries and of miracles that no one had seen. They mocked individuals behind their backs. They made fun of people who challenged them. They criticised people who were more educated than them. It was clear that they were operating more of a cult than an actual organisation.

My doctor was shocked when I told her that the program I had sought her permission to join, was like this. It was shocking and disturbing to both of us, that such a cult was in operation, and that it was enfolding more and more by the day. I felt absolutely disgusted at my conduct and at my presence there. I always will, till the day I die. I should have been smart.

The Wizards of Waverley Place was playing as it occurred. I woke up to the sounds of it. I was already physically uncomfortable that morning; I had gone to sleep in my jeans. I woke up to the sounds of my caregivers arguing. At first, I didn’t know what it was about. I overheard the argument becoming more heated. I realised that it was about the dinner last night.

My caregiver was angry about the timings of my other caregiver, who refused to listen to her and responded callously and with total denial of her concerns. Feeling unheard, the argument intensified. My other caregiver grew more agitated, intensifying their denial and becoming more and more accusatory. I did something very wrong - I participated in the argument and blamed the victim to try and make the perpetrator calm down. It didn’t work and wasn’t a good idea.

The argument eventually devolved into violence. I had to physically force the caregiver out of the house so he wouldn’t hit my other caregiver. I felt confused and degraded, I felt guilty and traumatised. I vacated the place and told my sibling to stay away. The experience left me feeling extremely shocked. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

My other caregiver then became resolute in the fact that they wanted to leave the marriage. I began to cry because I didn’t want them to leave us. I felt suicidal because I didn’t expect them to come up with this reaction. The experience was brutally painful as I begged my other caregiver to stay. Till this day, I bitterly, deeply, and absolutely regret this decision. They had every right to leave this abusive relationship and should have. Any children of caregivers do not have the understanding or the right to make decisions about their marriage.

The caregiver eventually relented and decided to stay. I felt painfully guilty asking them to stay because I didn’t want them to suffer more abuse. Except, that was essentially what I was signing them up for. What I should have done is leave with them and leave the abusive relationship. There was no reason for any of us to stay and that is the truth.

I wondered whether anyone I knew ever had to deal with such a situation. It is one of the situations that people would never be able to understand. The complexity of it goes beyond the understanding of people who don’t experience it. I felt belittled and trapped. I felt like I was sacrificing the wellbeing of my caregiver for my own wellbeing and felt deeply, utterly selfish. I felt like finding another family for myself.

Have you ever experienced or witnessed an incident of physical, emotional, or verbal abuse? If so, don’t be afraid to raise your voice. Let’s end the silence around abuse, our silence is our violence towards victims.

#FamilyTrauma

I always thought that I knew what I was doing when I signed up for this. Deep down, I ignored the incessant feeling that existed deep in my bones. The feeling of being an imposter. Of being unworthy. Being young and alone in the big city meant being young and alone with the feeling of being an imposter and being unworthy. Suddenly, I could no longer run away from this feeling.

I have suffered from the feeling of imposter syndrome for years. I would look around and feel like an imposter. I would feel consumed by the fact that the people around me were more talented than I am. I would feel consumed by the fact that somehow, these people were better than I was.

I bitterly regretted everything I starkly wasn’t in comparison to my peers - good looking, intelligent, talented, wealthy. I felt extremely devalued and underutilised. I wondered who would ever be able to recognise the fact that I too had a voice and that I too, was worthy. Inside, I chastised myself for trying to belittle me. But the feeling of being less than was immense.

What didn’t help was that I was being severely bullied at work. I got into the mindset where I really didn’t feel any value or appreciation for myself. My brain and my body felt completely chewed up. I no longer felt like myself. I felt like a body of flesh, fat, blood and bones. I was not myself. I was just a girl in a big city with severe imposter syndrome.

I felt used and abused. My colleagues were all living fabulous lives and I wasn’t. I was alone and I was tired. My parents weren’t here to shield me from the world which wanted to consume me alive. I felt totally alone and unworthy. I felt scared. I felt so scared. I felt so so scared. I felt extremely scared and pointless. I felt alone and deeply ashamed of myself. Why was everyone better and more worthy than I was? Why was I less than everyone else?

Didn’t I spend time studying well in university? Didn’t I work hard trying to get good grades? A decent internship? A hard earned diploma in school before that. Constant work on myself. Why was I feeling so unworthy? Why was I so unworthy? Why was I the one who was feeling unwell and depressed? I had lived in five other countries before this, I had studied around people from all over the planet. I shouldn’t have felt this way.

I felt extremely used and abused. I didn’t feel like myself at all. People around me - even expatriates - were happy. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t talented or worthy of mentorship or a decent job. I was struggling and I couldn’t accept the fact that I was struggling. I constantly compared myself to everyone else around me. I spiralled deep into depression, a depression which I couldn’t get out of. This time, there was no one protecting me from my unworthiness. No one shielding me from it. No one to motivate me or to tell me that I had what it took to keep going. No one to keep me empowered and driven.

#MentalHealth

The people I had grown up with were having the best teenage years, according to their curated and limited social media timelines. I hadn’t spoken to them, even though some of them actually lived in my block. Apparently, I was too “uncool” to be around and not someone they wanted to befriend.

I was a teenager, I desperately wanted to feel like I was cool and I was accepted. The fact that I was living in a city I disliked was unacceptable to me. The fact that I was studying in a school I disliked was unacceptable to me. The fact that I was unable to relate to, and was being bullied by my classmates - particularly of the opposite gender - was unacceptable to me. The fact that I was forced to live with constant strife at home and was subject to incidents of verbal and emotional abuse much more frequently than before was unacceptable to me.

I began to feel severely depressed and worthless. Here I was, living a terrible existence whilst the people I had grown up with were living their best lives. I felt as if I had been shortchanged, majorly. I couldn’t accept how I was being treated and the incidents which were increasing in frequency. It made life and the pressure of academics much more difficult for me.

I also didn’t feel like I had a voice anymore. I was no longer myself. I had to do whatever everyone else said that I should do. I was everyone’s rag doll, available to abuse and bully and mock and shun, constantly. This was the exact opposite of the lives that my neighbours were living. I kept comparing myself to them and the feelings of shame, rejection and severe worthlessness worsened. I couldn’t feel motivated to do well in my studies and only received average grades.

The point was, I was in a toxic environment at home and outside of the home. Both had a severely negative impact on my wellbeing, my self worth and my self perception. I went from being moderately depressed to being severely depressed. I could no longer take the feelings that I was experiencing and it made me feel the first true feeling of suicidality as a teenager. I no longer wanted to continue living the way I was. How was it so hard for me to live a decent life when my peers were living amazing lives? Why couldn’t I live a decent life?

I feel deeply, powerfully ashamed of being such a loser. I felt extremely pathetic and disliked, living the worst kind of existence I could have imagined and being abused in every kind of way. This feeling is very hard for me to shake off, and is one that I have not resolved internally. While I began to improve my mental health, I could never accept how poorly I was being treated and how terribly I was living my life.

The feeling of having lived my worst existence is one that makes me feel completely empty. It is the feeling which prompts me to work extremely hard and to live my life to the fullest possible. To go to every room and constantly learn. To push myself as hard as I can. It makes me want to push myself to become amazing.

It was a progressive decline. I was 9 years old. We had a dark summer. We had an even darker autumn, but the winter of 2004 was the darkest I’d ever seen my life. I had witnessed several incidents of physical abuse at home, that I couldn’t tell anyone about. I had been subject to bullying in school. I struggled to tell anyone about what was happening to me. Who would listen? I couldn’t tell them that my caregiver was talking to themselves in the mirror, that they were depressed on the weekends and that they were perhaps even feeling suicidal.

So I kept these dark realities to myself. I silenced myself and felt deeply pained. It was this feeling of pain from the silence which surrounded these things which caused me to grow suicidal. One of my caregivers refused to the eat food prepared by the other. My other caregiver left the bedroom and started sleeping in another room. My caregiver threatened to take us all back to our country. My other caregiver argued that parenting is a 50% exercise in which each person has to contribute. I was growing sick and tired of the constant fighting. I was afraid they were going to get a divorce.

The fear of them getting a divorce, the constant fighting, the violence and abuse, and the depression my caregiver experienced caused me to feel emotionally overwhelmed around November 2004, with no one to talk to. I knew I was in a foreign country. I could have spoken to someone. Anyone. A teacher? A classmate? I did tell my classmate the next year that my parents fight. What I didn’t tell her was that the fights were violent and involved physical abuse. That I was afraid they were going to get a divorce. That I had no friends and no relatives I could tell.

I felt suffocated in my situation. None of my peers could relate - they all had happy families, so happy that they would be smiling all throughout their schooldays. Their mothers would come to school and participate in the parent-Teachers association. Their mothers weren’t unable to do so because they didn’t speak English. Their parents would be smiling and giving them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, in their thermos boxes with ziploc bags, which they’d wear with GAP sweaters. I had chicken sandwiches and curry from my country, and wore clothing from H&M and C&A, and brought my food in tissue paper wraps because my Mother wasn’t comfortable using cling film to wrap my food.

This feeling of being “wrong” came from the silent condemnation I felt when I was in my school. I felt wrong for bringing curry to school. I felt wrong for eating food with my hands, especially when there was a chapati prepared, I felt wrong for wearing H&M and C&A when my peers wore GAP, wrong for bringing my food wrapped in tissue paper when it should have been wrapped in cling film, I just felt wrong wrong wrong!

Everything was wrong inside and outside the home. This feeling of being wrong caused me to eventually develop depression. I became severely depressed and tired.

#MentalHealth

I was worried that he was beginning to grow depressed from a very early age. But it was after he left for university that he reported symptoms of delusion and mania, of mood swings and psychosis. I had remotely been aware of the fact that he might have something resembling bipolar disorder and advised him to seek a therapist. He was reluctant to at the time.

His symptoms progressively got worse. Till the point where they began to affect his occupational functioning, his social relationships, his academic performance, his career prospects and even his physical health. He became reclusive and antisocial; he would try to avoid being engaged in any kind of relational activity.

I grew more worried and advised him to seek help. He was still reluctant and despite having faced symptoms of severe depression and mania, the existing care he received was minimal. His university mental health service was overused and understaffed. People did not help him or refer him to a consultant psychiatrist. It was after he was hospitalised that he was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and assigned medication.

I felt suicidal because before he was hospitalised, I had been extremely difficult and harsh towards him. He was taking a semester of academic leave from university after his performance was declining. I learned of the risky behaviours he had engaged in, in university and was enraged and sought to punish him for it. I then asked that he participate in a course which I had graduated from, for his emotional betterment and behavioral change, in the hopes that it would cause him to heal and recover. I was hoping that it would also make him realise that his risky behaviours were wrong and harmful.

It was after two courses that he began to suffer from hallucinations and delusions. He lost the ability to speak properly and was severely affected by the psychotic delusions on the television. He became self harming and incapable of taking care of himself. He needed to be hospitalised and he was, following which he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia elements.

I cannot forgive myself for recommending that he do this course and also for being hard and perhaps even abusive in my bid to try and get him to recover and change. I was deeply selfish and refused to be empathetic towards him. I was motivated by my own sense of depression and anxiety, my own academic stress to fail to be a good Sister and a good friend to him. I hold myself fully responsible and this is what made me feel suicidal. I could never forgive myself for the way I treated him, and for what I did to him which caused a decline in his mental health to the point of hospitalisation. Even though he did end up beginning medication, starting university in a new institution, changing his habits and focusing more on his beliefs, I still feel deeply guilty for the months of emotional turmoil he faced which caused him to grow extremely unwell and changed his whole life.

#MentalHealth

I had a bad feeling about the way the people were describing what was going to happen. An even worse feeling when I saw the address. It was strange and non-descript, and I panicked and got lost on the way. I wasn’t looking forward to going there, but something told me that I needed to release the trauma I had held onto from a young age.

Cults are places where individuals follow a leader, blindly. People do not really spend a lot of time thinking independently and critically about what they are experiencing. They hold what they are experiencing simply for the experiential value of it. As someone who was not responding to therapy and was being barred from taking antidepressants, I took this as one of the options through which I sought to cure my depression.

The steadfast belief that the person organising this can do no wrong is what defines a cult. There is no such thing. Even religion teaches people that they can do wrong. When I signed up for the course, I was doing so in good faith, hoping to treat my mental illness. What came about later was a reality that I struggle to admit to even myself.

The dark experience of being in an organisation which is leader and dogma centric is that it is totally hypocritical. The people I was around were hypocritical creatures with likely dark triad personality disorders. I am grateful I left as soon as I realised this reality, after 8 short months of course completion and volunteer work. It was after speaking to my doctor about this - who had given me permission to take this course - that I was advised strictly to avoid this.

I am ashamed and felt suicidal for the fact that I had been tricked. I had been tricked and misled, I had been manipulated and gaslighted. I had been harassed and abused. I had been exploited. There was no real support. Yes, they had imported alternative therapy techniques, but almost all of these could be accessed elsewhere. Without the cult structure surrounding them.

I take full responsibility for allowing myself to be misguided, tricked, manipulated and gaslighted, as well as exploited, harassed and abused. I should have reported this organisation for exploiting individuals with valid mental health concerns and leaving them feeling even more unwell, without taking any responsibility for their genuine physical and mental wellbeing.

#MentalHealth

It started off with a comment when we were leaving a meeting. He made passive sexual comments when I was referring to something regarding the business and how it could be developed in terms of strategy. I felt alarmed, but wasn’t sure what I could or should say. I felt ashamed and disgusted with myself for choosing to stay silent.

That was my mistake. This filthy creature took that as an acceptance and a tolerance of his toxic behavior. A whelp of a man, he could never admit to how much of a coward he was. He barely helped people grow. He only cared about himself and that too, if his poor ego was being validated. He thrived on preying on women, particularly women who were in the workplace.

This then became attempts to try and insinuate sexual activity. He began asking me if I used Tinder. He asked me why I didn’t consider him good looking. He would make comments on how I was wearing different kinds of clothing. At one point, he insinuated that I was using pornography as I tried to tell him about a new update to Google Chrome.

Workplace sexual harassment for me became a dark reality. I was unable to complain because I didn’t know who would listen. Who could I talk to? What would I be able to say? How would my parents react? I worried that I was shaming them. I worried that I had been targeted because I had a mental illness - being a foreigner, young and female had already placed me in this creature’s radar.

I felt sickened and pathetic. I felt like a piece of garbage. I did not feel comfortable being around this person. I hated him and couldn’t stand him when he was around. It was clear that he was simply trying to prey on young women and groom them for his own benefit. There was absolutely no assistance or mentorship that he was providing anyone.

I take full and complete responsibility for not reporting him. I regret this fully and will regret it for the rest of my life. People like him deserve to be behind bars and if I were in the same country, I would definitely report him. The experience of having him sexually harass me was disgusting, reprehensible and deeply pathetic. It was reflective of a misogynistic and hypocritical attitude this filthy, pathetic creature had towards women. The fact that I was in an environment where I had to tolerate this left me feeling suicidal and deeply sickened.

#MentalHealth