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glolovescats · 4 years

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A story of me and my history. My experiences.

CW - trauma, sexual assault, mental health struggles (ADHD, BPD, OCPD, Depression, PTSD, Autism??), self harm, addiction, psychological abuse

I’m 27 years old, non binary, AFAB. I am the older middle child of 4, all of my siblings are brothers.

I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), OCPD (Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder) and most recently PTSD.

My first psych evaluation was when I was 5 years old, and I have recently found the notes from that evaluation and they point to early onset BPD traits as well as ADHD. Though it is stated repeatedly throughout the notes that they could not complete a full assessment because I refused to participate in any activity or or engage with anything that I deemed “too difficult” instead spending more time on the things that I was comfortable with such as painting.

My favourite lines from the assessment are as follows:

“If she is not motivated by an activity, she trends to wander off physically and mentally. However if interested, she can concentrate for long periods of time.”

“*Deadname* was a great talker and loved to tell stories on and off topic. She had a keen sense of her own capabilities and was often self-critical of her work stating ‘it does not look good.’ It was very difficult to change her mind and she appeared to want to be in control of the situation.”

I remember after this assessment being medicated for ADHD for a few months. My parents called them my “hyper pills” because if I was hyper it meant I probably hadn’t taken them..... yikes.

After those few months, for whatever reasons my parents took me off the medication.

I have had a very intense oral fixation since a very young age, biting my nails for as long as I remember and being a thumb-sucker, not just during sleep but during awake hours as well, until I was 9 years old.

When I was 11 I began self harming, as a way to release my emotional energy and tensions and soothe myself.

When I was 13 I told my mom about my self harming, at which point she sent me to a psychiatrist again. I was again diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication, which I remained on until my second year of college when I decided I didn’t want to be medicated anymore. As a teen, I continued to self harm but hid it from my mom as she was very critical and cruel in her reactions to it. Anytime I had emotional outbursts (which was, fairly often) I would be asked “have you taken your meds today!!?” as if that would solve everything going on. I spent many hours curled up in a ball in my closet crying, sobbing, feeling like I was going to explode, then hurting myself to calm down.

When I left home for college, I developed anorexia. I stopped cutting myself, but began hitting myself repeatedly until bruises formed, then maintaining those bruises over long periods of time as a new form of self harm. It was also in this time that my love of cannabis started to really form (I had enjoyed it as well as a teen, but in limited capacities as I lived with parents who I had to hide it from, and they were quite controlling over my social life and free time)

After 2 years of college, my first queer partner, whom I still feel very fondly for and maintain a very strong friendship with, noticed not only my eating disorder but also my self harm habit, and convinced me to seek help. A few months later I went to my doctor and was diagnosed with Depression and Anxiety, and put back on medications. I was 19 then, I am 27 now and still on that same medication, though the dose has varied throughout the years depending on my emotional state.

I went through some other relationships, some healthy, some less so.

I became more and more in love with cannabis. SPending what little money I had on it. “Borrowing” some from friends and lovers. Smoking when I woke up, in the afternoon, and before bed, sometimes throughout all hours of the day.

When I was 23 I fell in love with a man named Derek. It was the first cis man I had ever truly fallen in love with, and that love became... toxic. Obsessive. At the time I would have called it passionate but I know now that it was very unhealthy. I put everything in my life aside for him. I risked pregnancy not because I wanted a child (I never have) but because I wanted to make sure he would never leave me. This is also when my love of cannabis solidified into an addiction. I was using it to cope with the pain of being so desperately in love with someone who, wasn’t very good at catering to my needs, to put it lightly. He was a dealer at the time, this was before it became legalized in Canada so dealers were still very much needed. So I always had access to it, and for free or cheap. We would wake up in the middle of the night and go smoke a couple bowls before heading back into bed. We smoked all day every day, it was what our relationship revolved around. We would also take large amounts of MDMA on the weekends and go out dancing from midnight to 8 or 9am at the after hours clubs, then go home and smoke to ease the come down. This gave me a love for MDMA which is a terrible thing for someone with low serotonin to begin with.

Nearly two years into our relationship, my friends started to notice that I wasn’t being treated well, that I was always hurting, always longing for more from him, and always pushing aside my needs to accommodate him. They begged me to leave him. I was having breakdowns, even with my antidepressants. I was self harming again. I was having rage blackouts. I was hurting. A few months later, he broke up with me. I begged him not to. I promised I could be right for him. We just had to try. He didn’t want to try.

Now, 4 years later, I’m so glad he didn’t. Yes, my heart was shattered in that moment, yes it sent me on a spiral, but I see now how toxic the relationship was and he is not anything like the person I would want to be with for life.

At that time I was living in towns on the outskirts of Toronto, but his dumping me gave me the push I needed to move to into the city, which I did, y months later. March 15th 2017. Moving to Toronto meant more freedom, more access to all the things that made me happy - a queer community, a polyam community *I discovered Polyamoury about 2 months after our breakup and realized how much I needed it*, more job opportunities, more diversity and acceptance. It also meant higher rent, higher weed prices as I was now buying from dispensaries, higher transit costs and generally higher cost of living. Some of my new friends were sex workers and it... appeared enticing for me. however I didn’t feel close enough with these friends yet to ask details about safety, vetting, standards, etc.

Well, I decided to get into sex work for myself, without really knowing what i was getting into. I’m not going to get into much detail here because my PTSD stems directly from these experiences and I don’t want to trigger myself right now. But I spent 2 years working as a Sugar Baby and Full Service Sex Worker. I did not have standards. I was driven by my need to maintain my weed habit - which was at least 2 grams/day - so on average about $600/month or more. I didn’t take safety into mind more than letting my roommate know the given name and phone number of the person I was meeting up with. This led to... a lot of fucked up situations. A lot of pain and trauma. I was constantly high, which allowed my to dissociate while these things were happening to me and suppress the memories quite quickly. By this time in my addiction, I was never NOT stoned. On top of that I would occasionally take MDMA before or during a date to maintain a peppy mood and appearance. On March 1st 2019, after realising that I wasn’t even making money off of all of it, I was driven far into debt by trying to maintain appearances and a lifestyle that i just couldn’t afford, and a realization that I was dissociating whenever I was being intimate with a client OR a friend or loved one... I decided to leave the industry. It’s been over a year now.

In the first year of my living in Toronto I saw a psychiatrist about my mental instability, my rage blackouts, my obsessiveness. I was diagnosed with BPD and put on a mood stabilizer, which I admit has helped a lot in terms of my heightened emotions and rage problems.

During those first 2 years in Toronto, I was also in a queer, polyam relationship with a person named Laurel. At first i was drawn to their softness, their creativity, their ability to be vulnerable with me and others. Eventually, that vulnerability became co dependance. They used me as a crutch, they took all of my emotional energy for themselves and never gave any in return. While I was being traumatized, I was also supporting them through their mental health struggles and ignoring my own. They had a bad habit of disregarding and stomping all over my boundaries. even after we would discuss them and i would make compromises. I was being abused by this inherently toxic person (I say that, having many friends who have witnessed and felt the toxicity from this person as well). By April 2019 I was drained, I was traumatized, I was falling into a pit and being pushed down even further by the person who claimed to love me. When I tried to set boundaries I was met with threats of suicide, manipulating me into staying with them longer. But eventually I started to see through it and I just couldn’t anymore. I ended it. Which was met with a lot of cruelty and more manipulation to the point where eventually I had to just block them from every form of contact and move on.

Throughout the year after that, my weed habit maintained, and got even more intense, going up to closer to 3 grams/day and including concentrates and edibles as well. I was always high. Always numb. I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t focus during conversations even if I was really interested in what we were talking about. I couldn’t stay awake, I would pass out while hanging out with friends, while on public transit, in movie theatres.. anywhere. I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings and when I did I would go straight for the bong.

I was constantly fatigued and I felt numb. I didn’t want to believe my precious cannabis could be doing this to me though, so I begged my doctor to refer me to a psych to discuss changing medications, assuming it was my meds giving me these side effects. That psychiatrist diagnosed me with OCPD, saying that he believes this is what has always caused the depression and anxiety, and he also diagnosed me with CUD - Cannabis Use Disorder - essentially a fancy way of saying I’m an addict and my drug of choice is cannabis. He told me that he would not touch my meds until I either drastically cut back my usage or stopped altogether.

I was devastated, I hated the idea of having to not smoke weed anymore. And I knew I would HAVE to stop altogether because my many many many attempts in the past to cut back were never successful. I knew then that I was an addict, just like my alcoholic father, my alcoholic and cocaine addict younger brother. I knew I had the gene too.

I discovered MA - Marijuana Anonymous, which is like AA or NA but for stoners. My dad had been sober for 11 years with the help of rehab and AA so I figured I would give it a shot. I smoked my last bowl on February 29th, I went to my first meeting on March 1st. I haven’t smoked or consumed any cannabis products since. It’s over 4 months now. I also made the conscious decision to be sober from alcohol as in the past my attempts at smoking less weed led to drinking more alcohol. I know I need to fight my addiction as an entire entity, not just as one substance.

In the past 4 months I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs. Not only with sobriety, but with the pandemic hitting Canada mid march, forcing me out of work and stuck at home, it’s had both positive and negative effects. My first month of sobriety I was fairly manic, I wasn’t as hazy and groggy and fatigued, I had also just started taking Vyvanse - a stimulant - for my ADHD. So I was very motivated and I was cleaning and creating and doing all these things I could with my free time. Then about a month and a half into it I started to get physically depressed - I say it that way because my mind felt ok. IO wasn’t having catastrophic thinking or suicidal ideation or desires to self harm - but I was feeling very avoidant and sleeping and napping so much more. Two months in, my memories that I had been suppressing with the constant high started to come through to my conscious. Sometimes they were childhood or teen memories, which I could mostly cope with. But then came the memories from the sex work. The traumatic experiences. The shame that surrounds them. I was having invasive thoughts. I would lay my head down to sleep and suddenly be in flashbacks. I had known for a long time (about a year, since leaving the industry) that I was triggered into panic attacks by intimacy and touch, but I didn’t know exactly what was causing those panic attacks. I just knew that touch made me feel so unsafe. Well, now I knew why. One night I called my sponsor, crying, stuck in a loop of flashbacks and memories and feeling like I couldn’t breathe. And then the words just flowed out of me, I said “I think maybe I have PTSD”. Luckily for me, I already had a follow up appointment with my psychiatrist scheduled for the next week. I told him everything that was happening, that I was remembering things but then getting stuck in flashbacks and shame and cycling thoughts. He then diagnosed me with PTSD. He suggested we go back up to a slightly higher dose of my antidepressant while maintaining my other medications (I’m still on the mood stabilizer and the stimulant) and urged me to find ongoing therapy. My sponsor had sent me a link to a group of psychotherapists who work on a low budget sliding scale, so I referred myself to them and within 48 hours had a free 50 minute consultation scheduled.

Where am I now?

Struggling with the invasive thoughts which make me feel depressed, but knowing where they stem from is helpful. Awaiting my therapy consultation which is in a couple of days, hoping it’s a good match and that we can start speaking weekly or every other week depending on cost.

For a while now I’ve been trying to decipher whether I really do have ADHD< BPD and OCPD all blended together, or if I’m really autistic, because so many of my traits and symptoms overlap with autism. I’m doing my research now on traits of autism and seeing where I identify. I doubt I would ever get a diagnosis, as doctors would rather believe we have all these other disorders rather than autism (stigma), but to know where I feel I fit would be helpful. I have some friends on the spectrum and I’ve reached out to them to discuss as well. My youngest bother is autistic but he really fits the “autistic teen boy” stereotypes which I do not. And I understand that autism can present very differently in different genders and different people. Personally, I believe I may be Autistic and have PTSD. But I will continue to pursue ongoing therapy, as well as DBT therapy, to address my behaviours and see where I can learn to cope better.

I am probably the most single polyam person you could meet. I have no intention of dating, though I do have a couple crushes I intend to grow strong friendships with, until I have learned to cope with the PTSD and intimacy triggers. In a way it’s as if I am currently feeling asexual, because even the thought of kissing someone I like triggers me into a panic. But I don’t believe that I will feel this way forever so I don’t use asexual as an identifier or label for myself. I am not working, though still technically employed, my job is in the travel industry and we don’t expect to have enough meaningful work to return to until at least the fall. When i do return to work I’ll be doing so remotely, as will most of the employees of our company. So I have less transit expenses, less time constraints, and more freedom to focus on myself and my personal development. I’ve made this tumblr to explore and learn more about autism in adults. As well as to have something to do and distract myself with when i start to enter a depressive cycle. SO this blog will be a mix of mental health and neuro-divergent info posts, along with cute animals, selfies, travel photos, and maybe a little shit posting - as a treat.

Welcome, and thank you for reading my story. If you have any questions or relate to any of it and want to chat, my inbox is open.

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