My mother will be the first to tell you how stubborn I am. She sees this as a compliment, as she takes pride in my sense of justice, but nevertheless, it sounds somewhat critical. She will tell you that when I was a baby, she tried to feed me with a spoon, but I refused to take it. Ever since, I have fed myself. She will add that at age two, I told my parents that I had potty-trained myself and since that day, never needed a diaper again. These stories, the stories my mom tells of me as a strong-willed, happy, silly child, are not my recollection of childhood before I went to boarding school.
I do not remember much of my childhood before then or my childhood, frankly, as it was not until I was sixteen that I left, but my life before that is mostly a blur for me. I know the things I have memorized, like that I was a competitive figure skater for eight years and I got my first serious boyfriend at age twelve. What is blurred, however, is the actual time within those years. Between those two settings, I was a victim of frequent emotional, physical, and sexual abuse for most of my childhood. As the strong-willed, happy, silly child I was, I never brought this home, or I tried not to by keeping it a secret. In doing so, I shattered most of the happiness and silliness my inner child held and formed a severe variation of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a chronic illness called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Still, I held onto my strong will and engrained independence, and told no one.
By my eighth-grade year, it was evident that I had fallen behind my peers in certain aspects. I was a gifted child and always intelligent but could not keep up in school. I could easily make friends and keep them, but I still evidently struggled to connect to others and maintain healthy relationships. My mother, a loving attorney, and my father, a kind law professor, could not fathom where they went wrong. They taught me everything I needed to know, but I just could not do it. So, in their eyes, originally, I just wasn’t.
When I was fifteen, I began revealing aspects of my story that I had kept from my family, leading to my first PTSD diagnosis, extensive trauma treatment, and my choice to go to boarding school. My parents have been helpful, accepting, and understanding, but nonetheless, our relationship has been severed because of my disorder. They remember a child in me that I cannot remember myself. On top of that, the things that I remember from my childhood are negative and rarely involve them. I know it is not a result of them not being there for me, but the feeling of unsafety I had as a child from other environments outweighed the feeling of safety, they tried to provide me with.
