[To those who do not know me, you should probably move along because none of this will make sense if you weren't in BBS Gen before it, you know, got frozen in time.]

Buckle up because this is going to be LONG.

I often think back to that time, how utterly miserable I was and I chide myself ruthlessly, but the more I think about it, I was a mentally unstable child with no one to talk to and no sense of self-control. So I'll start with the background info to explain what the hell was going on with me since I was not in a state to explain what was happening to me or what was wrong.

I moved in my with now-disowned grandmother and aunt when I was 12. Really, I don't know when my mental break started, but I think it started in about 6th or 7th grade. Either way, I began to notice forms of what I think were emotional abuse when I was about 13. My grandma would comment on my weight, once even saying I was fat in front of the family get-together. All I had gotten was a heated-up bag of popcorn and I hadn't eaten all day. She commented on my thighs either being too big or my stretch marks, you know, something generally normal for teens going through a very sudden shift in hormones in the body.

I began to feel very unloved. It was like every day, I was either not good enough or something I did that was wrong. When 7th grade hit, I was severely depressed. I don't remember when it started, which will be a running theme, but I began cutting almost every day. I'd hide it with my sweater. I was numb and needed to feel something, even if it was pain. My ARFID, which I recently discovered was a large part of my issues due to my autism got worse as well. I was not focused on losing weight. Keep that in mind. Everything in the fridge was either claimed by someone else in the family or something I just genuinely couldn't stomach eating.

The hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar for short, came soon after this became an issue. Every day I'd go to school from barely eating the day before. I'd get the second period dizzy, sweaty and clammy, and delirious with almost zero energy and when lunch came around I'd feel better. I tried to tell my school councillor and she said I couldn't be sure I had low blood sugar and I flamed her and shut her up real quick. I listened recently to someone else with the eating disorder who said they experience the exact same thing too and when they described it to me, I realised that I had had the exact same symptoms.

I wouldn't eat anything. It was so bad to the point I began losing too much weight too fast and I had to poke 3 holes in my belt just for it to fit properly. Later, I was put in a mental hospital because that same school councillor told my mom to get me put in one because of the cutting. I was there for 6 long days. It was traumatic because I felt trapped and also was forced to be in a group talk where people spoke about their trauma, specifically rape stories which was already a very sensitive topic for me that I would go out of my way to avoid. Being there was so stressful for me that I started having auditory and visual hallucinations.

I got a lot of second-hand trauma from just being there and having to hear it all. I was also on a medication called Zoloft, it was for my depression. They increased it because I wasn't getting any better. After the mental hospital, I felt even worse than last time. I tried to joke about it, but it hurt and I began to resent it when my mom and I would drive past it. Not even going to the doctor made it easy to forget, since they used the same machines as the hospital and the beeping sound was almost too much.

I also began to feel extreme feelings of anger and was having fits of rage and experiences of mania as well, which I believe was due to the increase in my medication. I would break things, stab things, and become aggressive and defensive. My self-harming became even worse as well. Sometimes I would feel like I was amazing and doing just fine for a good 5 minutes before going back to a flat neutral again. This is where I'm beginning to suspect that living there made me develop bipolar or at least sparked it once again, because Zoloft can cause more intense reactions in people with the disorder and I display symptoms that are very similar to it. I am not sure, but it is definitely something I want to keep in mind.

I have no idea where else to put this in a way that is fluid with my little story so I'll just say it now. My uncle slapped my butt and laughed when I was only 13. I laughed it off at first but the more it soaked in my brain, the more I've realised that was not okay. My grandma and aunt even saw and they did nothing to stop or even chide him for it. They just shrugged it off.

One of the users of the BBS told me about it and said I should definitely be assessed. I remember he was a regular but I just can't remember his name. He got banned though. Something about evading a ban? I don't remember. It started with an S. I think his name was Seth. Either way, it made me think but I thought back to what he said and began to think back at some of the symptoms. Once I cried for a straight hour, I couldn't sleep for 2 days straight one time, I had a lot of delusions, and of course, anger as I mentioned before. One I believe I posted about was when I remembered something traumatic related to my grandma.

When I was ten, she made me shower in front of her while she screamed and I cried and it flooded back to me in one awful memory with her yelling that she didn't care about my privacy. That's when I believe the Mania aspect of bipolar came in because I suddenly began to plot revenge. I grabbed a wine glass from the kitchen, went to the living room, and smashed it in front of my grandma and aunt before booking it upstairs to my room. I barricaded and locked the door. I debated what to do since I had nowhere else to go. Except for the window, that is.

So I grabbed a beach towel and my black and tried to scale down out of my window. As I was climbing, the towel and blanket untied and I hit the wooden deck on my back. I didn't even think about if I was injured, I just started running and was texting my friends. The dread sort of set in about 20 minutes later and I came home to police outside. They didn't chastise me and were relatively they asked if I was okay and what happened. I told them nothing though. I was too overwhelmed. I wanted badly to just throw my grandma out to the dogs and tell them what she had done to me, but I didn't.

Later my mom made me go to the emergency room even though I told her I was fine and the doctor ordered me back to the same mental hospital and I cried. This time I was in the day program. So I had to be there at I think 7 something and I was to leave at 2 or 3 something. This schedule was very sudden so I couldn't properly sleep and would come home completely exhausted and wake up in the morning just to get stuck in a loop. This time it was for 2 weeks. I took up drinking for 4 of those days just to cope since my mom kept finding out I was cutting and it was easy to get to.

So I drank mostly light beer seltzer en masse and when I upped over to margarita, mix, I got pretty scared because I realised I was sort of losing it. I couldn't take the fear anymore and poured all of the alcohol down the sink. I told the adults at the mental hospital about it and the old lady said I had done a bad thing and that I shouldn't have poured it down the sink because it was my grandma and grandma's property. I just bawled my eyes out and they looked at me with zero sympathy. They never even tracked back to it to make sure I got better. They just didn't care.

When I got out, I was even worse and I made sure to remind my mom of it. She said my alcohol addiction wasn't an addiction and that I was just acting out for attention. Meanwhile what really had happened was that I was showing more and more signs of manic behaviour and was using copious amounts of alcohol to replace my feelings instead of facing them. I remember making a post about how I wasn't going to be taking my medication because I felt better off of it and a lot of people were trying to convince me to keep taking it because it was just a delusion and I was going to feel bad again afterwards

In the end, I tossed my meds in the trash. I felt happy again and more stable again. I talked to my doctor at the clinic and that was the first time I ever felt that I could trust an adult what felt like forever. I told him about my issues with the alcohol and he said he was glad I caught the alcohol addiction before it had progressed into something more severe and that I was right to feel scared. I mentioned my worries about Bipolar, running him by the things I've told you and the Zoloft and he said that could absolutely be a possibility and that the symptoms lined up enough for it to be a concern.

I walked out of the doctor's office feeling so much better than I had in what felt like years. I finally felt understood for once in my life and could consider someone a trusted adult. I got off my Zoloft fully, powered through and now I'm turning 16 years old in three days. Can you believe that? That was 2-3 years ago and yet I consider that almost an era of my life.

As for all of those posts I made? Those were all just a product of the trauma I was being put through at home and I'm sorry to the people who had to deal with it, and to 13-14-year-old Pudgie who had nowhere else to go and no one else who understood them at the time.

Sure I still have paranoia and there are some things I need to work on, but writing this now I think has made me really appreciate how far I have gotten in life, you know? I really went through that shit and lived! That's just...so crazy. Anyway, my explanation is finished. Cya!