a brief history of a tangled mess

I started this blog, originally, in January 2010. It was more or less impulsive. I didn't know why I was starting it, what I wanted to do with it, what I thought it would accomplish.

Now I feel like most of those old posts missed the point somehow. Perhaps it began with too shallow of a context - before I'd really started figuring out what I needed to figure out.

There's a lot I need to figure out.

My parents had five children, and I am one of two who survived to see our first birthday. I understood death - really understood it - before I was two years old. I've watched my mother struggle with cancer, autoimmune diseases and various complications since I was seven. At eight, I was sexually molested - not raped, at least - but terrified and scarred nonetheless.

At sixteen, my father was in an accident that robbed him of his youth and mobility overnight. As the years progressed, he became depressed, angry, overly critical and emotionally abusive. Sixteen was also the year I stopped my best friend from killing herself. And the year I half-heartedly attempted suicide, and the year I was hospitalized to prevent me from whole-heartedly attempting suicide.

At eighteen, I learned how to trust a boy and fell in love. By nineteen, bipolar disorder had turned him into someone different - emotionally abusive, cruel at times. I tried to help him and almost destroyed myself in the process. I closed up again.

I've starved myself. I've binged and purged. I've cut and I've burned. I've deliberately refused to take care of myself and I've been creative about it.

There are still pieces of me I want to destroy. But somewhere, in that tangled mess of memories and emotions and things I've never managed to deal with, there are some pieces of me worth saving.

This is the story of a girl trying to put her pieces back together.