I know that some of you are new to my blog, and some of you follow me on Tumblr or LiveJournal, but don’t really “know me” or know how long I’ve been blogging. Well, I decided, while looking to see how much of my site got archived over almost 10 years, that I should probably post somethings that may not be known or may have been forgotten. Part of knowing who I am now is knowing who I’ve been.

2002 – My Biography

My name is Janet. I’m an eighteen year old girl from Huntsville, Alabama. I’ve lived here all my life with my mother and father and our various assortment of pets/relatives.

As a child, I was a ballet and tap dancer who longed to be Whitney Houston when she grew up. I worshipped Whitney. She and Michael Jackson were my favorite artists until sometime during middle school. They still are two of my favorites, just not at the very top of my list.

I’m what some would consider to be a ‘teenybopper’. I love *NSYNC. I’ve been to one of their concerts. I’ve also been to concerts for 98 Degrees, Chicago/Doobie Brothers, and Smash Mouth. Of all four, I loved *NSYNC’s the most. They were all good, though. (The 98 Degrees one would’ve been much better if the sound guy had mixed the music properly. He had the bass too high, so it was kinda hard to hear Nick, Drew, and Jeff. You could hear Justin, the drums, and some guitar, though.)

I am a high school drop-out. I dropped out in January 2001, a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday. I am not, by most accounts, an idiot. I was getting all A’s in my Junior year in high school before I got sick. I took my GED test May 14, 2001 and received my letter that I’d passed just a week and a half later. I then enrolled in college at Calhoun Community College.

So why did I drop out? Well, I’m crazy. I’m not joking about this. I seriously am crazy.

I suffered somewhat of a nervous breakdown. I was severely depressed and suicidal. I had panic attacks on a regular basis. I also had some health problems that weren’t psychological–bronchitis, asthma attacks, etc. I couldn’t stay in school and I did what any logical teen would do in this sort of situation…

I dropped out!

How did my parents react? My mother wasn’t too shocked or upset over it. She’d dropped out her Junior year of high school for similar reasons. She understood how I felt and what I was going through. My father, on the other hand, was pretty mad over it, but he knew that he couldn’t stop me. He tried to convince me that what I was doing was wrong, but I didn’t believe him, and I’m glad I didn’t.

My teachers weren’t exactly shocked. Many of my teachers from middle school and a few from high school thought that I would do better out of high school than in high school. They said high school wasn’t exactly my “thing”. They said I’d do much better in college.

My “psychiatrist” (he was a physician’s assistant of a psychiatrist) at the time wasn’t very happy over it. He didn’t think it was best for me, but he also thought I was sexually frustrated because I slept all the time. I was sleeping all the time because the idiot had me on 50mg of Paxil, 40mg of Celexa, 5mg Zyprexa, and .5mg Xanax twice a day. He never listened to me, so I never really trusted how he felt about the situation.

So, he got me an appointment with a therapist…the wonderful Lilian. She inspired me to switch psychiatrists and to try to get ahold of my life. (Lilian is truly an angel in my life.)

I switched psychiatrists just in time. My mom thought I needed to be hospitalized at this point in time (May 11, 2001) and she was right. Five days after my first appointment with my latest psychiatrist, I was hospitalized and put on suicide watch. I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder at this point in time and my meds got completely switched. The hospital was okay. I didn’t like it much. I had a run-in with a sadomasochistic nurse who liked seeing me in pain from lice treatments that you must put in ALL of the hair on your body. Some of the staff was rude to me because I cried a lot. (Hello! I was depressed–unlike many of the people in there.) My “therapist” at the hospital, Steve, gave me a hard time because of my diagnosis. I was said to have an attitude problem because I was sarcastic and because I screamed and cried whenever I was upset. When I told him that I felt like my father ignored me sometimes, he told me that he didn’t blame him. If he had to live with such a drama queen, he would’ve ignored me, too. That really slashed any self-esteem I had. On May 20, I was released.

I’m very opinionated. I always have been and I always will be. I’m a bit argumentative, and I do have a bad attitude sometimes. That doesn’t really mesh with some people and their original opinions of me. People tend to believe that they can walk all over me, and for the most part, they can. If I get sick of being walked all over, though, I will bite back. I come from two parents who are very outspoken, but not outgoing. This is part of why I’m opinionated and part of why I’m shy. I typically do not initiate conversations and, in a group, I tend to shy away from any attention at all. I try to be nice to everyone, but that doesn’t mean it works.

I’m usually mis-labelled by people, including my friends. According to my friends, I am the “nicest girl in the world” and “very quiet and shy”. According to them, I should “never change.” According to my ‘enemies’, I’m a “cancer” and I “demand too much.” I “exagerrate about everything and have no friends.” They also tend to think that I’m a “fucking psycho”, which I don’t appreciate.

The truth of the matter?

I try to be nice, because I want people to like me. Sometimes I suck up and I suck up too much. Then, I start feeling emotionally torn between loyalty and being true to myself. In the end, I have to live with myself and I don’t have to live with other people, so sometimes my opinions bubble out and offend these people. I am quiet. If a pin were to drop in a quiet room, it would be louder than my voice. I am shy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have tons to say. I am very demanding and I will admit that. I want people to do things my way and I feel hurt when they don’t. My feelings get hurt easily. I do exagerrate some things, but I don’t really lie. I’m very manipulative. I also have lots of friends. I may not always feel close to them and sometimes, I’m too depressed to be near them. Sometimes, I may seem selfish and for the most part, I probably am. I’m also the girl who was crying on Christmas 2001 because she couldn’t give the excess food to the millions of Afghans who are hungry.

No one has really ever understood what it’s like to be me. I cry about too many things, but I don’t always cry at the appropriate times. Sometimes I feel like I’m two different people, because one is outspoken and the other is shy and cowers in the corner. Sometimes my brain races so fast that I can’t think. By the time I grab a thought for my conscious mind, my brain has lost it in a jumble of other thoughts. I hate that I have to take so many medicines to survive, but after you’ve been sick since infancy, you accept it as a fact of life. I hate being so poor that I can’t wear designer clothes, but being considered rich by those who live in the projects–and actually have the designer clothes. I hate the way I look. I’ve been fat since I was a child and have always been ridiculed for it. I hate that. I hate how I have to endure so much crap from people. I hate how I’ve had friends who make fun of other fat people, but then say that I’m so pretty or that they would never make fun of me. I question whether anyone has ever truly been honest with me. I mean, I’ve been lied to so many times that I can’t trust anyone. I hate that my parents don’t trust me because they think I’m gonna go into ‘slice and dice’ mode on my skin. I feel like I walk a very fine line between sanity and insanity (blends of neurosis and psychosis). I never know when I’ll fall back into the insanity, but I know I can never be sane. I can never be free of the demons that hold me in their grip and force me to live a painful existence.

5 comments