As far as I can remember, I have never been happy, or at least, I never felt like it.
I have no memories from my early childhood. All I can think of, even now, are stories and pictures some family members showed me later on. But from my own self, it’s a void. My first memories come around age six, filled with a deep feeling of loneliness and abandonment. My parents had just divorced, and we didn’t talk about it. An absent father, a barely present mother—roles my sisters and grandparents tried to replace, but to what end? I certainly lived with them, but I didn’t connect with them much at that time.
So came the thoughts: Am I really loved?
Throughout my teenage years, the question never left my side. Whether it was about family, friends, or anyone that I crossed paths with.
At some point, it shifted a bit: Am I ever going to be loved?
I started to understand my sexual orientation around age 14, a time when people were filling the streets with pink and blue shirts, claiming that someone else’s life was unnatural, abnormal. And from my ears, it sounded like a sentence: You will never fit in, you will never be accepted; therefore, you won’t experience love of any kind.
I started to lose hope for the future. My sisters were gone from home, my grandparents couldn’t come anymore, and my mother was still working a lot. I was left alone most of the time. My inner self grew darker day after day, leading me to that afternoon when, in a remarkably easy yet nonetheless hard call for help, I swallowed all kinds of pills, alcohol, and chemicals. I vomited all night. In just a couple of days, I lost 10 kilograms, couldn’t eat or drink anything, and was barely standing up. My mom took me to the hospital, where I stayed the night. No one ever knew what I did that afternoon. I had caught an “unknown disease” that disappeared right after the hospitalization.
I regretted it as soon as I came home. I didn’t want to die; I wanted to go on and try no matter how hard it would get. As I write this down, I think that this intent to end my life brought me the strength to never do such a thing again, even though the idea of suicide kept coming back for years after that.
At 19, in university, I met this guy. We got along, but I didn’t want much more than a friendship with him. On the other hand, despite having a boyfriend, he was clear about how he saw me. Month after month, I started to feel weird about him—psychotic, obsessive. He was always on my mind, and I kept wondering where he was and who he was talking to. But I knew that it wasn’t love. I was lost and didn’t understand the feelings I had towards him. It drove me mad. Simultaneously, all the loneliness and thoughts of death came rushing back. I started to hate myself more and more. I hated my body and hated feeding it. I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing with my life. I became much more anxious than usual. Every sexual interaction I had with men during this time felt odd. I couldn’t lose control, I didn’t feel safe, and my whole body rejected the act.
My family and friends started to worry about me and convinced me to start therapy. It’s only some years later that I understood.
At 19, a few weeks after our encounter, this guy raped me as I was sleeping. Everything I had been feeling for years then became clear. I wasn’t obsessive about him in a loving way; I was scared of him. I wasn’t trying to find him but trying to run away from him, worrying about whom he could talk to and what he could do to them.
The way that understanding made me feel lighter and freed from those psychotic thoughts helped me to talk about my entire past. Slowly, I started to heal. I understood that I had been suffering from depression for years and that I indeed had never really experienced a true state of happiness. So I worked on it, progressed through therapy and medication, hoping to learn more and more about myself.
Writing all of this now, opening up to strangers, shows me what I have accomplished over the past few years. But I also feel a need to share my experience, to show that even if it might seem all dark and lost, there is always hope. We are the only ones who can heal ourselves—through time, with help, a lot of thinking, writing, and talking. Sometimes scary thoughts come back, but if you do it well, you’ll handle them. You will build all the weapons and tools to stay strong and keep going in life, making those thoughts unthreatening.
And now, proud, I can say: I love my friends, I love my family, and most importantly I love myself.