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(This was originally for a school assignment)
When I was eleven, I went to my first huge live concert. It was at a major Scout Jamboree in Alberta. Multiple bands played during the day and night as kids listened, traded badges, and had the time of their lives. While there were many bands, whom I met and talked to, there was one band that was very memorable. It was one of the last nights of camp and it was the biggest concert of the week. The band asked the crowd to move right up close to the stage. I was so close that I could touch the guitarist. The music was so loud that I can still remember the thumping that it made in my chest. The ground shook as kids and adults alike jumped and danced to the alternative-punk music. The night happened so fast that I don’t even remember the name of the band; but I do remember the two girls beside me. They were a few years older than me, I could tell, but they let me join in their fun of being young and happy. I was so excited to be there, living and sweaty, that all the bad things that had happened in the week prior, melted away. The best thing that happened that night, was when my siblings and I waited in line to meet the band. I got my shirt sign (which I still own) and talked to the band members. It was one of the best nights of my life.
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Hello everyone! It’s Syd, today I’m going to talk about what has been happening in the past 8 months or so, and why my content has been different and, I guess, off or weird. What I want to say before starting, is a, trigger warning for people who are sensitive to topics such as depression, anxiety, sexual abuse, addiction, and medication. This video will have the conversation of all of that in here, so this will not be the video for you if you are sensitive to those topics. Okay, let’s get started, I guess. I think I should start by explaining what has been happening recently, within the past 3-4 months or so. So, for the past year and a bit, I have been going through a bought of heavy depression and anxiety. I’ve had anxiety all my life and depression since I was 11 or twelve; it really started after my grandmother died, but we’ll talk about that later. So, starting October-ish, my depression servired intensely. I ended up not really wanting to do anything but stay in my bed, sleep, and watch YouTube. Making videos wasn’t exciting, art wasn’t exciting, writing was exciting; I just felt so unmotivated to do anything at all. This is why my videos have been mostly horrible livestreams and such. You will notice that you can’t see any of those livestreams that I don’t want on my channel anymore, as I have made them unlisted. It’s not that I’m ashamed of them, it’s that I wasn’t well when I made them, I was sick, and I just felt obligated to put out some kind of content, even if it was shitty content. I just don’t want to have that effect on newer viewers, or myself, as I am not that way anymore and I really, really want to start putting out better quality videos. I’m not going to be posting anymore cavetown music specifically, because the majority of them are copyrighted and YouTube is now my job, so; it’s obvious why I’m stopping. The videos will still be on my channel and yeah, that’s that. Now, if any of you are skeptic for a teenager to be depressed or unmotivated. I can say that as of December 14th 2018, I am officially diagnosed with Clinical Depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and trauma symptoms. This is by a professional psychologist, who has a degree, they are a child psychologist that helps children with mental health issues get the care they need. So, let’s get that out of the way. I’m going to dive a little deeper into trauma symptoms, as it is a broad term and can mean a lot of things. With that, we need to start with 5 year old me. Yep, 5. This is the part of the video where anyone who has a sensitivity to sexual abuse should not listen or watch. You can skip or just not watch the rest of the video. So, from the time I was 5 though when I was 7, I was sexually abused by the same person repeatedly. No names are going to be in this video at all, as it is not my right to, nor do I want to. Let’s just say that he knew my family, was about 9 years older than me, and about 100 pounds heavier than me. I grew up with a fear of men and teenage males. The thing is that as I got older, my mind started to block out the memories of this trauma. By the time I was 10, I had no recollection of anything that happened to me. This is very common among trauma survivors, as it is a coping mechanism for the mind to stay healthy and happy. The bad thing is, I had no idea why I had a fear of men. This caused me to have shame and an awkwardness around sex and anything sexual, again, not knowing why. The mind is tricky sometimes and can do weird things to cope. Moving on but in the same theme of trauma, we will be moving on towards more childhood trauma. While growing up, my parents fought a lot, mostly about money and nothing that concerned. I remember, my siblings and I sitting on our steps in our hall, supposed to be upstairs but not; listening to our parents scream at each other. As a child, this is very traumatic. Children’s minds are very impressionable. I developed a fear of arguments, confrontation, and conversation because of that. I cried whenever somebody got angry, I thought that every fight was somehow my fault and that I needed to fix it. A lot of this, I still carry with me today, but I am learning to get better. We are now going to skip forwards to when I was twelve. In short, my grandmother died of lung cancer. She had stayed at our house for months beforehand and then she was in the hospital. Every summer, my entire life, we would visit my grandmother for 1 to 2 weeks. I grew up with her love, and her death really affected me. The hardest part, she died on my first day of 7th grade. My mom gave my siblings and I the choice to go to school, which we did. Later that week, I started feeling really sick, tired, and just sore. So I did what most people do when they start to feel sick, they take some fever medication. But the thing was, this feeling never went away. So I started up the amount of ibuprofen and acetaminophen I was taking; at least 20 extra strength painkillers a day. Now, I was child, and dosage get tricky. Now, ibuprofen isn’t physically or psychologically addictive, but the body can become dependant on it; but acetaminophen is addictive; and you can overdose on both. At the time, I didn’t know I was addicted, I didn’t know I was depressed; I just knew I was taking a lot of pills. Again, at least 20 painkillers a day and up to 60mg of melatonin at night to sleep; by the way, the highest over the counter dose of melatonin I could get was 10mg, it is not recommended that you go over 0.5mg. This entire thing, the addiction and the depression, caused me to not remember the majority of grade 7. The way I got out of this, was by writing. I was writing up to 5 poems a day, and was writing my very first novel. This was how I got over everything, and by the summer, almost one year after the death of my grandmother, I was completely sober and happy. I went into grade 8, happy and healthy. I also figured out my seuxality around the same time; and came out to my family has pansexual. In grade 8, I started to identify as genderfluid, which is the gender I feel most comfortable with. It basically means, without going too into it, that my gender can be more masculine, feminine, or agender, depending on how I feel; that is the fluidity part of it. Going into high school, my anxiety was still just as bad as it had been before, but never too extreme except for a few occasions. I made some new friends, got away from the people that has bullied me in elementary school, and started using they, them, their pronouns; something that I felt fit me better than my assigned female pronouns. Grade 9 was a breeze, I got good grades, made honour role, and was generally happy with how high school was going for me; all the doubts of making friends and classes melted away. But, then the next school year came around and everything went downhill again. In October, 2017, I started my first job at a local Subway, which I thought would be a nice job to make some money before I started on my career and saved up for school. I was so wrong. Subway, not a bad company, I have nothing against it, but this specific place was absolute Hell. It was understaffed, busy as ever, and the entire environment was toxic and anxious. I ended up working them for 9 months. If you ever work at a place, where you absolutely dread going to and are scared as you walk in there, stop working there. My anxiety worsened and my depression came back. I started not being able to go to school, do homework, write, draw, anything that I loved doing before. I passed my first semester of school, but second semester was where it got worse. By February 2018, I couldn’t get out of bed, and an injury in my right wrist the previous summer had suddenly flared up out of nowhere. By the summer, I had finished one and a half classes in that semester. In March of that year, I had started medication for my anxiety and sleep, which I thought would be good, but it made things so much worse. The anxiety medication worked for my anxiety but made my depression so much worse, the sleep medication I was on made me gain a lot of weight really quickly. I had hit my breaking point, and even self-harmed. In the summer, my aunt took me to Toronto to get away from my family, and take me to a hospital. Needless to say, I needed the trip, and even though I wasn’t hospitalized, I could’ve been and was completely okay with that. I went home, and everything got worse. I felt completely awful. It got to the point where I tried to kill myself with my sleep medication, which ended up with me being really high, tired, and hallucinating. It wasn’t fun. I fought with my parents more and felt that I wasn’t getting the treatment that I needed. I pushed and pushed my mother for me to get more help. Finally, in November, my injury in my wrist finally got sorted, and I have a ganglion cyst in the joint of my right wrist. There is nothing we can do but surgery, but we have not done that yet. Finally, we went to a psychologist and they put me on new medication and finally diagnosed me. Since mid-December of 2018, I have felt the best in my entire life. I’m off my old medication, stopped gaining weight, and have started enjoying the things I love again. I’m excited for what I can do with my career here on YouTube, as well as branching out into freelance writing and maybe even an online store for my art. This is a video of a lot of things, but it is not a video of failure. I am alive, healthy, and well. I am a survivor of many things and even though I have my trauma and illnesses, I don’t let that defy me and I just really want to be able to do the things I love. Please, if you have any questions, or anything you want to talk about, you can DM on Instagram or contact me through my website. All my links will be in the description. Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it, that’s what got me through. You are stronger than you give yourself credit for, remember that. Thank you for watching and I can’t wait to see you later. Bye! |
Authorthis is where i ramble; have fun Archives
December 2019
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