Anita

I have been thinking about your post for the past couple of days, and clearly I wasn’t valued by my parents in the ways i needed them most, which was emotionally. My emotions were always secondary to theirs. I remember a birthday when I was about 11 or 12 and unwrapping my gift. I wanted to get through with unwrapping my gift as quickly as possible and get to my room in the basement so I wouldn’t have to sit through my parents dysfunctional relationship any longer that day, i can’t remember where we were before i got home to unwrap my gift i just remember i couldn’t wait to be away from them and the hair trigger attitudes that filled the air with tension. What I do remember is already being hyper aware of my parents emotional states by that age, or else i would face the consequences of not taking care of them. As i typed out that last sentence my stomach turned a bit and reminded me of that feeling of walking on eggshells never being able to relax in their presence, my favorite part of the day in my adolescence was being home alone or just me and my sister, because it meant peace.

I have been excited lately to find out what can happen in my life if i’m able to heal from my childhood, and truly love myself the way i need to. I can’t believe how far i’ve come already and I can only imagine how great life can be if I keep working at healing and take care of those wounded parts of myself. I’m thirsty to know who I am, my soul, and purpose in this life and universe. I feel closer to the answer than ever before i just need some guidance to find myself. It also excites me because i’ve noticed the more im able to understand my self the better i have become at doing therapy with others. I have been receiving unsolicited positive feedback lately and I know it’s because I am able to recognize patterns in others that have been brought into light for myself through therapy and through your guidance on this forum.

I’m getting a little off track here from the original purpose of getting in contact with the boy i was before depression. I want to say my parents bought me the skateboard when i was about 4 years old because i picked it out at toys-r-us. I have a vivid image of it in my mind and have been thinking of recreating it through a drawing. No one really encouraged me to skate, i remember watching the first x-games on TV at my grandmothers house in 1996 and trying to do what i saw on tv. As i grew older they opened a skatepark right next to my elementary school so i would go after school, i skated off and on and got back into it around 16 and 17 and then stopped cold turkey when i met my first girlfriend which i now regret. Skating was everything to me at one point, when i was fed up at home i would skate about 2-3 miles to the park and hangout all day and come back when it was dark. It was like all the misfit children knew exactly where to go. Nowadays I cant get enough and i feel pure joy when im riding, i feel free, extroverted, playful, creative, and as if i belong in the presence of other skaters. I think we all know there is something deeply painful were running from and skating is the escape.

Thinking of what else brought me joy as a young child, I keep thinking of living at my grandmothers house at age 4-5, it was more peaceful there than the apartments we lived in before, and the house we moved into after when my parents had no one monitoring their antics. I would play outside for hours, digging in dirt, chasing animals, and my favorite thing to do was climb the tree in her backyard. Me and my cousins about 8 of us would climb into this tree and we all had a spot to sit. We would play games and talk, or just sit and admire the small changes in the tree every month. I still love being outside in nature and feel belonging when i’m in the woods. I haven’t been hiking in a while but a friend offered recently so i will take them up on that and get back to myself hopefully.