How Abuse and Depression Changed my Ability to Love
By: Miranda Marquez
Numbing it out: it’s something you see in tv shows where the characters are looking for someone to pick them up when they can’t do it themselves. It seems dramatic, but that is what we look for most of the time: someone to do what we can’t do ourselves. It is easy to feel nothing, not to be hurt, or to at least pretend to don’t feel it. But you stop loving; you stop caring; you kill all those happy feelings, those things that can make your day. As a 14-year-old, I was the most joyful child, filled with friends, but, at some point along the way, I followed the wrong path. I got into a relationship where I was taught that abuse was love. It turns out that that’s not true. Once that moment in your life is over, you are worse off than before. You’re left with those bruises that won’t wash off, and what can a 14-year-old kid do with that? How can a teenager deal with emotions bigger than herself? At that point, I had two options: grow up and stop living my childhood, or numb it all. Under this messed up idea of love, I forced myself to stop loving. At that moment, numbing it all out felt like the only option, and I didn’t realize that by doing so, I was forcing myself to stop loving the people most important to me: my family. I soon realized that depression isn’t what it seems like in the movies. I got out of bed every day, I went to school, I put on a smile, and I pretended everything was fine. On the inside, I was screaming, I felt little, and I just wanted someone to notice, someone to care for me the way I couldn’t care for myself. But without talking about my feelings, how could I tell my family that I felt like I was drowning, how could I tell them that I wanted to love them but I couldn’t. And as my immature teenage mind tried to troubleshoot, I thought of a boyfriend and wondered if someone would ever love me after what I went through; but most importantly, if I could ever love someone else. After a routine of pretending to be okay and attempting to wash off things that weren’t physically there, my mom noticed. My mom saw the pain, the damage, the brokenness, every immense feeling that I was carrying. She took it upon herself to alleviate the pain. Then, all of a sudden, I was sitting on a couch in front of someone who expected me to tell her all about my problems. It was bizarre: I was expected to trust a stranger across the room. I didn’t want to, but I was exhausted that I just went with it. At first, I talked as though I was telling a story (as if that 14-year-old girl who had been hurt wasn’t me). I was being pushed, and, at the time, I hated it. Now, I’m grateful for it. I was being forced to feel, but how? How can you feel when you’ve become so used to protecting yourself from everything that surrounds you. In my brain, being numb to all the pain was the best thing, and being pushed to deal with things made me want to stay in this place, I thought was safe. Other people have to push you because, as it seems, “off” is the only button we own. I can’t say how I came to “feel” again or deal with the pain; but, all I know is that one day I realized that if I tried to stand up and couldn’t, someone would be there to catch me. Months later, I was faced with this whole new challenge, love outside my own home. I met someone, and even though I always thought love was ridiculous at my age, I went with it. This person taught me what love was, and they showed me that love went at my own pace. As could be imagined, I was mind blown by the idea that someone loved me even when I couldn’t love myself. This was a step in what I saw as recovery, where my idea of romance and love was reborn. To me, this was one of the biggest challenges, accepting that someone loved me despite the way I saw myself. I thank this person to this day for showing me that love is beautiful and that love doesn’t hurt. I could talk about self-love, but in reality, that is something that I struggle with to this day. You always hear people argue that you can’t love others until you love yourself. However, people loving me has shown me that I am worthy of love, not only from others but also from myself.
Really beautiful story. Thanks for sharing