Thursday, July 06, 2006

Family ties that bind

Seems that this craziness runs in the family. Somebody drank some bad water some years down in the gene pool. Seems that everybody in the entire family has some sort of mental illness. My grandmother died in a mental hospital. My mother has extensive mental problems, my father has issues of his own but just will not admit them. My fathers issues played into how he parented us and he made our lifes miserable most of the time he was around. He always had a reason or excuse for what he did.
My aunt is mentally ill and has spent years in and out of the mental hospital. My cousin has problems as well but like my father she will not admit to them. My brother has problems. 3 of my 4 children so far show signs of problems. 2 of them are medicated already. My grandfather had anxiety issues and had agoraphobia so badly that he never even took the trash out because he did not go outside and when he died he had like 10 years of trash in his house. I remember when we were younger that he wanted us to call him every night at 5pm. He told us that if he did not answer then to call the ambulance because it meant something was wrong with him. We called him everyday at 5pm for many years, I did not realize until recently that he was probably thinking that he would die alone and nobody would know.
All of my relatives on my moms maternal side of her family is mentally ill. SOme more then others but all of them are diagnosed with something.
The thing is, most of them were diagnosed in their teens. My mom and aunt were mentally ill at a young age so I figured by the time I hit 30 I had lucked out..guess it was just waiting for the right time to pop up for me.
Looking back I had lots of signs and symptoms of mental problems growing up but just never came out about them. I had bouts of depression where I would write poems about killing or harming myself.
I also self harmed myself numerous times, sometimes to make myeslf feel better, sometimes for sympathy and love. I will make another post about my self harming as this post is getting rather long.

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