2. Tumbling

My family and I rarely talked in depth about how much emotions affected us, and when we did, this would tend to be expressed in anger. It was like there was always an unspoken tension in the air that no one dared to examine. So naturally, when events like almost taking my own life threatened to break that barrier, we tried desperately to bury all the baggage from the past by coming up with excuses so as to prevent us from feeling the pain. The excuse used for me was the ‘attention seeker’.

Looking back I do understand why that label was used – it was the only way we knew how to cope. However after this particular event, I really needed someone to hold me and tell me it was going to be ok. But instead I buried it and kept on moving on without acknowledging that pain.

Our last holiday as a family was spent in Lake Garda, Italy; a beautiful place, with warm blue skies and stunning views, but it was marred by anger and also the fact that my grandma’s health had deteriorated before we went. Both my brother and I had a feeling that things were about to come to a head and when we returned, my mother sat me down in the kitchen the day before school started, and told me that she needed counselling for the first time in her life. I remember feeling sad for her and to lighten the mood, joked “you’re not gay are you?” I will always remember her response: “I don’t know”.

At the start of her journey to come to terms with this herself, she also found the courage to come out to me and then my brother. I was in shock and didn’t know how to react. My mum, who seemed the epitome of heterosexuality, was gay. My first response was to assume I was okay, as I’d always done in the past, and to support her warmly. But when I got into bed that night, the reality started to sink in. The thin walls of a stable nuclear family began to crumble and I had to come to terms with the all-too-sudden truth that my parents had split up. I’d wanted them to separate but this was a bewildering shock I could never have anticipated.

I did not know to handle the fact that my whole world had been turned upside down. Concealing my personal life became normal and it suddenly felt like the chains had been broken; I was free to express myself.

I became a martyr, and wanted everyone to pity me, walking around school showing off my pain to people in an effort to receive attention. I told everyone I knew that my mum was gay. I think I was in shock, I needed to let out all the crap that I’d buried for 14 years. I needed someone to hold me and walk me through what was going on, to help me find some sort of a structure. I started to lie to my school, telling them that I was feeling ill so I could go home. It became a daily routine of me going to student services and telling them my stomach hurt and that I needed to leave. They eventually sussed out that something was wrong, and the staff spoke to my mum over the phone in front of me; I was so embarrassed.

They arranged for me to meet with the school counsellor who was lovely but not what I needed as they were only 25 minute sessions every Thursday. I began using the same excuses to get out of lessons, but instead of pretending to feel ill, I’d say I had counselling sessions. I would sit outside the counsellor’s office for hours on end; they had no idea what to do with me. If I’m being honest, that really didn’t help – me sitting in silence, alone with dark thoughts; they just couldn’t understand. During these months I deteriorated so much that in due course I told teachers I was going to counselling sessions but in reality I was harming myself in the bathroom toilets. When my mother found a pair of scissors in my pocket, she took me to the hospital in a panicked state. I was made to stay overnight there, with a woman watching over me whilst I slept. It was dreadful, and by the time my mother picked me up to go home, I felt a billion times worse. And worse still, the second time I was taken to A&E – this time for two nights. It also didn’t help that when I went back to school the teachers really struggled to understand the gravity of my situation.

It had started with compasses and scissors, then it was anything sharp I could find. It became a routine, a particular time during the day, where I would cut and cut until it bled. The increasing visions of me overdosing, or jumping on to a train platform fogged my mind and I began to take kitchen knives and cut deeply into my arms. It had become an addiction, an addiction to pain.

You see, I wanted the horrific, unbearable pain in my head to go away. I couldn’t live with it, the monster, the dark swirl of hatred, telling me that I was a burden and that no-one wanted me around. They’d be happier without me, they wouldn’t have to deal with the looming black cloud of negativity surrounding me every time I walked into a room. How can one person handle all of those thoughts, whilst also dealing with the shock of her parents splitting and her mother being gay? Hormones and pressure from school didn’t help. I was broken and I thought the only way to distract me from this, was to feel physical pain. I thought that I deserved it, I deserved to be cut.

I was 15 years old, and couldn’t cope with the constant misery every time I went to school. Putting myself through this every day no longer felt like an option and the pressure was overwhelming. So I found that the only feasible choice was to stay away from that environment by leaving school for a period of time.