Coming to Grips with School Abuse @ 38 Yrs Old

I may have mentioned that I'm bipolar. I may not, however, have added that I'm mostly home bound and cannot work outside the house, even after being treated as a youngster (and force-fed "make it better" pills, incidentally). Like many folks, I was born with my brain the way it is - heterosexual, bipolar, a furry: all of it. But it sure didn't help that I suffered from some horrific abuse from the moment I was out of my mother's care and into the public school system.

My mother took care to keep me with her often, seeing as she was by herself for a period after divorcing my biological father when I was but two years old. This was awesome, and I have a very deep bond with her as a result... but it wasn't good that she kept me from other kids. She was well-meaning, but whenever I'd have interest, she'd put the other children down, saying they were "dirty" or "wild" and I shouldn't play with them. When we eventually moved into my grandfather's home (the only one I'd ever known until my husband and I moved into the one we have now), I played for a bit with the kids next door. I didn't understand why my mother screamed and I got into trouble when we played certain games (mud pies, etc), because the other parents smiled at us when we did! So, to put it simply: I wasn't around kids much as a kid. I was an adult. I didn't understand kids, my brain worked in a different way. As a kid myself, I thought this was what everyone thought like, and I thought it was right.

Imagine a child that doesn't know how to interact with kids being shoved into a room full of them. One, by the way, that had never been separated from her mother.

I cried.

Logically, you'd think 'of course you did,' but here's the kicker: no one else did. They looked at me strangely. I was marked as "different" ... and it was only Kindergarten.

I think that's what started everything. I got off on the wrong foot, and I never did get "on" the damned thing. Oh, in the beginning, parents told their kids they had to invite "the whole class" to birthday parties, so I'd get invited. But excuse me, being the one kid everyone ignored when she was terrified of being at a new and scary place without her mother - what experience was that? I remember crying at the one I went to and going home early, with, of course, everyone marking me as "even more weird".

By the way, the anti-depression pills I was forced to take as a teen burned my brain out, memory-wise. I can only see parts of things from the past, mostly bad, and I can't recall teacher's names or events like most people can. I suppose it's just as well, seeing as how many bad experiences I had. It's enough to throw me into panic attacks to this very day, at age 38.

I still wake up with nightmares that I have to go to school.

I want folks to understand that every day I went to school was a nightmare itself. I started out by thinking if I could be very good, I'd get noticed at least by the teachers. But one teacher in first grade told my mother (she told me this many years later) that one day at a Parent-Teacher conference she asked my mother, "oh, was she here today?" I was invisible (and unrewarded), even though I was silent and did my best to do everything I was supposed to do. Other kids that acted up got stickers and prizes and stuff. I never did because I was too good, being raised as a adult that understood "always obey the rules". What I did get was slapped down the minute I did a single thing that was "wrong", even though I did something by accident. The kid next to me that did the same thing 20 times a day got praised for sitting still for 5 minutes, though.

Anyway, I want people to know that I was sick every night because I had to go to school the next day. I couldn't sleep (I have terrible insomnia to this day) and then I would wake up and damn near throw up every single morning. I was in constant terror of "going back", even when it was a holiday or the weekend. And here's another reason why: in Middle School, the kids on the bus decided to harass me further than not letting me sit down and screaming insulting names in my ear. They thought it would be clever to throw things at me. It started with little wads of paper and ended up at weed-stickers that made me skin bloody and hurt, and small rocks and stones.

Every morning and afternoon, I got stoned by the kids on the bus. 

The bus driver didn't care. The school was informed - apparently they didn't care, because nothing was done except to make me the last stop and first drop off (meaning I only had 10-15 minutes on the bus instead of the whole trip). And that was Middle School. I started getting bouts of low blood pressure mixed with panic attacks and depression, and began fainting up to 20 times a day. This solved the school problem for awhile and I was home-schooled for a bit while my worried family tried to figure out what was wrong with me. The big problem occurred when they found out what it was, however. I was diagnosed as "depressed".

My family instantly did all the things they weren't supposed to do: blame me, try and tell me to "get over it", and put enormous amounts of pressure on me to, and I quote, "tell them what the problem was".  How the @#$% was I supposed to know? All I knew is that I was surrounded by badness and I couldn't win no matter what I tried. Everything I did was "wrong", I was told or shown by people's actions that I was ugly, fat, disgusting, weird, poor, stupid, smelly ... take your pick, I was called it. No matter that none of it was true, I believed it at the time, and that's what mattered. Plus, my house and family were the only sane place in my life, the only calm zone, and now my family hated me because I wouldn't tell them what was "wrong".

I'll admit I did something reprehensible at that point, but I did it to stop the madness. I didn't know what else to do, so I told a horrible lie about one of my best friends and a boy I truly, deeply cared about. It stopped the psychologist, psychiatrist and my family from picking at my head so hard all the time. But at what cost? I still hate myself for it, even though I can't see how I could have stopped everything. I tried countless times to tell them I didn't know why I was the way I was, that I didn't have an "incident" that "made" me the way I was! They didn't listen! 

That sucked.

And when I was forced back into the school system, nothing mattered. In fact, being the one that had been out for depression (and all the counselors knowing it) made everything worse. I was called in to the office at the slightest hint of "weird", which, by the way, meant blinking at the wrong time. The adults that went to that school think favorably on their time there because they didn't have the horrible life I had.

I always thought that I'd have my after-school NBC special moment.

You know what I'm talking about, right? The nerd that suddenly gets into the beauty pageant, or the dance, and all the girls help her instead of mock her and the boys realize she isn't so ugly after all. Where people her age suddenly treat her as a real human being with feelings. And that was my mistake. It's why I kept getting so terribly hurt. I expected it; I was raised to believe if you tried hard enough, it would happen, dammit. Instead what I got was being brave enough to say 'Y'know what? I do want to be the bride in our wedding at Health class" ...

... I'm sure you see where this is going.

No boy wanted to be the groom. Even the idiot that I was stupid enough to think that liked me (and I'd slept with, because of course I was trying to get any acceptance from people, remember)? He stood up and said something stupid like "I'd rather die".

No one helped.

No one spoke.

I still remember that, you know, guys? I'm struggling to make myself forgive everything - and yes, I've done shitty things I want to be forgiven about, too -- and it's hard. All I wanted was acceptance. I tried all the wrong ways, I guess, and I fumbled along the way by doing things to act out when I was seen as strange (the "who gives a shit, right? I'll show them weird, if they want it" attitude).

I didn't go to a single dance, of course no prom (although my class was the infamous "Dumpster Baby" prom, so... mixed feelings about that), and the only boy who asked me out first was the one I lied about. My mom said "no", by the way, to my only chance at normalcy there again - she thought I was too young although all the other kids were dating. I was "allowed" only the shit boys to date, like they were "good enough" for ugly me, even though they weren't and I knew it! (Again, all but they boy I wronged. I expect if things had gone right, we might have been together for a long time.)

I'm emotionally crippled, do not trust people, and still think I'm a piece of shit because I was told that so many, many times. It's hard for me to take any chances, because every time I did then, I was shot down and injured badly somehow. Now, I understand that a lot of where I am now is because I have illnesses besides the obvious crippling depression, but do you think all that didn't contribute? Depressed folks find it hard to "let go" of the past and we relive it constantly, often with the exact same feeling of pain that we had when it was happening.

It's hell. I was and am in hell, and you helped put me there. You all helped, even the ones that didn't do anything - you could have stopped something or even said a kind word. Why couldn't you have helped instead of hurt? Why me? And why, so many years later, are you all wearing rose-colored glasses and thinking I loved school as much as you did? Did you honestly not see my pain? How could you have not seen it, especially when things happened like in health class, right out in front of everyone?

38 years old, and I'm still struggling to come to grips with everything. I have to forgive myself and everyone involved in that past. Because I understand it's the past, and I should let go, but that doesn't help me when I hurt as much as I do now.

How to Create an Underwater-Themed Room

I know, I know, there are tons of posts like this out on the internet. This one, though, is a compilation of those with new snippets added from an actual artist who gets her ideas from her whacked-out brain, not others. So there's new stuff. Hang in there if you don't see it at first.

First off, let me say how @#$%-ing much I love underwater themes. I'm far from my native home, which was by the ocean, in a land-locked state. I try not to think about it too much, and my bedroom is my favorite place to relax and forget. I'm always trying to add new elements to make it more "sea" like.

White crystal lamp (or nightlight), fitted with a blue bulb inside. This is great because it's got a great underwater look to it, plus the soft blue glow adds to the blue water ambiance of the room. The white crystals are more fragile, BTW, so be careful.

Murals are awesome ways to add the sea to your room. You can get ones like wallpaper murals where you have to glue them to your wall (right) to cheaper, picture ones that come in many different pieces of paper you can tack up (left). The one on the right is a Komar Wall Mural entitled "Atlantis" that had to be pieced up and glued to the wall by myself and my dad. The one on the left is a photo mural, composed of 16 or so pieces of photo that we placed on poster board and then tacked to the wall to make it more sturdy. Incidentally, there's a stuffed jellyfish hanging from the ceiling shelf that I have wrapped around the room to further create an illusion of being underwater. Stuffed jellies are great, there's tons available for sale now.

Accent Bottles and Shells are a must have, but though I'd think they're the easiest things to make, some crafters out there sell them for up to $50 a pop! I don't know how they find buyers, since let me honestly say I can't (and money being what it is, I've tried). But let me ruin things for them here by saying: you can easily make all of these things above in the photos. Very easily. I mean, it's ridiculous how easy it is.

* Take an old candle jar, for instance, from Yankee Candle or something, peel the labels off, wash in the dishwasher and scrape the gunk off from said label(s). Fill with beach sand from a craft store and a few shells. Done.

* Take a jar with a lid that fits snugly (beer bottle, glass milk, etc) and fill with a solution of glitter-glue (blue colored, of course) and warm/hot water. Add more of the glue than water, stir, drop some shells, stones, and/or a rubber fish toy like I did here inside. Fill as far to the top as possible and superglue the lid back on - viola! Glitter globe bottle.

* Find blue glass bottles and such at garage sales, flea markets (even beer bottles like Bud Light Platinum!) Fill with shells, etc.

* Marimo (moss) balls are even better than betta fish for live accents of the sea in your room. You can buy them off eBay for much cheaper than a pet store and plop them in room temperature water in any bottle or container you have laying about. Roll them about once in awhile, make sure they get indirect sunlight and you're good to go!

Outlet covers/light switch plates are easy to find with sea motifs on them. Just make sure you get real baked-on ones and not ones that folks just glued pictures to. The quality is so much better!

Blankets/quilts for your bed may seem a simple matter, but I've found that finding sea-related sheets and whatnot is really hard. My mother quilts, so I always have wonderful covers for my bed - I'm lucky. But if you don't have access to a crafty mom (and can't do it yourself), a low-cost solution is a throw blanket. Mine's queen-size, so I paid around $50 for it, but there are others for less out there. It seems that sea turtles/dolphins are popular for these, so you can find a few patterns and pick the one you like best (I found one with a reef on the bottom after wading through quite a few wolves, horses and NFL teams, lol).

Here's the best tip of all, though: aqua-colored curtains.
I bought some sunlight-blocking aqua colored curtains for my room, and it was the best purchase I'd ever made. The room is bathed in an aqua light, like being underwater, and all from such a simple thing. People make comments on it all the time on how cool and relaxing and "underwater" it looks - all from the light half-blocked from the curtains and coloring up the room.

There's more, of course. You can buy many things to accent your room, such as "wave pots" that create an illusion of waves on your walls or ceiling. There's fish plaques that look realistic, and toys that are, too. You can always add netting and hold your stuffed animals up in it (if you buy fishing net it adds a bit to the decor, instead of a "petnet").

Whenever I get more ideas and add 'em, I'll add them to this post. Hope it helps you out there!

Gamergate & Female Freedom

I'm shocked, always shocked because this is the human race doing this to itself.

Guys think they're losing their "superiority".

The Bible, advertisements, magazines, television and gaming - everywhere they look - tells them they are #1, little "mini gods". Yet some females are telling them it's not true, we're equal. So males are fighting, slandering, threatening and doing anything they can do to stop equality. They're not losing their place by any means, by the way, but the IDEA that they could is threatening them.

I can't even breathe when I hear what some assholes say/do because of this whole shebang. Females are lower class citizens. We get told what we should like, what we should do and how to act. We get brainwashed into thinking we need to look a certain way or we're "ugly". We still earn less money than men. We get treated like objects because of prostitution and we are informed we're on this earth to "make babies". If you don't/choose not to, you're seen as the strangest creature out there. People simply cannot comprehend that myself at 38 years old, will not have a child. I will never have a baby. It is my choice, not anyone else's, not even my husband's. I asked him before we married and he said he was all right with never having any. But you know what? If he wanted to get "snipped", it'd be fine, he'd just go and do it. But in Kansas, where we live now, I, as a female, as the baby-making property of him, would have to have my husband - the man -- sign for me to have my tubes tied.

HE CAN DO IT WITHOUT MY SIGNATURE. I CANNOT.

This is not equality. This is not right.

I don't give a crap about what happened at "Gamergate" because it sounds like a bunch of politicized shit. No matter what happened, you guys have done it before and no one cared because it was done by men. But a woman did something to achieve status, and now you're threatened. Fuck off, now. Come on. We've had a black president, and I bet we have other types of skin colors up there before we have a woman, because when women run for anything and threaten men, men systematically take them down. They talk about what they're wearing and how ugly they are, and never focus on anything serious.

That's all we are to most males, beauty numbers. "Is she a one or a ten?" Did you ever think of what number you where before placing a label on us? Because if everything was equal in the world there would be restaurants with men wearing thongs swinging along low-set tables next to your local Hooter's. There would be nothing but huge, blond, tight-abbed men shown next to "fat chicks" in TV shows, and all advertisements directed at you would depict "you" as the unobtainable circus strongman type, showing you NEED to be THIS WAY and if you ARE NOT you are UGLY.

I'm 38 and have never wanted/will never want children. I have never liked the color pink, preferring blue (and sometimes purple) instead. I like gaming and can whup ass on my husband and many guys in different games, fighting games mostly, my favorite genre is Survival Horror, my fave games of all time: Silent Hill 2 and 3. I have recently shaved my head because I can't stand my hair and the need to "do" it to be perfectly female - I like coloring my hair crazy colors, but I can't stand getting up and styling it forever every morning. I wear men's T-shirts because they have cool things on them! Not sparkles and pink and Tinkerbell and teddy bears and unicorns that society tells me to wear: I like stuff like wrestling, dragons, games and anime.

I exist.

I matter.

I am female.

I am not what society tells you I should be.

And that should be okay.

Pokemon Game Word Censure is out of Control

All I wanted was a Koffing named "Cutie Poof".

...that's all I wanted. Poof, as in "poof" that comes out of their holes. Gaseous poof. Wind coming out of a hole. I'm living in America, I'm not in Britain, and didn't mean to insinuate someone gay ("Poofter", or "Poof", in Britain is a derogatory word for being homosexual). Poof means more than that.

It's also just "poof".

You can't enter a word like "ravioli", because the system sees "viol", and that means rape in French, so even if they have names with the same letters in them, and there's a @#$%ed Gym Leader named with those letters in them, we can't type it. You can't name something "Violet", or "Ravioli".

What about Cofagrigus, then, you idiots? We can't type that in anywhere in a Pokemon game, but the pokemon's name itself has that word in it! In one instance, I forget what game, I couldn't use my last name, "Sketchit". Don't ask why, I have no clue. Maybe because of the "chit"?

You can't take all the combined letters out, guys. You can't fix this. I've been horribly amused by all the idiot children (and adults acting like children) in their Secret Bases, for instance. They use all sorts of runarounds (7337, whatever) to say whatever they please. And the slurs & swears get across just fine, believe me.

(I then delete their base after taking their flag a million times. Bleah.)

Please don't take away my ability to say very real words in the English language because you're trying to manipulate & control nasty people that would use bad language. On Neopets, many years for example, we couldn't type the word "hot". WTF? Hot might mean someone talking about how "hot" someone was, yes, but it also might mean warm. You can't ban everything. It doesn't work. It's like prohibition... people get around it.

I shaved my head (and I'm female).

Myep.

I hate "doing" my hair, as I'm not the hyper-feminine type, and since Zoro doesn't care what I do to my own body (ladies, take note, that's true love & freedom), we went and he got a cut, I got a shave. Took a #2 blade, meaning there was just fuzzy stubble on my scalp.

So, two things: I look super mannish when I'm fat and the shaved head makes it worse. Two, I have a perfectly proportioned head. Huh. It's round & shaped the way it's supposed to be: no lumps or idiosyncrasies. Neat.

My hair will grow back if I choose to have it do so - I don't understand ladies that freak out about this. Hair grows back. What the hell. Society has brainwashed you, the 99.9%, making you believe that super long hair is the most beautiful and short is ugly. My shaved scalp takes no shampoo (I can use body wash on it), little to no care and will be super cool in the summer. It's actually really cool looking, different than anyone else on the street, and I don't have to fuss with it. Bonus! I love it. Also, no more expensive trips to the hairdresser. I paid $20 for a Wahl Hair-cutting Kit, and I'll do it myself when I need to.

Who are you growing all that hair for? I mean, sure, you're allowed to love what you love, it's a free country. But what if you could save hundreds of dollars - if not thousands for some -- as well as time and inconvenience (no more bad hair days, although quips will be made that "every" day is one when you're bald, I'm sure, in folks' minds when they read this). Men can be bald, fat, and even downright ugly, but women are supposed to take them as they are. Ladies, however, are held to a long, blond-haired, blue-eyed, thin nightmare vision. I say, down with convention!

~~


* 10/26/2017 edit: a few months ago, I began my first after-40 hurdle: really trying to find a good doctor. I haven't had one for the 13 years I've been in this yucky state. I hate doctors and have been mistreated my whole life by them, an interesting theme that continued no matter how hard I tried. The point is, one of the doctors I tried out looked at me and asked in great concern, "How long have you been doing this to yourself?"
I answered, but then as I left I suddenly understood the inflections of her question.

My god, I thought, this bitch thinks my shaved head is self-mutilation!

@#$%!

I found another doctor and FINALLY won the doctor jackpot. This woman is the best I have ever been to, friendly, friendly staff, agrees with the same fundamentals I do and everything. But screw that lady that thought any woman that shaved their head was doing it to harm themselves. I love my hair and have been complimented on it many times.

Pokemon Alpha Sapphire Wonder Trades

The Naughty List

Yep.

I'm wonder trading again! That means COUNTLESS wurmples and zigzagoon, trash Pokemon that no one ever wants. I try to send out rares or ones with the Pokerus, I get crap in return. Tip: when doing a wonder trade, at least send a small, tiny, cost-almost-nothing potion with them, or name them for god's sake! Sending countless trash into the system clogs it up, and hardly anyone rehabilitates like I do (leveling them up, etc). They just send it right back the frick out, meaning someone else's level 2 wurmple gets given to hundreds - if not thousands -- of hapless trainers that swear grimly and (you guessed it) send it right back out again.

STOP THE CYCLE.

I'M LOOKING AT YOU, JAPAN.

Why do Japanese traders notoriously suck?! You'd think they'd be good traders!

Anyway, these are the lovely ones that have given me trash.*

New year, new computer!

I finally got a new computer - for Christmas, from my awesome husband. After I yank my Adobe programs from the shelves and install them I'll be back to drawing again after a whopping half a year without CGI art! I still have sciatica, though, pretty wicked, so I can't sit at the computer for long periods like I used to... it's just gonna take awhile getting used to.

2015 means I'm finally going to start writing and compiling the insane, hugely Mary Sue fantasy world inside my head, known as "Moy Mell" (the "Plains of Pleasure" in Celtic lore). It's kind of for myself, just because it's so weird and so ...intricate, I wanted someplace to put it down. It's just my little blissful area where I always imagine I go when I daydream/sleep.

You know me, though. *snerk* It might be good for a name-grabbing concept, since I went off the grid for a year a few years ago and lost my momentum online (bleah, a sort of mistake but not really, since online drama crap makes me puke and getting away from it all was such fun).