The source of everything

I’ve spent many years in therapy — arguably most of my life — due to repeated cases of abuse in varying degrees throughout my entire life. There were times I was met with disbelief at first because there was just so much trauma in my past, and life just seemed to always throw more at me on top of stress and bad news at every turn. When I was rejected and thrown out by my mother when I came out as transgender, after a prolonged period of abuse from my parents, I was convinced something out there just didn’t want me to survive, whatever it was. (Thankfully, my mother has since come around and is very accepting.)

I’d buried all of my problems until I was thirty, when CPTSD came out full blown after starting to explore my trauma in writing during the pandemic. I’ve worked through a lot of it in therapy and on my own, and I’ve relived and sorted through some of the most troubling traumas in my teen and adult years, again, through writing and in therapy.

I thought I’d figured it all out. Surely, the worst of it being recalled and stated out loud and worked through was enough to start healing, right? So why am I still having disabling panic attacks when I leave my home? Why am I okay when walking by myself down a sidewalk in public, but as soon as I’m inside a building and I see people I immediately feel faint, and I melt down and can’t calm myself and I have to leave? Why, after realizing I am safe out there, is my home my safe haven and equally my prison due to agoraphobia?

In actuality, I’d had it all wrong. What I thought was the main contributor to my symptoms may have only played a part. There was still something I’d rarely addressed in therapy, that I’d only ever touched upon because I thought it couldn’t have stayed with me; it was so long ago. Kids get bullied in school. It’s not uncommon. I knew I was bullied.

But I never confronted the reality of what it did to me and my brain.

Something alarmed me when my father handed me a large box with some of my childhood school memories. Buried in the endless dorky photos of my nerdy kid-self were my old year books from the 90s, and within them was something I can’t believe adults ignored, or maybe I hid it from them, as I hid everything happening to me back then.

Whole pages were scribbled out so harshly they tore. Faces were cut out, including my own. Every other year from Kindergarten going forward, I would note my best friend — a girl who was often a bully toward me — in the book, but her image was harshly scribbled out to where her face was unrecognizable. This happened with another as well, one of my first crushes. I’d call him my best friend, but then his face was scribbled out in the fourth grade book. In at least one yearbook, someone wrote at the top of one of the pages, ‘(deadname) stop writing in your book.’

Scribbling and cutting out faces is a constant between books, but the fourth grade book in particular paints a very disturbing image. I scribbled out entire pages of faces, and at the bottom of one classroom section, I wrote, ‘I hate these people.’ My biggest bully had at least one photo of her with a hole in the middle of her face, which had been erased until it destroyed the glossy paper.

It was tragic to see as the years went by; people I considered friends eventually had their images scratched out or scribbled through, and it appears that I could trust no one to be honest with me. Friends became enemies. I even started to point out teachers in the fourth grade yearbook that I couldn’t stand.

As I looked over the pages with large picture collages, I tried to piece together what the school looked like from my fourth year. I drew a blank. I saw hallways and some rooms in the images, but everything remained hidden. The more I dug, the more I realized I was getting dizzy and starting to dissociate.

And then I saw a picture of the parking lot and the field behind it, and my mind flooded with images of the main entrance, playground areas, and other details. Things my brain had blocked out until then. At first, I was confused because I couldn’t remember walking those halls. I wondered how I could just completely forget existing in them. Until I finally remembered. And that was enough to tell me that the source of my CPTSD, the start of it that still affects my ability to live my life to this day, originated there.

The clues are in the troublesome hacked up yearbook pages. The dizzy spells and anxiety symptoms that surfaced. The sickening nostalgia that felt just the same as when I would experience childhood regression; the childhood regressing that confused me because the trauma I was aware of didn’t start until I was a teen and it didn’t make sense.

And now it does. I wasn’t regressing for the past few years because of the things that happened to me when I was a young teen. I was regressing further back to when I was a child, and what happened when I was a child?

I was so severely bullied I feared leaving my home. I endured taunting, manipulation, gaslighting, and I was blamed for things I didn’t do. Friends would side with my bully because the bully was more popular, and I’d get punished for something that wasn’t my fault. I had at least two minor concussions from an older girl pushing me forward until I banged my head on a metal pole and blacked out and saw stars, and then another time when she filled a bottle with rocks and hit me in the head with it.

I remember a group of kids convincing me to lay down so they could bury my head in the snow, and I let them. I just lay there as they all kicked me in the head, until a guard came over and made them stop. I remember her asking me something like, ‘Why did you let them do that to you?’ I’m not entirely sure. I’d just let them. I think at the time, being so young, I was suicidal but didn’t have the words for it. I didn’t know what was going on with me. It was an act of self-harm, maybe, to not fight back.

My best friend had once invited me to her birthday party with a bunch of girls who did not like me. At some point they gathered in a bedroom and my friend held out a hand to keep me out. I stood in the hallway alone, waiting. They spoke about something, making fun of me for wetting the bed still, likely, and then the room erupted in laughter. The door opened with them still laughing and I was invited back in.

Later that evening, as the other girls went home, my friend and her older sister forced me to stand in the bathroom to do the Bloody Mary thing by myself. I was mortified. They wanted to hear me say it. So I tried. I melted down so severely that I tried to open the door, but it was held shut. They both leaned against it and wouldn’t let me out no matter how hard I cried or how terrified I was.

My mother came to get me, and the girls were disciplined. I don’t remember much after that. I think I might have been dissociating on the way home. I was terrified of dark rooms after that, especially the hallway that led to my bedroom at night.

There’s a lot more, but that’s just the surface. I don’t understand why kids were so mean to me, other than that I was considered weird because I was neurodivergent (although not yet aware of it). Some of my friends were also weirdly sexual, and the friend who traumatized me with Bloody Mary was my first kiss, and my first ‘fake’ sexual experience before I even knew what it was.

Early signs were there that a serious problem was developing. My emotions would sometimes flatline for no reason, even if I was in a good mood and nothing was wrong. I’d be in the middle of playing with our puppies, or with my toys. I’d just… flatline. I’d feel nothing, like a robot, and I’d get the urge to harm something. It frightened me. I remember telling my mother at the time that I was afraid of myself. I was a little kid, I had no idea what was happening to me.

I eventually ended up in the Children’s Hospital psychiatric ward when I was about ten. My psychiatrist who was also my therapist at the time had recommended it, but my father wasn’t on board. Still, I ended up in the main community room of the psych unit terrified and shaking. A teenager sitting next to me asked why I was there, and I simply said, ‘I don’t know.’ She told me she’d tried to swallow a bottle of aspirin.

One of the nurses handed me a school schedule, since I would be taking classes while in the hospital to make up for what I missed in public school, so I was probably supposed to be there for a little while. She tried to comfort me, but nothing worked. I was in full panic attack mode.

They finally let my mother through to comfort me, and she decided to take me home because my father refused to let me stay. The nurses said they’d file a report for child negligence if my parents left with me that night, which did nothing to change their minds. I was in the car on the way home shortly after. Thinking back now, they should have left me there.

To be experiencing all of that mental grief — and physical and psychological abuse — from kids at school while living at home around an abusive father, who would physically attack my brother in front of me, is enough to fuck a kid up for the rest of their life. No child should feel suicidal at ten. No kid should be wanting to harm themselves at such a young age. This shit doesn’t happen with no cause. And most of the time, just like I was, kids are silent about it all because they don’t have the words. They’re punished for saying scary things, or they’re disbelieved. The bullying is downplayed and the kid is victim-blamed; ‘Hit back or you’re letting it continue.’

It’s no wonder I have rejection sensitivity dysphoria, BPD, and the constant cycling thoughts that no one actually likes me. I don’t trust a lot of people — very few. When you’re that young and your friends are also manipulative, gaslighting abusers who make you think they like you, and then abuse you in between the sleepovers and fun moments, and then go right back to siding with your bully because she’s popular, you lose that precious early stage of self-discovery and development. You learn to see the world as dangerous.

And that’s likely why, after all these years, therapy hasn’t fixed my agoraphobia, my fear of people, or my panic disorder. We weren’t focusing on the right thing. I’d fallen into a thinking trap that is popular in America, that kids get bullied sometimes and it’s a regular part of growing up in a public school system. So many TV shows and films involving high school, at the least, involved some characters getting severely bullied. It’s so normalized.

That’s bullshit. And I’m not going to normalize it for myself anymore. I’m not a little kid without the words now. I’m a grieving, severely mentally ill adult whose life was ruined by little fucks who probably grew up to have amazing lives. Maybe it’s not productive to think ill of them; they were only kids after all. That shouldn’t be an excuse, though. I never treated anyone like that.

I hope they have trouble sleeping at night and are flooded with nightmares, just like me. Most importantly, if they have children, I hope they protect their child from kids like them.

©2025 Shane Blackheart