I'm a Survivor (standard:non fiction, 2884 words)
Author: Lori	Added: Apr 30 2007	Views/Reads: 3111/1983	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Taking another look in the mirror, a woman gets a new perception on whom she is. She looks back at the demons from her past and faces them for what they are and what they made of.

I'm a Survivor 

By: Lori 

As humans we grow in different stages. We have childhood, adolescence,
maturity, middle age, and, a dreadful group of words, old age. Along 
the way, we have choices to make. The good Lord gave us the gift of 
free will to make the lives we live our own. So those choices we make 
can be good or bad. If it's a good choice, we tend to chalk it up to 
having the good sense of knowing right from wrong. When it's a bad 
choice, we chalk it up too not listening to our good sense, or we take 
a downward spiral and let it destroy us. 

My choice was to take the downward spiral. I looked in the mirror one
day and couldn't see anything but the demons from my past. I didn't 
want to be held accountable for the things I've done or the things that 
had been down to me. Looking at it like that, I could live the life I 
wanted. I chose to be a person people pitied. I needed an excuse for 
the things I did to myself and other people. It wasn't a pretty picture 
to look at. I was a woman looking through a distorted and depressed 
mirror. Having been depressed my whole life I should've known better, 
but that's one of the conditions of the disease, not having sound 
judgment. 

Being depressed blinds you to the outside world. You see things through
rose-colored glasses. People make a choice to do many things in their 
lives. Some people live their whole lives being depressed. They don't 
want to be cured because then they have to face up to the things 
looking back in the mirror. They dwell on the things that make them 
depressed. That way, they can continue the downward spiral to worse 
things. 

Worse things can take many different shapes and  forms. You can
self-mutilate. I never could be one of these people because I don't 
like the sight of my own blood, but I understand the feelings behind 
it. Self-mutilation is the need to release the negative energy. You get 
a sense of well-being when you cut yourself. My ex-sister-in-law told 
me once that seeing herself bleed gave her an awareness of being one 
with herself that nothing else could give her. You get a cognition of 
relief that you're alive to bleed, by being able to see the blood flow 
then you're able to feel the pain being infected, hence you must be one 
of the living and not dead as you feel inside. Have you ever heard of 
being dead inside? That's the feeling most people with full-blown 
depression feel. They're dead to the feelings of pain, emotions, of 
anything that makes a normal person feel alive. To most people, knowing 
you're alive is as simple as opening your eyes in the morning. To 
depressed people they have to have more then that, they have to have a 
sorrowful or a traumatic episode to pull them out of the dejected 
notions to know they're alive and well. 

Another form of worse things to come is addiction. You can become
addicted to things if you've had something traumatic happen in your 
life. These things are drugs, alcohol, and sex. All these things run in 
my family, so I have to be extra careful because I carry the addictive 
gene to these things. My uncle's started doing drugs, I think, when he 
was a teenager driving the car his youngest brother was killed in, they 
were sideswiped at an intersection. It got worse when another vehicle 
he was driving got rear-ended and his common-law wife and brother, my 
real father, died. My real father's mother was an alcoholic. I could've 
become one when my ex-husband took my children away from me. I don't 
know if you would call the next one an addiction to sex, but when I was 
younger I used sex as a means of getting affection. It was sexually 
abuse from my cousins and a next-door neighbor, but I viewed it as a 
win-win situation. It fed their need to have control over another 
person and fed my need to dictate someone else's emotions for me. I saw 
it as they must love me to have sex with them. 

A different form is to hurt you, they ones you love, or strangers. I've
tried to kill myself, seriously, once, the other two cases where cries 
for help. The serious time I'll go into this later, but the two times I 
tried before where my way of getting the attention from the people in 
my life. The second was just a ploy to make my ex-husband come back to 
me, but thankfully it didn't work. The first one was when I was raped 
as a teenager. I wanted to end it all, my life,  instead of facing the 
fact that maybe I did ask for it. Not in the way many would look at it. 


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