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I don't feel traumatized but I'm growing more and more aware of the ways certain events have affected me throughout my life. My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkins lymphoma cancer when I was 12. She went through chemotherapy for about a year and, miraculously, survived against all odds.
I used to think I was just too young or immature to really understand the situation, because I don't have many memories of feeling fear or grief at the time. As an older teenager, I felt guilty for that. I felt like I was too stupid or self-absorbed as a 12-13 year old to care that my mom was dying. I'm 21 now and in the past year I've been thinking back on that time frequently.
I think I repressed a lot of memories from that time. It feels like I have no clear memories of being at home with my family during those years; I remember middle school and classes and whatnot, but I swear, I can't think of a single vivid memory of myself in my home with my family; with just a couple exceptions.
I remember the day I came home from school and my mom had finally shaved her head. She had been wearing a headscarf for weeks already because of the way her hair was falling out, but I came home one day and she wasn't wearing it - she was just bald. I don't remember if she said anything about it, or how I felt.
I remember walking home from school once (or probably more than once) and imagining in disturbing detail what it would be like to come home to an empty house and a note from my dad that something had happened and he'd taken my mom to the hospital. I'd imagine what would happen if everything was fine; but also what it would be like if she died.
In retrospect, it's disturbing how often I pictured her funeral. I specifically remember not feeling anything in particular about it, and thinking that there was something wrong with that but not knowing how to change it. It was like a thought exercise - what music would they play (of course they would play music, my mom was a singer before chemo ruined her 15 years of opera training), what photo would they use, what would I say?
I have a hadnful of vivid memories of this time that impact me in different ways - I had to move in with my grandparents an hour away for a couple weeks when I caught a flu because my mom's immune system was so weak that if she caught it she likely would have died from it. I still had to go to school though, and the drive was difficult - so the next time (both my sister and I were sick, then) my grandparents stayed with us in a nearby hotel. That's the one time I remember crying: because I couldn't go home. I remember crying with my sister in the hotel room, on the phone with our dad.
I remember my mom hallucinating about Scooby Doo. I think I remember hearing her sobbing from the master bedroom. I think I remember her saying she wanted to die. I say I think because I honestly can't remember if it's a real memory or some kind of projection.
I know I remember her telling a family friend, on the 4th of July, some months after she was cleared as cancer-free, about how she would have killed herself if we'd owned a gun. She didn't know I was in hearing distance and I never told her, but that's a memory that surfaces frequently, uninvited.
This is really long, I'm sorry if I'm not using this thread correctly. I still have more I want to get off my chest though.
I started high school the year after she was cleared and my own detatchedness still bothered me, and made me feel guilty almost all the time. Those feelings were even stronger after she was cleared, for some reason. It was my sophomore year that everything really hit the fan, for me. I can recognize, in retrospect, that I was depressed. I didn't know how to understand my feelings at the time though, and was still dealing with - or failing to deal with - my guilt from what I thought was a lack of empathy.
My grades suffered and I stopped talking to my family. I pretty much lived online and talked mostly with internet friends. I fell-out with my best friend and stopped leaving the house aside from school. I had always been close with my online friends and liked staying in, though, so I guess that's why my parents weren't overly alarmed.
My dog died in November of 2012. She was the family dog and we'd gotten her probably in 2003, and of course we all loved her. I remember feeling a similar kind of detatchedness to the situation, and I remember that I didn't cry. I thought something was wrong with me for that, because I loved my dog but I didn't really feel anything about it, or at least nothing I knew how to identify.
That weekend, my parents had paid for my friend and I to go to an anime convention for my birthday. We went, it was fun, I almost forgot about my dead dog and non-reaction.
When I got back (with souvenirs for my family) something came up. I don't remember how the fight started, but I remember being in my parents' office, my mom at her computer and somehow it got to the point of my grades and anti-socialness; which led to her bringing up my apparent lack of grief.We were screaming at each other but I clearly remember her shouting at me, "Don't you feel anything at all?"
After that, I ran out of the house. I put shoes on without socks and ran to a park a few blocks away. It was nighttime so it was empty, and I sat on the swingset and thought about killing myself. I planned it out to a tee how I would do it and spent an hour psyching myself up to do it.
Obviously, I didn't. I walked back home after that hour and my mom had cooled down but told me that she was taking away my phone and internet privileges indefinitely. I panicked and convinced her that I needed to be able to be in ccontact with my internet friends - my only real friends, it felt like, but she still took my phone. I started self-harming then (not severely, but tiny habitual things that I won't go into detail about). I broke that habit relatively quickly, luckily.
My mom and I communicated almost entirely via email that year. It was a recurring thought that she didn't love me anymore and that I didn't deserve her love anyways if I wasn't really capable of feeling love for her in return. I thought for years that I was broken somehow, that she was right when she implied that I didn't feel anything, and I still think that a lot of the time, even though I'm trying not to.
I don't remember how we fixed our relationship, but we did somehow. We're very close nowadays, and spend a lot of time together, happily. But sometimes I still just burst into tears out of nowehere because my dumb brain will convince me she still doesn't love me and that I'm unworthy of love. Or I'll freeze up whenever she has a health scare (which is pretty often - she's getting older and the chemo did a number on her body) and be sure she's going to die. I have days when I feel almost as depressed as I did back in high school and think about getting help but the idea of telling someone about my feelings, feelings that I still don't always believe are real, is scarier than having to deal with them alone, and I'm afraid to tell my mom because it might trigger her own depression/suicidal ideation because she's always had self-esteem issues and is extremely self-critical and I'm afraid, at this point, she'll blame herself for not noticing my poor mental health earlier.
I don't know what any of this really means. I've never, ever told anyone any of these things before. I don't have PTSD from any of these things - I've never experienced a trigger, or had a flashback. Honestly, I feel embarrassed posting this here because everyone else here has been through so much and I feel like my expeirence pales in comparison to that. Sorry if this is the wrong place for this kind of problem; again, I just don't really know where this falls categorically.
