sarahsdiary

[sarahsdiary]

My Struggle with mental health

My struggle with mental illness. I don't know if anyone will read this, if you do, please be patient and considerate. Also please excuse spelling mistakes or grammatical errors I am not a native English speaker. I want to introduce myself first: My name is Sarah and I am a 17-year-old girl from Germany. In my perspective mental illness isn't really accepted here, at least where I am from. I live in a tiny village in Rhineland-Palatinate. I consider myself Pansexual and I am happy with that but my parents always speak ill of gay people and don't even know that there are other things that you can identify yourself as. They also don't believe that I can be sad because "I have no reason to be". I consider myself as a Christian, even if they are not, I work in the YMCA/CVJM and they don't accept that either, they always make mean comments and ask me things, knowing that I can´t answer them like "What happened in Moses 5 chapter 3" and when I tell them, that I don't know they look at me and say "Shouldn't you as a Christian know that?". But I am already used to that. What I will never get used to, is the fact, that my mother body-shames me. A lot. When I wear high-rise pants and feel good, she asks me if I want to wear a longer shirt, because you can see to much of my lower-body. When I ask her how I look in a skirt she just pulls a face and says "You are just to fat, you should eat less". When I decide to wear it nonetheless, she makes mean comments the whole day. My father just lets it happen. My sister who is a lot older lives far away from us and when I visited her, I wore the skirt that my mother didn't like and she hyped me up so much that I felt confident and when I came home my mom asked me, what my sister said about the skirt, and I answered she said, that she wasn't able to understand my sister's opinion. The same day I wanted to bake cakes in the late evening because my birthday was the next day. And I did my thing, listening to NF (It just was one of those days). I was doing really well until both of my parents came into the kitchen and tried to change my plan on what I was doing and when I replied and said, that I wanted to keep doing it like I had planned, they started to scream at me. They complained about my music and they complained about me, I was unbelievable and that I should follow their suggestions or else it would end terribly. I now was really sad and continued to listen to my music with headphones, so that I wasn't able to hear them talking badly about me and so that they couldn't hear my music. I was crying the whole time but really quietly. When my mom came in the kitchen to do something, she tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention, When I took out the earplug she said "You look even uglier when you cry". I finished the cakes and put them in the fridge for the following day. My friends and I wanted to video chat through the night, so that we could "party" into my birthday, but I was so sad that I texted them and told them that I had stress at home and that I didn't want to chat anymore, and they were so nice about it. They even stayed up and texted me at 00:00. Moving on: Whenever I was injured or hurt myself in my childhood my parents wouldn't take me to the doctors, even if I complained. I once ripped a muscle and complained a lot. When they finally took me to the doctors, after a week ( I even did PE) they screamed at me, in the doctor's office, why I didn't tell them, that I hurt myself. When I was younger I was able to run a lot, I could jog 90 minutes without break or drinking water, but in the eighth grade we went on a class trip to England and when we were in London we walked 27km (approximately 17 miles). In the evening, my joints were swollen and my legs and stomach were bruised blue, my feet were so swollen I barely got the socks off. In Germany we got that checked out after I showed my sister pictures of how bad I looked. My father took me to a specialist, he diagnosed me with Löfgren Syndrom. I was 13 so I didn't fully understand it, still don't. Today it still hurts when I walk and my hands and my feet get swollen easily. I am terrified of doing school sport because people don't really understand. I once did a test for a grade and collapsed while having a panic attack because I couldn't focus on anything else than my pain. My parents still don't believe me when I say that it hurts, they tell me, that I should just exercise more so that it would go away, but that is not how it works. After a long day of walking, I am exhausted and have trouble falling asleep. The next morning I can barely get out of bed because of how much pain I am in. So when anyone asks me how I am, I say "Good, how are you?". I don't tell them that I think that I might have a mental illness, or that I am doing terrible. According to my parents, I can't be mentally ill. How could I? When you body-shame me when you don't accept that I am in pain, when you make fun of my belives when you clown my taste in music, clothes, anything, when you make fun of gay people, not knowing that I am in the closet myself.  when you scream at me for nothing, and then tell me I look horrible when I cry, when you tell me that I am obligated to do something, because I am your daughter. I didn't ask to be born, you brought me into this world.