Relationships have made me see things differently with my life. One specific relationship, I was in a relationship where an ex-boyfriend was very manipulative and make me experience a lot of self-esteem problems. Through the years of being with him, I established a lot of issues and it really helped me to see that that was not how a relationship should be. The experience has allowed me to not allow people to treat me in that way. Because of what happened, I hold myself in a better stance and feel better about myself.
We dated for 2 years but we were kind of together for 3. He was very manipulative in the way that he would talk to me. He would say things that made it seem like if I didn’t so a specific thing for him that I didn’t really love him. He would also tell me that I would be really attractive if I wasn’t fat. I was never able to go hangout with my friends because he couldn’t trust me to hang out with my friends if he wasn’t invited to watch over me. He thought that I was lying to him about hanging out with my friends and he felt the need to always be questioning my loyalty. There’s a long list of things.
I’m very non-confrontational about approaching people when it comes to things like this, so it was very hard for me to bring up my feelings to him. The times when I would try to express to him that I was hurting he would just be very defensive and turn every conversation in to what I was doing wrong. We never really got anywhere when we tried to talk so we didn’t.
I broke up with him and he did not take it well. It could have been a violent break up but luckily it didn’t turn our that way. I was definitely scared to end the relationship with him because I didn’t know what kind of response I would get. After I finally did it he had a drunken episode in a public place in front of all of my friends and it was probably the most embarrassing moment of my life. It took probably 3 weeks to understand that we were actually broken up. I had to break up with him probably 6 different times to actually get him to understand that I was being serious. I still see him occasionally because we are in the same music community but I try to avoid him at all costs. He has stayed away from me and hasn’t talked to me out of his own will since.
I don’t currently have a boyfriend or romantic relationship. I was in one relationship between that one and now but luckily—because of what I learned—I was able to break it off sooner when I noticed that things weren’t going well rather than stick around in an abusive relationship.
Because of what happened, I now understand what I want in a relationship and the red flags that represent what I don’t want in a relationship. I’m happy that I was finally able to realize that communication is a key part of the relationship. If you have one person you can trust, you should talk to them. It’s better to talk about things than to keep them in. I used to think that if I had a boyfriend I was successful, but now I’ve realized what I really want in life is just to make a difference with other people. My life isn’t a relationship; my life is the standards that I hold myself to and who I am as a person.
I have experienced many things that have changed the way I’ve viewed life and changed the way that I push through each day. However, the biggest thing for me was dealing with drug addiction. Pushing through that taught me a lot about what I wanted from life and the ways that I wanted to move forward from it.
I have been sober for 2 and a half years now. I was doing just doing just about any drug that would make me not sober anymore but I leaned towards using a lot of controlled prescription drugs like Adderall and Oxycodone. There were just a lot of things in my life that I didn’t want to deal with or think about. The only times I was actually sober was when I was at work or at band rehearsal; because of this, I thought that I was high functioning. Dealing with life was hard for me when I was sober. I felt like I had to escape from it to anywhere else. Drugs were my release.
When I started losing friends and losing grip with everything in my life was when I realized that I really had a problem. Before it was the cliché, “I don’t have a problem: I can quit whenever I want to.” When I started to realize that that wasn’t true was when I started to started to take steps towards helping myself.
I had one friend—one time—comment on my addiction but other than that I had to realize my problem on my own. It took a lot of will power and withdraws to be able to stop. I couldn’t afford rehab or anything. I just made a lot of life changes. I moved so that I could get away from all of it. I left everything behind and basically just started a whole new life away from drugs. It was really hard. There were a lot of times where I didn’t think I would make it through it. During this, depression was a side effect of trying to quit and dealing with that for a couple years was hard too. My doctors diagnosed me and told me to take medication but I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to take any pills or anything. It was all just will power and removing myself from the situation so that even when I wanted to there was no one I could contact.
I used to wish that I could keep using but now I like to know that I have proof that I can help myself and make my own choices to not use drugs any more. I like knowing now that I can take a step back and look at myself and see someone that I’m proud of. I like to know that I’m not being controlled by something else. I like that I came out of this situation strong enough to be able to get back into things that I love and thought that I didn’t for a long time. I would have never known these things if it weren’t for this experience.
A year ago I had a very close relationship with a girl. It was one of those relationships where you see each other every for like a year and a half. It was good but you could tell that she had some anger issues. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with this during our relationship you could tell as she got more comfortable with me as we continued dating things that got taken to the next level. When we broke up things got even worse. Unfortunately all of her anger was directed towards me which is really difficult to deal with. I broke off the relationship because I started to notice that her negative behavior and attitude was starting to affect me. I didn’t like the person that I was becoming or treating people when I was around her so I broke up with her and she didn’t take it very well. When we initially broke up she set me a lot of verbally abusive messages and started spreading rumors about me. She told her friends that I was physically abusive towards her and that I would park outside of her apartment and watch her.
In the year that we haven’t been dating, there have been countless occurrences or these outbursts. When we first broke up she drunk called my mom and told me that I needed her in her life and that I was a terrible person. She has also sent me around 10 texts that have been long and full of harsh language towards me. As well as many voice mails to me talking about how her life is so much better without me. I would try to respond when I felt that it deemed necessary but I was always trying to be the bigger person just so she would stop.
Finally, a year after we have broken up she has stopped saying things about me and has finally left me alone. I realize that all of these relationship situations are hard and that we are all only human but I hope that I don’t have to go through this again. Because of this situation, I was able to take a step back and look at what I can do to not have things like this affect me. I have learned to treat the small things in a better way. I hope that in future relationships I can notice these red flags sooner and that I will be able to handle situations like these better because of what I’ve had to experience so far.
When I was 15 I was in marching band and the person who taught me primarily was a role model and I looked up to her both as a musician and as a person. But something happened in her life that made her want to take her own life which affected me a lot because she was such a big role model to me. I tried to reach out to her because that sort of thing always affects me; I feel like I always need to help those people. I reached out to her just as a friend because I wanted to make sure that she was okay. It really hurt that someone so important to me wanted to go away. As I tried to cultivate that friendship and support she took it in a different direction. It was a direction that I probably wouldn’t have been comfortable with today but I didn’t know any better. It started turning into a sexual relationship. I was 15 at the time and she was 20 so it was an illegal relationship. She led me to believe that she was the only person I could trust. At the time when you’re in your teens and you’re going through puberty you think that your parents don’t understand you and you just aren’t very happy with them. She pushed all of those things to the point that it felt that I couldn’t talk to anyone but her which lead to me lying to my parents a lot. My parents caught me a lot of times which further drove the nail and created a disconnect between my parents and I. I wasn’t sure if what she was telling me was right or if my parents were right. For some reason I followed her.
As our relationship continued, someone who knew both of us saw us in public and contacted the police about what they saw. I just remember driving home with my mom and getting a phone call from the police asking to come in for questioning as soon as possible. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen because I just kept leading myself to believe that everything we were doing was okay. The girl I was with would tell me that she looking these things up and that everything they were doing was legal and not to worry about it. When I went to the police station they told me what happened and brought me into an interrogation room where they interrogated me for about two and a half hours. They confiscated my phone and went through all my pictures and text messages. I felt like I wasn’t consenting to this search or anything that was happening and that it was all just a violation of my privacy. I felt like they weren’t even treating me like a person. I was just so hurt because up until this point I had been groomed to think that everything was okay and that I was the consenting person in this relationship. I was finally able to go home but they kept my phone for 2 weeks. After those two weeks of them going through my phone, they said that they were going to charge her with statutory rape and that I would get a restraining order against her. Things had gone so far in my mind that I tried to do everything I could to stop these things from happening. My parents would ask me if I wanted this to happen and I would just say no because I felt like I loved her.
It took me 3 years to really realize what had actually happened. The combination of being interrogated against my will by the police, the way my parents treated me, and the way I was torn from someone that I cared about really took away my will to live. Because of this, I struggled for a long time with self-harm, thoughts of suicide, and isolation. I kept having delusional thoughts that no one cared about me because the one person that I thought cared about me was taken away from me. Those few years where the most I’ve felt alone in my entire life. It took a lot of people who actually cared about me digging through everything that has happened to actually realize that I deserve to be here and deserve to be happy.
To this day I’m still confused as to why she did this to me. I thought she was a good person. Today, everyone she knows seems to really care about her and love her. She’s engaged. I’m just in a constant state of wondering why she chose me out of everyone and why she needed to take things from me that I didn’t want her to have. Sometimes I think of what would happen if none of this would have happened to me. I wonder if I would have even explored my sexuality. I’m not even sure I would be gay if this experience didn’t happen. However, I think I am partially thankful for being able to figure myself out and for how quickly I was able to grow up. Obviously it’s hard to have to grow up at age 15, but I felt that if I didn’t that this whole situation would have turned out much differently. Overall, I’m happy that I was eventually able to come to terms with the situation. Without realizing what happened, I don’t think I would ever realize that I don’t ever want to feel that way again.
As I have recently been able to put the pieces together of what has been true and what hasn’t, I made it apparent to my family that I wanted to reopen the case and press charges. She hasn’t tried to contact me since.
I’m in a program during the winter and spring seasons called Winter Percussion. Basically, it’s a group of drummers who get a few times a week for around 6 months and put together a show that will eventually be performed sometime in mid-April and watched by thousands of people. The ensemble I’m in is called Rise Percussion. We’re a relatively new ensemble as we have only been around since 2013. I joined the ensemble in 2015 but in just these few years I have built a connection with the people that I’ve marched with that I haven’t had with anyone else.
I love performing. In my normal everyday life I’d say I’m pretty quiet. I try to stay out of people’s way and I just get my work done and try not to stand out. But when I’m performing, my story completely changes. I love the closeness you get from indoor drumline. I love that I’m feet away from our audience and can make eye contact with people directly. I love that I can spend so much time working on a production and show something off to people that I’m proud of. The idea of hard work, perfection, and consistency I think is good for your future and it’s good skills to build. You learn a lot of team work because you’re playing with other people and you’re locking in a gym with them for 12 hours a day. You learn a lot of people skills and how to deal with yourself and other people. You learn that you can have a rough day but that you still have to bounce back and do what you have to do for everyone in your group as well as for yourself.
The show this year from our design team is called Scars and it’s a show about cycle of violence and about the stages of grief. At the beginning of our show someone gets injured and they obtain some sort of scar and that person who was scared goes on to scar the next person and so on and so forth. Each scar is sort of representative of a stage of grief. So for denial for instance, a person gets a scar on their eye because they can’t see what’s going on; they’re denying the situation. Just like that the shows have a lot of layers and deeper metaphorical meanings that you probably honestly wouldn’t understand from you’re first time seeing it. Which is okay but the best shows have a lot of layers them. That’s one of the beautiful things about the activity is the shows are usually vague enough that everyone can plug in their experiences to the show and bring their own unique interpretation. I think the most important part of the show for me is about the stages of grief and how you have to be strong even in unfortunate circumstances or even terrible circumstances of loss and grief and still being strong and doing what you have to do like a warrior would even if things around you aren’t going your way. And you know, everyone can relate to that and everyone can bring their own unique style and flavor to the show.
Winter percussion has definitely changed my life and the way that I perceive things. With this activity you have to push your body and your mind as possible to strive for perfection every time. You have to work together with a group of people that you may never have met because of this and do something great. I love that you get to meet people who do art and music and music education but also engineers, computer scientists, and all kinds of different people. It’s a family of people who are founded on this really emotional connection to drumming but also bring a lot of their own interesting experiences to the table. The best part is that, aside from this, you can put aside all of your differences with people and all of your struggles in the world and just do something that you love with people that you love. That is the most important part to me.
A years and a half ago my younger brother passed away. Because of that traumatic event it made me think a lot more about my own life and has made me think about things differently than I did before. Overall my view of life and how I go about living on a day to day basis has been improved.
He was waiting to cross the street and there was a lady who had a medical event happen. She ran off the road and hit him. He basically died on impact. I remember I was just sitting at home just playing video games with my friends and my dad just said that he had to leave to go figure some stuff out but I didn’t really know what was happening. It took me a while to notice that my brother wasn’t there and had been gone for a really long time. By this point there were police officers that came to our house and told us what happened.
It’s definitely been a long process but I started being really strong. I had to be strong for my other younger brother and for my mom. Eventually it started to eat away at me slowly. When it got close to about a year after the accident I really started to notice that I had gone downhill a lot. There was a point last year when I was dreading going to school or things that I had previously enjoyed. To be able to build up from that I had to make some big life choices. I chose to drop out of school and just work. How I’ve noticed that it gets better was being able to notice the small things. It’s the little progress that really keeps me going. It has been up hill from there. It’s really been this past calendar year that I’ve noticed things getting better.
It’s definitely been a roller coaster. I know my mom has ups and downs on a weekly basis. If there are Facebook memories she can get really down but she’s really good at using them to get back up. My dad has been very similar to me in that he started out strong but he has stayed pretty consistent. My little brother just turned 10 so when it happened he was only 8 so I think that it was kind of a blessing that he didn’t completely understand the situation. He just knows that he misses him because he’s gone but he’s less effected at an emotional level because he’s younger.
A lot of getting better was deciding to consciously make choices. I had to be very aware of everything that I’m doing. I had to try to be doing something every second so that there was never a time when I could just think about things. I got really bad with my physical health for a while. I had to make a conscious effort to try to make myself more health and that helped a lot. I would try to not be in situations where I couldn’t escape. I had some anxiety issues and if I would get stuck in a situation where I wouldn’t leave I would get stressed out a lot. I slowly became more comfortable being in those situations and trying to be okay. I make sure to take time for myself even though it was still important for me to be around other people. I actually found that it was better for me to just be alone and be inside my own head sometimes.
The support was a little over whelming. Especially right after it happened, there was an outpouring of support. However, it definitely helped me though. I had a friend that would just let me know he was thinking about me every couple of weeks and that really meant a lot to me personally just to know that there was someone who was being respectful of my process while also being supportive.
Today compared to a year and a half ago, I am a lot more aware of the relationships I form with other people. I don’t take anything for granted. I put the best into everything that I do and don’t waste time on anything that doesn’t matter. I’ve realized that you have to find a balance between what’s important now and what’s important in the future. There’s no point trying to invest so much in your future if it makes you unhappy. You have to find a good middle ground being happy now while also taking steps to progress in your future.
I went to a college where not a lot of my high school friends went. I felt like I had to rebuild up from nothing and it was pretty hard for me. Since I was new just like everyone else it wasn’t too difficult to make new friends. In my first year I made a lot of friends but I lost them all by my second year. Almost all of the friends that I made physically reached out to me at some point throughout that first year and told me to my face that they didn’t like who I was as a person and didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. I was actually handed a physical written out list by one of these people telling me everything I have ever done to her that made me a bad person. This tore me apart. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings but I guess there was nothing I could do. After two years I transferred to a new college where I had to rebuild again. Only this time was harder because everyone had already established their friend groups in their first two years of college. I did the best I could and did end up making some friends through marching band…. However, I eventually ended not being good friends with them because they all liked to party and I didn’t. While everyone was out having fun I never felt more alone. I would try to reach out to people and they would invite me to hang out with them at parties but I would eventually find myself sitting alone on a couch or in a corner on my phone because everyone else was drunk and having a good time and I don’t like to drink. I stopped going to parties. I started to question if there was something deeper wrong with me so I reached out to my doctor. I told her that I thought maybe there was something wrong with me because I felt sad and alone all the time and she asked me to fill out a sheet and eventually came to the conclusion that I have both anxiety and depression. I was put on medication and talked to a therapist weekly to try to make me feel better.
Depression is difficult and extremely misunderstood. Even myself when I was growing up thought that depression was just something that people used as an excuse when they were feeling sad. And this is so wrong. Depression changes the way you think. It makes you feel like you’re alone and that there’s no way out. When you have anxiety and depression you feel like nobody likes you and can’t stop thinking about it. When you’re alone you tear apart every little detail of every situation because you think that something about it has to be bad. It’s like your own head is under interrogation and you can’t escape.
I have contemplated suicide. I don’t think I would ever actually do it... A lot of people think that people with depression and suicidal thoughts are just looking for attention… I would say that, for me, when I have suicidal thoughts and try to reach out to people it’s not because I’m seeking attention. It’s because I’m try to see if anyone actually cares about and would actually care that I’m gone. Some days are worse than others and it’s fairly random. I do some extracurricular activities that can help take my mind off of things but sometimes even that doesn’t work. Sometimes I find myself not enjoying things that normal people should. The worst part is when you’re having a bad day and you can’t hide your feelings and people start to notice that you’re not okay and avoid you. When people avoid talking to me on my bad days I automatically assume that they don’t like me and don’t really consider me as a friend.
To this day I struggle with understanding the difference between people being mean to me and just being human. I think I always assume the worst of every situation and because of that it’s hard to function under normal circumstances. Even though my medication makes me feel better most days there are still some days that are really difficult for me to deal with. Most days I just wish that I had a friend that I could talk to and would understand me and not just feel bad for me. It’s still just hard to realize that I’m not alone.
If you know someone with depression or anxiety don’t take them for granted. Depression takes time to understand and might never go away. I still don’t even fully understand it. It’s nice just having someone who will hang out with you and make you feel normal again.
The summer before last was a pretty dark part of my life both in general and for my relationship. I went through a lot that summer. When my girlfriend and I first started dating we had both just got out of pretty bad relationships and were just trying to get through it together even though it felt like we didn’t really have a lot in common at the beginning. We were really unsure about everything even though we were sure that we cared about each other. Eventually we got better and had our fights just as any normal relationship would but one day when we were talking we realized that I had been lying about something that I didn’t even know was true anymore. I didn’t even know the whole story myself because I had been lying to myself for so long. I had convinced myself that I had done one thing when I had really done another and I didn’t even know what was real anymore. Once we knew that I was lying our fights turned into talking on the phone everyday screaming at each other and crying. It was at this point that, I knew that I needed help.
To go into more detail, when we first started dating before we had sex or anything. She mentioned that it would be really important to her if I got tested for STDs but I kept putting it off and eventually the situation came up where we were going to do stuff and I had told her that I had gone to get tested with the intention to go and do it later. I never did. We had a scare one time where the condom broke and I did go do it then just to be safe and everything was fine. But it wasn’t the issue of being clean it definitely the integrity side of it that pushed everything over the edge. There was very little worry of it ever actually being an issue but then she wondered why I would lie about something like that. So over time I convinced myself that I did get the test done the first time. It got to the point where we would talk and would say something and my story would change every time and that’s when we realized that something was up because I didn’t even know for myself. I went to many therapy sessions to help understand what had happened. It had been so long that I tricked myself and I had to realize that our own brains can be so fragile.
Since this, we are still together and our relationship is so much stronger than it has ever been; we’re planning on moving in with each other soon. Going through this definitely strengthened our relationship and showed that we both were willing to do anything that we could to make the relationship work. It’s nice now being able to move forward knowing that we can be completely honest with each other.
There are times when I feel like it would be easier to tell a little white lie but then I remember that lying about the little things aren’t even worth it. It’s so much easier to be transparent about everything. I have made a conscious effort to not lie to anyone about anything even when it’s hard. It’s better to just have integrity in your life. Because of this situation, I have grown a lot, become much stronger and become much more in touch with myself finding out what is actually important to me. I try to pay close attention to how I treat those around me and the people that I care about. No one deserves to be lied to or treated poorly because of a selfish decision. Your actions can effect way more than yourself.
About four and a half years ago I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This was a surprise and I didn’t know it was coming. Being diagnosed with cancer made me realize that some of the things that I valued were not so important any more. When you start to think that your life as you know it might be over you start to change the way you look at things.
A lot of people are diagnosed with ovarian cancer but they don’t usually catch it until it’s too late. Generally you can’t decipher the symptoms between other diseases until you’re at stage 3 or stage 4 cancer when it’s too late. I had several of the symptoms of ovarian cancer but they could have also just been included in everyday symptoms including stomach indigestion that you can just go get treated with something over the counter. So at first, they tried to treat my symptoms with over the counter medication. One day at work, as a kindergarten teacher, one of the kids ran up and hugged me and it hurt really bad. I thought that I might have had a hernia so I went into the doctor and they didn’t know what the problem was and ran a bunch of tests. They didn’t find anything so they couldn’t diagnose me or treat me for anything even though they knew I was in pain.
A few weeks later I was lying on my stomach reading a book and I felt like I was lying on a rock or something even though there was nothing there. When I went to the doctor again and told them I was still in pain they did a scan of my stomach. They didn’t find anything. I made it apparent that I thought there was something really wrong with me so they kept taking scans. Eventually they found a tumor. They said that I could go about my business as usual until they could schedule a surgery. It wasn’t until a few months later during my surgery that they realized that the tumor was cancerous and just hadn’t ruptured yet. This type of cancer is considered sage 1. I was really fortunate that they found my cancer as stage 1 because you can treat it by removing the tumor and taking out several of the lymph nodes surrounding the area to assure that the cancer hasn’t spread.
I haven’t had any symptoms since then. I’ve been to an oncologist to check that everything is okay regularly. They do blood checks just to check if there’s anything out of the ordinary. I won’t get ovarian cancer again but there’s a chance that you can get another cancer after getting one so that’s why they keep a check on you and make sure that nothing weird is going on. Luckily nothing else has come up so far.
After worrying that I might not be able to live very much longer, it just made me want to spend more time with my family. Also, I was in a job that I didn’t really like so I realized that I was more important for me to spend time with my family and do things that I wanted to do than stay at a job that was making me unhappy. Everyone tells you not to worry about the small things but sometimes you want to worry about the small things. Since having cancer, I care about the small things. Like being at someone’s recital or going to a game. You know, it may not be like a big deal but to that person to know that you thought about them and came to their activity or just making the time to listen to people and care about what they’re going through.
You always hear about people that have some sort of a near death experience and it kind of changes the way they look at things and I think it really does just come down to where you have this one life and you don’t want to spend it being frivolous and just spending money left and right and not paying attention to your future but you also need to know that you have to live your life and have fun and it’s about the people that you’re around and relationships and making other people feel special and valued. It makes you feel better and makes the world a better place.
