Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
Content warning for abuse, neglect, suicide attempt
My identity?
My name is Elisha. I am Malaysian-Chinese in my late 20s. I had a “traditional Chinese” upbringing, complete with a workaholic absentee father and mother who believed that beatings were necessary.
I have known for years that something wasn’t right with me. Mentally, I mean. But I coped pretty well. The voices in my head – more than one, always more than one – were a mixed bag. Some are kind and supportive. Others are cruel and evil.
I’ve managed to cope with them on my own for years. I was too scared to get help. I made it through university with the help of some close friends. I managed to get a job, but then workplace stress was overwhelming.
My life went to hell six months after I got my first job.
I suffered a severe breakdown in 2017
My mother had just verbally ripped into me again: about how I wasn’t making enough money, how I was a useless, irresponsible daughter who was ungrateful.
I remember my mother slapped me. Again.
I don’t know what happened next. I have flashes of memory, of screaming, of the ceiling in the living room. Then gray and blackness, screaming voices that wouldn’t stop until I felt something sharp in one arm.
I woke up in the Psychiatric Ward at PPUM. I spent the next two weeks there, “talking” to a therapist twice a day for an hour each time.
I remember those first three days. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to process what was happening to me. My assigned therapist sat next to me for that first week and just talked. He knew me better than my parents before he tried any form of behavioral therapy. He even brought me my phone, helped me “reconnect” with a few close friends.
My parents never visited in that two-week period.
I called my mother when I was discharged. I was told to take an Uber. That was the day I realized… I was on my own.
I finally received a proper diagnosis
Getting my diagnosis was a two-year hell of different diagnoses, different medications, and dealing with the side effects of both the medications and the symptoms.
This meant everything from depressive episodes to periods of manic energy and intensity, suicidal ideation, and auditory hallucinations.
Finally, I got one: childhood ADHD that was never treated, leading to poor academic performance. My mother, being of the “beating discipline into the child” variety of parent, is the root cause of my PTSD.
I have nothing good to say about my physically abusive, emotionally manipulative, toxic, gaslighting, specimen of humanity that is my mother. I also have nothing to say about my absentee, workaholic father who had no idea what was going on as he’s usually away for months at a time.
That’s still no excuse, though.
My family ignored me
I knew things would be different. I had been living on my own since I graduated and despite my meltdown, I refused to move back in with my parents. I have a cat that I rescued and he’s a bundle of love. Ranger is my emotional support animal. He is what family should be.
My parents let me stay for the reunion dinner and those first few days of the New Year. But Ranger was not welcome. The reason was that it was my mother’s house, and so her rules. I bounced back and forth so I could care for Ranger.
I cleaned the house and I helped prepare the reunion dinner. I did try to talk to my mother, to get her to understand what was going on mentally with me. She ignored every attempt, and finally told me, “Do what you’re told and shut up!”
I did.
Dinner came, and she took all the credit. I received not a word of thanks from her. No acknowledgement from my blood family. My siblings acted like I was not there and talked over me constantly. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
I was there for the entire 15 days of Chinese New Year, but I might as well have not been there. I was treated like I didn’t exist.
They went out of their way to show me they didn’t care about me
Christmas was just as bad. My family has a tradition of doing a Christmas Secret Santa and family dinner. Everyone puts down what they want, then we draw two names each that we would buy gifts for.
I asked for easy to get items from Lazada or Shopee. I even included the links and specifications. I got a box of chocolates and vouchers for a seafood restaurant – I’m allergic to shellfish.
All 3 of my brothers? Brand new iPhone 8s.
Again, I was ignored, talked over, and given the silent treatment. I left halfway through dinner. Nobody called to check on me, or find me.
I went home and cried.
I became an inconvenience to my family
I came home to find that I no longer had a bedroom: It was my mother’s new sewing room.
That’s when it hit me. My deepest, most anticipated fear had come true: my family didn’t know what to do or how to “cope” with me and my mental health issues. They were addressing the problem by ignoring it and hoping I would just go away.
I left immediately so they wouldn’t see me break down and cry.
All I got was a phone call from my mother demanding to know where I was, screaming at me for being an ungrateful, useless child for not coming home to help.
Because of everything I went through, I suffered another breakdown in 2019
I was readmitted to PPUM Psychiatric in 2019, because I attempted to commit suicide. Fortunately, my housemate found me in time, called an ambulance, my parents, and some close friends.
Those friends were there for me. Just holding me, comforting me, while I cried, and cried and cried. I won something back. I won back some semblance of balance and sanity. But I lost my family, that doesn’t love or want me. I live with that. Every. Day.
My mental health issues give a dark, brutally bleak insight into how some refuse to accept that mental health issues are real medical issues. My parents resorted to alternately ignoring it, and trying to “beat it out” of me for “my own good.”
After all that I’ve suffered, I accept that while I have a physical family, I don’t have the emotional or psychological relationships that the word implies.
The estrangement continues. I’ve not spoken to them in 2 years.
No matter what happens, my life has to go on
I keep living. I keep doing things. I struggle to keep on… keeping on… because I don’t see the point of any of it. But at the same time, I don’t see the point of ending it all.
Every day is a struggle: From waking up to medicating, to work, to eat, to buy groceries.
I live right now, to spite the voices that I hear in my head, telling me to quit, to give up, to die, to end it all.
I keep doing my job. I keep studying and pursuing further qualifications in my chosen field.
I live and struggle with my medication, which makes me bloat and I’ve gained weight that I cannot lose no matter how much I exercise or diet.
I keep going for Ranger, and those few close friends that helped me through those darkest times. They didn’t really understand what I was going through.
Eris, perhaps my best friend put it best when he said, “I don’t understand, can’t understand everything you are going through right now. But I’m here. If you need someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on, or someone to just hold you.
He and a few others like him are the only “family” that I have.
I fight to one day again feel something. Feel an emotion. Feel a connection with another person.
I have to do things. Anything. On my own. It’s the only way I can move forward, and have a life, build something that is worth having.
So… what happens next? Is there a happy ending?
I have to force myself to take every step forward. I push away people that offer me a handout because I don’t need that. I need a hand getting up.
It’s the only way I can have a life, and have things that I achieve that do mean something for me.
Eris described me as “powerful, not strong. Tough but fragile. She is the strongest and bravest person I have ever known.”
I don’t know what is next for me. What happens, happens. I will deal with things as they come.
For more stories like this, read: At Age 27, I Was Diagnosed With Breast Cancer. Here’s How I Became a Survivor, I Had Everything I Wanted, But One Day I Woke Up and Was Diagnosed With Depression, and My Parents Thought I Was Physically Sick But The Doctor Told Me I Had Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
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