My story and how I’ve started to heal

We picked up my sister from school and decided to take the long route home. As we rounded the corner, I fell. I tried many times to get up and still I couldn’t stand or walk. My muscles wouldn’t work as they always had.

My mom was holding me in her arms while I was in bed and no matter how much I tried to find her I couldn’t see her. All I saw was grey. Light in one corner and dark in the other. But I couldn’t for the life of me see my mother or anyone else in the room. 

Those are the two most profound memories I have when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis from age 4-6 years old.

Those experiences have helped to create the person that I am today and catapulted the insecurities that I have had since.

I could go into a long drawn out story about how the experience of learning to walk again helped to create the strong woman I am today, or how getting tutoring so I wouldn’t have to repeat first grade again made me into the writer I am today. But that’s not what happened. They were the challenges that I needed to go through at that time. But not a part of my story.

No, my story starts after one of the few times I was in the hospital.

I remember being in the bedroom with my sister and she told me, little me, that I was stupid, worthless and no one would ever love me. As a little girl, that was hard to hear especially after going through what I just did.

What she said to me stayed with me throughout my whole life. I would make friends and then second guess if they even liked me or cared about me. I drew into myself and stopped talking, stopped speaking up for myself and cried more because I didn’t know how else to express myself to others. There were times that I wanted to run away; times that I felt like people wouldn’t care if I lived or not. I started to hate everything about me and no one ever saw that when they looked at me because of the mask I wore proudly.

More than anything, my sister became my biggest bully and there are things that she has done to me that my mom still doesn’t even know. In her eyes, I was nothing, but someone that she wanted to control. One time, we were playing a game and she put a pillow over my head and told me to stop breathing. When she removed it, I breathed and she did it again until I listened to her. I didn’t pass out, but I did see this look in her eye that scared me enough to realize that she enjoyed what she was doing. I felt like she didn’t even want me around anymore. That life would be better if I ceased to exist.

There were other things that she did, like slam my finger in the front door, demand that I let her in the bathroom when I wanted time to myself and little things after that. But the one thing she wouldn’t allow was someone else to bully me in school. She had to be the only one.

What I know about her now explains why she treated me the way she did growing up and now she has her own demons to battle.

I am not writing my story to gain sympathy. There’s a lot that has impacted my life that is not mentioned in my blog. But the biggest impact that created the person that I am today was having a sister that loved me the way she wanted to love me not the way I needed to be loved growing up. It makes me wonder if there was someone in my family line that went through this exact experience as well and it got passed down a few generations later.

How I have started to heal was by blocking her out of my life. Blocking her negative energy because it was taking a toll on myself and how I viewed the world. It’s not that I don’t love my sister, but I get to do what’s best for Kayla and not what is expected of me. And I started to get the help I needed as well. Through therapy and in writing this blog.

Writing is the most powerful gift you have. You don’t have to be a writer to write. The fact that you can put a pen to paper and create words is all that matters. Not many people can even do that. Poetry became a huge part of my life and I never realized that gift until much later in life. And also writing a publishing a book was awesome to do as well.