Unapologetically myself.

TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains mental health, trauma, and abuse.

Writing about what I have been through and how it’s shaped me into the woman I am today doesn’t come naturally to me and, admittedly, I have been avoiding it. However, I promised I would be nothing but honest with this blog.

I was hurt. I was angry. I was neglected. I was abused.

I grew up an angry child. I was the type of person that you would hear before you saw me; overbearingly loud, overly opinionated and someone who loved to stir the pot. It’s documented that I displayed aggression and antisocial behaviour from as early as four years old, which baffles me. As a Psychology student myself, I find it hard to comprehend why a child would display those behaviours at four years old when my first recollection of trauma was at nine.

I grew up in what I would describe as the ‘party’ house; a home I was ashamed to call home. My ‘home’ was full of addiction, domestic abuse, self-harm, uncertainty and neglect. Ironically, the only thing that wasn’t full was the food in the cupboards or the gas and electric!

As an adult, I have a much greater understanding of my mum and her own life. She grew up in children’s homes and had her own demons to deal with. I love my mum unconditionally, and I don’t blame her for the things that happened to me.

But some things happened that shouldn’t have.

Her ex-boyfriend attempted to sexually abuse me. I would wake up in the middle of the night to unfamiliar men watching me sleep or beating my mum up. I was sexually abused by a family friend at nine years old. I was forced to grow up fast. I was emotionally and mentally abandoned.

Neglected.

That was my normal, which resulted in me growing up seeking that kind of environment, searching for chaos and danger to feel like I belonged somewhere. It’s what I was used to. It’s where I felt safest.

I think a lot of my anger came from being sexually abused by the family friend, who I believe was 56 years old at the time.

I was angry at the world, angry at the people around me. I was failed repeatedly and, even though I didn’t realise it at the time, I was angry at myself too. I didn’t understand why I felt the way I did. I just knew that I wanted people to feel just an ounce of the pain I felt daily, and, if I’m honest, still do.

And I was horrible at times. I became a bully.

I went out looking for trouble, fighting anyone who looked at me the wrong way, saying the worst things, intimidating people. I cheated, lied and manipulated partners, friends, family and even strangers. I abused drugs and alcohol. I abused my body.

I’m not going to sit here and rewrite my childhood and pretend I was this perfectly behaved, misunderstood little girl. I wasn’t. I was nasty, aggressive, argumentative and difficult. I knew how to push people’s buttons and, if I’m honest, I enjoyed it. I loved getting a reaction.

People hurt me. People did what they wanted to me. So, I figured it worked both ways. I used anger to protect myself. I thought if I was loud enough, aggressive enough, difficult enough, people would think twice before hurting me. But it didn’t protect me at all. If anything, people could see the vulnerability underneath it and continued to take advantage of it.

I had built this huge wall around myself, thinking it would keep the people abusing me, using me and leaving me out. But it didn’t. In fact, it never kept anyone out.

Growing up, I was a loud individual. I always wanted to be the centre of attention. But when I look back now, I wonder how much of that was actually me and how much of it was me just wanting to be noticed.

I wanted someone to look at me.

Like, really look at me.

I wanted someone to see all the pain I was going through and tell me everything was going to be ok.

I carried that anger with me for years. It followed me into school, friendships, relationships and eventually into adulthood. I became known for being the difficult one, the angry one, the one with an attitude.

At some point, my anger turned into sadness.

I realised quickly that no one was coming to save me, and as I got older, people didn’t want to deal with the negativity and chaos that came with me. I started internalising everything bad anyone had ever said about me and the way I acted.

One day, I woke up and all the guilt and shame had consumed me.

It still does.

I became incredibly aware of what people thought of me.

Comments that might have seemed insignificant to somebody else stayed with me. People’s opinions of me became something I carried around everywhere. If somebody thought I was horrible, I believed them. If somebody thought I was difficult, I believed them. If somebody thought I was too loud, too opinionated or too much, I started believing that too.

I will never forget something my mum once said to me.

“You were a nice, shy kid before that happened to you. Now you’re just a bitch.”

I will never forget those words for as long as I live, they will forever haunt me.

Because, in that moment, it felt like she was confirming everything I had already started to believe about myself. That somewhere along the way, I had changed. That the little girl I once was had disappeared, and what was left was somebody difficult, angry and unlovable.

And maybe that is one of the reasons those words stayed with me so deeply.

Because I already hated the person I had become.

I spent years trying to mirror others, trying to find the perfect personality that everyone loved. People saw through it all and, understandably, it came across as fake.

But I was just trying so hard not to be the person that I hated so much.

Myself.

Eventually, I became terrified of being that person again.

I became shy. I became withdrawn. I became selective about who I spoke to and what I said and ended up becoming a selective mute.

And the strangest thing about all of this is that people probably thought I had finally grown up. Maybe they thought I had finally become nicer. Maybe they thought I had finally calmed down.

But what they couldn’t see was that I hadn’t necessarily found peace.

I had found silence.

I wasn’t always quiet because I had nothing to say. Sometimes I was quiet because I had too much to say and didn’t know how to get it out, or whether anyone even cared to listen.

Somewhere along the way, I developed a stutter.

For somebody who had spent so much of her childhood being the loudest person in the room, becoming someone, whose brain is full of endless, racing thoughts 24/7, yet who sometimes can’t articulate herself properly, has been the hardest part.

Sometimes I just can’t get my words out.

Sometimes I can’t defend myself because I don’t want to destroy all the progress I have made.

I spent years being told, directly and indirectly, that I was too loud, too angry, too much.

I don’t think people realise how powerful their perception of you can become when you already don’t know who you are.

When enough people tell you who you are, eventually you stop questioning whether they’re right and simply accept it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the person I am now. I am kinder than I was. I am more understanding, more empathetic. I have a completely different outlook on life, and I am proud of the growth I’ve made.

But I don’t want my growth to mean losing my voice.

I spent so long trying to become somebody other people could accept that I forgot that I have to accept myself too.

Recently, I spoke to Sian Williams, author of The Power of Anxiety: How to Ride the Worry Wave, and something she said really stayed with me.

She explained that anxiety, fear and self-doubt aren’t necessarily things we need to defeat before we can start living our lives. Instead, sometimes we need to stop fighting them.

She described it as “dropping the rope”.

When we are caught in a tug-of-war with anxiety, perfectionism or the fear of what other people think, we can spend so much energy trying to win that battle that we forget what we were actually fighting for in the first place.

Something Sian wrote to me really resonated with me:

“Anxiety isn’t our enemy; we can stop the struggle. In our tug-of-war battle with it, we can just drop the rope.”

Sian also reminded me that sensitivity doesn’t have to be a weakness. It can be a strength. The things that make us feel deeply can also help us understand other people deeply, connect with them and use our experiences for something meaningful.

And perhaps that’s what I want to do with this blog.

I don’t want my experiences to define me, but I don’t want to hide from them either.

I want to use them to better myself and help others like me.

I want to turn the things that once made me ashamed into something that might make somebody else feel less alone.

I want to be able to speak without rehearsing every sentence in my head beforehand. I want to be able to have an opinion without worrying that somebody will think I’m difficult. I want to be able to tell people when they’ve hurt me. I want to be able to stand up for myself without feeling guilty for doing it.

I spent so long trying to become somebody other people could accept that I forgot that I have to accept myself too.

So maybe this blog is part of that.

Maybe writing all this down is me finding my voice again.

And maybe, for the first time, I don’t need to be the loudest person in the room.

I just need to be brave enough to speak.

Courtney

With thanks to Sian Williams for her encouragement and for allowing me to share her words and ideas from The Power of Anxiety: How to Ride the Worry Wave (Atlantic Books).