The best years of my life… taken! by -Kristy, 26, from Australia
my story starts when i am 9 years old.
hi. my name is kristy and i’m a trichster in recovery. i was 9 years old when i first started pulling out my hair. i’m told it wasn’t long after my grandfathers funeral.
anytime i would get stressed or teased at school for being dumb or overweight and i’d come home and silently sit and one strand at a time it would come out. my mother started to notice when i was almost 10, she took me to doctors and psychologists and they did brain scans and one of them even wanted to medicate me as a child. thankfully my parents said no as it would’ve taken away quality of life and turned me into a zombie.
i can’t remember who it was that told me the name of it. what i do remember is being eased at high school for having little bald spots in my hair. kids can be so cruel.
of course this mixed with bullying of other sorts made it much worse. there were days that i would skip classes where i knew the bullies would be and just sit in the girls toilets silently sobbing and pulling out strand by strand to make it feel better. to make the pain from everything else go away.
as fate would have it, one of my best friends found me one day and called my parents. i was at the doctor the next day getting put on anti depressants. every 2 weeks the levels would increase and every 2 weeks my hair pulling and deep depression would get worse coz i hated being on them. i got angry. some days i wouldn’t speak to anyone and other days i would just yell. on the very bad days i’d just cry. i was miserable. i didn’t understand why nothing was helping. i started seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis for help to manage it and to learn some techniques to help me not pull a my hair… instead all she focused on was my anger and rage issues. eventually i told my GP to shove his meds that i refused to take hem anymore. my mother was horrified. i learned to cope on my own without them. all my life i had loved singing and listening to music so i found solace in those. i would sit and sing and listen to my favourite songs and bands for hours while studying or doing homework or simply reading a book. eventually the bullying got too much and solace could no longer be found. i dropped out of school 2 weeks into my final year suffering a mild nervous breakdown and with very little hair. it wasn’t long after this that i shaved my head for the first time.
it was during this time that i rebelled rather badly against my parents. i hated them for making me take those meds for all those years and not listen when i told them that they made me feel worse about myself. i never really had any real relationships at school and entered my first real one when i was 20. i married at the age of 20. during the 3 weeks we were married he strangled me twice, he claims that i drove him to it and that my bald spots were ugly so he was trying to put me out of my
misery. stupidly i did not press charges. i’ve since learned he was high on speed on both those occasions. i kicked him out after the second time.
a few weeks later my mother enrolled me in the orion self healing courses… she came with me as she wanted to learn it too… vianna theta healing is what helped me overcome my hair pulling. that worked for me. may no for everyone. i simply had faith that it would work. it did. that was in may 2004, here we are now in april 2009 and i have not removed a single hair from my head since i did that course. i survived a mentally and emotionally abusive relationship that lasted 18 months
without resorting to hair pulling. that relationship ended but something new began. i’m now a recovered trichster with a 2 year old son who is strong and confident and for the first time in my life, i’m enjoying living.
What I have learned is that no matter what anyone else thinks or says, doesn’t matter… i don’t care what people think of me anymore. the people that matter most love me for who i am. it’s those people that are worth having in your life. if you’re being bullied, the best action is ignorance, a bully responds to anger and retalliation. ignorance to them is boring and they’ll eventually move along to another target. if they start getting violent, report them. it is not tolerable!
My advice is to get to know your inner self, that is where the true beauty is. once you know and love your inner self, the outer self will follow suit. in moments where you feel weak, find something to do with your hands, i found cross stitch, scrap booking and colouring in extremely helpful cause while i was using my hands i wasn’t thinking about pulling my hair out. my story isn’t anything special, it’s just the way things happened. i’m one of those lucky few who have found a cure that works. i only hope that it can help others as well. the best years of my life were lost to something i had no control over. i can never gain them back, i can only hope to help others like me to have those years and many many more.
Add comment April 10th, 2009
