Ranting about my pain

Rachel McConnell

Ok so I haven't written anything here since, whew 2017? And I wanted to get some things off my chest and didn't know where else to go. I'm having a hard time with a lot of things right now. I'm pretty sure my parents hate me, even if they wont say it, but I still love them. I'm going to start from the beginning, explain. To everyone how I got here, what I've experienced, and why I'm so done with life. I wont kill myself. I have people in my life worth fighting for right now but life itself hurts so much, so fucking much. My names Rachel. As of today, January 12th, 2019, I am 17 years old. I have more siblings than I can count on two hands and more parents than most people do.

When I was little, I wanna say 7 because that was around the time my mother divorced my father i saw for the first time how cruel life can be. My biological mother had become pregnant with her fourth child but this one did not belong to my father. My father was a United States Airmen and he was deployed at the time this all happened. I dont remember where he was deployed to I just know that after he left a man that he had introduced our family to started to come over a lot more often. I didn't understand why then but I do now. My mother was cheating on my father with one of his own friends. My father, after my mother started filing for divorce, tried to kill himself one night. I was in bed, trying to sleep but failing miserably like I do every night, when I heard my father sobbing. I crept out of my room and around the corner that separates the hallway from the living room and what I saw still haunts me to this day. Mu father had taken a knife and had slit his wrists. Blood was pooling and he was barely conscious still. I ran next door to the neighbors for help. My mother was not allowed on base at the time so me and my 2 brother, one who is two years younger than me and the other is seven, stayed with the neighbor for two months while my father was in a psych ward and my mother was no where to be found.

Fast forward a few years and my father has found a new lady, my current mother Amanda. Shes the best thing that's ever happened in my life but I'll get to her later. My father gets deployed again so I'm forced to move for most of my third grade year from Washington state to Missouri. My mother married the man she cheated on my father with and would eventually get pregnant with her fifth child. Living there was an absolute nightmare. My mother would get drunk or high off of I dont even know what and would beat me. I'd be beaten until I bled. My step father was worse. He was so much worse. He did things to me. He tried to do them to my two younger brothers. Not his kids but from when my mother and father were still married. I remember this one time when he took pictures of me in the shower. The humiliation I felt has never gone away. People cant be in the bathroom with me when I'm showering now, not even my little sisters, because I have panic attacks now. Whenever he wanted to hurt someone I would send my brothers away, tell them to hide in the crawl space in our closet, and I'd take the trauma. I dealt with all of it. The beatings, the touching, the things no kid should ever experience. That no person should ever experience. Fast forward a few more years again. I'm living with my family in Hawaii, specifically the island O'ahu. I have had a skin problem since I was about 5 years old and it's starting to spread rapidly across my legs, back, arms, and genitals. I dont find out the proper diagnosis until the summer of 2018. But while living there I had been prescribed so many different treatments that my body has never fully recovered. I was put on topical steroids, I had to undergo radiation treatments, and I was put on methotrexate. The skin problem is highly irritating and can be deadly if treatments do not work. My skin problem destroys connective tissues, like what's in your joints and heart. I will also become completely infertile by the age of 25. That's heartbreaking to know at 17. Knowing that chances are I wont have kids. Not only am I having issues there but I've also started self harming. I have scars on my arms, legs, hips, ribs, and neck from where I cut myself. I have burn marks on mh arm from where I held a lighter to my skin. I had even tried to overdose a few times. The first time my parents found out I was scolded and then comforted. They even took me to a therapist for a week. But when they found out I had relapsed my father told me to get out. He told me he couldn't even look at me. I walked the streets that night. Wondering what I did to deserve this life.

And I just realized I didnt say that my parents are strict. I'm so used to it now that it's just normal life to me. I am 17 and I have a curfew of 5 on school nights and 6 on weekends. I have to have almost straight A's, I have to be absolutely perfect on my chores and I'm the only one that cleans, and I even have a time limit for eating. I have to eat in more than ten minutes and less than twenty or else I get sent to bed early and I already go to bed at 9 every night. Anyways even after all that life doesn't get better. Just these past six months have been a living hell. I got kicked out for having sexual relations with guys, I had to live with my bio mom and her new fiance and while living there we barely had enough money for rent and even less money for food, and then when I move back into my father's house I find out the only parent who ever cared, that ever saw my pain and comforted me, is being divorced from my father because she cant handle it. My father does the same thing he did when divorcing my biological mother. I'm home one night, cleaning the kitchen when he walks in the front door after being out shopping and he hugs me and my brother then grabs a knife and walks out. I stayed up that night comforting my mother Amanda as she is on the phone with the cops. I had to hold back all my tears that night, I had to really grow up that night, to comfort the woman that always comforted me. She sobbed and begged and pleaded with my father on the phone to come back. The cops found him in time and took him to a psych ward. My mother, after that incident got into an accident. She was lucky she walked away from it with no more than a bruise across her shoulder. I'm lucky that that's all she walked away with.

Now my mother loves my father again and wants nothing more than for then to work things out but he doesn't want her. He manipulated her into loving him again just to say no. You wanna know the only good thing in my life right now? The one thing keeping me alive and sane? My boyfriend, Matthew. Hes the only one right now that is making me a priority. That is comforting me. Loving me. Treating me with care and respect which is something I never got from my other boyfriends. Hell I had a boyfriend two years back that beat me. He got so mad he bashed my head into a wall and knocked me unconscious and while I was out he did things to me. I'm sorry for ranting here but I just needed it all out. I needed to let go of some of my stuff. You guys dont even know all of it. This isnt even half. This is a taste just so I can breathe again. Anyone out there suffering as i do please know you're not alone. Not even a little bit. Thanks for reading if anyone does. Moral of this story no matter how hard life gets keep loving. Theres always something good. Just keep living. No matter how hard it is something will get better. The way I look at it is you cant have good in life with out the bad. You need your ups for your downs and your downs for your ups.