Blatantly Ignored

An eating disorder indulged in, and self harm blatantly ignored, it is no wonder that my depression was scorned as me being an overdramatic hormonal teenager. My journals pawed through when I was out babysitting, and my secrets never written down in real fear that they would be discovered, I withdrew, hiding my feelings from everyone. Writing my thoughts on my leg and washing it off became a normal occurrence. Penning my feelings on toilet paper and flushing them so they would never be read became a daily habit. As did hiding my blades and band-aids. The outdoors became my refuge, away from the oppression of my parents.
At thirteen I began doing sex chats online, which led to webcamming. I've never been able to figure out exactly why I did this, as it never once 'turned me on'. Perhaps I did it because I was isolated and lonely; maybe I did it to rebel against my parents. However, in those early days, I can only pin down one thing that feels the most probable. Coercion. I didn't really want to do it; in fact, I didn't even know what I was in for.
If you have never been in this particular situation before, I'll lay it out for you.
Imagine that you are a sheltered, isolated thirteen year old, with almost no knowledge of the Internet or of sex. You go online. You want to make some new friends because...well, you don't have any. And friends are the most important thing in the world to you right now (or the fact that you feel like a freak because you DON'T have friends). You google 'teen chat rooms', or some variation on that.
You click.
It asks for a username. You're at THAT age, so something cutsie goes in the box. You want people to like you, of course!
You enter the chat room.
Identifying yourself as a thirteen year old female, you suddenly get flooded with dozens and dozens of incoming messages. Perhaps a fifty. Maybe a hundred.
You feel popular.
People ask you for your 'ASL', and you figure out that that means your age, sex, and location. And you feel like you have learned the whole Internet.
Suddenly you realize that out of all these messages, almost all of them are asking for sexual favors.
And almost all of them are thirty years old or older.
Wait!
The chat room said no one older than eighteen!
And then you realize too late that you have been in a sexual discourse, making 'friends' with sexual predators.
Why did I continue? Did I become addicted to the attention I got? Or was it something bigger than that?
I had hope in the back of my mind that one day, out of all these predators I ran into, that one of them would rescue me from my parents. I would let someone just take me away? In a heartbeat.
All the times that my mother saw my cuts, that my doctors told her what I was doing, she covered her eyes, believed my shaky lies, and may as well have put the blade in my hand herself.
Someday I would be saved. But not before I tried to save myself. And failed so horribly that never again would I be written off as overdramatic or hormonal. Unfortunatenately, my parents would see first hand that I was not faking to get attention; they had waited too long to get help.

Smoke And Mirrors

There are some things I struggled with that are very familiar to some, yet very foreign others. As a young teen I began to become obsessed about my weight. This started as a combination of influences from my mother, and a strong desire to retain my body from childhood.
My mother, often making comments about how fat people were disgusting, and glorifying her youth when she was a runway model in the United Kingdom, would also make comments to me about how I could 'do to lose ten or fifteen pounds'. This went on from the time I was thirteen until the time I was seventeen or eighteen. She would see my thighs touching when I mentioned going on a diet, and always rejoiced at the idea. Once she even condoned me and my father going on the South Beach Diet together. At thirteen I was weighing myself several times a day and counting calories. By the time I was fifteen I had a full blown eating disorder. According to my mother, my butt was too big. According to my mother, my stomach should be flat. According to my mother...according to my mother...according to my mother...I wasn't attractive enough. I wasn't good enough to be her child. I wasn't 'beautiful' enough to be hers. Improve. Improve. Improve.
Fourteen years old, questioning everything, hating my body, and convinced if I starved myself enough my breasts would disappear, I met a kid at church. He was about my age. And he was gay.  I instantly felt a connection with him, and we started to hang out. My mother didn't know he was gay - god forbid she discover that. However, the young guy did unleash a proverbial liberal hellfire on her. She grew distrustful of him. He was my best friend, though. My only friend, and she didn't want to break it off over silly politics. P-shawwww....
 I already knew a little about self harm and cutting, but my new found friend seemed very keen on it. In a short few weeks, I came out to him as bisexual, and began experimenting with self harm. 
After a time, my friend loaned me a book, Neil Gaiman's Smoke And Mirrors. I kept it hidden in a big yellow bag of mine, knowing my mother was not generally a fan of books coming into the house without being censored first. Before I had an opportunity to do more than flip through the book in a few moments of my spare time, my mother found the book in the hiding spot. 
She was horrified at its 'pornographic' content and demanded to know where I got it from. In the pit of my stomach I felt so ill I thought I might throw up my lunch. I didn't want to throw my new best friend to the wolves, aka my mother's wrath...but he needed his book back. It was a loaner. With an internal groan of impending doom, I gave up my friend, and my mother returned the book on Sunday. After talking to his mother, who didn't care of course because it was a BOOK (Literature, a good read, short stories, and not blatant erotica... ) my mother confronted my friend. She had written in his book, highlighting the 'disturbing' bits. Let's just end this story by saying that there was a lot of yelling, and I wasn't allowed to see him again. 
He had helped me to realize that sexual identity was something I needed to explore. This I will always be grateful for.
Damage had been done though.  
I was now addicted to cutting.

And that is not something that just stops.

Something Was Wrong

Eleven years old, and moving to Orlando from Virginia was probably too much for me to handle. Leaving behind a huge backyard, a lush forest, and of course those D.C. Museums, I felt extremely lost in Florida. Once my family relocated to the 'Sunshine State', the minuscule amount of friends I did have began to dwindle; after a while, we would speak so infrequently that we could almost be considered strangers to each other.
Florida was exciting - at first. It grew old quickly when all the neighborhood kids were going to school and my brother and I weren't. They made their 'best friends'; I had 'play dates' with obnoxious homeschool girls that rifled through my belongings, wanted to play games that I had played when I was six, and were so clingy you would think they were cat hair.
My dreaded period came, I was twelve, and my mother was so excited she took the whole family out for dinner, to celebrate my entry into 'womanhood'. Soon after, when I couldn't for the life of me get the horrid tampon in (yes, it was a petite one), my mother had me lie on my bed, spread my legs, and hold that position as she attempted to insert the tampon. This situation occurred multiple times over the course of a few months to maybe a year. I try not to think about it.
Nothing prepared me however for the socialization drought I wound up going through over the next few years.
I grew very focused on my high school correspondence program; well, as focused as I could be with my mother handing me answers on a silver platter and breathing down my neck.
I babysat for a family with three young children, but when I wanted to become a vegetarian my mother threatened me with not being allowed to babysit for that family anymore because they were 'influencing' me. I made the decision to keep babysitting. That family, those kids...they were my only friends, besides a few older adults at a church food pantry I volunteered at, but I didn't like it there. It scared me.
I was thirteen or fourteen, and the men there were always hitting on me. I felt very uncomfortable. On occasion I liked it, but in general it made me very nervous. One young guy talked about very sexual things, and I didn't know what to do but just stand there and listen. Another older man kissed me. I never felt safe, but I never felt like I could talk to my parents about it.
I was just their over dramatic child. Their wild child. If something happened, I wanted it to happen.
And if they wouldn't believe me about this, how would they believe me if I told them how I felt about myself? Honestly?

I didn't even know what to think about myself. I just knew something was wrong. But who was there to listen to me?

Oral Sex?

Oral sex. I don't know much about how other people learn about this topic; in my case, I was homeschooled, sheltered, and coddled to an unhealthy extent. However, I was a very imaginative child, and loved to write stories. Having a diary felt like the best thing in the world. In fact, I grew a kind of notebook addiction and kept buying notebooks for years, never settling on a particular one.
When I was about nine years old, immediately before that damn puberty hit, my mother did a course with me called 'Secret Keeper Girl by Dannah Gresh' all about 'true beauty and modesty. I guess none of this ever hit home for me, for obvious reasons. I really demonstrated to my parents my lack of sexual indiscretion when at ten years old they found my diary with pages full of detailed fictional letters between girls talking about oral sex. I had come up with these ideas on my own, but my parents felt the need to have a sitdown discussion with me about this. Before they even read to me the 'perverted sexual material', they read a diary entry about a crush I had on a fifteen year old Greek boy down the street, making me feel as if that was something to be ashamed of. Henceforth I never spoke to my parents about my crushes again.
My parents of course would not dare to believe that I would think up something so reprehensible in nature, no matter how much I insisted that nothing had influenced me into creating these entries. As a child, I felt as though I had to give them an answer that they could feel satisfied with, therefore I turned on one of my friends, not really knowing what I was doing at the time. I can honestly tell you that we never spoke again.
However, I am still unsure as to how I came to my sexual conclusions. Perhaps it's because until puberty, I saw my parents naked, showered with them, and spent a good portion of my childhood nude in swimming pools, backyards, my home, and with my brother.
Perhaps it's because I was born sexually focused, always attempting to engage in sex play with girls and my brother, in a game he and I called 'Eskimo Eskimo'.
Perhaps none of my thoughts or actions were terribly uncommon for a child, particularly one who was repressed and stifled. So repressed, in fact, that life was only beginning to explode so loudly, and so violently that if you were close, you were undoubtedly going to get singed.

Naked Barbie On The Beach

I had always been sexually inquisitive. As a young child, I experimented with other children. These memories, although somewhat faded, are jolted into rememberence when I recall the time I got caught. A friend and her mother were visiting, and the daughter and I were in the basement. We had played like this before, so I was terrified and shocked when she ran upstairs and told on me. My mother apologized profusely, and I assume they left before my mum layed me across her lap and gave me the worst spanking I ever would get from her. This was ironic, considering she always talks about how 'gentle' her spankings were for me and my brother.
Nothing could really stop me, though, and I found immense interest in reading Life books and collections of nude art. After sharing an painting of a nude girl eating pizza on the beach with some kids who came over for a haircut (my mother cut fellow homeschoolers' hair for extra money), the children's mom called up. Her daughter had told her that I had showed them a "picture of naked Barbie on the beach". My mum asked me about it.
I lied. Of course. I was only about six years old, had very little social tact, and only new my books...my pre-approved books, my pre-approved videos. My pre-approved activities. When my mother came close to the art book I showed the kids, I half-fessed up, with a non committal "ohhhh, I miggghhht have showed them some art..."
I learned a little bit about puberty before I learned about sex. My pediatrician gave my mother and me a paper on puberty for girls on an annual checkup. My mother tried to hide it from me; I guess she wanted to surprise me with boobs for my birthday or something. However, I'm a snoop, and if something pertains to me, I'm going to find it out one way or another. I believe that particular time it was whining, coercion, with a little diplomacy. My mother told me a little bit about what was on the paper; breast development, body hair, pubic hair. I caught a glimpse of the word menstruation, but she wouldn't talk about it. I couldn't even pronounce it.
I can't really tell you what I felt about the thought of puberty. I checked for changes a lot. I was jealous that my friend was developing faster than I was. But I just kind of ignored it. I don't remember when 'this' grew or 'that' grew. Until I realized what had happened to me. That there was

no going back; that scared me like nothing else did, but I didn't know why.

The Beginning of The Beginning

Growing up was a whirlwind of strangeness for me. Feeling what I perceived to be love, I assumed that my parents loved me. Perhaps in their own warped way they did. However, it seemed that the older I got, the more estranged from them I felt. My brother never seemed to have this difficulty. He probably did though, but to a lesser extent.
Being raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, unschooled until the age of eight, and homeschooled my whole life, I felt exceptionally isolated from children my own age. My parents had been involved in a group called The Way International, now deemed by many as a cult, and I had been raised under a majority of its precepts. Besides many of its non-traditional views on Christianity, which led to an unstable religious upbringing for me and my brother, it also has a harsh, unforgiving view on homosexuality. This I had to learn the hard way.
I had already heard my parents brag to me about their time as Way missionaries in New Orleans, "re-training" people who were gay to become straight "again". Teaching gay men how to walk like "real men" and talk like "real men".
I didn't know what to make of any of this at the time. In fact, I had so little exposure to anything LGBTQ that I really didnt know anything about it at all. Just what my parents told me. That gay was bad, and we loved the sinner and hated the sin. These words were spoken to me on a rather frequent basis.
My only sex education came from my mother. It was brief, somewhat down to business, and was all within the context of man and woman, husband and wife, after marriage. That's how babies are born kids! I actually thought people had sex standing up. It was pretty confusing for me. My brother didn't want to hear a word of it; he got immensely grossed out and wouldn't believe what she was talking about, and went into a state of denial about the situation of how he came into the world.

The whirlwind had not even really begun yet, but it would soon. And I would begin to doubt everything I had ever known.