The Crazy Cocktail BPD, Bipolar & Me!
Today’s cocktail: Black Russian. 🍹
That sentence alone still feels surreal when I speak it. Like the walls should cave in afterwards from the weight of it all. It wasn’t accidental. It was endurance. It was my body staying alive when my mind had already given up.
I tried to kill myself at 14. I won’t say how, because that part isn’t important, and there may be some sensitive souls reading. What is important is the why. The culprits were the church, conversion therapy, and my mother. This story didn’t start at 14 though. It started earlier, like most things do.
I was outed by my own mother at age 11, not too long after my father had been murdered. Hmm, that word feels pretty harsh in the pit of my stomach, so I will say killed instead. Anyway, she went through my things and found love letters a female friend had written to me. They were nameless on purpose. I already knew my mother wouldn’t approve, especially given her position in the church. She was the minister of music. Head choir director. Highly visible. Highly respected. Highly concerned with appearances. Always appearances, and I quickly became the family embarrassment. She’s still embarrassed of me even now, present day, if we’re being honest. She just hides it better now.
So naturally, I lied.
I told her the letters weren’t mine, that I was holding them for someone else. Lying felt safer than the truth, especially after what happened years earlier in third grade. I had given a girl I liked a Valentine’s Day card. Her mother found it, saw it was from another girl, and suddenly parents were involved. Adults sat us down and explained how strongly they disapproved. I remember being confused. I thought it was sweet. I thought she was pretty. But leave it to adults to strip the color out of children early, pun intended, especially when they themselves are colorless.
Or maybe she was just deep in grief. I’ll give her some compassion here. Needless to say, that distraction worked in my favor for a while.
Fast forward to 13.
I could no longer hide my sexuality thanks to a nosey ass church lady who was also the neighbor who told my mother she saw me kissing a girl on the front porch. That girl was my 18 year old girlfriend at the time, who I had lied to and told I was 16, and my mother wasn’t even home when it happened.
When she got back, all hell broke loose. She beat my ass like I had stole something. Like I was a grown woman in the street. Like I was a runaway slave. My point is her fists were heavy and her tongue was sharp. This all happened in front of her husband at the time, my two older brothers, and my younger sister, until her husband finally pulled her off of me. It was a real bad day. When she was through, I felt like I was just some bitch in the street who had just stolen her lunch money or some shit. Like ma’am, was this your last meal?
Hmm, ironically it felt like mine, because everything and I do mean everything changed after that, and my life was never the same. If you want more detail on this, you’ll have to just read my book whenever I can find time to write it. My blogs, on the other hand, are meant to be more about processing rather than re traumatizing by going into too much detail.
After that, there was nothing I could say or do. No amount of lying. No fake boyfriends. No pretending. She knew. And once she knew, she decided I needed to be fixed. Conversion therapy began shortly after my 14th birthday. That time in my life is blurry. Trauma has a way of doing that, of erasing details while keeping the feeling burned into your nervous system. What I remember are fragments:
Two exorcisms.
Tarry services.
Church five days a week.
Consultation meetings with multiple pastors.
Hands on me.
Voices yelling demons out of me.
People praying at me, not for me.
I don’t know how long it lasted. Weeks? Months? Time didn’t make sense back then. All I know is that eventually it broke me.
That was the first time I tried to take my own life.
I survived.
I survived being told that who I was made God angry. Abomination and detestable were the words most commonly used.
I survived being treated like a spiritual infection. Unfortunately, deep internal shame and guilt also survived. Sometimes my own existence still feels wrong at 35, but that’s another story.
The military helped break me as well, but more on that later, because it deserves its own space. I survived a childhood where love was conditional and safety depended on obedience. I was raised by a mean lady who was at times selectively loving and highly hypocritical, cynical, judgmental, and the list goes on. No mother bashing here, at least not today. So I’m sure you could imagine my confusion growing up in such an environment.
I survived my own mind turning against me at fourteen years old. Telling me, no, convincing me that I didn’t deserve to live.
I’m here now not because it didn’t hurt, but because I survived. Because something in me refused to disappear, even when the people who were supposed to protect me became the ones who caused the most harm.
This isn’t a redemption story.
This isn’t forgiveness.
This isn’t everything happens for a reason.
This is just the truth.
That was the first time I tried to die.
And somehow, I’m still here.
The Crazy Cocktail continues.
Cocktail please?
Gia Beasley,