Finding Your Niche In The World

I'm not really sure anyone will ever read this, but being able to put my thoughts and feelings out there feels so liberating. Sometimes you hold so much inside your soul that eventually it creates cracks and poisons that makes living a happy life near impossible. So today I start a journal that is out there in the world, released from the confines of my soul. For once I feel like my load is being removed from my shoulders and it's all thanks to you my invisible audience, because even though there's no one there it feels like your talking to someone when you start a blog. Anyway, I'm going to get started on talking about whats on my mind and the journey I take through these next couple of years.

Let me introduce myself, I'm Alexis, a 22 year old college drop out trying to find her way in the world. Since I was very little I had an aversion to school and a difficulty in making friends. I was constantly the outsider always jealous of those who found social scenarios easy and fun. As I got older it became easier for me to be comfortable around people but it was still work, and even to this day I feel as though I don't give people the real me, only a mask... because who really wants anyone to peel back that mask? Not me, that's for sure. Because that gives them the power to break me, and having had that happen once before I honestly fear letting it happen again.

When I was 16 through 18 I met an older man at the place I was working. He was the big man on campus and everyone had a little thing for him. I was 16 and fell for those charms and the attention that he seemed to give me... Only now do I realize that it was always in secret and that he had started winding a thick net of manipulation around my nieve mind. We started with kissing and rapidly went beyond my comfort zone. I was scared and confused but so happy that he liked me best of all. I remember asking to stop and having to just back down because he never stopped. As the years went on he chipped away what had once been so bright within me, my idea of self.

I never really got over what happened, and only this past year even recalled it happening. I had started getting rather severe seizures and a bed wetting problem as the memories resurfaced (I later found out from my parents that the bed wetting had happened alot when I was 16). My body let me alleviate my stress with those seizures, I would wake up after one and feel all clean and new, like some evil dark presence had been lifted. Eventually the memories started to ease back in to my life little by little, and it was really the first time I was awed by the strength that humans have within themselves. Because I didn't have an avalanche of memories that would have surely destroyed what little sense of self I had left, they came slowly and eased me into the state of accepting what had happened.

Now, with this year coming to a close I feel as though I have really made leaps and bounds mentally, getting over what happened to me by myself and with barely any support. I still have an occasional flashback or a heightened emotional reaction if something reminds me too much of my past, but no more seizures and no more darkness surrounding my soul. But sadly at this point the damage that I found so hard to remember had crushed my life. I had dropped out of school and a hard time keeping a full time job, because until the moment I remembered what had happened, too much stress would trigger emotional upheavals. I resented him so much when I remembered him, because my bright future seemed so tarnished by what he had managed to do to me. But as I get through it piece by piece I feel like maybe there is still a bright future, just not on the same path as I had once imagined it would be.

So I'm going to use this blog to document my journey, wherever it might take me.