By Victoria @sillycreativexx - written August 2025
Processing a lot [...] talk of the past was shocking. I’m sweating thinking about it. […] The “after” of the injection. I want to throw up thinking about it. How it was in my chart not to do that. How my “regular” hospital doctor and therapist were upset about it after the weekend. The threats from hospital staff and my mom having to sit me down and talk to me about keeping it together (stopping the hospitalization cycle), or I was going to be “taken away”. I feel really sick and dissociated thinking about it. I’ve told myself I was overreacting about all of it for so long. Now I’m realizing it was worse than I thought. I wasn't just bullied and pushed around and forced; they (my lovely parents) were, too.
I was violated beyond even what the inpatient doctor deemed acceptable. I am still dealing with the consequences of the “on and off” medication cycle from then, today. All of that has tainted any help I’ve received.
Medication resistant or just medically abused? Psychiatrically toyed with until I continued to lose it more and more. Put on the good girl act eventually so I can be a star student; no need to worry about her. Go into residential for “structure” or “socialization”, or really to keep the psych-cops away? Because my struggling was a crime against normalcy, against the way a young woman is supposed to behave. Traumatize her enough, and she’ll fall in line and perform compliance the way you want her to, the way young girls ought to behave. Compliance to the abuser with a sign-in badge and script pad. Make her believe her suffering is her fault. Then no one will look at the chart directives being betrayed.
When she cries in front of the psychiatrist that's insulting her later, they’ll say “look at her, she's such a mess” to my mother's face.
You did this to me. You made my struggling into a crime and made sure I’d pay for it.
So when they say, “It's okay not to be okay. Help is out there. Get help.”
I say, the system you're telling me to turn to did this to me. They changed any future step I’d take for myself when they drugged me because my suffering was too big for their comfort. A piece of that little girl is left on the “quiet room” floor, where they grabbed my cut-up arms tightly and pushed the syringe in that would change everything. That’s what I got for seeking help.
So I cry for the little girl who was too young to know it was so much worse and wrong than she could comprehend.
For the twenty-five-year-old now who's struggling with her medication and doesn't know what to do with all of this; that just wants to live a meaningful and peaceful life that she feels proud of, that feels pushed around with her naivety taken advantage of. I cry with the realization that what my body has been trying to tell me was always right. And with no excuses for those who did know better than to hurt a hurting little girl.