Adolescent Angst

Fast forward several years to early teenage-hood.  My mother had long since left my abusive father and moved interstate.  Of course he followed and I still had contact with him over the school holidays.  I was always petrified to go, but even more scared not to and so the anxiety remained.  That fact combined with the emergence of 'flashbacks' relating to my child abuse made for a pretty mixed-up teenage girl.  Of course I said nothing, I was ashamed.  I tried to tell myself every day that it was me who was making it all up.  I constantly viewed the world as unfair and everyone in it as potentially dangerous.  The only constant throughout my schooling was that I tended to do very well academically.  Eventually that too slipped away.  I always felt like a person on the margins, never quite fitting in anywhere.  School was extremely difficult...I remember most kids as just being cruel.  Still, I kept up a brave appearance, ultimately pretending I didn't care much about anything.  Sure, like many others, I tried to kill myself when I was 15 years old, and obviously failed.  I have spent the past 20 years attempting to ignore the scar on my wrist.  Enter the world of drugs. By partaking of them, I could go to the 'happy place' I could never quite find in the real world, and I could be part of a group of like-minded people who would become my friends.  My relationship with drugs continued into my early 30s.  I won't bother textualising all the happenings around my experience of society's underbelly as it would take forever.  Perhaps I will write about that some other time because undoubtedly the stories would fill a book on their own.  Suffice to say, the drugs themselves ended up turning against me in the end also so they are now no longer part of my existence.  This  now means that I have to face my panic head-on...I can no longer use drugs to numb my pain.  More days than not, it consumes me.  The presence of panic-disorder almost makes the memories of child abuse pale in comparison, though I personally believe it is the abuse which caused it in the first place.  It's an ongoing, every day struggle.  It is mentally, emotionally and physically taxing.  It feels like a sentence; a burden; a curse.  I want to scream out about how unfair it is.  I want to ask 'what did I do to deserve this'?  I want to punish the man who took away my innocence and blame it all on him.  I want to wake up in the morning and it will all be gone.  But panic disorder does not leave, it does not discriminate, and it won't explain to you why.  There are two choices.  1. Learn to live with it. 2. Stop living.   I know what I'm choosing and it's definitely not the latter.