Shhh…

I walked through life—my whole life—pretending the bad things that happened to me didn’t bother me, that they weren’t affecting me, that they didn’t happen at all. It was survival mode, something I started as a little girl and kept doing, shoving it all in the bin and moving on.

Firstly—who the fuck was I going to tell, and secondly—nobody wants to hear it, especially when it’s happening inside the home.

Seriously—who the fuck was there to tell, when you would’ve gotten in trouble just for opening your mouth in the first place? I’m Gen X, we were told to stuff it down. Shhh! Told that what was happening wasn’t happening, and that what we were feeling wasn’t real.

“It’s nothing. It’s all in your head,” they said, but it wasn’t nothing, and it wasn’t all in my head.

I carried on this way my entire life. I left home at fourteen because I hated life, hated being alive, and hated who I was. I was looking for a reason to live, a reason to want to live, a life I didn’t hate.

If you know anyone who left home at fourteen in the 80s, out there in the streets, it goes without saying that a lot of fucked-up shit went down with that person—and it did.

All the shit from my childhood—my teens—I just stuffed all that shit down like I was taught. Shhhush! It was all in my head. In the bin it went. I carried on pretending it didn’t bother me.

I had my daughter at eighteen, and boom—there came my reason to live: someone I could nurture, show what love is, unconditionally, and someone who would finally, maybe, love me back.

After Kayla was born, some more shit happened to me—different shit—and I didn’t have it in me to sit around crying about it, because—ain’t nobody coming to save me! I pushed that shit down too, brushed it off like it was nothing, and kept on keeping on.

This went on throughout my entire life. It was like I had a magnet for bad situations because I’d been in a lot of them, and I never even thought about those situations or altercations—I thought I was bad, unbothered, tough. Up until two years ago—when I was told I had to have open-heart surgery.

A few months before that, a series of events took place in my life; I lost the place where I operated my business, and I was betrayed by someone I worked with at the salon—someone I was close with, someone who called herself my bestie. Eww. I was also betrayed by my brother, and then some.

Finding out I needed heart surgery—and how I felt about that—I tried to stuff it down too, but that bin was maxed out, filled to the brim, and when I pushed down, it pushed back and exploded in my face, bringing with it every incident, every altercation, the abuse, the violence, my way of life.

It all came flashing in front of my face, and I had a full-on mental breakdown. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on; I was crying— hard, spewing all of those things out of my mouth, losing it.

I shot my doctor a message, telling her everything—the things I’d never spoken before that day—and she said, “You have PTSD,” and I was like—”What? PTSD?” I wasn’t in the military. What the fuck?

My daughter was there that night, and I can still see the look on her face clearly before she walked out that door, and I didn’t see her again for eighteen months.

I didn’t really study or pay attention to PTSD or know what the fuck it even was. We were outside playing—in the ’70s and ’80s. Shit, we weren’t searching up anything on Google or YouTube. A lot of Gen Xers weren’t privy to meds or even getting diagnosed with PTSD, GAD or ADHD back then. Gaslighting—what’s that?

My PTSD made itself present, known—like, “Hi, over here, remember us?” Waving all excitedly and shit—and I went into some corner of my brain. It was survival mode, but a different kind of survival mode than the one I’d been in my whole life, where my subconscious took over and everything I did from that day forward ran on autopilot, all the pre-op stuff, the surgery—it was me, but it wasn’t me.

A lot of shit went down with the surgery and after the surgery. When I woke up from it—I didn’t know who I was. I lost my identity through that whole process and still I tried to act like I was OK.

As I was trying to figure it out—trying to gather all the pieces of my life, of me, that were scattered all over the place—I was offered a psychiatrist.

Well, actually—there was an incident in the hospital. A psychosis situation and that’s when Psych and Zoloft came on the scene. Mental breakdown number two. I couldn’t get it out of my head— why my daughter would just leave me like that.

When the time came to go to that appointment—which was five months or so after the surgery—I was numb. Still running on autopilot. Still in that corner of my brain—but only way deeper.

Images of what happened to me throughout my life—the shit that had been stuffed in the bin—were circling above my head like a carousel, but that’s all they were doing. I couldn’t focus on any of it or ground anything; it was just dark, horrifying visions—I didn’t understand a thing.

I sat in front of the psychiatrist, and let me tell you, nobody has ever been in need—mentally, psychologically or emotionally—as much as I was, sitting across from her. I was so relieved to finally have my moment, a moment where someone was going to hear me out and possibly get me, or at the very least, help me. I was desperate for help, desperate to be heard, and desperate for understanding.

You know what I got? The psychiatrist—barely paying attention, looking at her screen, rocking her foot, flipping her shoe on and off—telling me the best solution was to go back to work. I hadn’t told her one fucking thing about myself. I had just had open-heart surgery and a mental breakdown—not one, but two—due to PTSD, and I mean—she had to have known, right? It had to have been in my chart—that’s the reason I was there.

She never asked me one damn question about any of it—not the breakdown, not the PTSD, not what happened at my workplace—and even though my subconscious had taken over, I knew with whatever was left of my fucking heart that it was all kinds of fucked up. She gave me a prescription and sent me on my way. She dismissed me. She might as well have told me to go fuck myself, and I cried, and I cried, because what was I gonna do now?

There it was—I got the help I asked for. And she didn’t wanna hear it. She didn’t wanna hear my story. She didn’t wanna hear anything. I was broken—with a capital fucking B. I was completely lost.

So after that shit-fuck of an appointment, I just said fuck it. I went to the bar and drank my face off, and I continued to do so for the next several months, in a fucking fog—a delirium. At some point—after the Wake-Up Call—it became crystal clear to me that I was fucked and I was on my own, and if I wanted to come out of this fucked-up place I was in, if I wanted to find myself again, it was on me. I had to get myself together somehow, some way, by myself.

What I’m about to say next is something everybody needs to hear. You know when your friend talks to you and uncovers some deep shit? That person—your friend—is telling you because they need to be heard, they need to be seen, and they need to let it out.

You might not understand what they’re telling you, you might not get it, and that’s OK, but you can listen. That’s all you have to do—listen to your friend, acknowledge her pain, and allow her to release it. You can be a good friend.

What that person—your friend—is in need of when they start talking, when they finally have the courage to start talking, is someone to listen. To hear them. To hug them. To tell them everything’s gonna be OK. To know that another person knows—that they’re not alone anymore. That they have someone in their corner. I know, because I was them.

I wasn’t a good listener as a friend. Not at all. How could I listen to anybody else’s shit when I had a bin full—jam-packed with my own shit? Trauma. I didn’t listen to anybody. I wasn’t capable.

But you know—I hope this podcast, Truth Serum, will bring awareness into friendships. Just like I hope this blog post will. Because listening? That’s a huge component of friendship that’s missing these days—besides loyalty—it’s fucking listening. Hearing your friend out.

Being a friend is a lot more than going to the bar, going to a festival, or going on vacation together. Everybody needs a friend. A friend who will listen to you when you're hurt. Ask you what’s wrong, especially when it’s visibly obvious that you’re upset.

So you don’t have to stuff it in a bin, so you don’t have to pack another layer on to hide, just to survive whatever has happened to you—so you can be spared a full-ass bin and the risk of walking around with PTSD unknowingly until it makes itself known, because that shit ain’t pretty and that shame isn’t yours to carry.

I’ve been around a lot of women, and when I identified with someone who was broken like me—even though I didn’t acknowledge it at the time—I did. I instinctively recognized it, and I was drawn to them, able to listen to them and share some of my experiences—not to preach, but as a warning—hoping they wouldn’t end up like me.

These days—you know how it goes—as soon as you start talking about your shit, something that happened to you, even when you’re one-on-one with that friend, the moment you start to tell your story, the other person butts in like, “Well, this is what happened to me…” So what happens then? Your story doesn’t get told, and their story doesn’t get told, because your friend just shut you down.

What could’ve been a very liberating, sacred moment—went to shit. What could’ve been a powerful—freeing—release just died in the room. Two stories that mattered got dismissed because nobody was willing to listen. “Let’s do another shot.” So I can drown it out—the pain. So I can forget about what’s eating me inside. Stuff it down some more.

Guess what happens when you do that? Your soul takes a hit, your soul is left bleeding inside, taking a backseat and hoping that maybe—just maybe—that opportunity will come by again and actually be honored.

If that person you call a friend doesn’t wanna listen, or you don’t trust them enough to keep it to themselves, then ask yourself—why are you hanging around them, and maybe take some time out, alone, to reflect on that. Do some soul-searching, slow down, and trust that the people who are good for you, the ones who truly want to hear you, will find you.

I’m not telling you this is what you should do; I’m telling you this is what you could do—something meaningful, because we need each other. I just gave you a classic case of what the psychiatric system in Canada looks like, and if anything, that session pushed me deeper into the dark hole I was already in.

A lot of people who call themselves friends are in a dark place, and it’s easy to stay there when you’re surrounded by darkness. I know—I lived my whole life in it, and when I finally came out of it, all of the people who once called me “friend”—poof. Gone.

Gen X had it rough. I’m not saying the Millennials didn’t, or the Boomers, but a lot of Millennials speak on social media, on Facebook, about everything that bothers them, everything that caused them trauma, and let’s keep it real—the shit Millennials call trauma is the same shit Gen X would get a smack in the head for.

They post it, speak about it publicly, announce it on social media, and they don’t even know why they’re doing it outside of creating an audience, to gain followers, not realizing the whole point of speaking, of getting it out, getting it off your chest, is to become liberated, to break free from what’s living inside you.

I know so many people who post their whole lives on social media—they get likes and they get comments, its it’s satisfying for them. A lot of those comments are the darkness feeding into the pain that already exists. The darkness—it loves that shit. It waits for that shit. It ain’t hard to get in when the door is wide open. It’s called “feed” for a reason.

The world can be a cruel place, and if you don’t emotionally, mentally have it all together—you’re putting yourself at risk. I’m sure you’ve seen the documentaries, cases that wrap around social media—and if you haven’t—watch one. See what’s really happening with social media and today’s youth.

The ones posting—they aren’t healing. These people are still broken. They’re not liberated; they’re still carrying what was never fully seen, heard, or released, walking with it every single day. I see it. I happen to know many.

Posting your story on Facebook might get you likes, but most people are just watching, not listening, not really hearing you. It’s sad to admit, but you’ve heard it before—some people like to see other people suffer. They feed off it, gossip about it, and find joy in it, and the ones who do—they’re the ones suffering the most, deep in their own pit of darkness, and they may not even know it.

Stop that shit—seriously—because this world could be a mentally healthier, better place, it’s fucking possible, and I just told you how.

Give your friend the ten, fifteen or twenty minutes they deserve from you without interruption, help them break free from whatever the fuck is killing them inside.

I can see it clear as day, and if you’re reading this, if your eyes are open, I know you see it too. This generational “stuff-it-down” bullshit curse has been running wild through our bloodlines long enough—too long.

There’s a huge, clear message I’m sharing with you today—more than one, actually.

Take it in.