Last Place Girl

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Have you ever had the experience of being picked last or being someone's last choice? I asked this question on Instagram, and 93% of you said yes. When asked to share those experiences, here are some of the things you shared with me:
  • "I was last picked at an EFY dance 😂"
  • "As a kid I was often chosen last for sports at recess. I felt embarrassed about it."
  • "I felt lonely and devalued when for my eighth birthday I invited my whole class to my first and only birthday party. Only my best friend showed up."
  • "I was "hanging out" with this guy (his words, we were never a couple) who broke my heart into pieces and lead me to feel worthless and undeserving of better, but who was also so broken I reasoned everything away and tried desperately to help him feel whole. I decided this charmer was the one who deserved my virginity I had been saving, but when I felt uncomfortable or didn't want to because it was empty and life-draining, he would remind me that plenty of other girls would be happy to be in my shoes and he'd be happy to call them over. He told me once I wasn't even his second choice, or even further down the line, to call over."
  • "Before my husband and I started dating we were best friends who had just opened up about being interested in each other. He ended up choosing another girl over me and telling me he wasn't ready for a relationship, but I saw a few days later on Facebook that they were in a relationship together. I loved him so I stayed close friends with him throughout their relationship. Eventually he realized he made the wrong decision and they broke up after 2 long years. I watched them kiss each other and live together all while knowing it should have been me. After he left her we got together but it still hurts me that he chose her before me. We've been together for 4 years now, have a daughter and another baby on the way, but it still hurts to think about it. No one wants to be a second choice."


When I asked myself the same question, I had two answers.

I've never been picked dead last at a dance, for a team at school, never placed last on individual or team sports, never had the lowest grade in the class, never was the only one not invited to a party.

BUT, in the same breath,

yes. I have been in "last place" many times.

"Last Place" - and so aptly named by those that shared their stories as "Second Choice" - experiences can be painful because they produce a unique kind of shame. The shame of not being "worthy" or "good enough" creates a deep gouge in a person's self-worth. I've had my share of those.


I was hospitalized near the end of my senior year of high school with a painful throat abscess. Not one person came to visit me in the hospital, even when opportunity presented itself. Not a single soul came to visit, sent a text, anything. I'm not talking about friends bringing balloons or nice ladies from church coming by. I'm saying literally no one. At 18 years old I spent 48 hours in a hospital room alone, save the nurses who came to check on me and prep me for surgery. At one point I was certain I would die, not only from my physical condition but from the deep wound of being not just forgotten, but ignored. I remember being disappointed to wake up from the anesthesia post-surgery.

Last Place. It does things to you.

I found myself there a lot. It wasn't hard to feel like I wasn't high on anyone's list when I very often had no pencils for school and when the quantity of memories of going to bed without dinner far exceeds those of gathering around the table for a hot meal. Last Place was a real thing for me. I know what its like to be second pick, third pick, one hundredth pick, never picked. Last Place Girl. That's me.

Are you a Last Place Girl too?

Chosen last in an intimate relationship?
Overlooked for promotion after promotion at work?
Feel unwelcome at church?
Forgotten by friends?


Last Place looks different for everyone. Unfortunately, when we have heavy Last Place experiences Last Place becomes comfortable. It often becomes our frequent, unconsciously preferred choice. Women in particular find themselves making camp, sometimes even building brick houses in Last Place because women are taught from a young age to swallow disappointment, their own needs, and a million tiny oppressions in the name of making everyone else comfortable. Women are taught to say "yes" to everyone, to serve until their hearts give out, and have the smallest portions at dinner when there is not enough. Millions of women know Last Place as home.

So if you find yourself in Last Place, you are not alone. But whether what makes up Last Place for you is only a tinge of embarrassment or a truckload of shame, its important to know:

Last Place Girl has things
and she needs things.

Last Place Girl has shame. She feels sad and angry. She may feel forgotten, ignored, that the world is blind to her tears and cries for help and attention. She may feel she doesn't fit in and never will, or that she isn't good enough. She might feel she doesn't deserve better. Maybe she thinks she doesn't deserve anything at all. She might think, "What is wrong with me?" and "If only I was thinner, smarter, prettier, funnier, then they will see me. Then they will love me."

Last Place Girl needs to be seen, loved, and welcomed in. She needs to hear the words, "You are loved for who you are. You are important to me. You have a place, right here next to me." She needs people who are genuine in their concern and love for her. She needs safe people with whom she can be vulnerable.


Last Place Girl, find your people. Love from others is essential. It is a basic need to be loved and accepted in a community. Without a place to call home in the human family, we feel alone and exposed. My experience is this: people will show up. The people who show up consistently are your people. The secret to healing is to let them in. Let them love you. Let them show you what it means to be cared for, to be seen, to be watched over.

Last Place Girl needs medicine. That looks like a lot of things: intuitive eating, a special blanket, therapy, a girls night, a healing solo trip, a garden, a new hobby, journaling, meditation, etc. In reality, what I am calling "medicine" is really self-love. I'm not talking about the #treatyoself or the #selfcaresunday kind of self-love where you go out to buy yourself a new pair of Lululemon pants and some fine leather goods. I'm talking about the gritty, intentional, hard-working kind of love. It is the kind of self-love that is quiet. It has no hashtag. It doesn't make for a good Instagram pic. Its not easy. It requires you to sit with the discomfort of being human. This medicine is its own reward.

I've heard people argue for years over which comes first in healing: self love or love from others. Chicken or the egg? The answer I've arrived at is this: both are necessary. They are two sides of the same coin. They need each other. Self-love must come. Without it, there will be an endless, gnawing wound where the heart is meant to be. People who consistently show up for you reinforce your innate sense of worthiness. Self love transforms the love others give into enough. It is foolish to follow the path of insisting self-love is all you need. Wellsprings run dry when they are not fed. Someone who has strong self love spends time with people who are loving. This is because they have internalized the message: I am worth loving.


This week I walked out of a particularly difficult counseling session feeling the heaviness of Last Place on my chest. I hopped in my car and let the feelings that were bubbling inside just wash over me. I began to cry. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw my red eyes, felt the tiredness of my body, saw my unkempt hair and baggy sweater. I felt such shame. In a moment of extreme anger, I shouted at God. I wanted him to know I was pissed that he had forgotten about me in a hundred unforgivable ways.

"I am broken because of you!" I screamed at him through the roof of my minivan.
"You left me.
I was alone and you left me that way.
I hate you for sending me to a family
who hated me,
who treated me like an animal,
who forgot I was a little girl who needed things.
You never saved me,
never stepped in to help
or to stop the things you say you hate.
You are a liar.
All your fancy promises are lies.
What good is being a child of god
when you are forgotten like that?
I will never believe you.
I will never forgive you."

I cried until snot came forcefully out of my nose, because what else can you do when you feel Last Place to God?

And yet, there is a small girl inside me who wants more than anything to be held, to be loved, to have her hair brushed gently and sit down to a plate of hot homemade mac and cheese. She desperately wants to believe she is beloved, especially to God. As much as I want to keep that weeping girl quiet and tell her she doesn't need those things, I remember that my work right now is to listen to her and try to give her everything she asks for. So I took a deep breath and sat quietly in a wordless surrender.

Down the river of endless thoughts floated a faint reminder.
The first shall be the last
and the last shall be the first.
I rolled my eyes.

"Shut up, God. I don't care what you say.
Don't quote scriptures to me.
I'm tired of waiting for some future peace forever away
when you are forgetting me right now."

Obviously God and I are on good terms right now.

As I continued wading through my river of sadness,
another message flowed into consciousness.
Why wait?
Why not now?

Why not First Place now?

I was still deeply angry, so I said,
"Whatever, dude."
like the mature 28 year old woman I am.
I drove home,
holding my scathing anger as sword and shield,
and tried to forget my pathetic, desperate reaching
for a thread of love to hold on to.

But the question has been poking into my mind
like a rock in my shoe.

Why not First Place now?

I'll admit the idea sounds nice.
First Place.
I wonder what that even looks like?

What does First Place look like?
Last Place Girl wants to know.


So I pose the question to you:

What does First Place look like
for you?

and, more importantly,

why not First Place now?

New Diagnosis, Same Shizizzle

Monday, October 7, 2019

I have known I have a mental illness for a long time. Before I knew symptoms or even a name for it, I've known. 3 years ago I received a diagnosis for OCD that changed my life. My diagnosis empowered me by giving me both a name for my disease and also access to resources to help me. While I'm not happy in any way to have OCD, I'm grateful to know I have it. Knowing makes all the difference in the world.



I've also intuitively known that my OCD is accompanied by something else, something a little more elusive and difficult to identify. You may have heard me refer to it as "my childhood" or "childhood stuff" but never in more detail than that. My mom has a name for hard stuff beyond description - "shizizzle."I've coped by treating it with less invasive interventions - some light therapy here and there, writing, drawing, making jokes about it, and talking through it with safe people. These solutions have worked well. I have coped successfully for upwards of ten years with those methods.

Until February 2019.

That was my two year anniversary of my OCD diagnosis. I felt awful. Depressed is the best word for it. It wasn't anything near what I had experienced after my son was born, but it still underlined my days. I was tired all the time. Little glimpses of light and energy were a blessing and I took advantage of them by working on my new home, which did spark joy. But sparks only last if they can catch fire to something, and there was nothing in me to kindle a flame. As I examined my circumstances, I saw a lot to be happy with. A new home, a great ward, stability, family close by. Good things. But still, the sadness persisted. With my doctor I increased my medication dosage to alleviate the most alarming symptoms. It helped. After a few months of being more active in making friends and working outside on my garden, I felt comfortable reducing my medication back to my standard low dose. The underlying sadness was still there, but it was lessened.



Summer arrived and I was excited for so much - a first time real garden, Independence Day celebrations, my son's birthday, and small family vacations were things that highlighted my calendar. But as the weeks went by, the persistent sadness again became more heavy. Even surrounded by new friends and loving family, I felt lonely. Bullying thoughts sprang up in my mind towards myself. "No one loves you," they'd say. "These people like you now, but wait until they find out what's happened to you. No one likes trash," they continued. "You are such a fake, telling people to love themselves when you hate the world so much," and on and on until the thoughts came so forceful and often that I worried they were true. I tried every skill in my toolbox I had been taught to manage OCD, thinking these intrusive thoughts were created by my illness. But as hard and as many techniques as I tried, nothing helped.

Things got progressively worse. In addition to the constant overwhelm I was feeling, I began to feel disconnected from God, which was incredibly alarming to me because I value that connection above basically all else. I worried my marriage was failing because I was failing. I was constantly irritable, had no energy to do even the most basic housekeeping tasks, and I cried all the time. I was having weekly, then daily, then twice-daily panic attacks. Then the nightmares came. It became near impossible for me to sleep. I grew irrationally afraid of the dark. And as if things could not get any worse, I started to have nightmares while awake. Its about as fun as it sounds.



One night I found I could not sleep because the painful thoughts would not stop. I became so overcome with anxiety and anger that I could not lie still. I walked out to my garden and began pulling weeds and watering the plants. It was past midnight. As my feelings overwhelmed me, I began to weep heavily. In this moment I realized two things: first, if medication and techniques that had worked in the past were not working now, I'm probably not dealing with OCD; second, if things had gotten this difficult for me for this long, it was time to call in more help.

Within two weeks, I found myself in a new therapist's office explaining my symptoms, life history, and my hopes for treatment. At the close of that first meeting, she asked,

"Are you familiar with the term 'Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder'?"
"Yes," I said, bracing myself. "I thought that diagnosis was reserved for people who have suffered extreme chronic trauma."
She looked at me. I looked at her.
Shitz. I thought to myself as I looked at the floor with tears in my eyes.

And that is the story of how I found out that I don't have just one mental "thing" to deal with - I have two. They both suck. They feed off one another. Its a game of which came first, the chicken or the egg? OCD or C-PTSD? Luckily I think I have the answer.

C-PTSD is characterized by three things: cause, length of exposure, and effects.


Cause & Length of Exposure

The difference between C-PTSD and other mental illness is that C-PTSD is not an illness, it is an injury. There are no genetic markers that predispose a person to develop C-PTSD. The Center for Treatment of Anxiety and Mood Disorders states that individuals develop Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after experiencing long term, chronic trauma. C-PTSD is most often developed in response to childhood trauma. Beauty After Bruises, an outreach program for survivors of childhood trauma who have C-PTSD, explains the significance of these circumstances occurring during childhood.
"For those who go through this as children, because the brain is still developing and they're just beginning to learn who they are as an individual, understand the world around them, and build their first relationships - severe trauma interrupts the entire course of their psychologic and neurologic development."
Beauty After Bruises defines the disorder as stemming from severe, repetitive trauma and offers some examples of what these circumstances may look like. They include:
  • chronic emotional and physical abuse
  • sexual abuse
  • extreme parental neglect
  • sex/drug trafficking
  • child exploitation
  • recurrent medical traumas
  • living in a war zone
Nadine Burke Harris, author of The Deepest Well: Healing the Long Term Effects of Childhood Adversity has found in her research that the increased physiological stress response to childhood adversity significantly affects normal brain activity, hormonal response, and physical health not only during adverse experiences but has long-lasting effects well into adulthood. I'm not going into the complex biological process here when you can get the fascinating info right from her. I'm not a scientist and won't even try to pretend to be!

Finally, there is a difference between standard PTSD and C-PTSD. PTSD is the more familiar of the two and typically develops in response to a one-time event. It also has its own symptom markers. It is different from C-PTSD because of the cause and length of exposure to trauma. 

Effects

Symptoms of C-PTSD include the following:
  • low mood
  • disassociation
  • uncontrolled anger
  • self-destructive behavior
  • nightmares
  • flashbacks (ahem... what I called "day nightmares")
  • preoccupation with thoughts of revenge
  • hopelessness, worthlessness, and despair
  • feelings of numbness
  • trust issues
  • intense shame
  • social isolation
  • digestive issues
  • difficulty with relationships
  • sexual promiscuity
  • physical or medical issues
  • suicidal ideation
IT IS SO FUN, GUYS.

I have, at any given time in my life, had some or all of these. Some more than others, at times more often or intensely than not.

But the last 3 months have seen me through some of the most alarming: the numbness, nightmares, and flashbacks. My theory on why C-PTSD has shown up with such force now is this: I am, for the first time ever, in a safe and stable place with a solid support system that can help me while I work through scary stuff. I have many things here I didn't have in Phoenix: family, a compassionate and understanding ward, and willing and available friends. I also have a strong foundation of knowledge and self-awareness that I have worked tirelessly to maintain. I think my soul is telling my body its okay to fall apart now and let the pain go.



Recovery after a significant injury requires therapy. My husband is a physical therapist and often sees patients multiple times a week so he can help them gain strength, flexibility, and mobility post-injury. C-PTSD is no different. After intensely vetting therapists, I found someone I trust and is a great fit for my needs. She allows me the space and opportunity to take complete responsibility over the healing process, offering guidance as needed. We get to work on what I'm ready to work on, which are often my most horrific and shameful experiences. She is the first therapist I've worked with who has not shied away from the intensity of the work that needs to be done. I bring her my literal dreams and nightmares, my shame and my fear, and all my anger, and she sits with me while I figure out what I'd like to keep and what is ready to burn. I feel so good after our visits. I wish I could see her more often than once a week.

When working with C-PTSD, symptoms often get much, much worse before it gets better. So far, that has been my experience. It has a lot to do with digging up painful stuff you did or wish you could forget and sifting through the fallout. It is, for me anyway, a case of the biblical story of Moses at the bitter spring called Mara. When Moses throws a bitter bush into the spring of bitter water, the water turns sweet. Therapy is the bush. The plant is the treatment. I am sweeter for it.



In her book The Deepest Well, Dr. Harris talks about the significant consequences facing those with high ACE scores. (An ACE score is the number of Adverse Childhood Experiences you have had.) The higher your score, the more at risk you are for a myriad of health issues including heart disease, obesity, cancer, COPD, mental illness, and suicide. The highest score you can have is a 10. The threshold score to be considered "high" and at risk is a 4. Mine is 5. Knowing this, I am highly motivated to be serious about healing. The health risks associated with ACE's are mitigated with education, therapy, and support.

With the exception of a small, single handful of people, I have shared little with my community about what I'm facing, let alone any details. When I have, they have been compassionate and anxious to help. They always ask, "What can I do for you?" I am honored to have their offers. Unfortunately, the answer is, "Not much. Pray for me. Love me." Now that I'm in therapy, there is little else to do but go through the process. No one can do it for me. I have a friend who I am indebted to for having my daughter over every Tuesday morning until she goes to school. I have a husband who is perfectly equipped with in-depth knowledge of my diagnoses and how to help. Other family and friends offer additional babysitting, support, meals, and one-on-one time with me when they can. I am grateful for every one.



If you'd like to read more about C-PTSD, please check out some of the links and resources I've mentioned in this post. Hopefully as I complete more treatment in the coming months I will regain some of my brain capacity and energy to share more with you. Until then, thank you for being understanding and patient with me. Thank you for knowing that if I leave the party early, walk out of your lessons or talks at church, don't respond to texts or calls, or cancel plans entirely its not because of you or anything you said. Its because I'm attempting to prevent or manage a panic attack or flashback. Thank you for helping me, for asking me how I am, for inviting me to your girls nights and walking groups and get-togethers. Thank you for being a good friend. Thank you for being good to me.


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