And The Winner of .01 Bitcoin Is…..
I want to thank everyone for posting their painful memories in my Broken Heart Valentine’s Day contest.
Spilling your guts in public is not a small thing, so thank you to all who honestly confessed your memories. I read through every one of them. It was tough to decide who wins the .01 BTC, but one story really stands out and I will explain why I chose it.
The winner of my Broken Heart Valentine contest on Twitter is Adriana Diaz.
You can see all the entries here:
Here’s her full story:
First of all, Adriana’s tweet got 15 hearts, which was a lot more than most in the contest, but that’s not why I chose it.
The reason I chose her entry is because she painted a very vivid picture of her memory and also because it involves suicide. Her description of young love was very captivating and her choice of words to describe her boyfriend “rebellious, popular and cuddly” made her story particularly easy to visualize.
And then there is the suicide.
I have quite a bit of experience with suicide in my family because when I was around 20 years old, my father hung himself in our house, but luckily, the belt he used broke, and he survived it. Then 20 years later he hung himself again in our house, but this time, he was successful. I was the first to find his body. This image of finding my dad hanging has haunted me for a good part of the last year. I had to forgive him for putting me and my family through his hell, and realize that he chose to leave us and he was tired of being alive, tired of suffering.
But even though this is awful, this is not my horrible secret, nor the reason I decided to have this contest. No, my real dark secret is full of shame. I have been alone for a decade. I don’t even have crushes anymore (this is very strange for me because even when I was alone before, I usually had some crush on someone).
I think my brain got rewired from trauma, because after a lifetime of being kind of guarded with feelings, I finally let go when I met my ex ten years ago. I got pregnant almost instantly. At first I couldn’t see anything wrong with him, but the red flags began piling up pretty fast. It turned into mental abuse gradually, and over time, I began to feel so bad that I wanted to kill both myself and my unborn baby. I used to dream of suicide as a way to get away from him.
I ended up breaking up and telling him to leave our house. I drove him to the bus station at 4 AM in the morning, after handing my baby to my parents to watch. It was the best decision I ever made as my life had become an utter hell with him, and dragging an innocent baby into that hell was no longer an option.
Even though this is a long time ago, I am still afraid of having a relationship.
Something is altered in myself and I just decided to pour myself into work instead. During those first few years of being alone with my baby, I used to cry whenever I saw a husband with a baby stroller.
I felt like a failure every time I saw a couple with a baby. I still feel like a failure in the relationship area, but now that so much time has passed, I am numb almost to the point that I can’t feeling anything anymore. I don’t have crushes, dreams or anything anymore. It’s like I went to that futuristic place where they delete your painful memories, but along with deleting them, they remove things: sexual drive, feelings of attachment and desire for love.
I always knew I was a hyper sensitive person when it came to feelings of love. My very first love when I was 15 almost destroyed me. I don’t want to go into that one, but the end result when my first love abandoned me is that I stopped eating for 2 weeks. I fell into a dark depression and from that moment on I vowed to never let someone do this to me again.
Love seems like an elusive dream to me, one which only resides in others, not myself. I have mostly just given up on it, not because I feel upset, but because I feel mostly nothing.
No drive, no fantasy, no dreams of even things like lust. Lust, love, desire, the entire bag of sensations that make us feel alive, just gone. Poof! I don’t even feel human anymore, if I am completely honest with myself. Maybe love is just an illusion, a fleeting dream that comes and then disappears.
It makes me uncomfortable even thinking about relationships.
I guess the underlying cause of my personal hell is that I really don’t like myself very much. I look forward to the day when my suffering is over. But unlike my dad, I will never kill myself. I never want to put someone through what he put me through: seeing a hanging body over and over in my mind for months and years. That’s not what i want to leave the living with as a memory of me.
Suicide solves one problem, but then creates a new problem in the ones who find you dead. Even though I am mostly over the trauma of finding my dad, I am occasionally haunted, and that feeling of “my life has become a horror movie” resumes. When I think about that time, I have the sensation of thick black liquid coursing through my veins, sending out thorns and other sharp objects to my organs.
Congratulations Adriana.
This contest has brought all us closer I think, as we can now see the depth of being human among strangers on the internet.
