About Your Bestie

Hey it's Bixi. You're red lip coffee sipping bestie and adventurous poetess. I've been writing poetry since I was a kid. Something else I enjoyed writing as a kid, tall tales. I loved how exaggerated they could be. How big my imagination could get and I always wanted them to be really funny. As a teenager I'd take little notebooks and fill these notebooks with humorous short stories. In these stories the main characters and all other characters where friends and people I knew. If you know anything about my sense of humor, I'm sure you can imagine just how stupid these stories were. Let me clarify for those of you that are starting to get to know me. By stupid, I mean stupid funny. These stories were absolutely ridiculous, yet comical.

But you've probably noticed that my writing these days can be sad. Perhaps, you find it a bit dark. Truth be told, this started when I was about 12. I had a lot of memories I didn't understand. You see, when I was really little I was separated from my parents. And bad things happened. Yes, we were reunited by the time I started elementary school. That's all I wish to share about that. So lets fast-forward to when I was 12.

When I was 12 memories started resurfacing at super random moments. At school, on the school bus, in public, in private. I was only a 12 year old kid. I didn't understand the bits and pieces that were resurfacing. I didn't even understand the separation. So I'd have panic attacks in the most random moments. I started to feel the same level of sadness and even numbness that I felt when I was really little and separated from my parents. I was diagnosed with Panic Disorder and Major Depression. (That Diagnosis would later be changed to CPTSD.) The worst part? The adults around me who knew nothing about the separation (because it happened way before we met them, way before we even moved to NC) told my mother not to believe me. They told my mother I was throwing tantrums. They told my mother I was making excuses to get out of school. They told my mother I was faking it. They'd tell her it wasn't real. That all I wanted was attention. My mother felt confused. As if she didn't know what to believe.

It's an incredibly painful experience that's on my list of traumas. Those adults did so much harm. Because I started to believe them too. I thought I was some awful manipulative monster. I hated my self over their lie and wanted to change but the flashbacks would come, my heart would race out my chest, the air would leave my lungs. The panic attacks would happen and I had no way of stopping them. The things these adults were telling my mother in front of my face led to self harm. I had to see myself bleed so that I personally could reassure myself that my pain was real.

When word got out about the self harm, I can not tell you how much worse things got. These adults doubled down on their gossip.Secretly, I wished my mother would just tell these gossipy, busy bodies to just leave me alone. That I was a kid. That they should gossip about someone their own size. But she wouldn't. I felt alone. I wanted to die. I attempted suicide. I was only a 12 year old kid. I attempted suicide over grown adults gossiping about my pain over the separation, over the abuse I experienced as a really little child. I felt helpless with nowhere to turn. I was a 12 year old kid. I was a kid.

Do you know what would've happened if I would've died? They would've gossiped and said I killed myself for attention. They would've told a grieving mother who just lost her 12 year old kid that her kid killed herself while throwing a tantrum. The thought of that disgust me. What is wrong with people? As a child that was abused by adults, as a 12 year old kid whose pain was deepened by adults, as a grown adult today, I can not fathom how, I can not understand why adults would inflict pain on kids. I can not understand. Sometimes I run into the people that were saying these things to my mother and I look down at my arm where I still have physical scars self inflicted yet caused by them.

My poetry turned sad when I was 12. And I haven't written tall tales since. Paper and pens helped me get through that incredibly painful period of my life. I learned at an early age that no one was going to save me. I remember an adult back then said to me: "You should really look in the mirror. You look so ugly when you cry." I was only a 12 year old kid. I was only a kid. A kid with big traumas and emotions. But I was also a kid with paper and pens. Little by little, experience after experience, year after year I mastered the art of laughing in public while crying inside. I learned to use my tears as pen ink. And something about putting my writing "out there" is so healing.

Now here I am, 30, flirty, and thriving... ok maybe I'm not very good at flirting. But here I am turning tears, love, joy, memories and moments into poetry. Thanks for reading my writing bestie! I hope you enjoy.

Much agape,

Bixi H.