How 'Supernatural' Changed My Life!

About three years ago I was very shy, and I didn't really reach out to people that much. I was afraid of people, I didn't even like leaving my house because back then I was so worried about what people might think or say about me.

You see I come from a childhood of abuse in every way possible at home and bullying in school, so all I knew was cruelty from other people.

Even today I have bouts of depression and bad anxiety, but my family was mostly made up of people that cared only about how things benefitted them.

When I was five, I was taken from my mother who was mentally handicapped and bounced from one foster home to another without ever being told why it was all happening. At the time, I went through the belief that my mother hadn't wanted me anymore which started up beliefs in my mind that I was not really worth much or mean anything to anyone else which is when I started developing depression and anxiety problems. I started acting out against whatever home I was in.

During visits with my mom I was molested by the boyfriend she was seeing at the time, several times from the time I was like seven until I was nine and happened to confide in another foster kid that was staying in the home...she told our caretaker and the caretaker told the authorities and after that it stopped because they stopped letting me see my mother at all even though it had not been her fault cause she had no idea it was going on.

When I was eleven, I was finally adopted by a family who, on the surface, were nice people, the rest of the family was really awesome as well.

The school, though, was full of bullies who made fun of me and picked on me for being an adopted child and having once been in the foster system, they used to call me a reject.

My adopted parents split up by the time I turned thirteen and I was left alone with my father while my mom left.

Things got really bad after that because my dad started locking me in my room, and took away my stuff so that I had nothing to do but stare at the walls some days.

He later put a computer in my room that only played games that were loaded onto it for him, but those games were mostly all educational stuff for school which is the only reason he put it on there for me.

Throughout my life with him, I was only allowed out of my room to go to school and was only allowed to have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and only one sandwich and water. If I was caught eating anything else that was in the fridge, I was punished for it.

I was kept in that locked bedroom for years, not able to do anything but go to school, and then things got even worse.

My dad found a new girlfriend who was, if possible, even worse than him. She would hit me whenever she wanted, she had two boys of her own who would come in my room and wreck it whenever they wanted and grab whatever library books I had and I would do nothing about it. If I complained, I got punished.

So yeah, I grew up in a really bad home until I was eighteen, at this time, I was kicked out of the house by my dad, but luckily, I was already working on getting into a program called JobCorp and was able to talk a woman into driving me to the airport so I could get there.

While going through the program I went through an online registry to find my birth mother. She wasn't doing very well medically, so I moved in with her and took care of her.

But through all the time I spent with my dad, and all the stuff before that, the bullying I went through at school and at JobCorp, I was an emotional, anxious, depressional mess. I couldn't even bring myself to leave my birth mom's house, instead, I stayed home all the time and took care of her and then later her brother, my uncle, who I loved greatly as he always would always call me into his room just to talk or would have me eat some snack cakes with him or light his cigarettes and his weed for him.

They both died by the time I turned twenty-two years old. My birth mom's uncle ended up taking me in because since I spent all my time taking care of my mom and uncle, I had not been able to find work or earn money, and if I did find a way to make money my mom would always take it to use for junk food.

But my great uncle and his wife were nice people for awhile but I still stayed in my room on a laptop my mom had given me all the time, too depressed, too full of anxiety to really leave my room much. But the whole time I was on the computer I was working on trying to find a job and working with somebody about getting help with employment because I was so badly screwed up by the anxiety and had trouble with the interview step.

I almost had a job with a casino but by then my mom's family had decided that they were tired of me being in the house and still not having a job although I was about to have one in two week's time and they sent me away by buying a bus ticket and sending me to Orlando.

My brother tried to help me out by setting me up with a friend of his but the whole time she would complain about me being there, talk about my brother behind his back, and would say she didn't want me there. And then told me one day I had to be gone by morning, so I got up early in the morning and left her house...

From there I was forced to live on the streets, going from one homeless shelter to another.

But then amazingly, since I still had my laptop, I discovered an online streaming site that was free and that is when I discovered it.

A TV show called Supernatural.

From the very first episode, I was hooked. The brothers were the family that I had always wished I'd had, and I loved watching how they always had each other's back no matter what and cared about random other people, even the ones not directly related to them.

Slowly as I watched it, the depression I had started to lift.

Then through Facebook, I discovered a ton of groups for people that also loved Supernatural, and I quickly joined as many as possible.

From my first day on them, I started to see that not only was the show good and about brothers taking care of each other and other people, but the people in the fandom were amazing as well.

A lot of them would talk to me and though they were several states and countries away, I had found a community of people and some of them were just like me, battling depression, dealing with bad bouts of anxiety, panic attacks, the works.

This show started to change my life around, but showing me all these awesome people and then I started watching the behind the scenes videos and I really took I liking to Misha, Jared, and Jensen, the actors who played the characters of the show. I started seeing cons on YouTube of one of them having dealt with depression and I just started crying and I was in love with the show... This show has truly changed my life.

I'm no longer afraid to go outside, no longer afraid to talk to other people, and I was able to meet my now husband.

Ever since I discovered the world of Supernatural, I have not been the same, I still struggle with anxiety and depression sometimes but it's nowhere near what it once was.

And it's all because of the actors like Misha Collins, Jensen Ackles, and Jared Padalecki and because of the many communities on Facebook that I've come to love so much.