Elfin

Female
34 years old
 

It was only a week or so ago I re-discovered dNet.

After a few days of toying with the idea I finally stepped up and re-registered myself.  Much to my surprise I was recognised and remembered and i'm not sure any one will realise how much that meant.

For the recognition and welcome I am thankful. But already there is so much more than that to be thankful for. Please bear with me while I try to explain what the existence of this site has done for me in the past few days.
 

The past twelve months of my life have been less than average.  A little over a year ago, my grandfather died and I lost the last family home i'll ever have.  Shortly after his death was the anniversary of my grandma's death and then shortly after that was my first Christmas without either of them.  I spent my first Christmas Day alone.

Sometime about March this year a cycle of abuse started again and for the first time since I was twelve I was able to speak about what was happening. It didn't go well, I was unable to provide sufficient evidence to the police, they stopped their investigation but not before speaking to my boss.  Thankfully my boss wasn't a complete *** and he offered me a redundancy I had declined three months earlier, but i had to leave my job and with the police taking no action, I had to move house.

I'd spent ten years working in the same community and leaving was one of the most impossible things I have done. Not only did I leave behind a community that I felt a part of, I left behind a large number of 'clients' in the middle of stuff. I also left behind my friends. After ten years, most of my friends worked in the sector in the local area, and when I left it their lives continued to be as busy as mine used to be.
 

Now I've been diagnosed with PTSD, declared unable to work, and I live outside of Sydney, in a suburb without a single shop.  To get the paper on a saturday morning I have to walk twenty minutes into the next town and then twenty minutes back again.  If I want real coffee and a paper, I have to wait until 10am.  That's a big difference from having a coffee shop and a paper shop across the road I could go to in my pyjamas.

I've been told I'm unfit for work, and for the first time in my life I'm unemployed. I've gone from working 50+ hour weeks, running 5 welfare programs and doing bits and pieces of frontline service in Kings Cross, to barely being able to work a three hour volunteer shift in the local neighbourhood centre where the phone rings twice a shift and you see maybe two people.  I'm used to 120+ phone calls a day and non-stop counter/courtyard contact and weekly fist fights that I stood in the middle of.

The past few weeks I've been feeling kind of hopeless; what good am I if I can't work? 
How am I ever going to get a job again if I'm afraid of people?
 

Rediscovering dNet has given me cause to think back to where I was ten(ish) years ago when I first discovered this community and for that i am truly thankful.

Ten years ago I had no career, and no idea what I might be good at. I was in a dependent relationship, I was silent on many of the issues that undermined my life and my coping mechanisms were much less than desirable.

Coming back to dNet has made me stop and think about where I am now. Yes, I feel pretty shitty about where my life is at, but… I have spoken and my family and my friends now know about the abuse I suffered from the age of nine until recently, I am standing up underneath the weight of this better than I ever have before, I have a counsellor and a psychiatrist who are helping deal with the abuse, the effects and the impact of the police denial. For the first time in my life I am conscious of the fact I have a body and I am seeing the GP to help me address some of the issues that go along with that. I even went to the dentist.
 

I still have a long way to go. There are still a lot of things I need to figure out, but thank you very, very much to dNet for being here and giving me cause to think back and realise how far I have come. I know it's not easy, but all I have to do now is keep making good choices.

I'm eternally grateful for being reminded not only that I have moved forward, but that I can continue to move forward.
 

24th October 2011