My mom had always been a pretty mean person when drinking , she would tend to get physical and belittle me. Her boyfriend Leon was not by any means a nice guy , punishment from him was torture. He would make me stand in the corner on one foot and hit me with a belt if a foot touched the ground or lock me in the basement for a few hours. Things were never peaches and cream but there was a day in particular that changed my life , and not necessarily for the better . It all began when my mom came home drunk and beat me up pretty bad. The next day I told the school I was being abused in hopes to finally get out of that situation. It had been bad there for years I just never had the courage to say anything. So I ended up moving in with my grandpa , who I always had a good relationship with until moving in with him.Little did I know he wasn’t the nice guy he pretended to be. After I moved in with him things got crazy , constant yelling and belittling so I began self harming. I had been in and out of mental hospitals but there was one day that really was the breaking point and changed everything. It had been a long day, I had gotten into a fight with my grandpa so I decided to self harm that night. I laid down that night in my bunk bed. The room was cold , but that was to be expected in mid January in Northern Michigan. I cried that night for at least a couple hours. I thought to myself “Why does he hate me“. I had depression along with several other mental problems I knew it would never go away and that it would always affect me , but most of all I knew some people would never understand it. The next morning I went out to the kitchen for breakfast and my grandpa immediately noticed my puffy eyes from crying and cut up arm . . Next thing I knew he ,made me pack up some clothes and my medications and told me to get in the car. He told me we were going to go try to get me help. I blurt out angrily “You know just as well as I do , nobody is going to help me I am sad and everyone thinks I am crazy and nobody is going to change that!”. He barely understood me because I was crying so bad. We went to community mental health in Reed City. They did a “mental evaluation” at least that is what they call it. They handed my grandpa directions and he drove me about an hour or hour and a half away to Grand Rapids Michigan to Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Hospital. I had never been here before. They told me upon arrival they cared and were going to help me , my first reaction was “You are not going to help me , I don’t want help, I am not normal it will never change “. After I was registered and all of the paper work was done my grandpa left and they explained to me they were putting me on a 1TO1. A 1TO1 is when they assign you staff members to follow you everywhere so you can’t hurt yourself. They watch you do everything , all day every day, you get NO privacy ….I hated it!! I got depressed even worse than usually, they did a lot of medicine adjustments and I ended up on 6 pills a day instead of the four I was previously on. After a few days they took me off 1TO1 , my insurance would not pay for it anymore is what I was told. At pine rest they gave us these little hard plastic tooth brushes, it was the only thing I could think of that was sharp enough material to do any harm with , so I broke it in half , and used the sharp edges of it to slice into my skin. A few minutes into it, staff came in to do their check-in and clicked their “I need extra staff” help button. About 4 staff members ran in my room , they took all of my belongings out and tried to restrain me. I broke free of the restraint and started bashing my head into the concrete wall, that was when I got put in the restraint chair for my first (and certainly not last) time. The part of the hospital I was in at that time was a week long program , I had by far exceeded that time. I had been there three weeks and they realized I wasn’t getting any better. They decided to transfer me to “Cedar” , the residential part of Pine Rest. In the part I was transferred to , the typical stay can be anywhere from 5 months to a year , mine was seven months. It did not take me long to see how scary and crazy this place was , but it also did not take long to adjust considering the home I lived in was chaotic enough to prepare me for this. The main room we did our groups in was a pretty big room with concrete pale yellow walls. There were two sides of the room separated by a counter , on one side there were 3 couches and 2 chairs , the other side of the room was for mealtime and had about 8 tables and benches, all connected to the floor to avoid people shoving or throwing them around. All around that main room were 10 huge thick steel doors and behind those doors were our bedrooms. My bedroom consisted of 3 shelves for clothing , a desk connected to the wall , and a spinny round chair connected to the floor. My bathroom (in my bedroom) was very small just like my room. The bathrooms were so small and dark and scary that they made me feel like I was in prison instead of a mental facility. In the back of our main living area room , there is a small door that leads outside to our courtyard…..but I did not really consider going outside to be a privilege since there were 12 foot tall fences that totally blocked everything out. We felt lucky , if there happened to be a small crack somewhere in the fence , this was our only sight we had of the “real world” while in Cedar , except an occasional trip to the hospital. Staff at Cedar yelled a lot so I was relieved when I met Sheri , my calm and friendly case manager. There was at least a fight a day , every day at this place and only one fight, is a really good day. I am not proud to admit it , but most of those fights involved myself. I met a girl named Abby there and I thought she was a nice girl, we were friends for a while. Eventually she turned against me and she said I was crazy and made fun of me, she just didn’t understand my life. There was a staff member named Brandy and at first she was nice to me but eventually she started talking bad about me and telling everyone I self harmed for attention and that wasn’t at all why I self harmed. One day I walked up while she was talking about me and so I very violently attacked her, cedar called the police on me that day and I was warned that if I did it again Id be arrested but quite honestly with all I’ve been through that didn’t scare me one bit. They also liked to throw my background in my face when I was disobedient , they would say “you don’t live in Flint anymore so quit being crazy”. That really got to me! Eventually cedar took me to court and told my judge (Judge Menezes {reed city}) that I was out of control and they could not handle me anymore. That day I had to pack up and was told I was being transferred to Vista Maria. They put me in handcuffs and shackles and drove me to Dearborn Heights to Vista. It was a long uncomfortable ride. The worse part of that ride was when we got to a rest are and I had to use the bathroom and I had to walk in, in front of a bunch of people in handcuffs and shackles. They undid one of my handcuffs for me to use the bathroom , I remember one little girl pointing to me and asking her mom” Is she a bad girl?” and her mom said “looks like it honey , I wont let her hurt you, its ok”. That was super embarrassing. When we pulled into Vista I felt like I was entering a prison. A bunch of old brown brick buildings surrounded by huge fences and with a security station at the front that had to let us in. I honestly felt like I was in a scary movie. Once I got settled into this new place (I was in the Rose Hall building) , this place was so bad it made Cedar look good. There were between 8-10 girls on my unit , it constantly fluctuated as girls got switched, released , or admitted. So about 32-40 girls in my building (rose hall). That many females living in one building proved to be the disaster I imagined it to be. The doors on our bedrooms lock when shut so at night if we had to get out to use the bathroom , we had to bang on the door as hard as we could and hope that the night staff was awake , and hope that they would hear you if they weren‘t awake (they usually fell asleep , and wouldn’t always wake up to let you out). This sucked for me because I was , on both units I had been placed on , the farthest room from the desk. Every night when I went to sleep I thought things similar to “I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow morning” and each morning I thought something along the lines of “Damn it ! I woke up , another depressing day , same faces , same drama, same hurt , and same schedule” . I was so sick of being here! It was surreal, and in a bad way. I was living in a place I never imagined even seeing in my wildest dream , or in this case my wildest nightmare. I felt understood as far as my anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder ,and post traumatic stress disorder. There were even a couple who had bulimia like I did. Nobody understood what I had been through made me how I was , it made me stand out, and it didn’t make me stand out in a good way either. I was the girl who sat in the back corner and ate alone at meals, the girl who had no friends and feared to socialize scared to not be accepted, the girl who always had new cuts, and the girl who was only allowed to eat finger foods because they didn’t want me to self-harm with silverware and had to be kept out of the bathroom an hour after each meal so I couldn’t throw it up. I had no friends at vista , which is weird because now that I am out of vista Maria I am friends online with several of the girls who I met there. I sometimes would sit alone and girls would say stuff like ”you ever going to make friends “Being an already emotional person ,these comments really got to me. I would sit in my bed and pray to a God I didn’t even know if I completely believed in , begging him to let someone love me and accept me for who I was. I would beg God to make me normal. Eventually I came to the realization that “normal” was over-rated, nobody has the right to say what is and isn’t normal everyone is too different and unique to label what is to be considered normal. I came to terms with the fact that I was different.. All I wanted in this point in my life was to be dead , I was hurting …bad! I hated myself. I began to believe all of the negative things that my biological family used to tell me before I went into foster care. That I was crazy , worthless , ugly , and psycho. They always told me nobody loved me and at this point in my life I believed it , I truly felt nobody cared. I was a mistake, and this “God” that so many people say is so great , why would he purposely make someone this way….I was a mistake. That is all I could think of to explain it. I was being bullied so bad that I turned from a quiet girl to an extremely rebellious and violent person, I wasn’t proud of this but I wasn’t in denial of it either. I decided I was done being walked all over, so I began sticking up for myself. Just as I have to accept my condition I have to accept that I was becoming a horrible person.