Notes

heyo, i've never used this site before so idk how well this will work haha. i would create this with something i know how to work but like then it'd be attached to my email address or something and i didn't want to do that.

so yeah, this is cyrusus, aka catherine. i've kinda quit gaia i suppose. i simply lost interest in it honestly. i just decided to stop visiting it and it wasn't hard. my close friend joseph (koohoo-p) has left gaia as well and the one thread that i was following, his charity thread, is inactive. i didn't really have much reason to stay.

man, thinking about this site is interesting to me. i've grown so much while i was on gaia and i've grown so much since i've left it. i guess i'll try to give some sort of update to what's been happening?

but first of all i want to apologize for being a big fucking prick lol. i've learned a lot and there's a lot more i realize i still have to learn. i'm surprised that you guys even talked to me but i suppose you guys were okay with it because i wasn't at all malevolent? just really annoying and pretentious and stuff? yeah anyway sorry about that but i guess that's just what growing up is about. thank you guys for being so good to me, i really appreciate it. you guys deserve the best! <3 (man that heart sucks in this font)

so i'm a junior now in high school! i can't believe that i'm in grade 11 honestly. i remember as a kid in elementary school thinking about how i was 3/12th the way until graduation, 5/12th... etc. but now that i'm here it just feels so weird. i can't believe that i'm heading off to college soon but i'm happy about it.

anyway high school has been a massive struggle for me. i don't remember what i said on gaia about what was going on in my life so i'll just say it here just in case. so uh here's an update of what's been going on with me. sorry it's like kinda really long but i mean knowing you guys you'll probably read it anyway. thanks bro lol.

i've always been called a crybaby for as long as i can remember. however it turns out that, after seeing a psychologist, i'm not just a crybaby. i've been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and a panic disorder. in addition to panic attacks, i get these things that my psychologist calls "depressive episodes." they're basically panic attacks on steroids. they last for hours and that entire time i'm hyperventilating, feeling suicidal, crying, punching myself... it's just a mash of intense feelings and emotions that i don't really know what to say. the thing that finally got me to seek professional help was my longest depressive episode i've ever had, lasting 10 hours during the night when i was trying to sleep. i didn't get any sleep and it was the longest night i've ever had. i woke up and told my groggy dad that i've been depressed for years (i lowkey knew it for a long time) and i needed psychiatric help. and tl;dr i was put on medication and started seeing a psychologist. (this occurred about halfway through my second semester of freshmen year, march 10th.)

my first semester of freshmen year i got Cs for the first time. i wasn't used to anything but As. i've never struggled in school at all. my mental health just was deteriorating for a very very long time and it finally caught up to me in high school i suppose. i could no longer just refuse to acknowledge my undiagnosed mental health issues. i became paralyzed with anxiety and depression, not to mention the regular panic attacks and depressive episodes. i thought i had no friends, no one to support me. i thought i had nothing. my mental decline happened so slowly i didn't even realize it was happening. i believed everything i was telling myself. i became massively suicidal. i was asleep 16 hours a day. the only time i was awake outside of school was getting out of bed to get to school and to eat dinner. my weight had plummeted and i hadn't even realized it. (it's not an issue of body image, i'm not """fat""" so i've never struggled with it.) i ended my second semester of freshmen year almost failing some classes.

enter my first semester of sophomore year. i was so optimistic for this upcoming year. how i would get my shit together. how i would improve my grades. i was struggling with mental shit still i was so optimistic. my first semester of sophomore year went much better than the previous semester (freshmen year). still, i ended up with a bunch of Cs but i didn't care. i was making such an improvement over last year. i was still underweight but i was consciously trying to eat more and i was recovering. i was so excited for my next semester, knowing it would be even better than this one. my mental health went up.

things were initially looking good. i had an english teacher who everyone thought was an amazing teacher. was a little worried about my A in the class (regular english like not honors is a joke at my school it's basically a guaranteed A) but that was all. he's been teaching for an extremely long time at this school, extremely tenured, extremely well-respected. i thought he was pretty funny i guess? very charismatic. there were a few warning signs but i pushed them back because it wasn't anything much. it got worse though. i soon realized that my english teacher was sexually harassing me after discussing it with my psychologist (who is a woman). (btw apparently some people think sexual harassment means touching? but no that's not what i mean it was all verbal. i thought that would be sexual assault?)

every day there were little things that were a little off that he said. i don't even remember what they were exactly, but they were so constant but only just a tiny bit "off." it was before he said anything more obvious i even realized what was going on. sorry if that sounds like weird or whatever but like i'm sorry for not being able to remember what he said exactly. i'm not going to lie to people so i'm just going to say honestly that i do not know what small things he said exactly but it was every day. anyway, some of the bigger things he said to me were constantly calling me monica lewinsky after i did a research paper on bill clinton. he's married with kids my age, i'd like to add. oh well i guess some of the smaller things he did was lick his lips, wink at me, just... nothing tangible. sorry for being vague, it's just all i remember. another big thing was giving an example sentence of active voice of "catherine kicks mr.[last name] in the groin." i don't remember exactly how i reacted but the class just laughed it off. that's what they always did. nobody ever said anything about it, despite how everything he said to me was during the class in a room of a dozen other people. every time it was just laughed off. there was even a student teacher in the room. she didn't ever do anything. i felt so betrayed. i'm just a teenager. i'm clearly being sexually harassed here. please help me. but she never did jack shit. fuck her, honestly. i'm also just a very paranoid person, always overthinking everything. i started to have regular nightmares of him raping me in his class when nobody else was around. random times of the day i would think about him and him doing something sexually to me. to this day i still do and i end up like losing my breath and being super tense and jerking forward. idk how to describe it sorry. i was legitimately terrified that he was going to rape me. and what could i do against a ridiculously tenured teacher like him? and then i'd doubt myself because he'd never say anything direct. i felt like i was making it all up. he never touched me. he never said anything about touching me, the closest being me kicking his groin though. got a shit ton of panic attacks and my anxiety surged.

i began to lean on my friends more. depression has a nasty habit of blinding you from the fact that a ton of people are here for you. they helped me remind myself i was valid in my thoughts in this. late in the semester it was getting worse and worse, more and more direct. but never anything alone quite completely direct, you know? never directly said he would touch me or anything. ugh, i'm starting to doubt myself in saying this. i'm sure that it was sexual harassment. anyway one day in particular he was especially verbally direct. he even put his hand on my shoulderblade. i just laughed it off i guess. but i then decided that i would audio record my next class with him. so i did that. i started the recorder on my phone before i even entered the room. but he stopped. he didn't say anything that any other teacher wouldn't say. (i feel it's important to mention that i have never even gotten close to getting this vibe from any teacher i've ever had.) he was talking to me like any other teacher would. he wasn't singling me out like he usually did. it was with this that helped me realize that this is how he should be. that i wasn't imagining the harassment. this is what normal is and this is not how he was speaking to me even yesterday or ever even. so i left without anything. no proof. the next day was the same. the next day. i was terrified out of my mind at this point. what if he knew i was recording? it was technically possible that he had seen me open up the recording app on my phone. and if he had seen me on my phone, it was blatantly a recording app. i don't know. i didn't know. surprisingly, i became even more scared when he stopped so abruptly sexually harassing me. he knew? he knows? looking back, it was very similar to being gaslit. i felt like i was being gaslit about being gaslit honestly. i had no idea what was real. i didn't know what i remembered. i had overthought everything to the point i didn't know what i remembered.

so yeah, i guess that's how to sum up what happened. my grades went down again. i was so optimistic but this is what happened instead. i was so excited to work hard. instead i get this. i became massively pessimistic for the upcoming year, this year, my junior year. what else would this school have in store for me? what fresh hell will i have to go through this god forsaken fucking year? first year i have an emotional break down and my life falls apart. second year i deal with a sexual harasser. literally what else could this school do to me?

over the summer, i guess it was being away from school, my mental health skyrocketed up. i felt like i was able to see things with little depression haze around me ya know? i was able to see things how "normal people" see them. i realized that, despite how in my depression i thought i was the only logical person in the world, i found that i had been blatantly ignoring all of the positive things. but i mean, that's what depression does i guess. you just forget about everything good that has happened, is happening, or will happen. shit, i'm rambling. okay basically things were better over the summer but when i got back to school for my junior year, i was reminded of my trauma from the previous year, mental health went down. then went up. it's so fickle. god damn mental illness. anyway, i finally decided to tell my principal about the sexual harassment. tl;dr i did and tl;dr nothing happened. just like i expected. i didn't really expect much. i was the only person i ever saw harass. he was probably too smart to get caught. too smart to do it directly. so i guess i'm still trying to deal with it, move past it, not having these random invading thoughts of him raping me anymore. yeah idk what more i have to say about it.

yeah so that's tl;dr of what's been going on with me. i think my skype name is "cyrusus". i'm gonna go eat dinner now. also play undertale it's hella good.