JenniK

Disclaimer: I KNOW this piece needs a whole lot of work. What I did was I sat down and interviewed my good friend, Julie, about stuff I have heard her talk about before about her life. I feel like I've learned a lot from her because of what she's been through and wanted to share her story. My issue is that I'm having a super hard time making it sound like an actual story, rather than just a bunch of facts about someone's life. So, I need feed back. As much of it as you can give me, rip it apart if you have to, I promise I can take it! lol My goal is to make it into a piece that other people will find interesting and maybe even learn from. And I really hope reading this doesn't make you want to, like, choke me because of how bad it is. Lol

“The Julie Chronicles” By   Jenni Kirkeby 07.Feb.12

If we’re supposed to find strength and empowerment within ourselves, then why do we allow the opinions and judgments of others determine our worth? Is it possible for a person who has been made to feel worthless her entire life to realize her own value, beauty, and potential? Some people say that people don’t (or can’t) change, but I’ve seen it happen right in front of me. I first met Julie when she was in the ninth grade and I was in tenth. She always wore black, oversized hoodies and had her long, curly black hair pulled back into a ponytail. (I wouldn’t find out till years later that she wore the hoodies because she thought she was fat, even though she wasn’t.) At the time, Julie had a tendency to gravitate to different groups of friends, so we never really got the chance to hang out much. It wasn’t until our freshman year of college when we randomly ran into each other at UCA (during freshman week, when they had lunches for us newbies outside in the courtyard) that we actually began hanging out and became close friends. Over the past few years, I’ve learned of Julie’s journey from the self-destructive, self-hating person she once was to the strong, empowered, and independent woman she now is. Jennifer Julie Pyle was born in Lima, Peru. She actually has two birth names: Geraldine Gutierrez Ostos and Geraldine Gutierrez Sandoval. She has two last names because her mother, Roxanna Gutierrez, was with two different men at the time she was conceived. Because Roxanna was already a single mother trying to raise two sons –in a poor, third-world country—she decided to give Julie up for adoption. Julie was adopted by Bryan and Teresita Pyle when she was eight months old. Teresita is actually Filipino and Bryan is Caucasian, which made for a unique family dynamic. Like many parents, Julie’s were extremely demanding and controlling, especially her mother. Julie recalls a story that her grandmother once told her about how, when she was around a year old, Teresita would limit how much she fed Julie because she was afraid of her baby getting too fat. At a //very// young age, her mother was attempting to control Julie’s weight in an irrational and unhealthy way. When Julie was three, she began taking dance lessons that would continue until she was fourteen. She also began playing the piano at age three. “//One time, when I was little, I was with my dad at his friend’s house and his six-year-old son had a piano. He sat me up on the bench and began teaching me how to play. After about thirty minutes, I was already playing an off-key version of ‘Mary had a Little Lamb.’ Since I liked it so much, my parents got me a little plastic two-and-a-half octave keyboard that came with a book and stickers with the note names on them. I put the stickers on the keys, and I began teaching myself how to read music. By the time I was five, I could play two-handed pieces. So, they bought a keyboard for me when I was five and when we moved to White Hall from Vicksburg, they put me in piano lessons//,” Julie recalls. This was the beginning of her parents’ high expectations of their daughter. Julie’s relationship with her mother was, in many ways, the destructive force that drove Julie to harmful behavior, as well as her eventual independence. Teresita was always putting pressure on Julie to be the best at everything. Because of her mother’s controlling nature, as well as her involvement in dance and music, Julie had great difficulty making friends. Even so, in elementary school, she managed to make her first best friend, Dora, whom Julie considers to be one of the top five best friends she’s ever had. “//She was there for me in elementary school and even after she moved away in the fourth grade, we kept in touch and she tried to console me when things were painful and I didn’t have anyone else there. Even though she was in Louisiana, we still talked and emailed and IMed//.” As she grew older, her relationship with her mother grew more painful and strained. “//One time, she told me, ‘We’re glad we got you because you’re smart, pretty, and talented.’ She didn’t say anything about my personality or anything and I felt like I was being valued only by what I could do, not who I was//.” Teresita didn’t seem interested in whether or not Julie was a good person; she was only concerned with having a successful daughter. During her seventh grade year, Julie began taking advanced level classes and was no longer able to make all A’s by doing the bare minimum, so she began bringing home B’s and C’s for the first time. When this happened, Teresita became very derogatory toward Julie because she wasn’t making straight A’s anymore. Her mother made Julie feel worthless because of her less-than-perfect grades. Also, her mother was over-controlling; she demanded to meet her friends’ parents before she would allow Julie to go over to their houses. Julie felt as if her relationship with her parents was tenuous because she was adopted, so she felt as though she had to do more to make them want her. She began trying to do piano competitions, dance competitions, and spelling bees. When she didn’t make first place, her mother would say things like, “//How did you get// that //word wrong//?” or “//I know you didn’t practice hard enough//.” When Julie began developing breasts, her mother made comments about how she was getting fat and needed to lose weight, so Julie began drinking Slim Fast shakes for lunch when she was only in the seventh grade. This was the beginning of her descent into the dark, twisted world of anorexia. During the summer before her eighth grade year, Julie went to a high school party where she drank, smoked, and had sex for the first time. After this, she began to go to more parties and began drinking regularly at age thirteen. This was also the year she made her first group of real friends at school, but they were the outcast kids, but she was glad to actually have a group of people who wanted to hang out with her. During this time, she continued her anorexic behaviors and also entered the realm of self-mutilation. Unbeknownst to her parents, John became Julie’s first boyfriend that year. However, he ended up being yet another destructive force in her life. “//It wasn’t too many times that it happened, but the first time it did, I went over to John’s house, but he wasn’t home yet. So, I sat down on this huge, long couch next to his brother. When John came in, he was pissed off and asked me why I was sitting out there with his brother. He grabbed my arm and, like, pulled me to his bedroom and slammed me up against the wall and choked me. He did stuff like that to me a few other times before I finally realized I didn’t need this and broke up with him. I began dating Justin after this and ended up going to the mall with my friend Ashley. John was there and asked if I would go outside to his car with him.//” He put a knife to her throat and tried to rape her. Julie told me Ashley came outside at this point and told John that if he didn’t let her go, she was going to call the police. Julie didn’t see John after this. Justin was the first guy Julie ever introduced to her parents. Even though his hair was dyed blue and he wore black all the time, they liked him because his mother was Julie’s science teacher. Even though her school life was extremely busy and she was making friends, her parents continued to be more harmful than helpful. When her grades dropped from A’s to B’s, her parents would yell at her and ground her for the summer. Her father was generally uninvolved in disciplining her, except for when her grades dropped. When she began going out, smoking and drinking, and not performing “correctly,” her mother told her father, “I give up. She’s yours, because she’s not listening to me.” The way her mother was raised was very traditional in an Asian Catholic home and she was accustomed to the idea that the child has to listen to the parents because of the ultimate level of respect. Because Julie wasn’t behaving the way she was supposed to, her mother disapproved so she stopped trying to discipline her. When this happened, her dad began to overcompensate for her mother’s inactivity. Julie was never allowed to go out, and when she did she either snuck out or gave an excuse about having band practice and would catch a ride home on the bus or with a friend’s parents. When Julie found out that her father’s job was going to make them move from White Hall to Sherwood, Julie grew very depressed because she was going to have to leave her first group of real friends. She tried to talk her parents into letting her stay there for her ninth grade year so she could finish out middle school in White Hall, but it was to no avail. Because of this, Julie attempted suicide shortly after her fourteenth birthday. When they moved to Sherwood, Julie began to attend Mills University Studies High School, which is where I first met her. When she went to Mills she was basically “the” Goth girl and kind-of stood out. Here, she would meet some of the best friends she has ever had. One of them would be Carrie. “//Carrie was essentially my mini-me, I was able to relate to her in a way that I couldn’t relate to anyone else. We ended up going through the same stuff at the same time, so I had a good support system. Outcasts collide. There were some parts when we got into little fights and didn’t talk for a while, but we always ended up reconnecting and putting everything else aside, so it was always ok in the end,”// Julie said. She also met Rusty, who would be the second boyfriend her parents found out about. “//Rusty and I had liked each other and we had always talked on and off and he has always really cared about me and keeps an eye on me on Facebook and if he sees my statuses getting increasingly more depressing, he will give me a call. He was the first guy who had a crush on me//.” Julie also met David that year who, of all the men she has ever dated, ended up being one of her closest friends. “//David and I have always been on the same wavelength. He and I always used to say we were walking down two parallel roads, looking at the same buildings, but from opposite views. What I mean by that is we would go through stuff and have different, but parallel perspectives on the situation. And, despite the fact that I may not have been able to word things the way I meant it, he always knew where I was coming from and knew how to help me change my view or something in order to find the solution. Or exactly how to comfort me whenever I was down. And we never got mad at each other to the point, like, where it…had an overpowering reaction on how we acted towards each other. Even if we were pissed off at each other, we wouldn’t fight; we would just bicker or argue, even when it was about serious stuff. He was always just there for me and cared about me a lot. He has actually said to me that if he knew if someone else could make me happier than he could, then he would want me to be with that person//.” After the ninth grade, however, David moved to Colorado and they had a long-distance relationship for a year and three months. During her ninth grade year, Julie had started smoking weed regularly and taking pills, such as Adderall. In the tenth grade, she continued smoking weed, taking pills, cutting herself and starving herself. One day, she finally reached rock bottom. David disappeared for three months because of some drug deal that he was involved in where a girl got sick from the drugs because it wasn’t clean and David became implicated in it, even though it wasn’t his fault. Someone drove by and shot up his grandmother’s house, so David became homeless, living on the streets. Julie was unable to get in contact with him, so she became very worried and began freaking out. She had also reached an excessively negative point when her parents were being very hard on her and she was jumping back and forth between groups of friends every semester, so she didn’t have a steady support group and didn’t get to know anyone very well. Because of this, she was unable to talk about her issues and kept everything inside. Julie began feeling numb to everything; she explained to me that she wasn’t even getting depressed or sad anymore. One day, she took a shaving razor apart and used it to cut her arm. It was so easy for her to do this and not feel anything, which as she said, creeped her out, but at the same time, she didn’t care. She was laying there on the bed, with her left arm hanging off of the side of her bed, blood dripping into the trash can. When she went to cut her other arm, her left hand was so cold that she couldn’t feel it. At this point, she began to freak out because she didn’t want to kill herself. This was the moment she realized that she wasn’t as numb as she had originally thought. It was merely a result of all the walls she had put up around herself. She wrapped up her arm and this was the last time she cut for about two years. This incident took her out of the dark realm she had entered because she realized that since she didn’t want to die, she wasn’t totally numb. But she had felt like a spectator, watching herself live her life. After his incident, she went to her dad and told him she needed to see a psychologist. His first response to this was, “//Why can’t you come and talk to us//?” Julie replied, “//Because you can’t understand what I’m going through//.” After this, her father got a book on anorexia, read it, and then tried to talk to her about it, because he thought he understood. Even so, he still said things like, “//Why don’t you just eat?//” This indicated that he didn’t really understand. Eventually, Julie and her parents went to see a family psychologist where they had both individual and group sessions. Here, Julie was forced to talk about things in front of them, like how their comments and attitude toward her made her feel worthless and how she felt like she had to meet their expectations of her in order for them to want and love her. Her father was shocked by this, but Teresita wondered how she had gotten so screwed up and could not see her role in it at all. They stopped seeing the psychologist after about four or five months because her parent’s didn’t like what they were hearing. After this, Julie began cutting and starving herself again. However, eventually she began trying to work on herself through writing and music. She explained that writing and playing all of her instruments at one time helped her work through her issues. She also finally had a steady group of friends who took the time to get to know her and were still willing to be her friends and their approval helped to improve her self-image. One day, David finally called her again, but they eventually broke up because it wasn’t a convenient relationship and they both realized that it was causing them more pain. Not too long after this, Julie began dating Michael. She thought she was over her depression because she was putting on a good front, but she knew she wasn’t because she would randomly break down crying or have panic attacks, where all the pain came out at once. She was with Michael for a year and a half, but during this time, Michael would flirt with other girls behind her back. When she found out about this, she forgave him for it (multiple times) because she wanted that “happy portrait,” even if the picture behind it wasn’t so great. “//So, I ended up staying in that relationship a heck of a lot longer than I needed to//.” Michael actually told one girl that he was planning on breaking up with Julie because she was such a bitch and asked this girl if he would go out with him after they broke up. When Julie found out about this she, “//..told him to go fuck himself//.” But they continued talking and having sex after that, but when they went to different schools for college and David moved back to Arkansas, Julie broke things off completely with Michael. She and David began dating again for about two months, but then she had a pregnancy scare and David moved back to Colorado. During her freshman year of college, Julie went to a frat party and saw a guy there whom she knew from Arkansas Governor’s School. She was drunk and a little high, so they went to the bathroom and began making out. He asked her if she wanted to have sex with him, but she said no. They continued to make out, but he tried to undo her shirt and pants, but when she tried to make him stop, he wouldn’t listen; instead, he covered her mouth with his hand. Luckily, someone knocked on the door, so he stopped. She never really saw him again after this. Hurt and angry, she told David about what had happened, but he didn’t believe her. He thought she actually had sex with him and tried to claim rape afterward. Shortly after this was when Julie had her pregnancy scare and when she told David about it, he reacted with, “How do I know if this is my kid or the other guy’s?” So, Julie was forced to re-defend herself to him. At this point, Julie was feeling pretty low and began having sex with a guy named Jon (who was actually the younger brother of one of Julie’s ex-boyfriends from middle school) who also went to UCA. They began dating shortly after this and Jon was the first serious boyfriend who treated her well and was caring and supportive. He helped her to get out of her funk; she was in a healthier part of her life because she was living away from her parents and they had a lot of fun together. Also, she was happy because she was doing what she wanted to do, not what her parents wanted her to do, but it was still constructive with who she wanted to become. She actually began to appreciate herself. During this time, though, the group of friends she was spending time with was doing a lot of drugs. She allowed herself to fall back into her old habits of drug abuse in an unrestrained way. Eventually, she learned how to manage herself and what she was doing, both drug-related, but also in other areas of her life. That summer, rather than moving back in with her parents, she got her first apartment and a part-time job at the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. She became independent of her parents before they even knew about it. Everything changed within a week; she told her parents she didn’t need them paying for anything anymore and sort-of booted them out of her life for a while. One day, her parents came to her duplex and her mom began insulting her, her home, and how she was living her life. Julie began crying, but she then realized, “//This is my place I’m supporting myself. Why am I putting up with this? So, I told her to get out//.” Her dad tried to apologize for Julie’s mother, but Julie told him that it wasn’t his job to do so. After this, her relationship with her father improved a lot and even though she doesn’t feel like she needs his respect or approval anymore, she is glade to finally have it. Now she can actually talk to him and be around him and not be angry at him all the time. “//He finally accepted that his parenting style had an effect on me, but my mom still hasn’t realized this. He’s able to be happy and relieved that I’m O.K. and he doesn’t feel quite as guilty because at least the damage he did wasn’t permanently harmful or irreparable. He is able to face what he did because he knows he didn’t ruin everything.//” While she was in college, she began to see a psychologist and was actually diagnosed with border line personality disorder. This is a condition where people have long-term patterns of unstable emotions and their inner experiences cause them to take impulsive actions and have chaotic relationships. This helped Julie to realize that she wasn’t merely another person dealing with depression and couldn’t keep long-term friends or relationships; she actually has a disorder that causes these issues. However, she has learned to manage and overcome this disorder and has been able to quit engaging in self-destructive behavior. Julie stopped going to college and took a full-time position at AFCU. Since then, she has been promoted to a team trainer. She no longer cuts herself or feels the need to starve herself, even though her relationship with her mother is still strained. “//I think my mom is still sort-of disappointed in me because she ‘knows I can be doing so much better.’ She, literally, has said that phrase so many times and it’s really annoying and old. But I think she’s gotten to the point that she’s accepted that I’m going to do what I’m going to do, no matter what. And she’s started to make her peace with that. Even though she’s not proud of me, she’s accepting of me.//” Julie recalls the point where she realized it didn’t matter if she really pleased anybody was right after she did meth. At this point, she was smoking meth for two and a half weeks at least one time every four hours. She lost thirty pounds in that time frame and reached the lowest weight she’d been in four years. And she didn’t see it when she looked in the mirror. One time, she was changing her clothes and looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize herself. She realized she was sickeningly skinny. Her ribs were pointing out, her collar bones were sticking out, and she just looked gaunt and sickly. She recalls that it was sort of like when she cut herself and she realized she didn’t want to die; she realized that she didn’t need to do that to be beautiful because it wasn’t making her beautiful, it was making her sick. And she realized how much she had going for her. “//Even though I wasn’t going to school full time and I wasn’t falling the plan my parents had planned out for me, (going to school, making lots of money), I was doing what I wanted to do and I was proud of myself at that point. I quit smoking meth and began valuing myself as a person. And realized that I contributed to the small space of world I took up. I realized that my life has meaning. I felt like I was doing a good job with the hand that I had been dealt. I was making the most of my situation with my mindset and everything I had gone through//.” At this point, she had created her pagan coven that she has kept going for about two or three years. It has made her reach for something deeper. She already had a good idea about what her belief system was, like how everything is interconnected and we are spiritual beings. But it really helped her to make peace with things, empower herself, because magic is all about you willing something to happen and bringing together the elements. It helped her develop a sense of motivation and direction, as well as discipline.

A few weeks after she had stopped smoking meth, she met another guy named Michael and they began dating. This was the first relationship where a man was treating her well and she actually liked herself, which was a totally different experience for her. It was the healthiest relationship she had been in, especially when it pertained to how she felt about herself and the relationship. It was also very trying because Michael had never been in a serious relationship like that before, so he had to learn how to improve himself with another person and she had to learn how to not manipulate. She had to learn to overcome her borderline tendencies and not manipulate, control, and cling to the other person. Because, since she now values herself, she doesn’t need to be manipulative but it was such a built-in habit that she didn’t know how to not be like that in a relationship. She finally had someone who was proud of her success and he encouraged her to be proud of herself, too.