What if you suddenly felt like a werewolf? - [Rebroadcast - #119]
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Today we continue our annual summer rebroadcast series, returning with new episodes starting August 9th. Today's episode, What If You Suddenly Felt Like a Werewolf, was originally released as number 119 on October 30th, 2018.

It's like trying to go into a dark cave with a rope attached to you so that you can find your way back and then losing the end of the rope. And then when you come out of the cave, there wasn't any cave at all. It's so confusing. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 119. What if you suddenly felt like a werewolf?

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The cult my parents met in was this really intense evangelical Christian church.

The men and the women would sleep in kind of separate dormitories. To get married, they had to have permission of the pastor and his wife. My dad actually had planned to go to Edmonton as a pit stop for this tour across the world that he was going to go on from Quebec City, where he was born. And he got caught up in this cult and got married there.

And his life went a really different way than he had intended. And I don't think my mom had intended to get married that young either. I think it was one of those things where she just maybe thought that it was what you were supposed to do, but hadn't really given any thought if it was the right thing for her.

These two people ended up being pretty mismatched for each other, and there was, I think, from what they've told me, quite a lot of anxiety about going to hell in general, but also this sensation that when they were in public places that weren't the church, everyone around them would be sinning and going to hell, and it was their responsibility to save them, so...

there was quite a lot of stress and pressure. And it wasn't until after they moved to Quebec City, because my dad's family was there, that they really started to free themselves from that kind of thinking. I was born in Quebec City. My first language was French.

It wasn't the super rich part of the city. I remember we often got these molasses cookies at 10 o'clock because it was assumed that we hadn't eaten breakfast. It was the kind of neighborhood where

Most kids would walk to and from school on their own. And this was a source of a lot of anxiety for me because I was always afraid of being alone. From the age of about, well, six, I would say, I had this fear all through my school day that

That I would walk home from school and come up to my front door and that it would be locked and that my parents would have been gone and with my little sister who's five years younger than me. I just thought the apartment would be empty. It was that or being afraid of being kidnapped and taken somewhere. I had a lot of tension and a lot of fear about

I always had this what-if kind of narrative going through my mind, and it made it hard to relate to a lot of kids my age. I found it really hard to make friends, and I retreated into my imagination a lot. So I had imaginary friends that would go to school with me, and I found that I...

kind of glommed onto one friend really intensely and expected that one friend to fulfill all my friendship needs. And when I inevitably suffocated them, they would abandon. So it became this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for me. I could never understand why, and I just started to believe that I was too much. My parents fought quite a bit,

The arguing was pretty much a constant background noise. There was really a lot of a disharmony in the family in general. There wasn't a sense that going home was necessarily safe, but it was certainly safer than anywhere else in the world for me.

My mom never really felt at home there, so she was very unhappy and she fell into a pretty bad depression. I remembered even though my mom was smiling at me, there was something in her eyes that I knew she was unhappy. We walked to this park and we would play in the leaves because in Quebec there's lots of deciduous trees and

There were these swings at this park, we would play at these big, sort of rickety wooden swings. It wasn't until later that I realized that this park, what I had thought was a playground, was actually the yard in front of a mental institution.

My mother was, like, taking me there and playing with me there, partly because I think every day she wanted to check herself in because she thought she was going crazy. And it gave her some comfort to know that there was an escape route right there. And I knew that at any time, maybe my mom would leave me. It was...

really hard to predict when an argument was going to break out, but it was also very hard to predict when I would be punished for something. So I think being able to point a finger somewhere really helps make things less scary. I would blame myself for not only my mom's sadness, but my parents arguing and all the other sort of

things that were happening in their lives. I think the reason why I took it on was because the alternative would be that I had no control over it at all. I think that would have been scarier for me than to be able to point to something, even if it was myself, I could say, "Well, at least there's a reason for it." And internalizing the blame sort of gave me a false sense of control.

My parents had two very different sort of parenting styles. My dad was authoritative, but sometimes went a little bit too far with how harshly he punished us. My mom, though, was a little bit harder because she didn't really give any warnings. And when she did, they couldn't really be believed. So it was really hard to judge when I was going to be punished for something.

And so boundaries were not really something I grew up with. So that's where the desire for control really came from, was just wanting a sense of ownership over myself. And later on that manifested in disordered eating and anorexia, bouts of it anyways. So I kind of got control over my body by...

the foods that I was putting in it and refusing the foods that my parents were trying to give to me. And I think that I sought control in all kinds of ways, but never really found a healthy way to get it. When I was 13, the fighting sort of came to a climax and I

They decided to get a divorce. And because I had a pretty difficult relationship with my mother at the time, I decided to go live with my dad in an apartment. That was fine, but my dad was working out of town a lot. He was actually working all the way back in Quebec. And by this time, we'd moved to British Columbia. He would leave for a month or maybe more at a time.

and he would leave me about $100 a week for groceries. So I ended up spending a lot of time alone. I didn't really have many life skills. I couldn't really get myself ready for school, go to school, come back, cook myself dinner and do homework, and take care of the dog. So after a while, I stopped going to class. I stopped going to school.

The place would inevitably get so messy. I fell into this horrible sort of sleep routine where I became too depressed to really get a good sleep at night. So I would just lay down on the couch in the living room with my dog and...

either watch like an endless string of infomercials or my favorite for a long time was just reruns of Frasier. Like there was something so comforting about watching Frasier and Niles Crane. I actually had to bring back some of those imaginary friends from elementary school to keep me company except this time it was like I was 16 and I had an imaginary boyfriend because I just couldn't

really relate to anyone in the real world. I would break into my dad's liquor cabinet and just take swigs of whatever was there and I would take the whatever Tylenol was in the medicine cabinet and sort of mix those things up and then fall asleep in the bathtub. I wasn't really intending to do anything but I think

In my state of mind, I was okay if something bad did happen to me. I didn't really believe that my life was worth very much. And I sort of had this idea that I probably wouldn't live past the age of 23. The hatred that I felt for myself was so, so profound. I would just look in the mirror and just despise everything that I saw or...

at night I would try to get to sleep but I'd feel trapped in my body and I'd feel like parts of my skin were touching other parts in my skin that I didn't want them to be touching and I would have these elaborate fantasies of wanting to cut my stomach off and in retrospect maybe those fantasies are what got me used to the idea of self-harm because I did fall into that for

a long time. It started when I was 13. I remember the first time I did it, I felt so powerless against my dad who had just punished me for backtalking. I got a razor out and sliced into my thigh and was horrified, but felt this sort of immediate relief, not just from the endorphins, but I knew that...

It was an action that would hurt my parents and they couldn't stop me. And it was again another way for me to exert control over myself. And that became sort of an addiction for me for a long time.

I didn't really know what depression really was at the time. I kind of always thought of suicide as this escape route. If things got too hard, then there was always this. There was always this escape. So it was like this kind of twisted sort of comfort. And when I told my parents about it, at first I thought... I think that they thought I was being a little bit dramatic. But eventually...

I went to see our family doctor and she told me to just get up for a walk in the morning. And I was so insulted because I couldn't at that point even really get out of bed. Like it had gotten really bad. I was really low energy too, because I was restricting what I was eating. I would go through these cycles of restricting and binging. And when I was restricting my

It was usually with my friend from elementary school. We would sort of challenge each other, see how far we could go. One time, we ordered these steroids for horses online. We were like 16 kids.

These white pills came in the mail and we both started crying because we had this belief that everything was going to be better and everything would change and we would both be beautiful and well-liked and that, you know, all those, the loneliness and the bullying would go away. So we started to do those pills and working out really heavily at the same time, I was really,

on one of those Stairmaster stepper machines and I was going really hard and my heart started beating in all kinds of weird crazy ways that I had never felt before and I started to panic and I got off the machine

And I blacked out. And luckily, I was okay. I came to and that really shook me because I knew that I was probably doing some damage. And after that, I stopped taking those pills. But it took a good three months to get back to normal after that. At one point, I got pulled into the principal's office. And I was told that I was going to be expelled because I had missed

111 periods of class. They told me the only reason they weren't going to expel me is because they spoke with my creative writing teacher. He stuck his neck out for me and it helped a lot because I managed to finish high school in spite of everything. So I'm crematee and here in Canada that is really complicated.

I guess a brief history of Métis people in Canada. Men from Europe came to Canada and married First Nations Native women and had children, and those children were Métis children. There were these institutions called residential schools. These priests or pastors were

and nuns would come and take children from their indigenous families and bring them to these schools and then the children would grow up there in really poor conditions and often were exposed to horrific abuse. One of the worst things about residential school too was once the children were released

They then had no ties to their former communities. So it was a way to commit genocide, actually cultural genocide, and in many cases, real genocide against the indigenous populations here.

There was also a deep shame for a lot of Indigenous people who came out of those places, but who also were identified as Indigenous and therefore had to bear all these stereotypes put upon them. There was this sort of sense of

being hush-hush about being Métis, not really expressing any pride and trying to pass as white. And there was no celebration of that identity. It wasn't until recently, relatively, I would say in the past 15 years or so, that my mom really started to look into what exactly a Métis person could be and what

She started to learn about her culture and there's real question of legitimacy, I think, for a lot of Métis people, including myself. Can I really wear this label if I haven't learned my language? Who am I then? Am I just...

And have I completely lost that part of who I am, even though I look like I could be Indigenous? What does that mean? And I've had to deal with racism on and off through high school regarding that, sometimes from the administration of the school themselves as well.

So I've always felt a little fragmented, not really knowing what my identity was, because on top of being Métis, which means that I've got this sort of First Nations blood, but also blood of colonizers, I have mental illness and I am bisexual and trans.

I feel like a lot of what makes my identity are all these sort of little complicated pieces of my identity and I think being Métis is almost sort of like a microcosm for everything else. Like it's sort of an easy way to explain all the other parts of me that I struggle to assimilate and understand.

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When I was 25, I had just spent a year living in Montreal.

I loved it in Montreal. It was a really freeing time for me. I felt like I belonged there, but I also really missed my boyfriend. So he came back three months after he left and he came and got me and we drove back to where he was staying.

It was such a culture shock for me to go from this vibrant city to this really small town. My boyfriend would go and work all day and then he would come home and I would have dinner ready for him and he would get on his computer and game.

It started this really terrible cycle where every day was the same and I had no purpose or direction. I felt like I was just living for someone else. I was also really in denial about it. I wanted to be happy there, but it was really hard to stay disciplined because I kept asking myself, "What am I going to do?" And then that's when I started to really get sick.

I would go through these episodes where I felt like I would become a completely different person or that something was taking over like a werewolf. I would binge on everything in sight. I would be so sensitive and cry about everything. I was so afraid of those feelings. I just wanted to die. Nothing was right.

I hate myself and I'm in hell and I just want to die and it would be so easy and I would just let everything slip. This happened right before I got my period and then I would get my period and everything would be normal again and I would go back to sort of the docile, gentle, kind, thoughtful person that I know myself to be. I hadn't made the connection that it was tied to my menstrual cycle yet

So I was just going crazy every once in a while for no reason. And I really thought that I was losing my mind and I couldn't find anything to blame for it.

I wanted to blame the town that I was living in. I thought, you know, maybe it's just this place and I'm miserable. But then I'd have these really good days where I would smile at everyone and have these normal sort of exchanges. And I felt like a normal person and I didn't feel miserable. And then all of a sudden, this horrible dark cloud came over me and I started to wonder, like, am I bipolar? Like, what is going on?

So depressions, I had them off and on growing up. They usually entailed a lack of motivation and difficulty to get out of bed and insomnia. Just generally feeling pretty miserable and not having a purpose. When I had my first episode, it was like that, but also different.

Something that I had never really experienced before. It was so powerful. Feeling like a monster just eating over the sink and knowing and wanting to stop so bad, but not being able to. And I would feel so miserable that I couldn't function. I couldn't write. I couldn't do anything. And I'll just...

be sitting on the couch sobbing with no TV on or nothing, no form of entertainment, just sitting there sobbing and not realizing that I've been sitting there for two or three hours just crying and not knowing what I was even thinking about, just sort of in this cloud. I can't be reasoned with and I can't see any light in anything. When I'm not there,

It's hard for me to imagine what it's like. So I'm describing the memory of what it's like, but it's hard for me to imagine it's ever like that. I just don't right now understand how it could get that bad. It's the same when I'm in that mode. So I can't fathom what it's like to just be normal, just have thoughts about the future that aren't

just black and just have any kind of hope. I lose complete perspective and I forget that it's ever gonna stop and I forget what it's like to be human. It's like trying to go into like a dark cave with a rope attached to you so that you can find your way back and then losing that the end of the rope.

and just trying to feel around the cave in the dark. And then when you come out of the cave, there wasn't any cave at all. It's so confusing. So one day, I googled, why do I want to kill myself before my period? And found this list of articles about PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

So a lot of people who menstruate will have these symptoms of irritability and they'll, you know, want chocolate or they'll have cramping and they'll be uncomfortable. PMDD is so severe and debilitating that people who are 23 or 22 years old might consider getting a hysterectomy just to avoid experiencing the symptoms every month.

I was reading stories of women like this online and relating to them. And I felt so relieved finally that there was an answer to this horrible thing that had been coming over me month after month. But it's hard because every month is a mystery. I don't know what it's going to bring. I don't know who I'm going to be. I don't know how long it's going to last. And...

I can't make plans around deadlines or friends or anything around that time because I don't know who's going to show up for that. Now that I know what I deal with on a monthly basis, I have this app in my phone and it's just one of those period tracker apps and I can refer to it and get a sense of when the next episode might be coming.

I go through this sort of period that I like to call a quarantine, where the peak days are usually two to three days before I get my period. That's usually when it's the worst. So during that time, I like to have my bedroom really dark and cold. I usually just sit in bed and feel...

Like, all of a sudden this heaviness on me and this real, real sadness. Things that I've thought about before just don't make as much sense to me, so plans about the future stop making the same sort of sense sometimes. And this is also part of the whole being taken over by this, what feels like this werewolf and...

I just feel this transformation and the way that I know that it's happening is I'll wake up and things won't look the same. Things will look duller and things will taste worse. Things are too bright, things are too loud. It's this really sensitive state that I just try to ride out like a storm when it happens.

From what I've researched, um...

During a person's like menstruating person's like luteal phase, their estrogen goes down, their estrogen level goes down and like their progesterone level goes up. I think the estrogen is supposed to help with the production of like serotonin. So there I think is like a scientific explanation for it, but it feels crazy when it happens and it feels supernatural because it's

It is so different and it's not just me getting a mood swing and craving a Snickers. It's like this other person comes out and wants to break things. It became so unbearable that one day I checked myself into the psychiatric hospital. And every day I spent there, I would color and watch educational videos.

And my boyfriend was so worried about me because I told him that I was going to stay there for as long as it took to figure out what my problem was. And he really didn't like that idea. Like, even though he couldn't take care of me at home, he didn't like the idea of me needing to be in the hospital. It's that thing with psychological sort of issues that it's all in your head, but that's the issue. So...

It was hard for me to explain why I needed to be there. I never really felt like anyone had taken care of me before. And growing up, I always tried to take care of other people, including my parents. And then I went through that long bout of time where I had to take care of myself and I had to take care of my sister and I had to take care of the dog. And finally, I was in this space where

I was just allowed to cry and have a hard time. And my meals were prepared and the nurses would ask me how I was doing and they would get me DVDs with whale sounds to fall asleep to or CDs rather. And I just felt so comfortable even though I wanted to get out of there. I felt so good there.

While I was there, I had a few appointments with some specialists. I saw a gynecologist and I had charted all of my symptoms through the months and kind of wrote records of it because I knew that it would be the only way to get a diagnosis. She decided, yeah, okay, you have PMDD and put me on some birth control to try to treat it. And I wasn't getting better at

Even after I came out of the hospital, I was in group therapy. I was on one-on-one therapy. I was going for walks. I was trying to eat better. I was trying to do everything I could. And I just wasn't getting better. Every month, I would just be dragged back into this hole of sadness and wanting to disappear forever. And I couldn't figure it out.

Then I would get my period and think everything was fine and that I'd made progress. And then a few days later, I'd be back where I started. Earlier this year, during the summer, I had some really terrible bouts of PMDD again during my luteal phase. My boyfriend was visiting from that town and he was here spending the summer. And I...

slowly started to realize that I wasn't happy with him anymore.

This truth would come to me and it had been coming to me since its onset when I was 25. And so for years, this little whisper would come to me saying that this relationship wasn't right. And I was so good at ignoring it because we had been together for six years and I didn't

didn't want to break up over what I thought was this kind of feral werewolf taking over me. I couldn't see logic maybe when I was in the States, so why would I listen to it when the kind normal me was the person that everybody liked and that I liked better?

It became too hard to ignore and I broke up with him. It was really difficult, but I felt immediately better after. The next time I had my luteal phase, it was less severe and I knew I did the right thing. And it wasn't until I decided to move to where my parents lived and go back to school and really get my degree to become a writer that

That I started to improve a little bit. That gave me a really key important piece of the puzzle for this illness. That I've really had to keep learning over and over again. A lot of the time, the illness is so much worse if I'm hiding something from myself. Or if I'm in denial. So while I was there in that small town with my boyfriend, I...

was in total denial about my happiness. I was trying so hard to be happy there at the expense of my own experiences and my education and my own dreams. And it was making me sick, so that really taught me to try to listen better to what it is that I actually need.

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And sometimes it's things I really don't want to face. And it's either ignore them and push them down and then get sicker and sicker every month or deal with them. I don't really have much of a choice. I can't afford to ignore it because my health deteriorates so fast. And because of how debilitating the illness is, like, my life is at stake.

I usually, when I have PMDD, suffer from really severe intrusive thoughts that I can't control. And they're always about killing myself. And the thoughts will just come, well, there'll be no one home soon, so I could just run a bath and slim my wrists.

or like these violent images of what I could do to myself just come into my head. And if I'm going for a walk, it'll be things like I could throw myself in front of this truck. And it's constant and it's exhausting. And in December, I actually, I attempted suicide. I just decided, okay, I think like, I think I've had enough. I think I can't do this anymore. And

I certainly can't do this every month for the rest of my menstruating years. There's no way that I have the strength to pull that off and I don't even want to count how many more periods I'm going to have in my life that I have to feel this way over and over again. So I took the cable from my laptop and wrapped it around the bit of my closet, like the pole in my closet, and twisted it around my neck and

I let myself hang for a bit and started to see stars and things were kind of blacking out a little bit. On the night that I attempted suicide, I couldn't really fight the intrusive thoughts and I just sort of let them play out in my brain. And the more I did that, the more concrete they became, the more they took shape, the more they started to turn into a plan. And

I guess I had googled a lot of different ways to die and I'll save people the trouble there is no easy way like it's all hell. I knew that anything that I chose would would be horrible but I couldn't get the thought out of my brain and I just felt like I was alone and that I was always alone and that I would always be alone and

Hey, wasn't it impressive that I had lived until 27 anyways when I thought I was only going to live until 23? I thought of my sister and I just realized how stupid the whole thing was. There's no way that I could just leave my sister. I couldn't go through with it. So I unwrapped myself and I pulled my boots on.

and put a coat on and I went outside and I walked to the hospital and I checked myself in and I spent the night sitting up in a chair and the next morning I saw a doctor and told him like I just needed a place that was safe for the night and I'm fine now like I know it's gonna pass so I came back home and I unwrapped the cord and plugged my computer back in and that was that

When I think about it, at school I was doing super well and had quite a few friends and professors who really cared about me. The guy that I was talking to, like, he didn't say that he was going to disappear from my life. He just couldn't have a relationship at that time. So it wasn't anything so bad that it wasn't like I was being abandoned, but maybe I wasn't worthy.

And I think that's the core of my issue. And it's always been that, what if I'm not good enough? And that night I decided I wasn't good enough, that I'm not worthy of basic love. And when someone tells me they love me, if they message me that or something through text, like I'll read the text over and over just to make sure it's real.

It's not that I think I'm a bad person or anything. I just think that there's this fundamental flaw. Like there's something about me that isn't human and that's not worth connecting with other humans. I've seen like 13 different therapists in my life and I've learned a lot from most of them and I've never learned how to close that particular deep wound.

It's like, it's not me. So it's hard. It's like something else takes over. But at the same time, it is me because when I actually take the time and listen to it, it usually has some kind of wisdom, some kind of like secret that I've been holding for myself. Maybe that kind accepting,

friendly person that I am in my day-to-day life is too much for me to bear and this sort of monster has to come through to provide some kind of balance because I can't seem to do it and I'm so passive normally and I let people kind of do what they want to me and

And then this monster comes through and is like, "No more." I've started to kind of think of it as an ally, even though sometimes it feels like it's going to destroy me. I also think maybe it's a friend at the same time, and it's trying to teach me another way of being. And maybe one day I'll be able to find like a middle path, and the episodes won't be so severe.

when people are exposed to traumatic experiences sometimes or reoccurring trauma like childhood abuse, they learn to make themselves really small so they can minimize the amount of abuse they're subjected to. But this also has this effect of of never really getting their needs met and I guess there's this theory that some doctors have like

The body rebels and demands that someone slows down and pays attention by getting fibromyalgia or lupus or Crohn's

or even irritable bowel syndrome, or maybe PMDD as well. And it's this way of the body to say stop, like you need to pay attention to yourself now. You need to care about yourself and what you're doing now.

That's a really uncomfortable lesson for someone like me to learn because I have this sort of warped self-esteem where I don't believe I deserve that. I think that my body kind of doing this thing every month and becoming a monster every month is

is a way for me to learn through that how to become more assertive and to take better care of myself, to ask for things, to ask for help and to ask just to be heard. For me, it's manifested in ways I couldn't predict, like that suicide attempt I had back in December. Ever since then, like,

I've been healthier than I've been in a long time because that got me out walking every day and carving up time for myself. The guy that I was thinking wasn't going to work out with, it ended up working out with, and he's been incredibly supportive through all this. He doesn't try to take away what I feel or manage what I feel, but he has this belief in me.

He also has really strong boundaries that were quite a shock to me at first to learn that healthy boundaries were actually a thing and there was something in between love and hate and actually you could love someone and still have some boundaries and need distance from them. It's something that I've been working on and since then my PMDD episodes have not been

so severe as that last time. What was such a turning point for me in December when I actually attempted it was that I untied myself and I got help. That is such a certain, decisive evidence that I actually do want to live. So now that I know that I want to live,

What am I going to do now that I know that I'm here to stay? From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free.

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Welcome to the offensive line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery+, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.