I'm fine with good-faith questions. I'm still trying to work that out through therapy, so far the rough picture I've formulated is this. Sorry for the long text.

I've suffered some pretty intense bullying from my entire class in middle school when I skipped a grade. Some of it was because I was younger (and as a result less physically developed) than them, a lot of it was because I was really fucking stupid when it came to social cues as a child. I did weird self-stim things that annoyed the other kids like bouncing my leg when I was anxious, not being able to stand still in line (swaying back and forth when I was bored or anxious), biting my nails, etc. So in hindsight I bet that put other kids off to me and made me stand out in a bad way that was easy to prey on. Subsequently because of their treatment and my alienation, I had depression and suicidal thoughts during that time. The girls would do typical mean girl things like spread nasty rumors, while the boys would make these crude sexual jokes about me that went over my head but nonetheless were disturbing to me. My parents acknowledged my hurt sometimes, but at other times would deny me any sort of treatment. Or, they would look for physical causes instead of allowing me to get counseling for mental/emotional causes. Sometimes they would tell me I have to deal with it, be stronger. That was the general answer to most emotional problems I would bring to them.

How did I cope with this when I was a kid? I repressed. I pretended like they didn't hurt me, until the emotions would bottle up to a boiling point. When they did, I lost sense of reality and in the middle of the night I would scratch layers of skin off my arms to finally feel something and come back down to earth. Since this was the only outlet I saw as helpful to me, I would continue to repeat this cycle whenever I felt very, very emotionally distressed. This continued into high school (especially when the sexual taunting, slurs, and assaults by boys got worse, my dad lost his job and my entire family was tense, and for some reason I still have issues with understanding people socially and curbing the self-soothing things I would do when I felt anxious) and eventually adulthood. I also had issues during high-school when I realized I was not entirely straight and tried processing this. Instead of processing my attractions healthily, I tried my best to repress my attractions because my parents characterized gay people as "mentally ill", "gross", and essentially undeserving of having their rights to partnership legally recognized by the state. It led to ingrained self-hatred that I still struggle with today.

Every time I came to an adult with issues with depression, I was essentially told to "turn to God". In school and in my home life. Well, that ended up not being effective despite my religious devotion. Mental health services were demonized by my parents because they disapproved of what the plurality of psychologists condone and advocate for. They made weird and insane claims about what psychologists would try to do to me that I vaguely remember.

I've since gone to therapy to work on all this after I got to college and therapy finally became accesssible. Replaced my self-harm with more healthy ways to being myself back to reality. Engaged in more positive self-talk. Started to learn that being attracted to certain people isn't inherently evil or sinful, and that my parents were very, very wrong about what psychologists do. Started to learn that my social ticks weren't necessarily bad, but sometimes it can bother others, and there are other things I can try that are less distracting to others. (Also, it helped that people in college kinda gave less fucks about my ticks, and I was a wee bit better at determining when I engaged in them).

But I still struggle with all of these thoughts and sometimes my coping mechanisms still fail me.