#like others would notice some crazy dude is trying to psychologically abuse a bunch of kids in their basement

[pinejay]

wait but like what's so wrong with cloning humans how is it ethically different from natural conception

(re: shortened telomere problem, see here)

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story PART 66

When I got back from Texas, things pretty much went back to the way they had before, like I had never left. It felt like the people around me were becoming more and more unhinged though – like all this craziness was eventually going to lead to a death in the family, like the decisions and the way everyone treated one another was going to accumulate into a chaos that would rip through the centuries and become the psychological ailments of future generations of people distantly related to us one hundred and fifty years in the future. The chaos that was created by my parents, my older sisters, and my brother was going to pierce the heart of a city. The decisions we made today could create the right stuff to breed a monster, the same way that some drunken alcoholic rapist for a dad back in the late seventeen hundreds likely abused his kids and the abuse and dysfunction prevailed throughout the family line and created a school shooter several hundred years in the future. I truly believe my family is unknowingly planting seeds.

It might have been that I was just noticing things I hadn't noticed before. That was always happening now.

Me, Allison and David, we all got really into Fight Club for a time and would watch it every night. I loved the inner dialogue of the main character – and didn't really know how played out Fight Club kind of was. Most people complain about the ending when Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter's characters hold hands and watch the buildings fall – but I personally loved it. It's just such a moment. I have double feelings about Fight Club. On one hand, it has this postmodern honesty to it that I had craved – and hadn't known I had craved. I understood the disenfranchisement in my own way. I adored Marla. On the other hand many of the fans of Fight Club are these fake 'revolutionary' dudes who think it's a movie for and about women bumming men out. They look at Tyler Durden as some kind of role model – Brad Pitt's character in particular – in a way that sort of completely misunderstands the book. Most of the people who think they understand Fight Club actually do not. Which is okay. We all have the right to enjoy media entertainment in our own way. It just felt to me at times like it appealed to and eventually helped breed the fedora wearing meninist nationalist Mr. smooth voice dudes. It really has been misused – a lot.

David and I got into boxing. Really, it was my father who was into boxing – and he thought that maybe David could use his access aggression to become a boxer – perhaps even a successful one. My father had had a friend who boxed professionally, being one of the better boxers in the state, and that man had told my father that he himself could have been a boxer had he chosen to dedicate himself to it – which he was probably being honest about. My father has a very thick skull. I don't believe this is the worst idea my father ever had, but it was in a way emotionally lazy to believe that what David had was an access of energy that could be fixed by buying a punching bag. David was personally suffering and acting psychotic and boxing didn't fix anything/ However, we both did like to box. It's hard to believe it now, but for about three months I mulled over the idea of perhaps taking up boxing myself. My father was a little taken aback by my ideas in this regard. He didn't condemn me for this idea per say, that I might be the boxer of the family and not David. He more just didn't like the idea of having a girl in the family who was physically tough. In the end, I gave up being a boxer, some for reasons I will explain, but largely because I didn't want to have a permanently smashed up face.

What I liked about boxing was, there was something incredibly liberating about being able to mock beat the fuck out of something. All my life, I guess since I had been a sweet shy little child in a homemade sundress, I had been really messed with and I had been psychologically socialized to not think that I was capable of getting my way, emotionally, psychologically or physically. And that had gone so badly for me. Having been abused in so many different areas, when I boxed I felt like I had the control again temporarily – as if I was knocking down those who victimized me. Secondly, though I know it would hurt like hell in the ring with a professional, I sort of enjoyed getting punched. I know it's weird, but it brought me this weird kind of joy. Sometimes I would do poorly when jousting with David just so he would punch me repeatedly. So, for this reason, given also that I am much stronger than most women physically, I thought that it might be a plan for my future – maybe. I also liked how boxing was a game of strategy. I watched all the famous boxing matches, all the Muhammad Ali fights.

David got a lot of attention for being interested in boxing from my father, and it became this really unhealthy thing in the end as I soon came to find. My father taught David a limited amount of defense techniques that he knew, and bought him a punching bag. But there was never any further training for David. David would walk around at first – pumped up believing he was going to be a pro boxer. But without a trainer he would never have a chance, and my father of course was not willing to spend any money on it. You could see this mounting disappointment growing on David's face – as he was now feeling cheated more by my dad wanting to fantasize than anything ever actually happening. Secondly, my dad only got into the whole boxing thing because he wanted to distract himself from online relationships he was having for a few months. As soon as he was with someone new he met online, he totally neglected David's interests in boxing. It was not hard to see the true feeling of being betrayed and abandoned on David's face, but nobody could say a thing.

David about a year or two later ended up putting my father in his place. My dad was just beginning to be intimidated by David. He was afraid that David, being as he was young, somewhat tall and muscular would eventually overtake him. My father believed that all sons want to destroy their fathers physically and make them the bitch of the house (as to any real verification of this, maybe, I don't know because it's so outside my zone), he became intimidated by David boxing. He wanted the local fuckheads and losers to see how much tougher he was than David. So, he decided to set up a boxing match between himself and David while David was still young enough to be beaten. He set the boxing match out in the backyard of Billy's house and a handful of these idiots came out to watch my Dad essentially put David in his place. It was so, so backwards. Well, David was starting to really resent my father. I think he resented dad on some level when he had been talking about moving away from all of us to live with Patti in Boise instead. It had really rattled David's understanding of his place in the family at that early age, and this all was beginning to feel, and rightly so, like my father was more or less using us kids to fulfill his own emptiness and David was nothing more than a vessel for my father to relive his 'glorious youth' through.

And well, David ended up catching on to just how fucked up it was that my father wanted to beat him up in front of a bunch of guys. My father was actually beginning to punch and hurt David in the boxing match – pretending that David was being weak and he was merely trying to 'toughen him up', but David somehow turned it around, realizing it was not a fair fight and putting all his might into it, he slammed my father in the face and bloodied his nose. David didn't pulverize our father, but he knocked him down, in front of 'the guys' which he completely deserved and it humiliated my father, though in order to save face with himself he acted proud of David. The dynamics between them were getting stranger and stranger.

As for me, I once went outside and overheard my father talking to David out by the boxing area around our porch. They didn't know I was out there. What I overheard managed to upset me to the point that I did start to cry. Basically, David was being mostly calm and agreeable. I don't blame him for this. My father was making fun of me, saying that it was very dumb of me to think I could ever become a boxer, and he was prepping David to beat me up really good in order to teach me some kind of lesson. Basically, my father was trying to get David to beat me up for him. David just mmhmmed it, and it was an open rule among me and my younger siblings that mmhmming things when our parents were talking badly about one of us to another one was a perfectly acceptable way for us all to survive. Our father was actually quoting Fight Club, him being one of those fucking idiots I guess who think that the story was antiwoman. And it really  hit me then, not that I hadn't instinctively and at times somewhat directly understood that my father resented women. But he wanted to take that anger out on me specifically – there was something about me that bothered him the worst, and he wanted to kill the poetic bird inside my heart, chop off my wings and my sense of self sufficiency, and he wanted to see me physically and psychologically beaten. I hid behind the house and cried against the wall. I asked David about the 'talk' I had overheard, and David confirmed to me what my father had been saying.

A year later, I decided to spar with one of Kyle's little brothers who lived next door, Khris. He was really strong, but I knew more techniques, and in any case we were only doing this for some fun. We both agreed not to punch as hard as we could or anything. Well, he wouldn't get close enough to actually be in a match. He stood seven or eight feet away and wouldn't get near me enough to fight. I should have just said, 'hey, I don't spar with wimps,' and took my gloves off, but instead, after waiting for three or four minutes I decided to get in there and just take this to some kind of conclusion. As soon as I walked over to him, he threw this wild haymaker and rabbit punched me behind my head, between where my head starts and my neck – and he did it as hard as he could. You aren't supposed to punch like that, since it can cause spinal and brain damage, and it really did mess me up. I started crying and I had to get in the house. Everyone was very annoyed at Khris, knowing full and well that he had intentionally cheated in just about every way. Khris just kept saying 'wow, it's because I am so strong! I didn't know I was this strong because I just tapped her!' which was total bull. He wanted to pretend he was superman, basically. And I just decided as I held my head and cried against the tool shed, that I was never going to box again. Second to that, David and I had gotten into a disagreement and then proceeded to box once. We both had gotten really aggressive with one another, which was stupid. I guess I was infuriated by David and I wanted to be able to take it out on him. But me initiating that fight had also been stupid. So for me, being a boxer was not meant to be. I didn't want to deal with my father being a sexist prick, getting rabbit punched by cheaters, and using boxing as some kind of coping mechanism. So I let that dream die.

Upon my father's behest, I attempted to apply to ATK where my father worked for a job at the sorting lines. This involved going through a very large process of applying, and going to a class in the unemployment office that tested our basic IQ's. I still could not write, nor did I have a social security card, but my father seemed to think you didn't need these things to work there – you did. I think he wanted this because he wanted to control me – and in his mind I am sure he saw it as helping. In any case, if I got the job, the starting pay was thirteen dollars an hour. That sounded amazing to me. I didn't even fully understand what could be done with that kind of money. I couldn't manage to scrap together thirteen dollars a week most of the time. I had to somehow bleach the rainbow out of my hair just in the hopes I might get the job– making the mistake of doing it right before we had to leave was a sorry mistake and it pretty much destroyed my hair. I mean, it was blonde, but I didn't even finish washing out the bleach before I left. My head dried with crusty bleach since I didn't wash it out well enough. My skull bled a bit, the hair wasn't even hair anymore. It was falling out. I really had not wanted to change my hair color, but work would never allow me to have rainbow colored hair. For this reason, I hoped dearly that I would be able to at least get the job I wanted. Nothing hurts worse than sacrificing parts of your identity for someone/something, only to be rejected anyway.  

I went in for my final assessment where I was going to talk to some people about getting hired. I went into this office, where I was called in. Two men came in. They were very phony to me – you could tell they had moderate positions of power, had to kiss ass to their bosses, but also loved getting their ass kissed too – which I guess made it all worth while to them. They used a bunch of absurd company lingo, and they didn't talk to me directly at all. They looked over my application and my basic information, and they talked about me as though I were not in the room. I didn't have the job. They didn't want to invest their time and energy in someone as young as me. But rather than have someone come out and tell me that I wasn't a good fit, I spent twenty minutes listening to this absurdly phony banter, which I assume is some kind of cheap ass corporate technique of letting people off easy. I hated it. I would much rather they just looked me in the face and explained what was up. In any case, I hadn't really wanted that job. I just needed it. Which kind of sucks worse, but you know.

At my mother's it was the same old same old. Roxanne and Jeremy had gotten into the low income housing they needed, so they no longer lived at my mothers and I had more reign again. Roxanne was pregnant again, with a baby girl. She seemed happy, but she seemed unhappy about it too – very unhappy. Jeremy had basically forced her into getting pregnant so that she would never have any recourse. He wanted to be attached to her forever. Roxanne likes having babies. It's sort of her thing. But I had this very eye-opening experience with her where she showed a rare moment of clarity and honesty. She was crying after a fight her and Jeremy had had. I don't remember all of what was said. I was laying on the couch a bit mystified. But essentially she told me that she dreaded having the baby. She almost wished that she could get an abortion, and part of her was willing to go to hell for it, just to not have to be attached to Jeremy. She wanted away from him. He was dangerous and sociopathic and controlled every aspect of her. She was sobbing uncontrollably, and she had pretty much spelled out that she knew full and well what this pregnancy was. But there was also no place for me to stop this train. I listened and I tried to agree with her. But I knew that agreeing too hard would get me shut out, and she wouldn't even have the opportunity for these rare moments of hearing herself say something that made sense. I was hoping she would listen to herself. She did not.

I began to go to bible studies with Roxanne and her family. This particular group was mostly younger and middle aged people who had really messed their lives up. It wasn't your typical older folks church. I was an atheist there, disguised as a Christian. I mostly went for the food and because I was always feeling anxious and alone and it at least gave me something to do, but there was something really humbling and comforting about being around people who were trying to better themselves, no matter how misguided I felt like it was ultimately. I went because for one, there were honestly, passages in the bible about love and about how we are to see one another that I thought were pretty damn deep coming from someone nearly two-thousand years ago. Even if you don't agree with those statements, it's really worth understanding and appreciating that they really were dealing with certain elements of the human condition in the best way they knew how, and in certain ways, society hasn't changed from then. Most of the bible is totally frivolous demanding statements without explanation and the other half is fairy tale, but here and again, if taken a part piece by piece sometimes you find something is there. I thought the guy who ran the bible study, was a completely self righteous asshole. He had a lot of power in the community, and I guess he helped a lot of people. A long time ago, he had been a heavy drinker and had become an alcoholic, and he had turned his life around. People groveled to him, and when they had Christmas and Thanksgiving get togethers in the community hundreds of people would treat him like he was a prophet. But to me, I thought he was a sick arrogant bastard. The whole thing had gone to his head. He not only looked down on those he helped like they were freeloaders, he also thought that his wealth and his influence in the community meant he might actually be some kind of messiah.  Maybe he did a lot of good – he was definitely a smart guy and he was able to rally up money to help needy kids, but his personality was shit and he was homophobic and sexist – though he generally didn't talk so much about sinning and rather applying the bible to your life so it didn't come up much. I looked around sometimes and could not people were so in love with this guy.

All the same, I went to his meetings for about a year. I sometimes got free top ramen and I was given a free raincoat once. He didn't talk offensively about 'the gays' and he was never rude to me. He made possible, and offered places for homeless people to live, and offered up and found places, sometimes even in church basements for people in bad places to stay for awhile till they got the help they needed. It was no wonder in many respects that people of the community cared so deeply for this guy. I guess I couldn't personally complain either. I just knew he was a real douche, I could read it on his face and I could tell how much be looked down on people – I just couldn't tell anyone I thought that.

I remember very vividly a terrible fight I ended up having with my mother and David. It was up to that point one of the worst fights we had had in some time. It started with my mother was being really virulent towards David for no reason. My mother has some kind of unspecified personality disorder. Everybody who has ever met her has said it. I think it's likely she has several and they interact with each other strangely. My father thought bipolar and sometimes sociopath (though he's no angel either honestly). I think borderline and anxiety. She's been diagnosed with ADHD. It could be that she is just massively insecure. Now that I am older and I can see her not as my parent, but as the weird woman that she is, and can identify in myself the things that came from her, I have learned what I can and cannot tolerate from her personally and have to leave, and what isn't worth getting into with her. Because she won't stop. Her moods and her entire identity will fluctuate and her fantasies will proceed more deeply. If she is being mean towards you, it's a petty power play. She might really hurt a person and totally forget she ever did it. I don't think she can help it. Anyway, living with her is a drag. She likes chaos and will find ways to create it. She was intentionally being mean towards David this one Saturday evening, pushing his buttons to make him snap.

I put my book down and tried to stick up for David. It is a weakness I have. It might slightly be fueled by my ego. I have troubles understanding what is acceptable for what I accept, and therefore I will accept a lot of abuse. I am also a bit of a coward. I am not the most cowardly person mind you, but I know I could be better. But when I see someone I care about being given a hard time I jump in and try to protect that person and I rarely think of the consequences. That's what I did, and when I stepped in and tried to tell my mother to knock it off, or tried to explain the misunderstanding that I thought the two of them were having, it all went to hell and she was screaming at me, and I was trying to defend myself. Pretty soon, David, who I had been trying to protect, sided with her and the two of them were screaming at me together calling me worthless and a number of other things I don't even fully remember. David saw this I think as an opportunity to blow some steam at me, which made little to no sense, but he was a fucked up angry kid in certain ways so it was to be expected I suppose. I was being attacked at different angles, I was being told I was a loser and that my dreams were nothing, and I suddenly felt myself snap. I called my mother a bitch and told her she could fuck herself and she was a terrible person and just about everything I could think of. I was sobbing and I knew if I stayed I would physically attack them, so I slammed the door and left. I was crying and out the door grabbing my shoes and coat as I went

I thought about running away. For about five minutes it all made perfect poetic sense to run away. I didn't know how I would survive, but people surely did this kind of thing all the time.  I knew there was a world out there that wasn't my family's house. I wanted that freedom. But then, as I walked on I realized flatly that it could never happen. I had less experience out in the world than most. I could only survive with a book in my face at this point. I felt ugly and fat. I was already starving and I needed to pee. I was freezing without a coat. I had no money. It was basically winter. But I felt this agonizing frustration at the idea of going back. It didn't seem emotionally possible for me to simply stroll back through the door. Things had been said that had been malicious. I just figured I would walk around, cold and miserable as I was for awhile. I was hoping the library across town would be open – it was not. I knew I had to walk back or take cover somewhere.

Meanwhile, my mother called up my father and told him that I had freaked out on the family, and had been acting crazy and suicidal. Like a fucking sucker he bought her story of all people, and he came over – convinced that it was yet again me who was the true culprit of all things terrible in the family. Honestly, I think at the heart of it my parents wanted to snuff out a certain kind of clarity I had that they found offensive. When people talked to me, I tried to be honest and thoughtful and thorough in my responses. I was a listener and found ways to be trusted and needed by my family when they talked.

I went back to the area, but I saw my dad's car in the apartment complex driveway and I just couldn't do it. There was some guaranteed drama in there. I listened in. My parents were talking about me. They were talking about how I was a mooch, about how reading and studying philosophy was ruining me for the work force – I was too poor and too lower class to be thinking that I had any potential to become anything. I had been talking loosely to my mother about a dream of mine to travel the world. I fantasized about hitchhiking since I had just read the Dharma Bums. I wasn't actually going to do it, but I wanted to travel like the beatniks did back in the day. Her and my father both spent a good deal of time talking about how I was unrealistic about my goals. I don't even know what they were even trying to say about me after awhile. I was just a horrible person I guess, with no specific crimes other than being who I was. My goals had had nothing to do with my mom attacking David over the remote controller mind you. Also, my parent's hated one another. They both saw the other as a sociopath. My mother had tried to get my dad into prison for not keeping us one weekend only a year and a half previous because she and Danny had wanted to party. They hated me because I was passively rebelling. I wasn't fucking up like my older sisters had by having gross boyfriends, drugs, getting pregnant with babies I couldn't take care of and didn't want to. Even though I generally said very little, I had dismissed their way of life, their world views and their existences and had become a voluntary orphan of sorts. And I was so bad that these two shitshows for people had seen fit to side with one another against the common enemy – me. I was mad, and I didn't want to be spotted by anyone lurking outside the window. So I left.

I had to go pee so bad, it was pitch black out and my skin was ice. I could see my breath, I felt exhausted and cried out in the winter air and horrible and panicked. Down the road quite a ways there was a gulch, and I figured I might be able to pee there. I didn't have toilet paper. It was going to be a mess. I just couldn't walk through that door with everyone revved up to attack me like this. So I walked over there and tried to pee. I ended up slipping as I tried to pee, which caused me to fall on a bunch of puncture weeds which are the curse of Clarkston. So there was not only pee all over me and my clothes now, but I had scratched up my butt and the pee that had gotten all over me made me even colder and I smelled and I had no future and I hated myself but resented the reasons why other people hated me and I missed the few people in my life who had ever cared about me at all, and it was seriously, no fucking fun. I wish this misery on absolutely no one.

I trudged back to the apartments frozen with pee all over me and I walked down into the laundry area. It was a really fucked up laundry room. Part of the wall had been torn down and there was broken wood and knocked over dead washing machines and various parts of debris and garbage all over floor. It looked like someone might have squatted down there. I found a place to sit. I sat there and sang to myself and rocked back and forth. I felt sick and alone and mentally unstable. Eventually, the voice of utilitarian pragmatism took over, and I knew that sooner or later I would have to go back into the building anyway. It was two in the morning by that time. I had been outside frozen and feeling awful for eight hours. My mother was still up and she tried to say something to upset me as I walked through the door. I just closed my eyes and said nothing. All that mattered was that I get warm and get clean clothes on. I just pretended she didn't exist.

Of course, my father's later retelling of that story is that he protested my mother's snarky confusing comments about me. While it is true that she initiated the entire thing and made up the most about me that wasn't even true, she had also gotten my father to speak pretty unfavorably about me. He doesn't remember it that way. He honestly remembers being some kind of honorable ally to me this night, but he doesn't know that I had been hanging out outside the window and had heard it all.

On the positive – kinda. There was this beautiful husky that lived a few doors down. Her name was Tikka. She was well trained, she wasn't reserved at all as some huskies are. She loved people and she loved especially children. For some horrible reason her masters just left her when they moved. It made zero sense to me. Tikka ended up come up to our area of the apartment complex, and more or less became everyone's dog. Everyone fed her, everyone let her stay in our apartments (this despite the fact that there was a no dog rule). She would knock on your door when she wanted in. This went on for a few months I think until someone found a permanent home for her. During the days she would play outside with the children. I seriously remember this almost cartoonishly sweet scene out the window one day. Tikka was smiling ear to ear. On her back as she walked were two small toddlers. She was seriously voluntarily giving the children free rides. I know that things like Tikka being a good community dog are really small. But they were literally the only things that kept me afloat. I had to really have a blind faith that things were going to work out well for me. Because I had no indication that they were. I was pretty much trapped, by my own inability to operate in the world like a normal human being, my lack of connections, but mostly my family. I sometimes just started thinking about killing myself. I didn't really ever have a plan of action. I didn't openly express that I was going to commit suicide. It just felt as though death's door presented itself to me and creaked open a little bit. I didn't go through, but I didn't keep my eyes off it either.

I sometimes would look at the old letters Zack used to write to me about me having a destiny and being a very special person and about how the world was trying to dim my inner light and I couldn't let them do that to me. I would remember that he had told Casey that he loved me still. It hurt. I couldn't face him, he had a girlfriend. Zack also was not a caretaker. There are the types of people who want to take care of others, and there are the types that do not. Zack was not someone who took care of people. In this sense I think I was beginning to understand that he wasn't a particularly grand human being. I had never seen him kick anyone while they were down. But I hadn't seen him help anyone either. I had read enough books, and knew enough very real feeling fictional characters to know that he lacked a lot of positive traits I had never thought to look for when I was naive in my early teens. And I was so full of the kind of pain someone might very well run from. I didn't want to be seen as a weak person filled with pain. Perhaps if I had known Zack better. But I really didn't. I understood that now. And he hadn't known me either. But I had to believe he knew me well enough to have seen that inner light I had, because if that inner light wasn't real, and I wasn't special or perfect or loved, than nothing was worth it for me. It wasn't worth being alive for me really. Not like it was. Still, I just knew somehow that he and I were meant to be. My new reason for not telling anyone that I was still in love with Zack wasn't to avoid talking about him or to deny it myself or get people to not want what I had. It was to prevent people from thinking I was fucking insane. Because at this point, five years after all was said and done, for me to be holding on to this in some way really was absolutely crazy.

PART 65 - https://tinyurl.com/yb22o6rv

PART 64 - https://tinyurl.com/y98zxljs

PART 63 - https://tinyurl.com/ybosu235

PART 62 - https://tinyurl.com/ybjrvccn

PART 61 - https://tinyurl.com/ybm99k8o

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-60 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far). 

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-60

[forceyourway]

Tree of Life Shadow Work Challenge

Day Two: “What facet of my childhood have I overlooked or otherwise need to evaluate?”

(Using Loki’s tarot deck, “The Raven’s Prophecy Tarot”)

The Magician - A master of all they undertake, The Magician has extraordinary influence on the world. They’re versatile; they can shape things and bring them into being, alter them, and destroy them. As such, they are in a sense indomitable; they can take whatever the world throws at them and make it their own. I thought this would be Loki’s signifier, as I experience him very much in this way, but he ended up going for the Nine of Wands. I do maintain that he fits the description, and though it may not be is calling card, he is The Magician all the same. This may be about recognizing how he fits into my life, and/or about recognizing my own power and ability to control my destiny. Both, probably. Both is good.

My Childhood

Trace back your memories as far as you can. Try to overview your early life in as much detail as possible. Articulate or otherwise express how you experienced childhood as a whole. Heed to any areas of resistance you encounter. Note pivotal turning points or memories that stand out. Attempt to recall the first time you experienced emotions like sadness, anger, jealousy, anxiety, remorse, and contempt.

TW: abuse, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, mental abuse, spiritual abuse, bullying, Christianity

It sucked, basically. My mom’s abusive, my dad’s abusive, my sister’s abusive, everyone’s abusive.

When I was young, I’m not sure how young, but before 3rd grade, my dad was setting off fireworks in the backyard. He’s still really into that. They’re illegal in my state, so a police car came by, and I think they were asking my dad questions. My babysitter took me and my sister and ran upstairs to hide. Maybe in a closet. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I was scared. That’s probably my first “fear” moment. That or walking in on my mom watching poltergeist, holy shit that was terrifying. I still can’t do scary movies, especially not supernatural ones. I had a crush on the boy who lived a few houses down. He was a few years older than me, and his sister was the babysitter mentioned above. Sometimes I hung out over at their house, playing Sonic and stuff. One day, he and his older brother staged some kind of ridiculous murder scene downstairs. They kept trying to get me down by bribing me with lollipops, but I kept refusing. I knew they were up to something. I don’t remember how I ended up going down - maybe just to get them to stop bugging me - but they played out this whole thing where there was a murderer in the house and he was slowly killing everyone. Ketchup and lemonade (to make their voice hoarse, as if they were choked) were involved. I knew the “blood” was ketchup and that everything was fake, but ended up getting really upset by the thought of my crush being murdered. That’s probably my first “anxiety/despair” moment.

We moved the summer before I started 3rd grade, I think, and stayed there for the entirety of my childhood.  I’m not sure when my parents started going at each other. I remember we went to Disney World, maybe when I was in 5th grade? and there was a good bit of screaming at each other then. I don’t remember it before; maybe I was too young to know. Regardless, Disney World is probably my happiest (childhood) memory.

In 5th grade, we went to a Catholic school. I was bullied by pretty much everyone, even my “best friend,” who ended up being a sort of nightmare. But otherwise, nothing too crazy.

When I was in 6th grade, my mom took me and my sister and ran off to another state (where our extended family is). No warning. One day we were just gone. I don’t remember how she explained that to us. We went to a Catholic school that had a serious Hive Mentality thing going on. They didn’t want me and my sister. Our teachers were horrible to us, and I kept ending up in situations where I looked very guilty but was in fact innocent and totally oblivious to what was going on. This is probably the start of “anger.” They wanted to expel me, but couldn’t come up with a reason why. My mom immediately started seeing other people, and my dad was furious. He’s of a very traditional mindset, marriage is forever, your duty is to your family, blah blah. So he did some e-mail hacking and ended up posing as an online therapist, who encouraged my mom to go back to him. She still doesn’t know.

That’s about when shit started getting really bad. He would scream til he was purple about how awful she was, pretty much all hours, pretty much every day, I think. Anti-women slurs everywhere. When me or my sister displeased him, he’d turn it on us. Even casual conversation with him was somehow linked back to our mother “ruining our lives.” At some point there was family therapy, which was an absolute disaster. They said I was “Obsessive Defiant.” I guess “abused” was never even a consideration. He’d start screaming “Defiance!” at me if I didn’t do a thing fast enough, like, “Pass the butter. Defiance!!!” like shit give me a second. My mom I guess blamed us for our dad’s BS and was always on about how we’re ruining her life and how I’m some kind of evil devil child and I’d have nightmares all the time about burning in hell.

The second half of 6th grade I went back into public school, and basically went right to my closest friends from public-elementary-school, who were The Losers. No one else remembered me, so going straight for The Losers pretty much instantly made me one of them. Probably the most, like, “establishing character moment” in my life, and the first "fuck you” at the world moment. Like I was starting to realize what behaviour was not acceptable among people (after fucking up a whole lot first, courtesy of my parents), and pretty much took a hard stand against bullshit, and recognizing my friends being The Losers was messed up. I got bullied. One girl beat the shit out of me once. My dad picked me up from a sleepover at her house, and blamed me for it. Obviously I must have deserved it, or something.

My sister was a weird aggressive child who physically grew up too fast, if you get me. She was always jealous that I got along so well with our cousin (she was like in-between us, age-wise), and her favorite game was Beat Up. It’s exactly what it sounds like, with me as the target. People don’t take notice because she’s younger than me - a good bit younger - but damn if she wasn’t bigger/stronger than me, like. There’s more, but I won’t type that on here. I don’t talk about that.

High school there was more persistent bullying, but never physical. Only the one time ever was. In 9th grade it got to the point where I just stopped talking. I’d talk to like 1 person, and at home because god, can you imagine what would have happened if I went silent at home. “Defiance!!11!1″ I think in 10th it got better. I kind of acquired friends because my (new) best friend was friends with a bunch of people, and I was always hanging out with her. We’re all still friends now. I guess.

No one knew about my family’s issues. Not my friends, anyway. One of my sister’s friends found out once after kind of witnessing my dad beat the shit out of me because I refused to go swimming at the river (I was on my period, dude). He was screaming about how I was destroying the family or something??? I provoked him into hitting me, so he smacked the shit out of me. The poor girl was apparently smacked around herself, because she didn’t take seeing this well at all. I remember my dad was going to drive me to school for my senior picture, and I was tying my shoelaces and clearing my throat. You know how your voice kind of catches in your throat? For some reason he assumed this was me throwing a fit about him not “getting ready fast enough”??? and he started with the usual screaming. I said fine, I’ll walk, not wanting to really ride with that anyway. I get about halfway there, and he’s in the car hanging out the window, purple-red, screaming about how if I don’t get in the car he’ll drag me in, and my mother, my mother, it’s all her fault, I’m just like her. I tried sitting in the back. Wrong choice. He screamed in my face the whole way there. I was crying hysterically at school, but trying to hide it. People who hated me were asking me what was wrong. None of my friends were there. I was trying not to burst into tears literally as they were taking my picture.

It was bad. My childhood was bad. Bad all over. Not sure what you’re looking for here, really.