If you notice something is actively harming you, what do you do? You keep it around? You stick through it? You push it away? You push yourself away? Well, for me, I do all of these things. I’ve had people harm me and yet I keep them around because I love them, but after enough time, I have no other choice but to push them away, and sometimes they’ll come back, and so I have to push myself away. It hurts to push away those who you care about, but if they are actively hurting you with the things they say or the things they do, a point will be reached where you are left with no more tolerance. We all have a certain breaking point that we can take before doing something, that something might be mentally shutting down, physically or verbally fighting, or, in my case, it ended up being running away.
I ran away from home, sort of. It wasn’t exactly running away, but some things occurred that I can play out in my mind’s eye and it almost seems like that was what really happened. Before getting into the events unfolding, I want to talk about why I got as far away as possible from my family and the old environment that was harming me. Hopefully it will bring something of worth to you, whether that might be in the comfort of knowing someone has done something similar to you or maybe it will give you the strength to get away from a life that is causing you to be in a state of pain and suffering.
I don’t go about many of the experiences in a linear fashion because at times, it serves better to give future context to the past. However, there will be times where it seems awfully linear. I mention this because I’d prefer for the content to be comprehensible to someone other than myself, and at times, it might seem confusing. I attempt to specify when I’m talking about the future, or past, or I will give a particular age in reference to the experience. Otherwise, know that this is a release. My release from many memories, experiences, and thoughts.
I used to literally fantasize about running away from home. This started at about 13 or 14, because I had developed enough emotionally to determine that I could not be who I wanted to be where I was. If you’ve listened to anything I’ve shared already, you may know I’ve talked about systems that were around during certain parts of my life that made sense during those parts, and many of these were created at this age, and only became deprecated a year or less ago. Due to not being who I wanted to be, or being loved for the type of person I wanted to be, even if it were because of things out of my own control, I mentally locked myself down to my new reality.
While I would think about running away at these ages, I wouldn’t have been able to feasible survive. Legally speaking, I wouldn’t be able to find work, and I mentally decided that it would be better and more advisable for me to sit through and suffer for a few more years before I did gain the ability to leave. I feared and anguished over the thought of living on the streets, despite many others in similar position suffering through that path. However, was it the right call? It’s hard to say. I wouldn’t want to live on the streets now, just like then, but now, I would prefer living on the streets rather than living at home. I don’t have nightmares about streets, but I do have nightmares about waking up in my room at home, and I feel relief when I do wake up and that isn’t the case.
Wait, so what did I have to hide or not acknowledge to my parents that caused me to lock down? Funnily enough, these things are not the biggest of deals, and I attempted to verify that my parents truly would not be able to cope with the fact I am this way. Really, it comes down to two main parts of me. These being my sexuality and my gender dysphoria. Why am I attracted to the same sex? I have no clue. Why do I have gender dysphoria? I once again have no clue. It’s not like I’m going to know, I can try to make guesses as to why these came about, but really, it’s more likely that they aren’t explainable, and they don’t need to be, because I can’t just remove them, they are things that I’m stuck with, and no matter how much I tried to make them go away, they wouldn’t.
I see a common trend in parents that would dislike their child for these things out of their control. Would you guess that my parents are Christian? Unfortunately, it seems all too common that Christian parents, despite pretending to follow the teaching of Christ, one’s supposedly of love, are actually creatures full of hatred, and if their book tells them to hate a specific type of person or thing, you know they’ll damn well do it to the best of their ability. Am I generalizing all Christians? Yes. Should I? No. I’m still hurt, and because of the hurt and pain I still feel, I still target it towards this group, because I know I’m not the only one, and it makes me feel even worse that there more out there that are in the situation that I was in. Are there other religious groups that have similar beliefs? Yes. Are there Christians who withhold these particular beliefs? Once again, yes. Of course, there’s all sorts of variability, but my feelings are based on my experience, and that experience has hurt.
According to some book written by some human beings, if I want to have sex with a man, I should be stoned, and god damn, if I’m gay, that’s going to be a no-go in that household. Sex or not, it isn’t happening. Obviously, I didn’t expect nor would I expect to have that ability in that household, but to have a boyfriend, would that really have hurt so much? I’m sure we all know what it feels like to be hated, to be rejected, to feel like we aren’t supposed to exist because we don’t fit into the confines of those whom we love. It feels awful, it’s one of the worst feelings I’ve had to experience, and one of the worst feelings I’ve had to experience over such a long period of time. This caused me to never have a relationship during the years of my life in which I experienced my most important and largest physical and mental developments. (I say to never have a relationship, but there are some more nuanced qualities to this, and I’ll get into that shortly.) Even if I had nice parents, due to the other external environment that was my life, school, even there, being gay wasn’t accepted.
Would a relationship during middle school have led to anything meaningful? No, probably not, but it would have given me something, literally anything, to make me feel loved and appreciated, to feel just a little more connected to someone else, to feel like I was someone worth loving, someone worth caring about, but that wouldn’t happen. My home life was full of hate, and school was full of hate. From the perspective of my parents, it probably didn’t seem like this was occurring. At one point or another probably around ages 13-14, I was asked if I was depressed, and obviously, my answer was no, because I didn’t believe I would receive the help I needed. At one point, I did ask for help in reference to one of the mentioned mental issues, a few years in the future, and I didn’t receive help, and so this reinforced the fact that I wouldn’t be receiving the help I needed to feel okay with myself.
To bring us back, I was pretty slow as a child, mentally I mean. During elementary years I was not the quickest. It could be stated that I was physically slow too, because I was quite fat until puberty where I experienced changes in my perception of what I should be. I think because I was obsessed with the internet and being on the family computer all the time, I lacked the physical exercise that other kids were receiving when they played outside with their friends. However, I didn’t really have friends. The friends I would say I did have, were well, not all that connected to me, and before something like puberty, I don’t know how nuanced a child can really be. Even so, the connection required from one child to the next is probably pretty minimal. It’s not like they’re going to have in depth conversations, they don’t want to have philosophical discussions with one another, they want to play! They want to have fun!
Where I’m going with this, is that, while being slow during my elementary years, I was able to have “friends” to a certain extent. It wasn’t mentally an issue to find people that I could actually connect with, whoever I just happened to gravitate towards or have gravitate towards me did just fine. I was also a lot more open; I was blissfully unaware of all the social games being played, even by children! I was also easily able to conform to other children, and this enabled me to connect with just about any another child. In this conformity, there was one important situation where it led to me getting in trouble. Kids were swearing with one another, and by kids, I mean 2nd and 3rd graders, so kids from 7 to 9 or so. I joined them, so we could all play basketball, or just shoot hoops, or something like this, but as I was swearing with them, I somehow ended up being the one getting in trouble. I had to apologize, I think I cried in front of the principal or whatever, but now, I would consider it an important variable in my disconnect with others. If there was no issue with my continued conformity, and it always worked for me, then I would have continued it, but because of this confrontation, it emotionally hurt me and logically taught me that if I don’t want to experience something like that again, I should stray away from conforming to others. Was I thinking about it in the context of conformity? Did I really know what was going on? No, not at all. I was just being a human, a child, and I didn’t want to experience pain, just like now, so I did what I could do to stop that pain from happening again.
This leads into my increased isolation from there-on out. Was I still conforming? Yes, but there was always a limitation to that conformity, I couldn’t fully conform to the same level of the other kids, always leading to some disconnect. What might a kid do, one that’s already online when they aren’t at school, and lacks awareness? They connect with people online. Well, okay, that’s what I did. From age eight to now I have had most my friendships and connections purely online. This has allowed me to make actual connections beyond the surface, but it has also led to a lot of opportunity for me to be hurt. Whether it was by those who wanted to hurt me intentionally or unintentionally, whether emotionally or sexually, even if just online, it can do damage to a child, and it sure did damage to me, even in my later years.
Even before I was eight, even earlier, I was still on the computer often. I have distinct memories of playing online games even just within the browser. Games like Poptropica come to mind immediately. There were others but I don’t actively remember the names of all of them. There were others outside of the browser too, like Roblox. I don’t really know why I would get so obsessed with these games, but I do remember obsessively asking my mother to buy me the online memberships these games would offer, which oddly enough, still makes me feel guilty today. I was obviously a child, and the memberships were there to abuse the parents of kids like me, and it worked, and it still makes feel indebted, even after all that has happened, all that I’ve been through, even how I feel towards my parents now, I still feel like I have a monetary debt to pay because I asked my mom for money to spend on online member in video games when I was single-digits old. Isn’t that absurd? I think it is.
In online games I would talk to people, and it rarely led to connections. Really, I didn’t have all that many connections through the web games that happened to be online, nor did I find many on Roblox, but there were a couple, and I have contact with at least one person from Roblox, and I met them, what, when I was 12? I’m surprised we even are connected to each other at all, it’s really a surprise to me. I did play Minecraft too, and that ate up huge amounts of my time, even beyond 12, and I talked to a variety of people, many of which I shouldn’t have, and we usually connected outside of Minecraft using Skype.
However, up until around age 13, I still was mentally slow and lacking a lot of the social connections that a child would need for proper development. There were a few, ranging in their significance. And how these people saw me, I’m not totally certain.
There were bits and pieces of real connections, I had at least one friend who consistently played Team Fortress with me until around 13 or 14, but I can’t remember exactly when it cut off. He transferred to a different school, and at these ages, I wasn’t playing the same games as other kids, or I wasn’t doing a good enough job of playing them, literal and metaphorical games. Playing the game by having the right social media, acting socially as I should, or playing the right sport—you get the idea. As a result of this, we couldn’t connect all that well beyond Skype and occasionally playing a game together, along with references to the game in real life. There were at least a few other kids that were aware or at least interested in the things I was, but it usually didn’t last nor did it reach to the point of friendship.
There were many friends online, but as you might expect, many these didn’t last. I was trying to make friends with those who were years older than me, an eight-year-old connecting with a 13-year-old is an oddity in my mind. There is such a large gap in development between these two ages that I find it surprising that I had anything resembling a friendship, which was lost when I developed more. Eventually we cut off, but that person was a very important friend to me, and we aren’t actively connected anymore, but I could connect back with them if I wanted to, but I have actively chosen not to, as the last time we spoke, I realized there was such a large difference in interests and priority to what we wanted to do with our lives, so I was better off not trying to get back what had already passed me by. There were also other connections with strangers online that happened here and there, but many of them would not be long-lasting. Some did really last, but in the long-term, only two individuals have survived, and we started our friendships when I was in the age range of 13-14.
It's hard to gauge what most kids were doing at these ages, what the majority cared about, what the majority spent their time on, but I know that I had spent my time unwisely, but I had no conception of spending time wisely or unwisely, and when I did have the ability to conceive of this, it was irrelevant to where I was mentally, and we’ll get into that shortly. So, what did I spend most of my time on as a kid? Aside from the mandatory things that I didn’t have my own choice in, like school and whatever my parents told me to do, I would spend most of my time on the internet, on a desktop computer. Whether it was watching online video content or playing video games, that’s all I did. Now, I have a few friends that were already ahead of the curve at those ages, at least in my opinion, because they were doing things that would define them in the current day, or would help them figure out how they would choose to define themselves. Whether it was music, painting, writing, or whatever, it would carry on into their adult life or it would influence what they would do with their time.
Playing video games, talking with friends, watching videos, or all of these at once, were the identifiers in my childhood. Yes, I would play outside, but that died with middle-school. In elementary school it was mandatory for us to go outside for a set period of time, the length of which I can’t remember, but I’m aware that it was too short, but that at least gave me something at that age. I really didn’t even listen to music until I was in 7th grade, so once again, 13 into 14. Unfortunately, this did not benefit my ability to connect with others all that well. I could be doing the thing I was supposed to do, playing the right game to talk with certain people, but I wasn’t feeling much as a result of it. It made me question why I was doing it, why I was trying to hard to connect with these people. If playing the video game, the other individual liked didn’t give me anything socially, then I’d be better off playing the game I wanted to play, I thought. Eventually, this adapted itself to me; choosing what video games I would play, because I wanted to play them. This ended up being games like Minecraft, Team Fortress 2, Roblox, and sometimes an outsider, like Osu, but these were based around what I wanted to do, and like I’ve mentioned, there was at least an occasional person or two I could play the game with.
I found myself trying to connect with a lot of kids that were totally unlike me. Some might identify or label these types of people, or in this case children, as normies, or with a less exaggerated label, as normal people. In my perception of reality then, I didn’t really have a problem with these kids being normal, and I still hold that perception, but now I understand that I can’t have any sort of meaningful connection with that type of person. What would be a deep connection for that person would end up being a surface level connection for me, and it would take an unreasonable amount of energy to have that connection, even if it resulted in a weak link. I didn’t care about football, baseball, or basketball, yet these were the lives and the most important things to many of these adolescents, along with the social games they wanted to play with one another.
Once again, I always ended up spending a lot of time and energy trying to connect with these types of kids. To be fair, the majority of students in middle-school, at least the one I went to, were like this. Here and there I found that a kid might have something in common with me, or we could have something close to a friendship, but nothing was ever all that deep. I don’t have a single friend from middle-school that I still speak to, and I’m perfectly content with this. There was one that I could talk with and play games with, not the already mentioned one, but that eventually died off as I continued to change, and I found that they didn’t change. I have distinct memories of sitting at the lunch table with all the people I had no connection with, and usually I would keep to myself. I think I played on my phone; I wasn’t really reading anything at this age. I was doing some sort of scrolling. That was fine then, I was still getting an escape from the reality that peered through my peripheral vision. The point is, I didn’t want to continue being there, I was trying to get away from my external space even then. I would have much preferred being home, in front of my computer, and not having to associate with all these people that wore me down. And wore me down, they did.
I was waking up absurdly early to go to school, no kid should be waking up at 6 AM or earlier, and yet I was, because I had to. I guess school started early enough to require this and I had to be at a specific spot where the bus would pick me up, and the ride to school would take a significant amount of time, once again explaining why I had to wake up this early. This meant that I was sleeping poorly every night, I couldn’t just turn myself off like a switch, and yet I lacked the energy to do much of anything, so what do people do when they lack energy? They do the easiest possible thing, the path with least resistance, so this meant playing video games. If I wasn’t going to play video games, I would end up watching YouTube, and eventually another media ate up my time: anime.
I watched an unbelievable amount of anime, I don’t even know all of which I watched, because I just watched an absurd amount. Of course, I wasn’t going to retain hours upon hours of these shows when moving onto the next one right after finishing one. When I try to guess when I started watching anime to this extent, it probably was around 12 or 13, or 12 into 13, something along those lines, it’s a little too blurry to be exactly sure. However, what I do remember, is all the time spent watching anime. I would go to school, come home, watch whatever, and then go to bed, and rinse and repeat this cycle for months. What I would watch would change, but some things actually stuck around for a long time. I watched over 1000 episodes of One Piece. It’s not like I’m proud of that, I’m embarrassed, but it’s been done, and I can’t undo all that time spent. Was it worth it? Absolutely not. And that’s just one show, upon many others. I somehow strayed clear of things like Naruto, but I watched many 12 to 24 episode-sized shows, and those add up, after years. I don’t dislike anime now, but I don’t actively watch it like I used to. One show, here or there, and that’s enough. The most recent anime that I enjoyed has been Sonny Boy, although I have enjoyed Made in Abyss, although I hadn’t watched the latter in one go, like I did with Sonny Boy. Anime worked as an easy and immediate escape, and so I would hold onto it until I moved on, but that would take years. So, imagine, for years, when you have free-time, the only thing you can do is watch anime. For some, this might be great, but for me, it wasn’t.
The disconnect increased only further. The friend groups I was a part of were exactly like many adults in a sense: they loved to hate and were incapable of understanding things that were different to themselves. Some things, some very unexpected things, began to occur as I developed into my own individual. I was a part of a friend group that hated homosexuals, and as I gained my own ability to feel sexual attraction, I realized that I was within the group that hated people like me. These people were supposed to be my friends, but as I grew, I started experiencing the growth of my own personalized characteristics, which were out of my control, and that they hated. I don’t understand now and didn’t understand then why they hated these types of things. Worst of all, I was following along until reaching a certain awareness. They also hated furry’s, without a reason that I could find, but I find it ironic. Funnily enough, I ended up developing an interest in anthropomorphic animals. This was sort of a choice, but I was content with it, I liked it, and it feels good to like things. I wouldn’t say these two things were indicative of my personality, but they were two aspects that made me who I was then, and who I am now, and these traits were hated from within the group I was a part of. My parents hated homosexuals too, so now having a home life of hate, where they hate a type of person, and then a friend group that hated, the same type of people my parents did, for no reason, I couldn’t be open to anyone as to who I was.
No one in real life knew these things about me for a long time. I couldn’t tell them how it was, and really, in all honestly, with my perception now, these interests and qualities are not worth noting, but from the perspective that kid, I was really stuck. I felt like I really had to close myself off from myself and others, and the damage it did, well, has made me the person I am now. A good question one might ask would be, “Well, if your home life sucked, and your friend group sucked, why didn’t you try an alternative group of friends?” It’s a great question, and I think there are a few parts that caused me to struggle with making new friends and being a part of a different group.
Like I’ve mentioned before, many of the kids within middle-school, were, well, basically the same. There wasn’t enough variety. The obvious choice would have been to try and integrate myself with the outsiders, and the outsiders would congregate together, but even those groups I didn’t feel like I could connect with. Struggling with variety, I would be stuck with a different group, but would have a different set of problems. There were groups of kids that were gay, and that was their glue that kept them together, that was what their life was centered around, and I was not like that, and I didn’t want to be that type of person, even if it would have meant less hate, and not only this, I had a fear, albeit irrational, that somehow my parents would find out I associated with these people, and that I was gay too. Later I found out that they had contemplated whether or not I was gay, but I think that’s bullshit, and I believe they’ve only said it to make it seem like they had any awareness of who or what I was.
There were probably kids that had some of the same interests as I did, but I couldn’t connect with them. Not all kids develop at the same rate, and just as I had developed faster than the one’s I was surrounding myself with, there were also kids, I’m certain of, that developed at a faster rate than me, and they would congregate together. So, now those types of kids were out of my grasp because they were more developed than I was, so they couldn’t connect with me, and it would have been surface level and mentally taxing for them to interact with me, and I couldn’t connect with the ones who had not developed at all. If I’m in this middle-ground, then I must be able to others that would be at a similar point in development, right? Well, I didn’t.
As I developed through middle-school, not only did I develop physically, but I also developed mentally. I went from being on the slower side to being on the faster side, which was awfully odd. I still don’t know why this is, but I’m under the assumption that due to the nature part of me, I was just genetically predisposed to experiencing far more growth during puberty than others, but less growth from the ages between 6 to 11. Mathematics were still my weakest subject, and today, that’s probably the same, but I was able to comprehend textual information much better than previously. I went from being in classes that provided “extra help,” of which did not help, to honors classes, which in my perceived view, were of equal quality and difficulty. Quite honestly, I don’t believe these classes to have been more difficult than the normal ones, but something I am painfully aware of is the fact that the teachers made it a point to note that these were honors classes, and it was drilled into the students that this was the case, and so believed they were of a higher quality, and their work should be higher quality too. Was my work high quality? No. Was it good? No. And I say no, in reference and in the context of a middle schooler. It was awful even then. However, my work lacked grammar issues, and it usually contained whatever qualities that were required for me to reach a certain letter grade.
Unfortunately, this increased mental development, with a lack of connection in real life, led me to search for it online. At the beginning of middle-school, I didn’t even own my personal computer, but after a few months, I did get my own computer, and that led me to explore things I otherwise wouldn’t have explored, and also allowed me to connect with people I otherwise wouldn’t have connected with.
Before getting too deep into my internet usage I want to briefly mention music. There were people in school that impacted my music interests, despite not really liking the people or being all that well connected to them. One person in particular introduced me to metal, and that’s what got me interested in a lot of the music I enjoy today. He brought up bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Behemoth, and some other popular ones, all of which I hadn’t listened to before. What was my music taste looking like before this? Quite honestly, it’s hard to say, I can’t really remember listening to all that much music up until this point. Maybe I did listen to music, maybe I didn’t, but this was a paradigm, because I can think of how listening to these bands, and metal in general, has introduced me to so much more music I otherwise wouldn’t have considered.
Back to home, it was awful, even if I could stare at a computer screen. It really sucked, if I haven’t made that already obvious. My parents were very intent on giving me zero privacy, and I had to force them to accept things like, having my door closed. This wouldn’t have been absurd to most parents, I don’t think, but it’s not like I’ve had many parents to interview and find out whether or not this would have been the case. With time, things were normalized, and I could closer to having bits and pieces of privacy, enough to allow me to get away with the dreadful eye of my mother or father, if only for a moment.
This meant I was beginning to look at things I otherwise wouldn’t have, and talk to people I otherwise wouldn’t have. I had a smartphone, yes, and that meant I would use that to talk these people, and maybe sometimes play a mobile game. The tool I used to connect with people the most? Discord. I still use it today, but I’ve been through multiple different accounts when trying to escape the grasp of certain individuals who would always pop-up. I also had a tendency, a few years ago, to delete and create new accounts, across the board, not just for Discord. I’m uncertain why I did this, but my immediate guesses are that I wanted to be identified as someone else because I felt like I had experienced enough of a change to be classified as someone different. Or, I just wanted new names and wanted a different identify for the sake of being different. At times where I was especially emotionally unstable, if someone disrupted my already-fragile balance, I would then go on to delete accounts, or remove people, or really just partake in destructive behavior—albeit online.
The kinds of people I would connect to would definitely vary. At this time, I would use servers to connect with people, and I make direct mention of this because I don’t usually stick in them for long anymore. I have a tendency to leave and rejoin servers if I want to connect with some people in the server, but chances are, I already have those particular individuals on my friends-list, I just had hoped I might be able to find more people worth chatting with, but considering the fact I always end up leaving, that goes on to say how that usually works out. However, the point is, at around 13 to 15, that’s what I would do, and that’s how I would find people to connect with. The types of servers I would be a part of would vary, but the most significant one that still takes up space in my limited memory is Fritanga’s server, which is just some commentary guy, who makes commentaries on video games or whatever? I guess it was perfect content for a 13-year-old, and so I joined the server, and through that server, I was able to connect with people, and it led to me connecting with one person that I still have a connection with today, and another person leading me to the other connection I have today.
Were these people I should have been chatting with at that age? Probably not, but some were definitely around my age, and others were at the same maturity level, so it wasn’t all that terrible, and it offered me something, unlike real life, which offered me less than nothing; it was a negative force on me. So, I was then associating with people I shouldn’t be associating with, reading things I shouldn’t be reading, and making mention of things they shouldn’t be, and, I started acting similarly. Somehow, I made other connections, that had nothing to do with that server. They must have found out that I was underage, from someone or somewhere, and that was why a few of these people had gone out of their way to contact me. Could you guess for what reasons men online would want to contact a 13-year-old boy for?
As you may have guessed, yes, they wanted nude pictures and videos, from a variety of angles, and in return, they would send videos or pictures back. In my 13-year-old mind, I couldn’t see a problem with this, which is honestly horrifying, because I know there are more like me who have experienced this and more that are actively experiencing this. I was receiving attention, attention I had never received before, and my hormones were totally out of control, and it was perfect for people who wanted to abuse me online. Nothing has happened to these people, and they probably found other targets, although thankfully, there were only a handful that personally attacked me. Did I receive attention that I wasn’t getting? Yes. I felt like those people loved me, not understanding what love actually was. I felt like I actually offered something to someone, and I wasn’t being dismissed or hated for things I could not control. These people wanted me for who I was, and I was a 13-year-old, with a smartphone and a need for attention. Then, I didn’t think about the age difference, I merely saw individuals who had in interest in me, who wanted my attention, and wanted to give me something in return, and I couldn’t actively see all the awful things going on.
None of these people lasted for very long, eventually they went away, or I moved from one account to another, I deleted them, or they deleted their account—you get the idea. Of additional note, none of these people actually dated me, of course we’re using this term loosely, but none offered that type of relationship. None of them offered or wanted to meet me in real life either, which is a relief, not that I would have gone through with such a thing, but it wouldn’t be unsurprising that I could have been coerced into something that would have hurt me more than pictures and videos.
There were other individuals that weren’t out to hurt me, but did many of the same things, they just happened to also be minors, or at the very least, they claimed to be. There’s obviously no way for me to verify such a thing, but the point is, that happened as well. Why? I wanted attention, and I was able to receive attention this way. I wanted to feel wanted, and guess what, I did, I really did feel wanted. In the most fucked up way possible, these people wanted me, and I was willing to give them that, because I wanted something in return, and the transaction occurred, back and forth, for a while, until I moved onto other things, which were no better for my development.
I couldn’t get the love I wanted from my parents, and I couldn’t get love from a boyfriend, so I had to cope somehow. I think that if I had received something in real life, many of the events that I’m going to tell you wouldn’t have occurred. Even if I had a really good friendship, or just a fine group of friends, or if I were able to have a relationship with someone, literally anything, things would have turned out much better, and I wouldn’t have gone through such awful things, and I wouldn’t have put someone else, through such awful things. If my parents just cared a little more, if they just told me I was okay for the way I was, if they weren’t beings of hatred, then things really might have been okay, but we don’t live in that timeline, we live in this one, and what has happened is in the past, and we can’t reverse these things, we can’t change these things. These people, these actions, and these events have made me the way I am, for better and for worse.
I had online dated with many different individuals, most of which did not last very long, nor did they really make sense. I was a teenager, and it tended to be another teenager or someone with a similar maturity level. So, what would we do besides chat, exchange nude pictures, and play video games together? However, not were all like this, there was a single particular relationship I had which was very important for my development, and it’s probably the realest online romantic relationship I have ever had, and because of the connection this person and I, we’re still connected to this day, which I find to be awfully absurd.
I met this person through another layer of connections, and it comes back to that Discord server I mentioned. Through connections there, I joined another server, and this person was part of that server, and I started a conversation with that person based on a profile picture they were using, which aligned with their interests, and picked up my intrigue, and from there on out, we would talk. It was gradual, but eventually things escalated to a relationship, and I think that because of my prior experience with other men online, I had expectations for what this would mean, and somehow this person felt responsible for my well-being, and I would also make claims of suicide, so I’m sure this instilled fear into them. Anyway, there it was, an online relationship, and this would go on for a few years, with many bumps, because we were both very emotionally unstable and we both had a variety of problems, and our problems meshed together, and I now believe because of this person, many of my ways of thinking and acting are a result of my connection with them.
Along with the emotional instability on both sides, this person was also mentally ill, and had various other problems, so I think that due to their mental illness, might I add it was schizophrenia, which was untreated for years, led to less than desirable impacts on my mental health, if there was any health left. At first, I had no idea what was going on, but eventually I found out this was the case, but I never cut this person off, maybe for short periods of time I would cut them off, but I would always come back. Did they manipulate me into acting this way? Sort of, but there were also times where it seemed totally done, but eventually we both made it back to each other. I definitely liked some of the ideas mentioned, I was called God on more than one occasion, and I was given a feeling that I was special, and imagine that you’re a teenager that has not received this level of praise, this level of attention, and this level of interest in you, and now you are receiving it—what do you do? Do you keep on sucking it up, or do you go back to having nothing or very little again? Obviously, you keep sucking it up, and you know damn well I did.
This, like I said already, went on for years, and eventually it no longer was labelled as a relationship, but we never broke off connection. I tried breaking off here and there, but would always end up crawling back, just like now, even today, that’s how it is. Now, it’s arguably fine, but I’ve definitely developed in many ways that differ from those times, and we are very different people with different values, but we seemingly do not separate.
Really, the most significant piece of information that I’ve been neglecting has been the age gap between this person and myself, which is 10 years, and at an age of 14, I should have seen all that as wrong here, and I probably did, but I somehow convinced myself it was okay, and I convinced myself it was the right thing to do, because I received something I otherwise wouldn’t receive.
I already mentioned that I talked about suicide with this person, which definitely instilled fear into them, and many of my thoughts during this time, and in the future, would continually be about suicide. Surprisingly, despite the constant thoughts of suicide, I never committed suicide, and maybe that would have been the right thing to do, but something held me back. Was it fear? Did I believe there were better days ahead? Did I have something I felt like I had to do, which extended far beyond any feelings of suffering or misery? Maybe none of these, maybe all of these, quite honestly, I’m uncertain to this day, but what I do know, is that I’m here, now. Am I happy with the result? I don’t believe I’m at liberty to say quite yet, but, what’s important to note is that there were times, not all that far in the past, where I was genuinely ready, and if I hadn’t done many of the things that I will later describe, I genuinely do believe I would have ended my life, which would have been tragic, and it would have been easily preventable.
The thoughts of suicide were mostly due to my rejection by the external world, real life, and having to deal with that. Whether my expending my already small amount of energy towards putting on a mask that I did not identify with, or feeling like I couldn’t talk about things I needed to with my parents, or really anyone with authority that could help me, I felt truly like there was no escape from the feelings I was experiencing. I couldn’t escape from the environments I was in either. It was either being at home or at school, both of which wore me down to feeling that if I hadn’t been, or that I would no longer be, then things really would be better, and that was true then, and those feelings made sense then. However, many believed, at least the ones I was connected with online at that time, of which I was around 16, said that I should tell my parents at least some of the feelings I was experiencing, even if the possibility of being helped was small, I should do it. I was initially in complete rejection to this idea, I was already aware that it would not help, that I would not receive the help I needed, but I eventually gave in, thinking that I didn’t really know my own surroundings well enough. These people online did not have any idea what my parents were like, but I listened to them nonetheless, I really wanted to feel better, and I wanted to try, because I couldn’t do things on my own at this time, it would be impossible to save myself, and there was no one to save me, so I might as well try for the 0.01% instead of nothing.
I did try. What did I tell my parents? Well, I straight up told my mother I wanted to be a woman, those were the words that came straight from my mouth. She started freaking out, yelling my father’s name, and eventually we all end up downstairs talking, and further investigation ensued. Now I’m being asked about my sexuality, and I can’t admit to being attracted to men, so I act as if I’m asexual, but it doesn’t help my case. They were in total disbelief that this was me, that I had these feelings, and they believed that the reasons I felt this way was because of others telling me this is what I should be, and what I am, rather than me accepting parts of myself that I couldn’t hide away any longer. There were some important things said then, most important, a statement by mother, being “If you ever marry a man, I will disown you.” As an aside, when mentioning this and telling her that she said this to me in the present day, she does not own up to it, and claims she doesn’t remember saying it, but I remember it as clear as day. So, despite being open, despite saying how things were for me, despite saying the pain I was in; despite saying I wanted help, I did not receive help. Rather, I was told to read the Bible, for that would have all the answers to my problems. It was my sibling, in spite of our lack of a connection, that held me. Neither did my mother or father hold me when I was in pain, when I was crying, when I was asking for help. In addition, I was stripped away from my small amount of privacy for a temporary amount of time, and my parents were in disbelief that this was reality, and as time passed, they seemingly forgot, and I’m under the assumption that was because they were unwilling to admit that this is what I am. So, after this event, it solidified the fact that I really understood who my parents were, and that my thoughts were true, that they really were this way, and I wouldn’t be receiving the help that I needed to be okay. I would not be accepted, and in my perception of reality at that time, I felt like dying. Really dying, because the pain I felt was so terrible that it would have been better to die than to continue on living, however, I continued on.
There were bits and pieces after that event where I would be asked if I felt the same feelings, and the answer that I gave, that anyone rational would give, was always a “no.” I never admitted to it. I never admitted to my sexuality, I never admitted to my true feelings, and they never heard or were aware of my true feelings until I was independent and no longer within their grasp. I don’t even know why they would bother asking, especially if I tried being honest and received no help, what good would it be to say it was still the same? To have my privacy stripped away again? To be told to suppress my feelings again? I was, and still am, hurt by this, and I find it absolutely insane, despite bringing it up in the current day, I never once received an apology, nor an admittance to the things that were said that night.
There were events during this time period which gave me moments where I felt like I was getting closer to freedom, or freedom within this context, free from these particular tormentors, anyway. One of these were the fact that during one summer I had a job, and it went on into the school year for a few months. I had a checking account, a debit card, and money. This made me feel like I had more control. I could purchase things, without asking, and I had my own purchasing power, which made me feel like I had power to obtain things I wanted that wouldn’t need to be known that I owned. You could make some guesses what some of things might have been, but I won’t state them here, but it definitely gave me some further awareness to what I was, and that I had to go through so many hoops to hide it. I felt weak, and without realizing it, I didn’t do all that much saving. I would work and would often spend a majority of the money I made. I was 16 at the time, so maybe it makes sense that I couldn’t plan ahead, think about my future, or care about my future, and that I just wanted to feel okay, then and there, but I would have the thought that I should be saving as much as I can, because I wanted to leave, but it would die out.
Unfortunately, the job was awful, but what kind of job would a 16-year-old be getting that wouldn’t be miserable? To be fair, I haven’t had a job that I wouldn’t consider not awful yet. It was repetitive, boring, and drove me insane, but I was making money, and that was enough for me. The fact I was making money made me very happy. To see hundreds of dollars was something that was huge to me. I had never seen that much money, I had never had that much money, and I had never had this much control or ability to spend or not spend. A lot of it went to waste, and to this day, I’ve had moments where I just, wasted money, because I had lost control, because I felt the same things as I did then: a want to feel immediately okay. Unfortunately, in the end, I always realize that purchasing things won’t make me feel okay, it never works, although I really want it to, but there is never a quick and easy way to feel okay. Though some would consider drugs that quick and easy way, I would also so they come at a great cost, a cost you don’t know you’re paying until you’ve gone bankrupt. Even so, at this age I was not doing any drugs, and my coping was limited to just buying things, usually technology, and playing around with it. That was my means of distraction, keeping me away from myself. Did it work? Sometimes, but eventually, after working this job for long enough, I quit. I couldn’t take it while also going to school. I would go to school for five days, and then work the weekends, and you can only do that so much until it wears you down. It was funny though, the types of thoughts I would have to keep myself doing it for as long as I did.
Living in a rural area, we didn’t have the best internet. At times this would impact how I would cope. For a long time, I stopped coping with video games, despite enjoying playing online video games, particularly Team Fortress 2, but I no longer could. Due to the limited bandwidth, I was sharing such shit internet with three other people, and it could not hold up, I would have huge ping spikes, or I would be completely disconnected, so I just stopped playing, I had to do other things because I couldn’t do the things that would keep me away from myself. There is something else important about this poor internet use, and it was the fact that because my father has always had some level of immaturity, he couldn’t stop playing a particular online video game, Forza, and he wanted to play online, why else would he play? Unfortunately, due to the poor internet, it often meant he would disconnect or have very high ping, or whatever else, and because of his poor decisions to live in such an area, for he could not predict his own immaturity, he would be angry at his family for using the internet while he wanted to use it.
This might all sound insane, and that’s because it fucking was. It was absolutely insane. I didn’t believe my father would get to many of the points that he did, just over not being able to play a video game. He had literally nothing else he could do? Nothing else he wanted to do? Nothing? There was nothing he could try to solve the issue that wouldn’t involve yelling or screaming? It seemed like that was the case in his mind, and everyone else had to deal with it. Even when confronting him about his yelling in the modern day over something like this, he brushed it off, he still did not care. There were some moments where I thought karma might exist, although I don’t think that way now, but there was one day where he ran upstairs to yell, unplug the modem, and whatever, and then he later hurt his knee, and he lost the ability to run up and down the stairs like that again, but while he was injured, it meant he was home all the time, so he would still complain but didn’t have that same level of authority, until more things changed of course, but you get the picture of how he acted.
While I want to keep this pretty linear, from beginning to end, young to old, there were some moments that I don’t think would make sense mentioning later, but make sense because I’ve already mentioned some of my father’s antics here. As I got older, he still acted this way, and eventually our relationship became pretty minimal. His interactions towards me usually were purely based around the internet, no longer did he ask about me or how I was feeling, to which I would have to lie anyway, but now instead, he would ask if I were using the internet, or if I could do something about the internet for him, or if I could tell the other family members to stop using the internet, and so on. There was another important moment, while I was at work, mind you this many years after what I’ve talked about thus far, and we’ll get back to that, but I get text messages from him. About what? Yes, the internet, what else? However, a few days after those texts I found out that he and my sibling had fought, and in their fight, he attempted to choke them out, but nothing has come of this, even now, so I don’t even know what actually happened, but if that’s not fucking insane to you, I don’t know what is. Just so he could play a fucking video game. Anyway… I was getting into the reality that even at 16, I didn’t want to be at home, so I’d tell myself I should work so I didn’t have to be there.
If I couldn’t properly escape at home, why bother being there? Why not just work and get away from that place? I would expend all my energy trying to disassociate from myself at work, then I would go home to sleep, and if it wasn’t work, I would disassociate while at school, to go home and sleep.
This was my life for years. Even without the job, I would be disassociating at school, to come home and sleep or do something like watch something or play a singleplayer game. It was awful. No one should have to disassociate for that long. But I did. The damage it did I am still uncovering from, I have lost years of my youth that I can never get back, and I can be upset that this is the case, but I understand I felt like I had no other choice, I really felt like that’s what I had to do, and I don’t blame myself, I can still feel that pain, I know how it feels to want to disassociate and get away from yourself like that. When the pain of your reality is so severe that you will do anything and everything to just make it through the day. This is the danger of drugs, because they will help you make it through the day, and instead of solving the core issues that need to be resolved, instead of working on the issues that cause you to feel like you need to disassociate, they solve it for you, temporarily, at a cost.
There were other characters that played an important factor in how I would develop into an adult.
There were other online connections along the road, and there ends up being another significant one at around 16 years old. This person I met through another friend of mine, and we sort of, connected, awfully quickly, and things were okay for a while. As you might expect from the trend of people I was associating with online, yes, things turned sexual, at this age though, I was making the choice, and I was aware of the choice I was making, it’s just unfortunately, due the past experiences, I didn’t realize it was abnormal to act in such a way. To just send sexual videos and pictures to someone you hadn’t known for very long, that’s not normal, but it was my normal, and that was the problem. However, the other party was deeply content with this, and we did have good and real conversation, the sexual content and chatter was never the forefront of the relationship, and I say relationship as in friendship, because things never turned romantic between this person and I.
This person was significant to my development because of the things that were brought up in conversation, and the things that this person brought up were important. This person often talked of drugs. There was a definite variety in the drugs that this person would chatter on about, and almost all of them I had never heard of before being introduced to them in these conversations. This piqued my interest, I was now learning about things I had never of before, and this person described their life as a lonely one, and I was lonely too, so it probably wouldn’t be so far off that we would end up doing the same things to cope, right? Their cope being drugs, it probably wouldn’t be all that unsurprising if I were to follow in their footsteps, right? Well, if that’s where your mind was going, you’re right, to a very limited extent.
However, before going any deeper into the nuances of that, I’d like to quickly mention what was also happening while I was connected to this person. I was still going through school, and it was miserable, I was miserable, every single day was awful. I really would have to disassociate day-in-day-out and then do a small cope when home, and then sleep, to repeat it all over again. Life really was miserable. There were small wins here and there, and I don’t remember what they were, but I know I would have had to received some good days otherwise I wouldn’t be here, now.
When I was around 17, I did have a VR headset, using money I got from working that awful job, and that was a fine cope, once and a while, but there were certain times when I would or wouldn’t use it. I mentioned the poor internet because there were times it was okay and usable, but they were rare, but in those rare moments, I liked to get on things like VRChat. It was a good escape sometimes, sometimes it would work. Not all the connections on there lasted, some might have, but others died off quickly, and I would come and go. At one point I was really into it, and I bought old gear, and I had full-body—and then not even so long after that, I wouldn’t want all that, and eventually I sold all the VR stuff. Was that a regrettable decision? Kind of. I did enjoy VR, but I just, had very little room, and I felt like I should get rid of things. That it would be better to have the money, I thought. That type of thought would come and go often, and it was a weird cycle I had, and it is also worth mentioning because it was a showcase of where my mind was and where it would go at this age and a little older.
I would have this weird cycle where I would try to sell as much as I could and to minimize things as much as possible. I felt like I had to do this, because it would mean I could leave at any time, or so I thought. I would have things I liked, like VR, but go and sell them, because I felt like I wouldn’t be able to keep them. These periods of time would be the peaks of when I would think about running away. Sometimes I would go through and sell as much as I could, and have things all minimal, but at other times, I would have all the things packaged and ready to sell, on something like eBay, but never go through selling them. I would literally open them back up and put things back to how they were. I actually received comments from my parents, especially my mother, on this thing that I would do. Comments about how I was getting ready to move out, and so on, which were funny, that she would say things like that, as if in acknowledgement that was something I really wanted, and I really wanted to get away, but I couldn’t get away, no matter how much I wanted to, she must have genuinely believed I would never able to leave, or never go that far.
It goes to show how badly I wanted to leave. I would go to bed, be in bed, thinking about how I wanted to run away, how badly I needed to get as far away as possible. I would be in bed fantasizing about going on the Appalachian trail, and somehow, at some point, I would be where I needed to be, I would be free from the grasp of these people, and they could no longer have influence over me, and I could be me, and I could finally be okay. At other times, I would think about going on a hike of death. Instead of reaching a destination, I would think about going on and on until I collapsed of exhaustion, from a lack of food, or water, or maybe actively committing suicide at one point or another. That seemed appealing to me, that would be something I fantasized about, and I thought about it often. These thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone. I had to get away, I had to get away at any cost.
It never happened; fantasies are fantasies after all. I would never be able to do something like that, and I never did. What would keep me in check? I would say fear, and also a loss of comfort, because I didn’t really want to do something like that. I just wanted to feel okay. I just wanted to feel safe. I just wanted to be okay with being me, but that was something inaccessible to me, I thought I would be unable to obtain something like that, it would always be continually outside of my grasp. This also plays into the idea that I hoped that there would be some destination for me.
I know I talked to a lot of older men online, and especially the one I had a long-lasting relationship with, because I thought they could somehow save me from my situation. As if they could take me out of that household, as if they could help me be okay, as if they could provide me with an environment that would make me okay, but it never happened. I was too foolish to see that it would never come. Although that’s what I wanted. I always just wanted someone to save me, and when I was younger, before I became an adult, there really was no way that I could save myself. I had to rely on someone else to save me, but that never happened. There was no one to save me. I had to accept this, and I did begin to accept this as I aged. There would be no one to get me out of the environment I was living in, there was never going to be an individual, or even group of individuals for that matter, that could bring me to a place of safety. I would have to do it myself, and that was hard to accept, because it would mean I would have to wait until I could make that a reality, and even then, there would be many hoops before that would even happen. On top of that, when things actually started rolling, it wasn’t really done fully on my own, but that’s even further on in the story.
In school, it was about the middle of senior year, and I was officially an adult, 18 years old, but it didn’t mean much. I wasn’t working. I was just going to school, coming home, and rinsing and repeating the same old processes that I had been doing for the past few years, if I could even do that. It was so hard, but I think that by reaching legal adulthood, I had gained the belief and the idea that I would now begin having a chance. I was getting so very close to that freedom I desired. Being free from something like school would help me. It would be a huge burden off of my shoulders. The thought of just, simply, being able to sleep enough… it was such a beautiful thought, a beautiful idea. I wanted it so badly. In only a few months, I would graduate, and it really would be over, but until then, I still had to stick through it, and there were many things still weighing me down at school, but I think the thought of having a chance, having made it this far, that I really could make something happen, that I really could have a chance at a life that wasn’t total misery, that I should stick around even for that possibility. I had promised one of the aforementioned people, the online-relationship person, that if I were to make it to 18, I no longer would commit suicide, and so far, I have held onto that promise. Was it the right promise to make? Sometimes, I’m not really sure, sometimes, I really get stuck into these ideas that it would have been better for me to have committed suicide at 13 or 14, but that never happened, and I’m not 13 or 14 anymore.
With this promise in mind, when actually becoming 18, things were looking okay. I think this was because of a mix of my ability to tolerate everything I had been tolerating for years, so I had become so good at building up mental defenses that, while I was numb, the external world couldn’t hurt me, and so I could keep on functioning. Beyond having such strong mental defenses from all the things trying to pry and pick away at me, I also saw glimpses of hope. Becoming an adult at this time didn’t really mean anything, but what it meant outside of this was what gave me hope. To have a possibility of gaining control over my life was my hope, to have some independence was my hope, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there, and I didn’t know if I could get there, and it would take a lot of bargaining with myself along with finding new people and new ways of thinking before actually making it a reality.
Until then, I would have to continue coping, like I had been for the last few years. It’s just that the form of the coping had now changed. I went from watching anime, or shows, or whatever, with playing video games, sometimes, to reading and writing, but bits and pieces of those other things remained, of course. I was still not ready to spend all day reading, or all-day writing, but to be reading at all was such a huge upgrade from where I was mentally before. I literally felt a mental uplift as a result from reading, and although my writing was, absolutely awful, the fact that I was doing that at all was great, and I still view it that way. To do something is far much better than doing nothing, and for the most part, I’d consider brainless consumption similar to doing “nothing” and I would never want to go back to that, the thought of it physically hurts me.
These were good signs, to actually go on doing things that weren’t totally brainless, to go ahead and try to make things, even if just foolishly throwing some ideas in a document, I’d take it, it still would be better than whatever the hell nightmare had come before it. Not to say I wasn’t still in the nightmare, but nightmares are a gradient; they aren’t all equally horrifying.
I would go on through the rest of high school using books as a cope in addition to whatever else. I would have to read something, anything, instead of playing a game on my phone or texting someone in class when I had free-time. Senior year allowed for a lot of free-time, and this was good in a sense, because it let me ease up, read, and get lost more easily in a different world than the one that was most definitely the external one I had no other choice but to experience. It also made me feel awful, if I thought about it, because here I was, spending hours upon hours in a place doing, well, things that had nothing to do with the establishment itself. So why the hell was I here? Legislation would be the most correct answer, I guess, but it was hurting me on so many levels to have to deal with that, still, and the thought of doing anything more, of my free will, college I mean, wouldn’t be something considerable.
Senior year of high school meant that the students had begun to become more mature, they weren’t nearly as irritable as the beginning, and I could tolerate them much more easily, and arguably, I could now tolerate myself more easily as well. Unfortunately, there was one class, and in this class, the students seemingly never matured, they stayed immature for the entirety of the class, and it did a number on my mind. It was amusing, it was as if the friend group that I was able to distance myself from that was present in middle school was thrown into this particular class and then pulled up to their most extremes, in the worst ways. Hateful, annoying, parroting whatever information they had been fed to believe, and loud.
In all these awful experiences of being around with people I didn’t like, they didn’t know me, and you might have begun to understand that in order to get by, I would have had to use a mask. A mask was used, at all times, and this was incredibly tiring, but it helped me understand people better, and maybe it even helped me understand myself better. I could put a mask on, put on a show for these people, and they loved it, they ate it up, and they had zero idea that I was putting on a show for them. It was only when I had the especially bad days, the days where I was so depressed I couldn’t even put a little mental energy together to put on a mask, even for a little while, was when they saw glimpses of my true nature, which at this time, was dark, brooding, and miserable.
This probably had helped me in life, being able to put on a mask, because I had to continue using a mask, or I believed I did, for some time, and it still wore me down. I always used a mask at home, there was no exception to this, but there were times where at my workplace after high school where I would slip off the mask, due to fatigue or a strong enough emotion, and that was surprising to some people, and others found it amusing. Now, I try to be wise with my ability to use masks. I don’t want to expend the energy to put on a mask, to put on a show, but I will do so if I believe if it makes sense. If I want a personal connection with someone, I don’t put on a mask, or I don’t do it intentionally, because I can recall times where it happened, and it didn’t turn out great. In other situations, like in a job interview, obviously I’m wearing a mask, I want both of us to believe I’m the best fit.
All this time using masks may have worn me down then, but when being myself now, I’d like to believe that it has now helped me understand how I can make others aware of certain parts of me, while less aware of other parts of me. This is for good, or so I’d like to think, and so I can portray and believe in the good parts of me, and let those be the focus, instead of all the bad parts.
Back to the years of high school, there were some other people online that had made an impact then and made an impact even after school was over. Aside from the one person I had online dated, the long-term one, there was another person that was talking to me at about 16, although they say 15, but we’ve had some distance from each other, here and there. I believe I have changed significantly, while they have not changed as much, and the change they have experienced has been negative, rather than positive. I would consider this person significant to my development, but the most significant traits and qualities that they had that had an impact on me would only come at a later date. Anyway, they were someone I would spend a lot of talking to when in school and outside of school. Aside from doing the easiest possible things, like watching a show or playing a video game, I also would talk to people, a lot of random men online on Discord, and yes, it was more often than not a bad thing. I was always texting, because there wasn’t a chance I was going to voice chat at home, because I had one traumatizing, or borderline traumatizing event, so I wanted to avoid it if I could.
I was healing, slowly, but surely, but there are limits to healing if you don’t take care of the wound itself. You can put band aids on your wounds, but it doesn’t matter if you never cleaned up the wounds, or if they’re so deep and damaging that they require stitches; the band aids won’t help with these types of wounds. Although, yes, at this time, a band-aid was a huge upgrade from literally nothing, from just ignoring the wounds, and pretending like they weren’t there, as if that would actually make them disappear. Finally, I did make it out of high school, and that was one less thing wearing me down, but instead of being at school, I was now at home all the time. I knew this wouldn’t work, and I had to do something, but I didn’t know how to make it work while keeping my misery down to a minimum.
I was looking for work even before school ended, because I wanted to go to work as soon as possible, and I was pretty content with everything other than completely hands-on work. Funnily enough, that’s what I got, but it was unskilled labor. Not only was it unskilled labor, it was also at night, so I was working a total and complete night-shift, but at the very least, the hours were always consistent, which were not my expectation despite it being a retail position. The store was closed at night, but as you probably guessed, you opened boxes and put product on a shelf, for hours, pulled the product forward, and then you went home. You were tired, and you slept to your alarm, to do the same thing again.
Obviously, this work wore me down heavily. At first, it wasn’t terrible, because like when I was 16, I was making money, and I was happy about this. Now, I was making even more money, because I was making more per the hour and I was also working more, 40 hours a week, and sometimes 48, on other days, 50, and that type of money was kind of a big deal for someone at that age. This also meant the things I did, well, straight up decreased. I just was not doing things at all, the only thing I did was work, and that was about it, that was my life, but it beat being at an institution where I gained nothing, and it only took from me, and it beat being at home, where about every 30 minutes I was thinking about either ending my life or fantasizing about the impossible.
The night-shift hours were also nice. Not because I wanted to work night-shift, but instead, because I was avoiding my family, all the time, and at worst I’d only have to see them a little bit, and I loved that. That was the “big benefit” to those hours, along with making a little more money. I would come home to sleep, sorry, can’t interact, I’m tired from my physically laborious job! And they would leave me alone, it would work, at least most of the time it would work. On the days I wouldn’t work, which was usually one or two days of the week, those days weren’t weekends, so even on the weekends, when my dad would be home, I wouldn’t see him, because I’d be too busy working. Once and a while I would have a weekend off, but even then, at this time, I could hide away in my room, it was normalized, and so I could continue doing that. Funnily enough, it was joked that I hid in my room, I guess it didn’t occur to my parents that I would want to do that because I didn’t like the world outside of it, huh?
The reality though; it began to weigh down on me quickly. Listening to music or podcasts and eventually audio-books helped me power through these long nights, and it made them seem not nearly as long. Doing physical labor also made time move faster, or so it felt that way. Before I knew it, I was there for months. Months of the same repetitive work, and I would continue this, until… when? When would I stop, when would I have enough money? I didn’t actively spend it all, I saved a lot, and because of that saving, I was able to do what I wanted only some months later. It didn’t make sense to buy goods when you didn’t have time, and if I did have time, I wouldn’t have the money to spend on the goods, so when I was working a lot, it was obviously pointless to buy things if I couldn’t use them. There were a handful of purchases that I think were worthwhile, like I eventually bought a VR headset, that I still use to this day, I bought an e-reader that worked better than a kindle, more functionality and whatever, and later on, I eventually bought a guitar, and that was a pretty important purchase.
Days and days of working, for the hope that at some point, after enough working, I’ll be able to leave, I’ll be able to get out, if only I worked enough, if only I could make more, if only I had something. Believe it or not, even the dumbest people get tired of this type of work, or I’d like to believe they do. It was physically and mentally painful, and somehow some of these people I worked with had been doing it for years, or decades, which put me into shock and awe. I don’t know how someone could do that to themselves, and I knew I couldn’t, so I would have to figure something out.
Due to being in a rural area, I would have to get my own vehicle if I wanted more independence and control, but I never bought one. I used one of my parent’s vehicles until the end, which ended up being the right choice in the end. It meant I could avoid spending all that money on the vehicle itself, and all the money spent monthly on insurance, for some amount of limited control, but back then, I was considering it. Obtaining a night-shift position was another means to avoiding this issue, because using the vehicle at these times would never cause any issues, and I obviously had no where to go, and if I did, my parents knew exactly where I was going, with whom, when, and sometimes they needed to know why.
So sure, in my mind, considering my options, I could get my own vehicle, then pay for that, and I was just supposed to work five to six nights a week, and eventually after enough of this, maybe a year or a little more, I could get some shitty apartment and continue working at this job, and that would somehow make me happy? No, that wasn’t going to work. If that wasn’t going to work, I was going to have to find an alternative, but my mind was not ready for the alternatives quite yet. This only meant I felt even more stuck in this world, I didn’t have the same opportunities as others, being able to go to school somewhere and get away from home, while being educated to have their cozy position at a large corporation, nor was I even sure that was wanted, if even I could have that.
In my mind, I wanted all things to be perfect. I wanted to appeal to my parents, have them view me in a certain way, and avoid their judgement, and I obviously, like anyone else, wanted approval from them. Unfortunately, this was impossible, and it would take nearly a year for me to realize this, but in that year, I think I grew significantly, and in this growth, I was finally able to put some of my feelings into actions.
Within this timeframe of a year, I experimented, I wanted to see if I could do things, if I could make things happen, and in this experimentation, I learned many good and bad things about myself, some of them I was able to accept, while others I could not, like the judgement I was placing on myself and others. I went to school for a semester, and it was completely online, because I was still working while going to school. I had decreased my hours from 40 or more to a consistent 24, which ended up being 3 days of the week, but I still maintained those night owl hours, and that meant I could still avoid my family. It worked, sometimes they would question why I would have these hours, and they were initially upset at the fact I was decreasing my hours, but eventually they were less upset, or really just able to cope, over the reality that I would not be interacting with them more than the bare minimum.
The school sucked, I had declared a major, Information Technology, because I have always had a past of enjoying technology, but these were mostly introduction classes, along with other mandatory classes, and I did fine in them, but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed them. I found them, for the most part, awfully boring, and I really could not care about the content withheld in them. If I couldn’t care, then this wasn’t going to last long term. What would keep me going to do well? The fact that I had spent my own money on the classes, obviously. It was, and probably still is, so expensive to get higher education, and I was not receiving support from my parents in this regard, although I did get some money from my job, which was nice.
I still wasn’t the machine that I am today, but I was getting closer to that. It’s not like the content within the classes pushed me mentally, but they were able to intrude on my own personal time, and I wanted to minimize that, and at one point, I was able to somehow cram all that work into one day, so I could have the other three days to myself. Even three days of work was wearing me down, and I’d have three days of free-time, if I was able to cram all the school work in one day. It was tiring, so tiring, and I still wasn’t getting what I needed.
Was I really supposed to believe that I could go on doing this for 2 more years, until I get an associate’s degree, and then, with that, I can finally get a job that will pay me enough to survive, and survive just enough that I’m still spending all my time at work, but the work is just barely fine enough for me to tolerate? Isn’t that absolutely absurd? How could anyone think that would work? After years of having mental defenses, exerting all my energy to barely make it by just to function, and I was going to go on doing this? It also seemed to me that things hadn’t really changed, I just changed the forms of the things to be suitable to the new environments, because I no longer had high school, but work was like high school, and I could ignore a lot of the home life, but I still had to be there, at least some of the time. I was still tired, but once switching to a lower-hour work week, I had enough energy on some days to do things, and that led me down some paths which I still follow today.
I was reading and writing, not as much as I would if I had more time and energy, but even during the months where I was working full-time hours or more, on my lunch break and small breaks, I would be reading. I would read as much as I could until it was over and I had to go back to work. There were ups-and-downs, there always are in all periods of life, but the ups were higher than I was used to, but the downs, they were getting only lower, to stay in equilibrium with the good, I suppose.
I was playing a lot of VRChat during this time too, a lot, relative to the amount I had when I was working often and less often. The internet wasn’t too awful when it was night time, which is to be expected, and I talked to a lot of people, a variety of individuals, and spent a good amount of time connecting with the people I was already friends with that also played VRChat. I made a friend on VRChat and he ended up dating a friend I introduced to him. I find it a little wild, they connected pretty quickly, and it feels weird to be responsible for such a thing, to be the middle man for a connection like that, and I was still not obtaining any connections like that for myself. Being online at night meant that I could be a little freer with my speech, and I could say more, but I was still fearful of being heard, if only by my mother, for her to know any true aspects of me would destroy the mask I had spent so much time and energy working on.
I still tried to talk to people online, it was my only means of connecting with people, and there are two more individuals that were significant to my development, and the impact from the interactions I’ve had from both of them and the actions caused by such interactions has led me to a lot of my modern ways of thinking and acting. They’ve both impacted me in very different ways, and I’d like to go through each one and the impacts they had on me, and what that led to and how that changed me.
The person that I spoke of, when we started talking when I was 15 or 16, was an important character. There was some conversation that was to be expected, much of what I’ve mentioned, again, the sexual conversation, pictures, videos, that type of thing was exchanged. There wasn’t nearly as large of an age gap as many others I had interacted with, but we continued to interact. Both of us were emotionally unstable, so there were times where we would remove each other, do account deleting bullshit, and sometimes just go absolutely insane. My insanity, while I don’t believe it to come from mental illness, has been limited to what I decide to put myself through, and so it has been less of a problem in the modern day. However, on their side, the insanity only increased as time went on, not only being of mental illness, but because of drug use. The drug use and talk of drugs was probably the most significant aspect of this person and it had the largest impact on me, aside from me sending explicit videos, which I’m certain has done me no good.
This person was my introduction to drugs, and I would want to say that this person never wanted me to do drugs. It was more-so due to my own intrigue and eventual asking of particular substances to try that led me to getting a taste. The most significant, in my humble opinion anyway, was LSD, and it impacted me in some terrible ways, but I also believe that it was a reminder of what I was doing, and what I was doing probably wasn’t the right thing to do be doing, for me, at least at that time, and I would say, I also still do not want to experience that or anything like that again, right now. If I had never connected with this person, I don’t believe I would have tried a substance like LSD at such an early age, early in my opinion anyway, being 18, but I would also like to note that it is also heavily dependent on your own mind and emotional stability whether or not you’ll be fine. Believe it or not, I was not in a position to be doing psychedelics, but did them I did, and harm did they cause.
It didn’t immediately start out with pain, surprisingly. I started with low dosages and then relatively quickly, built myself up. I didn’t really know what to expect, but many of the times I had done the low dosages, I had a lot of fun. Supposedly at my age, the other person also did LSD, but they weren’t seeking anything out of it, or I don’t believe they were, if I were to trust my memory. Instead, it was purely for fun, and that meant it was pretty safe, and there could be opportunity for life-changing experiences to sneak themselves in. They were interested in sex, or whatever, on psychedelics, and after my experiences, I don’t really understand that. The last thing I felt when on psychedelics, on any dosage, was any amount of sexual desire. I mention this because I had expectation that would be retained, but it wasn’t, ever, and so what I did was shifted, because if I could have done anything like that, I might have.
I spent many trips in VR, and yes, you guessed it, VRChat. There were varying levels of impact, dependent on mostly dosage, but also the environment I was in. On the lower doses, I could get away with being in the crazier environments, like the Great Pug, but even then, I would have enough, and it was just too much to take in. It would be too much, but then I’d eventually be moved to a new environment, by my own will or someone else’s, and then that would continue on until I was done with the night. Being in VR for nine or ten hours, or even more than that, is just, absolute insanity, and my perception of time was blasted.
On these lower dosages, nothing really changed for me internally, things didn’t change, and as a result, I started boosting up the dosage. At some point, I couldn’t play around or have fun, that just wasn’t an option anymore. Instead, I’d sit down and listen to music and meditate, and there was absolutely nothing I was capable of doing other than those things. At times, this was okay, just sitting and letting it happen, but the times it wasn’t painful were when I wasn’t asking anything out of the drug, when I started asking for things, when I started taking it when I was depressed or wanted change, then it began to hurt me, and increasing the dosage at the same time only increased the negative impact it had. There were probably three trips that I could remember having a lot of impact on me, and I think it’s best to go through them, one by one, from least to greatest, and break down the impacts that they had.
The one of least impact actually came after the one of most impact. I don’t know what I was thinking after going through that, but I had too strong of associations between the pain I felt and the alteration of perception that I was experiencing with the drug. Would you guess that I was in VRChat for this? Yep, same deal, but eventually I couldn’t do it anymore, I started staring at the sun in one world, unable to do anything other than roleplay as a flower, and then I just took the headset off. I was pretty upset at myself for letting this happen again, thinking that I would somehow obtain something out of it, that I would be fine, as if I hadn’t learned my lesson, so I had to be put through the ringer again, but at least to a lesser extent. I tried writing while in this state of agony, and it did not work. I simply told a message to myself, and left it at that. I told myself I was enough, and that I shouldn’t hate myself. For the rest of the night, I talked people on discord, especially one in particular, and they were very content with my brain vomit, and I also was watching videos on YouTube. I actually watched a lot of, if not all of, exurb1a’s content, and it gave me a sense of comfort. I was happy to have any comfort while in that state, so I listened to his stories, and while I don’t think I would listen to a lot of them now, I know if I ever need them, they’re there for me. The Answer is Not a Hut in the Woods has been a go-to for me, before and after this experience, and if I ever need it again, I know it’ll be there for me, it has brought me to tears, with or without substances in my body. After enough videos, chatting, and some music, the trip was over, and I lived, although I was uncertain if that’s what I wanted.
The second most impactful one was before the worst one, and I thought this would be the last time, the final, the ending, and I would do this no longer, I would no longer try to reach for things that have always been available to me if I wanted to get to them. I was in VRChat the entirety of the trip, and God damn, that was a mistake. It was just uncomfortable, but I only realized the severity of the discomfort as the trip was ending, because my forehead was pleasantly upset, and the dosage was high enough for me to forget about things like physical pain temporarily. At first, I was able to chat here and here, but that ended, and I was put into a meditative state, but now in VR, and I had one friend with me for the whole time. We listened to some music, he had some choices, and I had some choices, but it was difficult to say that I wanted something, and it was hard for me to really do anything other than sit on the floor and be in my head. I’m very appreciative of that fact he stuck around until I left, and that meant a lot to me then, and means a lot to me now, I think at some point I started thinking of him, as something, I wouldn’t say my father, but maybe what a father should be. I don’t know if I learned much about me, but I think sifting through whatever memories came to me then might have helped, it allowed things to surface, be released, and then move on from them. It might have been a mental cleanse too, just an awfully harsh mentally cleanse. Imagine taking a very hot shower, like yeah, you’re clean, but damn it fucking hurt. There was another guy that showed up, and was totally oblivious to how I could have been feeling, but he must have noticed I was in a vulnerable state, in my speech, maybe he was told what was going on with further detail—I don’t really know exactly what was going on in his mind, if anything. I would sift in and out of this weird clarity, and I would say things that didn’t make sense in this clarity, words were still awfully hard to use, but words are the core of my foundation, so I’m not totally surprised I could speak or communicate in some of these moments. However, the build-up is that I said something about being a dam, and wanting to be used like one, and the guy that joined said a follow-up comment on that, I can’t even remember what, but when thinking of that moment, I feel oddly uncomfortable, and the friend that sat with me the whole night had responded to his inquiry with “no.” And that gave me a sense of security. This moment still has an impact on me, even if slight, because it plays in my inability to give into a place of vulnerability. Otherwise, the trip was, like said, sifting through memories, and it ended, and I dealt with the reality that it wasn’t the life-altering trip that I wanted it to be, which was idiotic to expect.
The most impactful one came in-between the other two. I did not get into VRChat this time around, I honestly didn’t think I was capable. I sat in my computer chair, and when that wasn’t working, I sat on the floor. I then sat on the floor, for hours, thinking, sometimes not thinking, sometimes just, well, it’s hard to say. I listened to music, and it had a strong emotional impact on me, more than anything I’ve had before. I had been introduced to Nine Inch Nails not too long before then, and I really enjoyed the work Trent had created, and I especially loved, and I still do love, The Fragile. At first, I had my eyes open, and I was listening through his most popular albums. I was staring at the wall, I could see the wall from under my desk, because of where I was sitting on the floor. The fact that I was staring at my wall, the fact I was in my room, and that’s all I’ve ever been, or so it felt, made me feel terrible. I felt like I was trapped in a prison, and I really couldn’t get out, no matter how hard I tried. I was reminded of the things that have followed me for a long time, I visually saw clocks and the number 54. Eventually mental barriers were destroyed, and the emotionality that had been suppressed day after day came out of me, and it hurt like hell. I cried the hardest in my life, even to this day, and I don’t know if I’ll ever cry like that again. Aside from the crying, I was also felt like I was really losing my mind, far more than I had ever lost it before on psychedelics. I thought Trent was speaking to me, to me in specific, reaching out to me to get me out of this simulation, because in this state I believed we were in a simulation for some reason, and that he could somehow get me out. This was absurd, but I was totally buying into it while in this state. It was starting to feel really agonizing, and I was starting feel really painful, and then I started feeling nauseous, and I really thought I could control it, but I couldn’t. Anyone rational, and even in this state I was rational enough to make this decision, to run to the bathroom to the vomit. However, I didn’t want to, I was too scared to. Due to the structure of the house, the bathroom was right next to my parent’s bedroom, and the walls were thin, and my mom was sleeping, or I assumed to be sleeping, and I thought the sound of me puking would wake her, and then I would have to explain things, but I definitely wasn’t in a state to, and I was scared of this interaction, and all the things that would come thereafter.
Well, I was going to puke, and I couldn’t avoid it, so I did, right on my floor. The only thoughts that floated to my head were, “so this is what love is,” and “this is what love feels like.” It was, well, horrific, traumatizing, and I never want to experience that again. Thankfully I don’t have to, but the trip went on for many more hours, and in that time, I wished for death. I asked God to kill me, and if that wouldn’t happen, I wouldn’t believe in God, because surely God would have some mercy on me in this moment. I listened to music, a lot of The Fragile on repeat, and after enough mental stretching and abuse, I fell asleep, only for a few hours, to wake up to my reality.
Another significant moment during that trip, I wrote a lot to myself. I must have had a brief moment of clarity, towards the end, and in that, I wrote many things to myself, and I made it known to myself that things had to change. I had to change my environment, and if I never did change my environment, things would never get better, I would never feel better, and eventually I would really hurt myself, and I really would kill myself. Because of the pain I endured, because of the things I could not ignore, I now realized that there was no getting around what I had to do, and I was capable of doing it, and it was up to me do it, because now I had the ability to do so, I now had a lot more control than I did previously.
However, even after this realization, even after going through all this pain, even after days of feeling like I was dying, feeling like I was totally and utterly alone, feeling like nothing had ever changed, and I really couldn’t go on living. Things didn’t change overnight, and I was still going through feelings of vulnerability for a while. What I would identify that feeling of vulnerability would be a return back to only a few years prior. There’s one quote from Beauty and Sadness that I thought I really identified with, and described very well what I felt like during the trip and a few days after. "Had Otoko not wanted to create a pure, lovely image of herself? Apparently the girl of sixteen who loved Oki would always exist within her, never to grow up. Yet she had been unaware of it..." Although for me it had not been a 16-year-old still living inside of me, for me, it would be a 13- or 14-year-old living inside of me. I still feel this way these days, like that person is still living inside of me, this immature part of me that had never grown up, while another part of me had to grow up, and that ended up being the face that others would see, but it was just a face, not indicative of reality, not really who I was, and it would only be through more time and pain that I would begin to allow that person to assimilate into my whole person.
I eventually built up my defenses again. It took some time, but I remember the immediate three days after I was in an especially vulnerable and fearful state. I remember many moments where I had the thought of hugging my mother, but knowing that it didn’t actually mean anything. That the connection I wanted wasn’t actually there, the love I wanted wasn’t actually there, and I had to accept this. It hurt, an unbelievable amount. I just wanted a hug, that’s all I wanted, that’s all I needed, and there was no one there to give me a hug, there was no one to love me, there was no one there to make me feel safe. I just wanted to feel safe, and since I couldn’t be safe without my mental walls, I had to return back to normal. I began to normalize back to where it would be expected for me to be. I would go on doing the same things, repetitively, and not change things, even though I was very much aware that things had to change, but I would not go through with what needed to be done for months, and although there were good days, most were awful.
Many of these moments I would consider traumatizing, but they were important for my development, and they forced me to face my reality, to face all the things I was unwilling to face, to accept the reality that was staring at me in my face. Unfortunately, it would not be enough. What would it take, then?
I mentioned that were two people that made large impacts on me, and I think it’s fair enough to talk about the other person now. Unlike many of the other characters I’ve mentioned, this one was a relatively recent encounter in comparison, and we started talking when I started the overnight-box-torture-facility job. I was aware of them, and they were aware of me, but there was no friendship present up until that point, I don’t know what it took to begin the friendship, what changed in either of us, but whatever it was, I’m thankful for it, because I believe this to be my most important friendship of recent times, and I think it has given me a positive light as to what a friendship could be, unlike all the previous significant one’s where I’m either being abused, abusing, or some other variation of a shared hurt.
At first, we were just text chatting here and there, but at some point, we starting voice chatting everyday before bed, and it became a ritual for some time. It was nice having someone to speak to after a day of miserable work that you didn’t care for. Day-by-day we grew closer, and it was nice being able to talk a little more openly with someone, as before that time, I didn’t have that. Most people I had that were friends I either didn’t feel like I could trust them all that much or there was so much baggage I had to go through mentally to decide whether or not I could try talking about something. However, that wasn’t the case here. While I like the idea of searching for others, deliberately putting in time into finding people that think like me, putting energy into helping others like me, this connection just came about. It wasn’t like I was looking for a connection at this time, but it happened, it just happened, some might think of this as fate, or just the natural flow of things, but I’m really unsure if I could put a label on it.
This person introduced me into many things that I had never known before, and other the things I did know of, but could grow a greater appreciation for. None of my friends at that time were introducing me to new things, and the very small minority of the time when I would be introduced to something new to me, it wouldn’t be something I liked. This person introduced me to one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, and that alone is something that I’m thankful for. It seems his work isn’t for everyone, as I tried getting someone to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and they didn’t enjoy it, but perhaps I just chose the wrong novel for them to read. My introduction to Murakami was Colorless Tsukuru and his Years of Pilgrimage. I think I could have chosen any novel and enjoyed it, but maybe this was the right one to tick all the boxes in order for me to enjoy the other novels, but I can’t say anything for sure.
It’s not like we had a shared interest for reading, it was mostly me who enjoyed reading, and I could poke them to read, but it didn’t mean it led to anything. However, just because there wasn’t a shared interest in a topic didn’t mean there couldn’t be a shared interest in the future. After some time, I don’t really know how long, we came to an agreement, a pact if you will, and in this exchange, it brought me the introduction of guitar, which was something I had thought about but never really thought I’d execute. Honestly, even today, I can’t really play, I mean I can, but not really. Despite this, it was nice to learn about it, understand it, and spend time with it. I still do, and it has given me something, otherwise I would have stopped.
We talked, and I talked to my other friends as well, and things were pretty much maintaining the same way. Eventually, after growing close enough, I talked about my personal life, my home life, how I didn’t like how things were, how I hated my job, how I hated my life, and I had moments of emotional instability due to all of these things, along with all the baggage from the past of my life. This brought upon further chats and calls on the fact that things needed to change, and things could change, and I’d have to be the one to make it happen. I was so locked down into my old ways of thinking, just like I was when I was child, thinking I couldn’t help myself, but I actually could help myself, things had changed, I wasn’t a 14-year-old being groomed online anymore, I had financial power and could leave if I wanted to. Even after all these chats and calls, it would not be enough to convince me then. It would take many more months until I finally had the solidity and the opportunity to make things change.
The things that I would spend my time doing would be mostly of what has been described previously. I would be reading, writing, guitar, VRChat, sometimes a video game, probably Team Fortress, and chatting. Those were the things I did, that I could chose to do. I did one semester of college, it sucked, but it is what it is. Time moved quickly, the days went by like hours, and I felt like I was never catching up with myself, like I was only getting farther and farther behind from me, but I didn’t know what that even meant, I just felt like I was falling, but there was no end, I would just keep falling until I died, I would never hit the ground.
There were moments where I felt like I really had to make something happen, but I had to remove the mental barriers that were stopping me from doing that. To get there would mean that I would have to try things that sounded undesirable, I would ask of things that you shouldn’t ask of, and I’ve described already how awful many of those experiences were. Eventually through, there must had been a mental breakthrough, will all those experiences, the talking and conversation of my life, the need to change, something was ticking, and I had to make it happen, or else I really wouldn’t make it.
Even after years of suicidal thoughts, I never committed suicide, and it kind of makes sense, at a certain point, if you keep having the thoughts and haven’t tried to kill yourself, then you probably won’t try at all. In my mind, I wouldn’t attempt suicide, I would commit suicide, I wouldn’t play games with myself, if I was going to do it, I had to make sure I was actually dead. The means to killing yourself when you’re younger are a little more difficult, especially if I didn’t have money nor access to obtain tools to kill myself in the first place. Most ways of suicide that were available to me would be awful, long, painful, deaths, and that was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to be out of pain, not to experience a peak of pain before my, unfortunately, long-drawn out death.
However, things did change when I had the ability to buy things, when I had a job, and when I was an adult. I had access to buy whatever I wanted, to an extent, and my mail was never opened, so I could buy things that could make me want to change my life or end it. Eventually I bought enough depressants to commit suicide with, and I really thought it was going to happen. Either things had to change, I had to break through, or I really was going to kill myself, and that would be the end of my life. I can see the split in the timeline, I know if I hadn’t done the things I’ve done now I actually would have killed myself, it really would have been over.
However, you and I are not in that timeline, and I have lived. There was one night in particular where I really felt like I was going to end it all, but that night, I didn’t have the means, and that was the night when I decided I would obtain the means. If I felt like that again, it would happen, and I would be free from my misery, the misery from the past, the misery in the present, and all the misery I would experience in the future. Obviously, I have not felt like that again, and I’m very thankful for that, and I hope it doesn’t sneak up on me again, because if it does, things really will end, and that would be my life. That seems awfully sad to me, to have lived such a short life, even as things stand right now, and if I didn’t get away, that would’ve been even more sad. It would have been like I was never given a chance, but thankfully, I have been given a chance, and I’m trying to make the most out of it.
I don’t even remember the day, or the month, or how long ago this was offered to me, but the friend that I had grown close to offered me an opportunity. This opportunity would mean I could, well, essentially run away from home, but also have the means to sleep somewhere, have a bed, a blanket, you know the deal, and I could finally get away from the things that were, well, for lack of a better way to put it, torturing me.
Initially, I didn’t agree, out of fear, but after some time, I realized that I wouldn’t have a chance like this again, and really, I had to take advantage of it, because something like that would never happen again, not even a chance. I did some basic preparations. I got myself set-up to leave, and then I left. Of course, there’s more to that, and the emotional strain of doing something like this—I can’t put it into words. Imagine doing a series of things you have never done before, going to places you’ve never been to before, and trusting, when you haven’t trusted for a very long time. Despite this strain, I made it through, and I’ll walkthrough all the things that happened, although many aren’t interesting, it does work towards bringing us into the present day.
At my job, there was someone that played an important role, and he gave me something—just something to make me feel a little less alone. There was immaturity, silliness, sometimes an attitude, but he had more of a brain than the other people I had to work with, and that was something really nice, something I could appreciate. We connected a little, despite the enormous age gap, and at some point, I would have to ask him for a favor. Since I was going to be travelling by plane, something I had never done before, I had to go to the airport, and I had to get there somehow. I thought I’d ask him, otherwise I’d just use Uber, something I had never done at that time, but there was a particular fear with Uber in my mind. I just didn’t want there to be any possibility of, well, interaction before I essentially snuck out the door. My father would be sleeping, but I had no idea where my mother would be. I was too fearful of confrontation, the thought of it really scared me, I was horrified of the idea that I would have to explain that I wanted to get as far away as possible from my torturers, and they wouldn’t never understand, and they would yell at me, and they would try to manipulate me into staying, and I couldn’t do that, I wasn’t strong enough to put up with that.
Anyway, he agreed, and I still was fearful despite this. Things did work out though, with some communication, he somehow didn’t alarm my mother, who was obsessive over any vehicles entering our driveway, even if she knew there going to be one. I guess she wasn’t paying attention, or the timing was just right, and she had no idea he had showed up. Ideally, I would have preferred for him to have stayed at the bottom of the driveway, but that didn’t happen, and it seemed like fate was going to be kind to me. It’s funny thinking about the small actions, the actions I committed on the external world, that were so difficult to do then. To open my door. To leave the house. To get into his car. It was absolutely insane that something like that would be so difficult to do, just some actions, basic ones, and they felt like they took everything out of me, but I had everything to give, and so all I gave it all, and it was enough.
He drove me to the airport, and we didn’t really talk much, I wouldn’t say the mood was somber, but it was a little awkward, and he knew I was experiencing anxiety, but what could he do? He didn’t know the nuances of my life, and even during this drive, he still wouldn’t have had the time to hear about everything I’ve described here, not that I would have been able to describe it all to him anyway, because I was still bottling up much of it, holding it up, keeping my defenses up, because I still had to function that way for a little longer. Eventually though, we made it there, he dropped me off, we said our farewells, and so the next few hours would feel awfully long however awfully short, a weird contradiction but I can’t describe it any other way. It was probably due to the sleep deprivation and the anxiety; it created a weird mix.
I was in the airport, but I had no idea where I was going, well, I knew where I had to go but I still was confused and still lost. Thinking ahead, I was prepared for something like this, so I was there very early, and after asking for help because I really was still unsure, I made it to where I needed to be, and things were fine. I waited around, went through security, waited some more, got on a plane, and left for a couple hours. It was, well, all very new, and all very scary, but it all very well had to be done. From there, I used public transportation for literally the first time in my life, and finally after some help and walking, I made it to my destination.
Some time has passed, and I think I’ve gone through a lot healing, but some things are definitely not fully healed. I have brief moments where I feel the same way as I did in many previous years, and I feel like that person, that child, that teenager, and I can’t get away from it. Yes, I know, that person is me, and I can’t get away from myself, but I want to, because it hurts. It hurts to still feel the pain of that person. Even if most days are okay, when sifting through all the memories, all the experiences, I really wish I could have done something better for this person. I wish someone could have done something better for this person. However, that never happened, and will not happen, and all I can do is what I’m doing now: trying. All I can do is try, try and do what I can, with the time I do have left, because I couldn’t end my time then, and it I cannot end my time now, I don’t know why, but here I am, still, after it all.
Much of which I’ve described is over now, and I’ve changed, and the world has changed, but there are times when the feelings come back. I could be minding my own business, but I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or a few small things knock me off balance, or a few things add up to make me emotionally unstable, and I’m feeling similar to these old times. Things have been good for the most part, but it will creep up on me, when I’m doing fine, when I feel like I’m finally getting lost in something, when I feel some real determination, it will blow out like a candle, and I will lose it, and I will have to wait for things to be okay again. It’s not fair, it’s obviously not fair, but there’s only so much I can do about it. I have formed some coping mechanisms to try and make it through these dark days, but I still fall back to many of the old methods, where I just try to sleep to get away from the pain, because I’m not feeling the same if I’m asleep. If I’m asleep, I’m as good as dead, and only God knows how much I’ve asked for that.
There are other copes too, but there is always trying to work through the feelings, just like now. I didn’t just write all this for the sake of writing, but also to identify all these things as parts of me, to acknowledge them, and to be okay with them, to be okay with me for acting in these ways. Those times are over, and sometimes I will mentally return back to a state where I don’t believe it’s over, and I believe it’s the same as it always has been, but it isn’t, because things really over now. Things really are changed now. I don’t know how long it will take for that to be drilled into my mind, but once it is, I really do think I’ll begin healing a lot faster, and I think that the healing will be long-lasting, long-term, and I won’t unconsciously fall back into these old feelings. I think I’ll be able to tap into them, I think in a year from now I’ll be able to read all this and know exactly what was going through my head as I was writing it, and I will be able to go back even further and feel all the things I was feeling when I was even younger. Some things will take a lot more time to pass than others, though.
In going through and feeling these parts of myself that I wish to ignore, the parts I want to suppress, the parts I want hide, I might get closer to feeling more okay. I don’t know how many people have had experiences like I’ve described, I don’t know how many people have felt the pain I’ve felt. I really have no idea, and I have no idea what more pain would feel like, or what less pain would feel like. I know there has to be, if only a few, that have gone through things similar to myself. I don’t know to what extent, and I don’t know if they’ve made it out okay, or if they ended their lives, or if they hide away, but I hope that all those who have felt this way or still do, will be okay, at one point or another. That’s all I could ask for. That’s all I could really want.