As promised:

I can’t say that I was ever a really happy child. As I was always shy, and my parents were always willing to put me out in the open and trying to push me to be independent. I loved not having to do anything but what I wanted, my early years of going to soccer sucked, and I hated it. Gymnastics and dance were great, except for the recitals, never liked those, something about getting up and showing off never really appealed to me. In fact, as a competative gymnast, I was always focused on the scores from the previous meet and trying to out-score myself.

Anyway, back on subject. There was a certain shitty chain of events that happened when I was 8, that was set-off by my older should-have-been-my-brother person. He was walking with a group of friends to one of their houses, on the usual dark farm route roads when he was hit by a car speeding down the road. He lingered on for days till he passed over in front of my eyes. He flat-lined as one of the adults took me to stand outside of his room (was under 13 and not a family member, so I couldn’t go in). Out of everyone in my life, who claimed to understand the spirit in me, he was the one who really did. I pretty much died that day, and with him went my carefree smile.

Fast-forward to next in the chain, in the middle of 5th grade, my parents decided they wanted to move to Texas. I had no choice but to go, and my brother got to stay with his friends up in Illinois. Did not make for a happy freak, in fact, that was the event that alienated me from my parents. It wasn’t just that they moved me away from the support group I really needed, but they also decided that I had to move back a grade – in the middle of the year. I forgave my mum for that when I graduated university in 3 years. IMO, I had made up for her mistake.

In the next couple of years, I spent my time trying to kill myself. The only good thing in my life was gymnastics, and that wasn’t reason enough to remain here. Didn’t have many friends, and the ones that I did were just as petty as the ones I couldn’t stand. My dad and my brother kept finding me first, so they’d be the ones to cart me off to the hospital before my mum found out. After a while, I just got tired. Seriously, if you suck so much that you can’t manage to successfully kill yourself, without taking people with you, you might as well suffer for being an idiot. Instead of fighting with myself, it was fighting with my family. My dad’s theory was, if he bugged me enough and baited my anger, I’d gain a tolerance. Didn’t work, least not towards him. It only resulted in getting scared shitless when I took a pair of scissors to his throat and realized that I was capable of killing someone. That thought alone was what saved him, least on my side. Seeing that side of me was a shocker, and knowing that I could get that angry was even more of a nightmare.

Then, I found a good shrink and agreed to therapy. Didn’t help much, but it got me through my last year of h.s. without blowing up my parent’s house. It also helped that I got a boyfriend, and was someone who was just as hooked on me, as I was on him. He also provided a way out, back to Illinois. I got accepted, against my parents wishes, to Illinois State University, so off I went, at the beginning of summer. It was the best thing for me, as far as my family life went. But that’s also when the beatings started, and the ugly head of possession reared itself. I quit gymnastics that year, too. My focus wasn’t there and I couldn’t break the psyche boundaries from a few accidents I’d had leading up to this point. I was also tired from life, to that point. I was sick of school, but it was my only way out.

The first year of university, I met one person that I became friends with. I was his psych experiment and paper topic. He found it interesting how someone could have an emotional and physically abusive background, and still enjoy rough. physical sex. It was a coping mechanism, for me, but he helped me start cracking out of the shell that my boyfriend had gotten me holed away in. That all changed when I met JD, Susan and Travis. Those were the 3 that really got me to open up, show me what love isn’t. Buck was the one that got my head open to the oddness of Druidism, that somehow fit what I grew up with. I started working with various groups on campus, started a pagan organization, joined the hockey team, and boy did the boyfriend start to get pissed. Then, the “affair” started…

Boyfriend was already nonetohappy with my friendship with JD, as we often curled up next to each other in bed, and just settled in and shared our souls. Susan wasn’t a threat, but that’s because she was obviously female. Curling up with her didn’t threaten boyfriend’s masculinity, despite the fact that he and I agreed to have a semi-open relationship. He failed to tell me it was only on his side, because the minute I slept with another guy I was going to be out the door. Found that out after I met Travis. Boyfriend tolerated our friendship for a while, then Travis and I got emotionally and physically involved. It hurt to leave him when I moved to GA, but it was where I was going. Boyfriend said shit to Travis and made him feel like shit, despite the fact I knew how much he was hurting, because I was hurting too.

Got to GA, and the night I arrived was the first time someone tried to purposefully break one of my bones and crush my throat. That was also the night I knew that regardless how much I loved my boyfriend, we weren’t ready to get married. In the next two weeks I ended the engagement, but we continued living together. My impression was that we were trying to repair our relationship, apparently that was a joke, because I was always the “roommate”. So I took my cue and started telling people I was single. Boyfriend got pissed, but hey, can’t have it both ways, now can we? Made a few friends, as we tried to work things out, but the death came when I went out to meet scourge for the first time. That was the point boyfriend decided that I no longer loved him, so he would never love me. It was the night I met most of the people who are closest to me now.

Fast-forward through a year of suffering at trying to be the girlfriend I was expected to be, making myself miserable, becoming borderline anorexic, and ending with being choked and a few other bones trying to be broken. I decided it was time for me to leave, so I started looking for my own apartment. Boyfriend made finding an apartment easy, but didn’t make moving out easy.

My parents and I had spent much phone time, and sparse vacation time mending our relationships, boyfriend was doing everything in his power to reverse that. He wanted me to hate my parents, and he wanted them to hate me. So when they came to move me out, he yelled and screamed because my parents drove over there and just took stuff. My mum left crying, having seen the filth I lived in, which was worse because I wasn’t there to clean it up before we cleared out.

But even in my new apartment, boyfriend haunted me. I had my gypsy friend come visit me at one point, boyfriend kept coming over and trying to get me to go somewhere with him. Gypsy got pissed and kicked boyfriend out, because he was at my house, therefore it was his time with me. That was about the time I stopped having anything to do with boyfriend. Got a job at Turner and started talking more to Big Cat, and going to visit him (yes, I’m purposefully leaving out the Clueless Wonder, as he contributed nothing to me). Out of everyone, Big Cat was the best thing for me, showed me how to communicate again, made me feel beautiful and appreciated. He brought a bit of the smile back.

And that is how I got to where this journal begins. I will say that my smile is coming back, I have lots of people in my life who love me the way I am, and let me express who that person is. Honestly, the timeline here is over a decade long, and as I’m almost 28, and just now starting to rediscover what life is, it’s been almost 20 years since I really, and truly lived life, and appreciated everything that I have and what has made me.

I don’t regret the lessons that came during that time, though learning how to deal with my internal anger issues is not easy. I’m still learning, and they’re still quite powerful, enough to consume me on an infrequent basis. But they also feed the passion inside of me, I recognize that everything I feel is what moves me.

I had the option, at one point, to deal with my low crests of depression with drugs. I opted not to, because I wanted to know that the feelings I had were real, and not something cooked up by some outside chemical. I hate the lows, but the suicide thoughts aren’t that strong anymore. They peak out from time to time, but they know their place. They are the reminders that I have a choice, live or die. I’ve already spent time in hell, which is a walking death, empty shell of existence, not a state of afterlife. It’s also why I’m pro-choice when it comes to death. Sometimes, life is more of a hell than actual death. I’m not going to deny someone that relief. But that’s getting off-topic and into politics of belief.

So there you have it.

12 comments

  1. Smiles & Stuff

    I feel like I am reading my own journal. Except instead of my brother dying it was my mother’s boyfriend trying to fuck me and calling me a lesbian when I resisted. And I think I moved a few more times. But, yeah… Good to know some of us survived. Being strangled by guys is never fun, either. Especially when they propose to you ten minutes later in a desperate attempt to get you back; or maybe to stop you from getting out of the car and running to the poilice that pulled into the parking lot while it was happening… It was definitely time for that situation to change. I am suprised you stuck around as long as you did. And I am glad things changed.

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    1. Re: Smiles & Stuff

      It was actually my brother’s best friend who passed, but he was like my older brother. 🙂 Sorry about what happened to you, and yes, we have survived.

      As for strangling, I got the “you know, your lips turning blue turned me on.” Fucker.

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      1. Turning Blue

        That’s really fucked up about the turning blue thing, and I am sorry stuff like this has to happen to anyone. I wasted a lot of time feeling shitty about what happened, but things did turn around. Every time. So I am at the point where I kind of just learned to take things as they come. I get a lot of support from my ma. We kind of worked through it.

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      2. Re: Turning Blue

        Yeah, I’m also very observant about some things now and making sure I pay attention to things I should. I spent all of that relationship with the “I need to leave this guy” in the back of my head, but didn’t listen to it because he was my ticket out of my situation.

        Neither of my parents know the extent of this, haven’t been able to tell them because I know how it’ll make them feel.

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      3. Tickets

        As long as you have your own means of travel now. Signs are there for us to see, but we don’t always. Thank goodness we have the ability to learn though.

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  2. Seriously, if you suck so much that you can’t manage to successfully kill yourself,

    I have seen this theme crop up on several occasions, and it’s always stood out to me somehow, despite never having been suicidal. There’s a (wonderful) fantasy book in which one of the major players is of a culture that commits suicide when they fuck up, and a “failed suicide” is among the lowest of the low; this is a huge part of the drives and motivations of the character.

    My last significant ex also told me once that, after attempting suicide by cutting himself, his boss at the time saw the scars and said something scathing to him about not having the courage to go through with it. It had happened several years earlier, but it still affected him to that day.

    I think it’s a severely overlooked psychological aspect of suicide that sits heavily on the soul even when one is no longer suicidal.

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    1. Eh, I wouldn’t know, honestly. The stigma is horrible, but there are tons of reasons why a suicide fails, not always because someone is too “wuss” to finish the job. I have slashes on my wrist where I did, my failure there was the fact that I’m left dominant and I slit my left wrist because I use my knives with my right hand. God bless the right-handed world for making that one happen. The rest of them were the fact that I was never left in the house long enough for anything to really happen. Little did I know my brother and dad had me on suicide watch, whether they knew it or not.

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  3. I’m glad you made it through.

    Someone told me one time that before we’re born we make a choice: have a lousy childhood, followed by a wonderful adulthood, or a wonderful childhood, followed by a lousy adulthood.

    Here’s to your future wonderful adulthood 😉

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      1. What if your childhood was near lousy? will I have a near wonderful adulthood? 🙂

        I can’t say that I’ve experienced the same things, because, luckily, my life hasn’t had a lot of violoence in it. But there was a lot of lonliness and feeling unwanted which has driven me to the brink of suicide, which is something that I still have to try to cope with sometimes. It makes me glad to know that that all the BS of childhood can be put behind you, and relationships with family members can be mended.

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      2. My opinion, life is what you make of it. If you’re determined to be miserable, that is what you will get. If you are determined to be blessed with absolute happiness, you will be. 😉

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  4. *hugs* As I said on my piddly journal, I’m extremely glad to know and have known you for the short (compared to others who know you) time I have. You’re a beautiful person, and not just on the outside. Yes, sappy-me but its true. You kick ass.

    OT: Fuzzy/Mara/Selchie! Why haven’t you talked to me? Pfft! Hrmph. You all suck.

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