long read warning. There's a lot of shit that led to this night, and it was 2 decades coming.

Context (Skip if you want, essentially life was messed up and I was messed up from it): I have lived most of my life with CPTSD, Higher Functioning Autism, Inattentive ADHD and Tourettes (Tics like repeating shit under my breath, facial tics, making clicks and sounds with my mouth etc.). On top of that, I have also lived with loud tinnitus since I can remember, I don't know how I got and neither does anyone else in my family.

I also have Exploding Head Syndrome. "WTF is that?", you may ask. When I'm in bed at night and I'm really stressed about something, right before I go to sleep, I will see a flash of light and hear a loud auditory hallucination. It can sound like an explosion, a thunderclap, a door slamming really loud, it's different every time. It has something to do with signals misfiring in the brain stem, similar to when you get that falling sensation. For me however, instead of the falling sensation, my brain feels like it's just exploded. It sounds really fucking loud too.

Lastly, this all stems from genetics and a traumatic life raised in a cult by a con artist of mother, a strained relationship with my abusive father in order to have a relationship with my brother who lived with him. He struggled on and off with drugs for years, a lot of it re-triggered in the past by my mother deciding to financially ruin him and leave him with her almost having sole custody of both my brother and I. The only reason that didn't happen is that my father almost killed my mother in front of my brother and I when I was 8 and he was 6. This was well away from her lawyers so she agreed to shared custody.

And in the JW cult, I was unfortunately SA'd during my childhood. Not to mention the bullying from being a weird JW kid. I didn't really start making friends until the last few years of high school. So needless to say, my brain became a maze of repressed emotions. I needed to mentally protect my brother by hiding a lot of fearful emotions from him around that age. My parents were going through an ugly divorce and we were only ever used as bargaining chips.

Actual story: I was 18, and was having to live with my father. My mother had decided to move overseas to marry a rich man, and gave me 5 weeks to decide if I wanted to come with her or not. I chose to stay to be near my brother, and so she left to, "...live with my new family". I was hurt, but as throughout my life, I cried for an hour in total privacy, swallowed the emotions and then numbed myself to it.

Being a JW teenager, I started to question what I was forcibly raised in. "If this place was the true religion, how could Jehovah do this to me? I have done nothing to ever deserve this. And then the realisation of everything I didn't stand up against because I thought I was doing the right thing genuinely killed a part of my soul.

2 years of drugs, partying and hanging out with my father's criminal side of the family. He was a reformed addict who joined the cult where he met my mother. During the divorce, he fell hard again, but slowly climbed his way out of it. We were slowly building a relationship but I was still dealing with the fact that I wasn't dealing with any of my own pain.

One fateful night however saw me watch my entire life crumble. I was 20 at the time, almost heading on 21. I was at a house party with a few friends from college. To say I could knock them back when I was that young is an understatement. I pre-gamed by finishing a 750ml bottle of Smirnoff Red, half the bottle with half & half ratio mixers, the rest I just did in shots. At the party, I was drinking half & half Jack and Cokes. It got into a couple of hours or so into the party, I start to realise that I don't feel drunk. I was acting like a complete douche-bag however, and I was realising that I couldn't really control my actions.

I practically skull 2 more cans of JD, continue to get worse, and It's really starting to feel like I have no control over my actions. Friends try to calm me down and sit me down. I fall into a lawn chair and bust through the material. The centre of my spine lands on an exposed bolt in the chair frame, and suddenly I feel a bolt of lightning up and down my back. I then lose complete control of myself. I feel myself pushed into the back of my own mind, seeing the next moments unfold from behind my right eye. I can't move or scream, I am now cut off from all of my motor functions.

What takes over my body is pure rage unleashed. I see my body get up, run out to the front of the house, punch the door of my friend's car so hard that it ends up being concave. My body then sprints at full speed down around 20 meters or so, and kicks another cars backdoor so hard that the window cracks. My friends are trying to catch up to me, but my unconscious just start sprinting down a steep hill street for about 200m and somehow not tripping over. My body reaches the bottom of the hill and starts rocking a 6 meter fence line back and forth, so much that according to the police report, the posts were almost completely out of the ground.

I have no idea where this strength is coming from, but I'm just forcibly watching in horror constantly thinking, "Please stop please stop please stop...". More sprinting down another steep street, and my body finally stops and drops to its knees under a street light. Finally my unconscious says something, "WHHHHHYYYYY? WHY DID YOU LEAVE MEEEEEEE!? I DID EVERYTHING FOR YOU, I LOVE YOU AND YOU COULDN'T LOVE MEEEEEEE. WHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!" The screams and yells are so loud they can be heard throughout 5 streets. We turn around and see my mates finally catching up. We start running again, but my friend is able to grab me. He has to let go because my body is still uncontrollable and I start to run off again. I need this to stop, and so I start clawing my way back to the surface. My body finally stops and drops to the ground and I'm not back.

I weep in my friends arms, still shaken and in shock. We all take the long walk back to the party, and the owner's of the house, the parents of the host who I barely knew has called the cops. Totally understandable would be the understatement of the century. I'm taken to the police car after being questioned and I'm taken to the station. The officer driving goes through every single thing I was being charged for. He explains that people described me as appearing to be on bath salts. At the station, my fingerprints are taken, I'm tested for drugs, but obviously show up clear as I was only on the booze that night. Interestingly enough, I showed up as almost zero on the alcoholic breathalyser test.

After the mugshots, I'm taken to a holding cell and just sit there with the reality of whatever just happened. A week later, I was disfellowshipped from a cult a had no love for, and kicked out of home due to the rules ,y father had to follow. 2 weeks later, he calls me and tells me the JW's can get fucked, and so we start talking again.

Not the craziest thing that's ever happened to me, just the most terrifying thing.

I am 32 now, have spent so many years healing and reconnecting with myself. The one thing that has always got me through everything is the fact that I have been through shit worse than death, so what else is there to be afraid of?