Throw away account.

Notice, there’s stuff about abuse, rape, domestic violence and shit in here, be warned.

So, the decision here is that for the first time ever, I will write about Everything... and I mean Everything In its entirety, I will try and process the first 20 years of my life for the first time ever.

Childhood Chapters.

There's a lot I don't remember about my childhood. What is my earliest memory?

I remember showering in the farmhouse and wiping my hands, but after using the toilet the first time, I realized I didn't have to stand up. I remember living in the Besser block building in the paddock next door to the main farmhouse with the passion fruit vines growing out the front, arguing with my older sister about her repeatedly playing the spice girls. And the time that I snapped her CD. I remember when no one would let me play the games on the PlayStation, so I stole the Mickey Mouse black and white game and ended up snapping it in half.

I was not an easily controlled kid.

I remember that time when we got home to find out my mother had disappeared and run off to get away from our father's abuse. How upset I was to find out that I had been abandoned. How I quickly wrapped my emotions up to hide them behind the anger and hate that would eventually be my primary coping mechanism.

At that time, when I was a kid, living with my grandparents because my violent, angry, abusive druggie father was off nailing our babysitter. I remember the steak knives my nanna and nannu had, with worn wooden handles and two rivets holding them together. I remember holding one to my chest; I couldn't have been more than 7 years old and trying to bypass my inbuilt defense mechanism that knew if I plunged it in, I might die. That self-survival instinct meant to keep me alive, and I, as a child, was already wrestling with it, trying to override it to end the misery. This would later be joked about as the time my siblings remember me sleepwalking and asking for a knife; I don't know if anyone knew what I was trying to do; my siblings, of course, wouldn't have been able to comprehend it, I didn't even fully understand it at the time. If my grandparents knew, they wouldn't have been able to process and deal with the mental issues I was/have been dealing with. I've learned not to blame them, just as people nowadays expect an understanding of people with cognitive problems, I have learned to accept people's ignorance of such things.

I try not to be intolerant or selfish about it all; we lived in a rural town, farming land. Well known for men facing mental issues to go it alone to kill themselves, there's no real support out there. There's no fundamental understanding of what people go through when they can't even voice their issues. Not even in the current age, when we know all these things, can we do much about it all except to have telehealth with its mechanical and less-than-desirable chopping and changing and dealing with a different doctor every time you call a broken system.

My challenge to find normality and equilibrium in my life has resulted in the understanding or belief that there is no such thing. People pretend to be something they're not 100% of the time and preach stuff they don't practice. Ours is a broken society, always has been and always will be. My topmost belief is that everyone lies to themselves and everyone around them. Just a fake society of predominantly narcissistic people only looking after themselves whilst telling everyone they are caring and compassionate. It is a dark belief, but I would be surprised if it's not true. Although it's a herd thing, and most people might be okay, the few make the poor decision, and as such, do the many not bear the responsibility for allowing themselves to follow?

So, to recap my childhood, I grew up in a rural farming area. An abusive, violent father who beat my mother until she left him, abandoning her 4 children. Tried to kill myself when I was bout 7 years old. He was a problematic child prone to acting out.

I remember the first time I was exposed to sex when my older sister climbed into my bed and asked to see my penis, she showed me her vagina, and we tried kissing. It was weird, and I thought it was harmless at the time.

Alright, on to my teenage years?

So, by this point, I had been abandoned by my mother, and my father had started shaking up and had subsequently impregnated our babysitter; they had gotten into a serious relationship. We moved out of our grandparents' house, down to state capital city, and back to small city in north of state. My father sold his farms and returned to working as a boilermaker (Heavy metal fabrication and welding). I am trying to remember the moves and what sparked them. I remember the schools and some of the friends I made, girls I had crushes on, and small things from the time.

In capital city, I had my friend Kyle, and we believed that eating chicken gave us superpowers. There was the beautiful girl I had a crush on, Chole Wren. I can't remember speaking to her much, but I am smitten. I remember my brother and me doing drawings of Dragon Ball Z, our favorite show, every morning and playing with Beyblades. I remember our father cutting out plywood into two swords modeled on the Final Fantasy 7 and 8 games; I think my brother was a buster sword from the Cloud in FF7, and I was Squall's gun blade from FF8. I remember making little dirt tracks in the backyard of our house for bay blades to run through and trying to "train" to become the ultimate Beyblade champion. I remember the evil stepmother making us pick up her cigarette butts from their smoking area. I remember when my father fell asleep while looking after our half-sibling Joseph, a toddler who opened the front door and ran around the block in his nappy. Fortunately, we wound up finding him about half an hour later. I understand the worrying situation nowadays, but it was funny then. At that time, we lived in capital city and were pretty happy. But there were the bad times.

When my father got really angry with my younger sister for some unknown reason. Thinking back, did my little sister have a twin bed? And her own room? My older sister had a single bed, and my brother and I had two single beds and shared a room. Some things don't make sense to me about many things during specific periods of my life. I remember my stepmother leaving for a while and taking her kids with her, my brother and I taking turns sleeping in our father's bedroom. As I try to remember these things, stuff gets darker, and I fear remembering even more. This is something to discuss with a shrink.

After some time and some drama, I remember both my sisters moving to live with my mother. As I think about it there was a time when my brother and I ran away from home, riding our push bikes down the motorway to get to our mother's house, him buying me a 007 collectors tin at the service station when we stopped to get drinks. When I started writing about this, I thought it was a good time; now I realize it wasn't good. I remember the Oscar fishes we had in their massive fish tank. I remember stealing my neighbor's toy BB gun from him and hiding it in the backyard. I remember that there was no real good time throughout my childhood. I remember when my father was angry at my younger sister that one time he blew up and screamed and carried on hitting her; I remember being scared that she was going to be hurt. This was more than the usual punishments he would dish out on us, slapping us and yelling at us until we were curled up in a ball crying; this was a grown man attacking a child.

I can't remember; this was why my sisters went to live with our mother then. Before, my brother and I ran away to stay with them. I don't remember much, but this led to all three of them living with her, my father, and me when we moved to small city. Or did I live with them as well? I am trying to remember that time as well as I should.

I remember living with my younger sister in small city. I would walk home from school with her and do the same with my brother and older sister. We all lived there together. I remember my father beating my older sister to the point that she went to the police about it, and that was another time my sisters went to live with my mother. I remember my father beating the stepmother and me protecting my younger half-siblings in their bunk beds, trying to drown out the noise so that they didn't have to hear the yelling and screaming going on between my father and stepmother.

There was so much violence that it's hard to remember there ever being a genuine reason for it. This is why I care so little about getting attached to things; what does it all matter. I remember my brother getting chicken pox and my father accusing him of smoking drugs.

Somehow, it came to be that just me and my half-siblings lived with my father, while the other three lived in capital city with our mother.

Kay came first in terms of relationships. We dated briefly in year 8; no matter how brief it was, the fact that it drove home reasons to not trust anyone and compounded my earlier issues is enough to make it a sizeable, important event in my life. Within a couple of weeks of initially asking her out and going on a couple of dates to the youth club thing at the nearby church, it quickly became evidence that our cute, childish romance was doomed when she cheated on me. Nowadays, most people wouldn't even think of it as cheating. We were kids, and she kissed another guy… it's not like the end of the world, but we fought each other over it. She tried to deflect blame to make herself feel better; thinking about it now, she probably had low self-esteem and didn't want to deal with me looking badly at her. Regarding its effect on me, I don't blame her in the slightest; at the time, I might have called her names and been upset about it, but it is what it is. That is my own personal issue, increasing the negative emotions I was presented with; I had already been abandoned by one woman, and here was a second that I had a crush on and was thinking we could be a couple (not even knowing what that really meant at the time).

After all that, I remember the time I got put into foster care for a bit, and that's when I met Sarah. I became inseparable and absolutely obsessed with her. She had her problems. She was put into foster care because she was "Dating" her father's friend, a 30-something-year-old man sleeping with a 16-year-old girl, which is not what I would consider dating; she also had her issues with drugs at the time, which is what got the police involved in her life. Turned out that from a young age, she was basically prostituted by her father's friends; she had been fed drugs and alcohol and raped most of her life. She looked after me and was nice to me when I got put into foster care; I was so afraid of Everything when I was there; I was maybe 13 years old at the time.

I was not sexually active at the time, but this was the first time I participated in sex. She came into my bed, and I think because of her upbringing, she thought she had to do it to keep me in her life. And we had sex, or we tried; she sucked my dick and had me use a hairbrush as a sex toy on her and tried to have sex. I didn't understand what we were doing but went along because I loved her. After this, though, eventually, I went back to living with my father. We would see each other at school, and I would skip classes to spend time with her; we had a stormwater drain and a big pipe that was maybe 2m high, and we would walk into it and hang out inside with a camping light and some candles. It was our hideaway.

Eventually, Sarah left the foster home and moved away, I didn't see her for years after that, but we got in contact when we were adults, and she eventually took her own life.

This was also about the time that I remember being introduced to sexual misconduct right in front of me; I had remained acquaintances with Kay; she had begun dating our friend's older brother; she was 20 at the time, and she was 14-15. Basically, he used her for sex and bragged about it right in front of her to us. He would make her take her clothes off in front of us when we were at his house and try to get us to have sex with her as well.

I can't remember much after that, but the result of being in foster care led to regular child protective services visits; I remember being coached on what to say to the court-appointed counsellor by my father and stepmother; it was at this time that things with my stepmother got really abusive. she began locking me out of the house, not giving me dinner, I wasn't allowed to watch tv with her children in the house, constantly being told I was dirty and was only allowed in the house to use the shower, she would pull my hair when I walked past her and threaten me. Looking back at it, there is the potential she wanted me to leave or possibly for me to get my father removed without her or her children having to take the blame. I couldn't have understood it at the time as I was doing what I was told, but looking back now, maybe she expected something of me, and I had failed, so she punished me until I left. If she had wanted to leave my father, she shouldn't have tried to make a 13- 14-year-old kid take the blame.

After that, I moved to live with my mother, I was put back a year in school as I had missed most of the year due to acting out and misbehaving, but I got to live a somewhat normal life for a bit. I needed to be adjusted or understand what was expected of me in this new life. I got suspended from school continually and got into fights.

This new life is where I met Natalie, and this mess of a relationship would take up the next 6-7 years of my life into my early 20s. She was the goth/emo kinda of kid; she moved from New Zealand to live with her mother and stepfather. There was potentially some abuse there that she shared with me once, but it is possible, given my own history, that I might have been reading into it a bit much. The first time I saw her, I was in love with her; she was relaxed and excited. I remember saying she was the shiny new girl; she was intelligent and attractive, with dark red hair and the cutest freckles on her face. I made many, many mistakes during this period of my life. She would bear the brunt of my anxiety, self-doubt, and obsessive tendencies, and my consistent ability to not know whether I was in love with her or if I hated her for not loving me. I was unstable, to say the least; I couldn't believe anything except complete devotion. The worst things I did as 1 15-year-old boy included following her around at school and walking past her house in the middle of the night. not knowing how destructive these behaviours are, I would never repeat them. But as a kid, I never understood; I was driven to be near her. I wanted to spend every waking moment with her. I remember destroying her relationship with a friend of mine... well, I considered him a friend, some friend I turned out to be. by spreading rumours about her and telling people that she was cheating on him.

Sometimes, I hope that she understood that despite my unstable, abusive, manipulative, self-destructive, and creepy behaviour towards her, I did really care about her and didn't know how to deal with my emotions. It doesn't matter, and I know I was in the wrong; I would constantly message her and tell her that I loved her, but then I remember one of the last cringe messages I wrote, accusing her of being like her mother. I knew she had issues with her family, but I was trying to hurt her, and as dumb as it was, the fact that I didn't know much about her family made it even weirder.

The last I heard; she was doing well. I have made a few mistakes there in my grown-up life, but I am dedicating myself to learning to improve myself and build my own life.

May, May was a couple of years younger than me; she is and will always be one of my most significant failures. I could have stopped, and I knew it was going to happen, but she was raped, not violently, but drugged with pot and cough syrup, and then taken advantage of by an older guy we knew. The older guy we looked up to. It was crazy hard to let that one go. It was at a house party, and I had a suspicion that it was going to happen. But I got stoned and drunk and couldn't look after her properly, and I struggled with the self-blame for this one. This is something I've never spoken about with anyone and has massive, complicated personal issues; when I brought it up, people would say I was jealous. This led me to question what I was upset about; sure, I had a crush on her and feelings towards her, but it's not like I ever wanted to do anything like that to her, but I kept quiet about it.

TLDR;

I grew up in a crappy home. Full of domestic violence, abandonment issues, anxiety, and OCD, I moved around a lot. I let a girl I cared about be used for sex by an older brother of a friend, and I failed to protect her. I will always be the bad guy in Natalie's stories of her teenage years and the creepy stalker type. I failed May even though I was not responsible; are we not all responsible for protecting those around us, and I couldn't save Sarah. I couldn't save her, and while it's not my fault, I don't know if I could ever not blame myself for her death.