Post
by Satchel » Tue Dec 29, 2015 12:02 am
This is gonna be a VERY long post i guess.. i NEVER wrote down my entire story, nor did i tell it in that way in such complete manner to anyone ... anonymity ftw!
One thing before all else: i will write alot about my parents and how they failed .. that does not mean that i dont love them! They tried, most of the time they did the best they could. If it wasn't for the odd combination of things coming together everything might have turned out completely different .. but thats just not how it was.
My parents came from another part of the country to where i was born and grew up, and as i was raised in a rural area, that actually mattered as it made me an outsider from beginning on. My parents didn't speak the local dialect, so i didn't grow up with it either. But before that became important i had a little accident at 2 1/2 years, pulling a big cup of boiling water off a table (was to be made to tea), causing 2nd degree burns on right arm and the right half of my chest and belly; later it was said the removal of the scab on the arm caused the heavy scaring which did not happen on the belly as the scab just fell off easy there and didn't get removed under tears daily. The scars on the (thankfully only inside) arm are very visible until today... though, that was never a big issue, at least not compared to what was about to still come. Oh, and if not enough, i always had a fear of hights .. someone once said it could have to do with beeing flown in a military heli under shock and heavy meds to the nearest emergency childrens hospital, but thats just a guess.
As said, i grew up in a rural area, actually a village that was over-aged as they say .. very few kids in the neighbourhood, not many friends to make before school. In school i was the outsider from beginning on, not speaking the local dialect at all. The classes bully, the most likely tallest 6 year old you have ever seen, ever since targeted me, and with the help of, sometimes changing, friends he made my life not as pleasant as it could have been. I still had friends, not many but i had them, and i wasnt even feeling like too much pressured. My parents did their best i guess, keeping me happy and helping me out .. but the bullying would show long term effects.
If that wasn't bad, the asthma was a problem (so were the allergys but to a lesser degree), not only beeing the outsider but also having something that prevented me from participating in a lot of sport activities in and out of school .. hell. Not like i was only sitting at home, i was known in the whole village to ride around on my bike .. for hours on, i knew every single corner, every ditch, buckle and sneaky way .. and the asthma wasn't the biggest issue as i could do everything on my own pace! Still, i wasn't the most sportive in the end, beeing in the end the asthmatic, slightly chubby outsider kid.
To the 7th grade i switched school, no one i knew was on that school .. and a stupid idea got hold of me. Though the bullying wasn't the worst thing in the world, i just wanted it to stop nevertheless .. and in the 6 prior years i learned enough of the local dialect to convince everyone i was from that area .. so i started speaking ONLY dialect .. which made school more difficult, till then i was a good pupil (no teachers pet or so, but not often i would hesitate to rise my hand to give an answer), but especially at the new school, as it was a higher grade education, it was more focus from the teachers to get pupils to not use dialect as much .. giving me the conflict of not wanting to "blow my cover" and speak without dialect. So i ended up not speaking at all to teachers pretty much .. which led to a decline in my grades and had me go from a pretty good pupil to a way below average one. This, loosing contact to most of my friends and not having as much time anymore made me spend less time on my bike .. and getting somehow from just a bit chubby (but active) to overweight! And it's about to get worse with the next point.
That said next point were unfortunately my parents. I wasn't lazy or so, i just had my few friends, my bike (though less and less), the PC of my dad (that one more and more), so many ways to spend hours on hours without learning or doing homework.. and once my parents' relation got worse (my dad beeing a stubborn dickhead at times, my mom a depressed housewife who got into painkillers and alc), they didn't check on me doing my homework or learning. At first i liked that kind of more freedom, but it came at a price, loud yelling arguments between my parents, sending my younger sister and me out of the friggin house if it got too bad, which it got on a regular basis... the feeling of divorce hang in the air, but not before destiny struck again.
It could be a bad joke, but it wasn't. Cherry picking in the summer at my grandparents place, they had a metal workshop and big gardens, lots of trees of different fruit .. and the cherries where to be picked. My grand-dad was saving money whenever possible, so it seemed normal that this 30+years old wooden ladder that had seen better days, provisionally 'fixed' but still looking not too trustworthy was the way to go high up and pick cherries.
As mentioned, i always had a fear of hights .. even as far up as that ladder at 2+ meters was just too much, so i said i won't get on the ladder when i was told to pick the cherries.. my dad got up and did it instead.. i sneaked off into the metal workshop, very thick walled building that was much cooler than that very hot summer day outside, to play around a bit .. when i heard the scream that would follow me for years. My dad fell of the ladder when it broke nearly in two parts, hit the trunk of some shrubbery they just removed. Flown off to hospital with helicopter, 1 bone of the backbone partially fractured, thankfully no direct injury of the spine so no paralysis.. but ever since heavy pain, not able to lift heavy weights (bad for someone working in metal crafts) and always in danger of ending up finally breaking that spine from a unlucky fall or too heavy lift. Ever since i got feelings of guilt, i should have been on this ladder. Of course everyone assures me that no one, not even or especially not my dad would have wanted ME to fall down there instead of him .. but it has little effect on that feelings.
With my dad for month in hospital and rehab, my mother prepared to move out, preparing divorce. She planned to take my sis and me with her, and she asked us, but we hear only her and didn't tell our dad as she wanted, so when the day came and my dad was back home and i felt i had to reveal (mom and sis out of house at this time) he said he might move back to the other part of the country he was from if we all left .. together with feelings of guilt i HAD to change my mind and i stayed with him so he stayed around and the family didnt get torn apart .. worst.descision.of.my.life. Don't get me wrong, i love my dad, he tried hard to get back on his feet after that accident, even still trying to start his own business .. but he just failed at this, and as much at helping me in many of my problems too.
My mom wasn't too happy to hear i wouldn't move with her, she had all things organized and that meant trouble with the social office that helped her pay the rent and so on. But despite moving to a city 30 km away so i couldn't just visit them easily, she disappeared from my radar completely .. even my sister, and she was the one LIVING with her said, at times she saw our mom once or twice a week. She had found a friend fast, and the alc was just doing the rest .. for nearly a year or so i have seen my mom less then 2 or 3 times and just didn't have a chance to reach her otherwise.
Dad was trying to build his business.. working from sometimes 7 am to 6 pm, so he came home, cooked dinner and we watched a bit TV and that was it .. i got worse and worse in school, but he clouldnt help me, and whenever he did i didn't understand him (until today i think he is just one of the worst persons to explain anything unfortuantely) .. which then led to us two arguing .. the 14 year old, just getting right into puberty, getting stressed out by his overworked and stressed dad (who can't explain shit). But hey, it could get worse right? Of course it can .. it did.
Stress at school reached a new level, one teacher who happened to be the 2nd principal and was the most feared teacher in the whole school because of his yelling, his obvious HATE for each and every single pupil, he was just getting too much for me ... and i made the 2nd worse call in my live. I told my dad .. complaining about teachers is not really a thing i guess .. but it comes down on what the teacher actually does, calling you out on your not good homework infront of a class of 30, calling you a lazy shit who couldn't understand the most simple things on earth, adding that back in the good old days ... well, i wont go into too much detail, but the implication was so bad that after not only me and my dad complained but month later a whole other class complained this teacher got prohibited to actually teach .. says enough.
But hey, thats just bad .. not horri.. oh wait, PLOTTWIST: as i said, i told my dad. He was busy. Really, busy. Too busy to drive that 30 km and come to my school to talk to that teacher in person ONCE. But hey ok, thats would be 2-3 hours of his time .. He wrote a letter. Did i say that my grandad was cheap? My dad made me take the letter to school and give it directly to the teacher. You guess what the teacher did .. as he was 2nd prinicpal he was too busy to get the letter when he wasnt in my class so he got it in class .. and i got the answer from him on the spot .. in front of 30 pupils .. the things he said, i whish i died back there, the embarrasement was just too much. And of course my dad wanted to hear how it turned out, so he had to write antoher letter, and things went back and forth, i tried to avoid giving the letters directly to the teacher, but he would get them, take them to class, open them there and give me the answer for my dad there .. in front of 30 giggling asshole classmates. And when i finally got around to somewhat successfully lie to my dad that it was ok, the teacher had a note written on one of the tests i had to bring back signed from my parent (recognition of the grade) .. it started all over again. This all lasted nearly the whole school year.
This was around the time i was having my first severe fears, i had fears because of the complete new school before arleady, but it was just beeing nervous and trying extreme to fit in at the 7th grade.. that 8th grade with this teacher, my parents divorced, my grades falling in a bottomless pit, me gaining weight as nothing else .. it started to be in panic mode every morning, feeling sick, dizzy, nervous, riding the bus the 30 km to the city where the school was, feeling sicker the closer we got, then changing bus in the city to the absolutely overcrowded busses that where so tightly packed you have only seen form japanese subways before .. until today i can't stand beeing touched, hugs, even from relatives, are unpleasant in general.
I was getting more and more silent, i had at times 1-2 friends only, but most times 3-4 .. still, so few, and no one EVER tried to find out what was wrong. My mom tried to get me tutoring so my grades would at least improve a bit.. but she couldnt afford it, neither could my dad .. who was obviously disappointed, yet tried to hide it.
Nights on end i cried myself into sleep, just to see the nightmare repeat itself on the next day.
If i had easy access to a weapon, i would not have seen the end of 10th grade.
I left the school with one of the worst school certificates of this year, just barely not having to repeat the year. I was looking to find apprenticeship the 10th grade and the year after.. i sent dozends of applications, i got 9 or 10 invites .. i was then already a wreck, so anxious and nervous i could barely talk, heavy overweighted.. of course i didnt get any of the apprenticeship. In my country you are screwed if you don't get one of these.
Tried to get a better education.. building up on the grade i had to the level that allows you to get to certain colleges, 2 more years of school. Anxious again.. but no bullying this time, everyone was 16+ .. i was already 18 even. Ended this school with 20, again only a few friends, and again worst possible grades in the end .. but a higher degree at least. Didn't see any chance in going to study in college .. bad grades and i had no clue what to do.
The relation with my dad got more stressed, we were verbaly fighting often.. he said i have ot move out, but it was on good terms, he helped me with everything as much as he could. So i did move out, 600km away to the nations captital .. we have relateives there so i though i am not completely cut off and its the biggest city in the country so even a fail of a person like me would find SOMETHING there ... turned out that it nearly would cost me my life.
Wrote application after application, for apprenticeships and low grade jobs alike, i just wanted to get ONE chance at no matter what .. but at this time i was so deep into depressions, anxieties and overweight, it just didn't happen.
I lived 2 years in this city, i visited my relatives .. which i learned i didn't like as much as i remembered from childhood visits .. and otherwise i stayed at home whenever i could. If it wasn't for the 'voluntary' work at non-profit organizations i HAD to do, like every unemployed receiving benefits in this country has or had to do (voluntary because by law they can not force you, but if you don't that means you deny cooperation and you get sanctioned), where i got to know a handful of people, of which i actually only 1 would call a friend ... without this i wouldn't have had a single social contact besides relatives.
It was around that time that i nearly ended my life.
Late evenings in the subway staitions, i actually can't remember how often exactly, but a couple of times you couldn't count on one hand, i was standing at the platform, close to the tracks .. and it was more than just a thought that it would only need ONE STEP to finally end it all .. it were serious considerations, in a few cases i think i might have done it if i was completely alone on the platform .. which is funny, because it means that social phobia saved my live. That and that i couldn't bear the thought of scaring the subway operator/driver with having happen that to her/him.
Social phobia .. it's the term i learned years later, beeing the anxiousnes i got so used to i saw it as integral part of my beeing, as the one flaw in my person i couldnt pinpoint or get over, the question i had to cry myself to sleep so often when asking myself "what is wrong with me"
Appearantly i didn't kill myself, i still don't know how, but i got all my hopes into one last educational approach to get just somehwere .. i wanted to go to a college. I was the son of a metal worker, i was interested in engineering all my life .. and i had all the prequisites to start studying 'mechanical engineering' ... besides having horrible grades in math, which would show to be futile.
But i was going somewhere, i got out of the city, 'back home' .. not to my dad but into the house of my grandparents, they had transformed a old storage&industrial mill into a number of flats .. i got it cheap for rent, could help my dad in the metal workshop sometimes and watch after my grandparents a bit .. again, a bad plan, but at least a plan.
I got student loans to live off, and it was more then i would have to live from unemployment benefits, i enjoyed studying.. i had a perspective ... for a year or so. My grades in physics where good, top in CAD and plastic geometry, ok-ish in metallurgy but horrible in math and computer siences .. after the 2nd year i had to give up, no student loans without proof you are getting somewhere .. and i didn't get anywhere.
At this time i was so depressed i didn't even think about suicide anymore .. nothing did matter. I spent days and nights online, playing online games, watching all them naughty stuff .. but nothing helped anymore making me feel even slightly better. I was finally dead inside. I reached 195 kg .. when miracle struck for one time: i got a job!
Funny thing, they searched so desperate for ppl that nothing actually mattered .. having a driving license was enough, i was delivering parcels .. with 195 kg weight not an easy task! But my work was highly praised. Though beeing the slowest of all, doing a job that others on that tour i had did earlier in around 8-9 hours daily, i needed sometimes up to 12-14 hours .. but i delivered every parcel (unlike some of my predecessors and other drivers in general) and when it was usual to have customers complain about other drivers every now and then, no one ever complained about me. And i lost weight, i lost 20 kg in 3 month (which is not only positive as it wears you down a lot too)! But it wasn't all good .. how could it have been. They pay was so little it was barely more then unemployment benefits .. and when i got the boss to pay more she just ignored our agreement for the first month. In addition i was getting so exhausted from 12+ hours days that microsleep while driving was not just happening, it was happening on a regular basis, daily. This plus the 'betrayal' in our agreement .. i was done. Of course quitting my first regular job in years wasnt easy .. at least i didn't regret it as much as i feared.
Did it make it easier to find a new job after having one job and at least something to show that i am not just a lazy slob? Nope. Didn't help either that i got to get a forklift-license in a course by the unemployment agency.
That was around the time that i lost my hair. No kidding, late 20's and getting bald .. a trait from my granddad that skipped my dad, early balding .. made the best out of it and shaved my head.
And it was also the time that i found out that fresh shaven head is very sensitive .. especially if you happen to have neurodermatitis, which i didn't know before .. but what came appearant by 2 closely followed heavy skin-infections that nearly spread all over the body.
THIS was what lead to a hospital stay, a very big university hospital with many different parts .. one beeing the psychosomatics .. and the first time someone actually got so interested in my held back, shy and overly stressed by social interaction beeing that i got invited to talk to a psychologist.
The first time ever someone told me that his is not what i have to live with .. that this is something that can be treated, that its not only depression but social anxiety/phobia, not very well known (till today) outside of psychosomatic therapists and psychologists -circles.
From there again it took some time, but i finally got into therapy, and for the first time in many years the horizon wasn't completely blackened. The therapy started 2010 .. slow progress, something that took so many years to build up can't be overcome fast .. in 2012 i got to a stationary clinic stay, treating the social phobia, the depression, and the eating disorder. I even nearly fell in love with another patient .. she was gorgeous, instead of overeating she was anorexic though .. what a strange picture that must have been, seeing us two stride thought the clinic park. But i didn't dare to confess or anything, just 2 simliar souls with similar problems (though different symptoms in some things, e.g. weight) sharing time and helping each other in a hard time in therapy .. and she had a friend. After the clinic she called me twice .. i didn't dare to pick up or call back ... i just couldn't.
5 weeks that changed so much and yet helped so little .. i was coming back home, into the old problems as ever before. No perspective, my ill dad taking care of his bedridden mother in the same house as i am living in, so he actually moved in too, living in the part of the house my grandparents lived in last .. now that both granparents are gone he lives still there .. and i am again living in the house of my dad. Seeing his struggles, with health, with finances .. and i can't help. I can't help him, i can't help myself.
Looking now to get again into a clinc for stationary treatment for some weeks.. this time ill plan, ill move house as soon as i come out of the clinic .. i need to leave this life behind me, these problems i can not change nor solve, they have held me back so long.
And as Christmas was about to arrive, the depression got so bad again that i was just searching for stuff to keep me busy and not think too much .. and i had to pick out of all things possible Katawa Shoujo! I played 3 storylines in a row (Emi->Hanako->Rin), didnt sleep for over 40 hours then when i finished the last one and continously cried for 2 days after this session (started already IN the session of course) .. i just couldn't handle the feels.
And by now, after finishing all lines i needed to get this all out .. sorry for it beeing SO long, but it had to be.
tl;dr/conclusion
I am a 34 years old depressed social phobic, with 200+ kg heaviliest overweighted, whoms last real sexual activity is more then half my lifetime ago.
My scars are on my soul for the most part, but can be seen on the outside (besides the small burns) by my heavy overweight. I have parents and a sister, i love them all, but i can't trust them enough to talk to them open about everything .. i am lonely, ABSOLUTE lonely. Most of the time i am also alone, but thats not the same as beeing lonely, as i can be in a room full of people, and still i will feel like the lonliest person on the planet. I do not have anyone i trust enough to make my sorrows disappear. Even though i am not looking for someone to use as a dumpster for my sorrows .. i wouldn't, no one want's to be the trash-can for someones fears, depressions, feelings and so on .. but not HAVING anyone i could tell any of the things i can not tell anyone i know ...
I relate so much to Hanako that i nearly lost myself when i played her storyline.
I love Hanako.
I am Hanako.
I'm scared to get close, I hate being alone
I long for that feeling to not feel at all
The higher I get, the lower I'll sink
I can't drown my demons, they know how to swim
