So this is my story... *EPIC triggers ahead*

[songbirdrosa]

I've been thinking for a while of doing something where I just spill everything and get it all out at once, and I think I'm finally ready. Stuff has just been coming out for the past few days, and I really feel that I need to have this out of my head. I'm not sure how to structure it, so it may be some weird list-based, stream of consciousness hybrid, I don't really know yet. I wasn't certain which category to put it in, since I've copped abuse in all its forms at some point or another so I just decided to leave it in general. Hang in there with me, this is going to take a while.

I'm the youngest and only girl of three siblings. My eldest brother is seven years older than me, my middle brother is four years older. Remember them, they're going to become important later. I don't really remember my childhood very much, but what I do recall was relatively happy, up to the age of about six. After that, I kinda wish I could reach into my brain and remove the neural pathways that store my memories. We'll start our journey with my father.

My dad is a psychopath. He scores 33 out of 40 on the Hare Psychopathy test, and he is one of the larger specters that haunt my mind. I'm not really sure what he was like when I was very young, but as I grew up things went from ok, to bad, to horrific. I think I was around seven or eight when I began to notice that something was really wrong. He got a job in another town and would spend weeks on end away, always promising to come home but rarely returning. His extremely controlling nature came out more as I got older. It started small. He'd tell me off for not hanging out the washing right, for being too emotional, for taking too long to walk my dogs, for playing outside, for whatever he could think of at the time. As I grew up even more and my parents divorced, things got really bad. I lived primarily with my mother, but was required by their custody agreement to spend every second weekend and half of my school holidays with him. I dreaded it. What used to be a reprimand became a full-blown screaming tirade. If he didn't like how I'd washed my hair, he would hold my head under the shower until he thought it was clean enough. If he didn't believe that I'd brushed my teeth, he locked me in the bathroom and refused to let me eat or sleep. If I was being "lazy", he would make me move huge piles of bricks one at a time, or haul fallen tree branches around his 5-acre property. I slept in one morning and he pulled me off my bed, causing me to hit my leg on the side and fracture my kneecap. I was 11 the first time he threatened to kill me. I begged my mother not to make me go there, but as you're about to see, there was complications there too.

I will say going into this, that my mother didn't have the easiest of upbringings. My grandfather is a very harsh man and he belittled and criticised her relentlessly. She had some issues of her own that she still hasn't dealt with, and that's how she fell into my father's trap. She had a lot of stressors that unfortunately ended with me getting left behind. Not only was my father abusive and controlling, but my middle brother has a rare genetic disorder that required constant vigilance and meant that he went to hospital a lot. Since I'm the youngest, from the very first day I wasn't having my caring needs met because she was too busy with my brother (henceforth known as J). When I tried to tell her that I didn't want to go to Dad's anymore, she would tell me that I had to go because that's what their custody agreement was, and that it wasn't really that much time to be spending with him. Her own mental health worsened and with it went her treatment of me. She began to do to me what her father had done to her. Criticising every small thing I did. Telling me to clean the house while she spent hours on the phone to her friends, complaining that I was a horrible daughter who was the source of all her problems. I was lazy and ungrateful. I was rude and nasty. I made excuses and wouldn't do as I was told. I was too fat, pedantic, and sneaky. No matter what I did, it was wrong.

When I was 13, J had a liver transplant that saved his life. My mother spent two months away at the hospital with him, while I lived with my father. And that was when I fell apart. I started crying when they left and my father yelled at me for it. It was the catalyst that finally set the reaction going in my mind. Those two months were horrendous and when it was over, I broke down telling my mother that there was nothing in the world that would make me go back to my father's house. Mercifully, she finally saw my pain and agreed that she wouldn't send me there again. As punishment for my no longer speaking to him, my father killed my dog that I had raised myself from a puppy. True to form, he didn't leave any evidence that could have convicted him. I spent the next three years with absolutely no contact.

But what about my eldest brother? The other one you were supposed to remember? We're going to call him T, and you're about to find out what he did to contribute to this mess. I don't remember when it started. If it's even still in my mind, it's buried deep down somewhere I'm fairly sure I won't find it. And I don't really think I want to. Even so, some of the most vivid, most painful, and most scarring memories I have are of him molesting me. He says that it began when I was around six or seven. He said he did it because he was curious about female bodies since he was just entering puberty, and because he was confused about his own gender identity. I don't believe him. He used me in the worst way you can use a person and took my innocence from me. When I have nightmares, they're about him. I felt guilty about it for the better part of twenty years. I believed that I was as much a part of it as he was. I hid it from everyone because I felt like they would get mad at me for what I thought I'd done. My mother still thinks he's the most damaged, that his childhood was the hardest, like pain is some sort of competition.

I think that's enough for tonight. I'm sure I'll eventually get to Part II: Further Horrible Things that Happened to songbirdrosa When She Became an Adult, but for now my mind is quieted. Hopefully getting this off my chest will appease the darkness for the moment.

[Three Roses]

I'm so sorry to hear the terror that you were forced to live with. The constant belittling, the feeling that no matter what you do, it's wrong. Wondering, hoping, maybe today will be the day that for me things change to the "normal" I see everywhere around me.

Thank you for posting and sharing. More another day! 

[Coco]

I'm proud of you for remembering, for acknowledging it, tolerating the memories, and especially for telling someone else (us). That is brave. Look how resilient you are. Ultimate respect for you right now.

[sanmagic7]

songbird, what strength and courage you have, letting that crapola out.  my respect - you are inspiring. 

i'm truly sorry for what you've been through in your childhood.  by the by, i don't believe your brother's 'reasons' for what he did to you.  you were victimized, and none of it was in any way, shape, or form your fault.  you lost  - no, it was forcibly taken from you - something precious re: your innocence.  that is horrific all on its own.

i'm glad you're finding the means to excise some of this from your psyche, even if we can't perform brain-ectomies on ourselves so that we wouldn't have to remember.    you have a warrior spirit that has gotten you through all this, and will keep getting you through.  you also have warriors surrounding you here so that you know you're not alone.  we will help in any way we can.  big hug to you.

[Ct02]

Songbirdrosa i am so sorry for your pain. You were a victim of such crimes and your innocence was betrayed in so many ways. I wish for you the inner peace that will make it possible to recover your true identity. Your courage and strength throughout all that was done to you are indicators that you will find your way. Thank you for your help in voicing these unbearable moments as they help me know i am not alone on my journey in healing. Again thank you and so very sorry.

[texannurse]

songbird,
your courage in sharing this is inspirational. But at the same time, my heart breaks for what you went through and what was taken from you. I hope you find peace in this process. You have far more courage than I have.
Peace and all good things,
Texannurse

[clarity]

Songbird, your experiences are shocking. Your courage in sharing them immense.

Kahlil Gibran wrote something along these lines.....that the pain we live through carves out a hollow in our heart that will come to hold our joy....

May this be the truth for you.

[songbirdrosa]

Thanks everyone for you kind words and support. It means the world to me

I guess now we get to Part II: The Consequences

*trigger warning, some content may disturb*

This chapter begins at an end. The end of high school. There I was, 17 years old, severely damaged and severely depressed - though I didn't know it at the time - suddenly catapulted into "adult" life with no idea of what to do, where to go, or what I even wanted. My study path in my final year didn't qualify me for university entry, so I didn't have a lot of options open to me. My mother, control freak that she is, decided to take matters into her own hands. She enrolled me in a foundations course that would prepare me for higher study. What's more, she enrolled herself in the same thing.

I was, as you might imagine, utterly horrified and humiliated at having to share a classroom with her for an entire year. She presented herself as the perfect student, being friendly to the teachers, always studious and far too eager to offer her input for every small thing. The only area she fell short in was the one I excelled at: maths. I believe she resented me for my natural abilities with numbers and the ease with which I could outstrip her. So she did what she does best. Pull me down through backhanded compliments. "You're so smart, you should be doing better!", "If you didn't volunteer yourself for the higher maths unit, I would have done it for you." I tried my hardest to get the work done, to be better than I was in school. But I couldn't. Something was there, lingering in my mind and dragging me into the darkness. I struggled immensely to hand in work on time, if at all. My stress was compounded by the fact that my mother knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing, and that I wasn't doing it. She never missed an opportunity to tell me off. I managed to scrape through the first half of the year, but the second saw a huge drop in my mental state. I had to withdraw from units, and what little work I did have I could barely handle. I didn't make it to the end of the year. This was to become a pattern.

In mid-December, my mother decided she'd "had enough of you" and threw me out of the house. Where else did I have to go, but to my father. Out of the frying pan, and into the pits of Hades.

He wasted little time in telling me how I was screwing up my life, so he was going to take over because I had no idea what I was doing. He worked at the university in my hometown, so he set about finding some way he could get me into something there. And he succeeded. I was told that I was to begin a degree in psychology. He stood behind my chair and watched me as I enrolled, dictating to me exactly which units I was to choose, and what my study load was to be. I was allowed only one choice of my own: the elective. I chose theatre studies. That became the one thing I truly enjoyed in the whole fiasco. This year was to be even worse than the last. Much more than handing in assignments late, or missing a day a week because I was 'sick', I ignored the course altogether. I didn't go to lectures, didn't even bother logging on to the online components. Deadlines came and went without my even knowing about them. Theatre was the one subject I consistently went to and made some small effort in. Little did I know, my father was keeping tabs on me. One day, toward the end of the first semester, he came storming into my room, incandescent with rage as he had just had an email from the convenor of the course, saying that I had failed to hand in any work and was staring down the barrel of imminent removal, as my inclusion in the degree was conditional from the start. He told me that I had until the weekend to catch up. I refused. I told him (well, screamed in between sobs) that I didn't want to do it and I couldn't force myself. He verbally tore me to shreds for almost an hour.

Later that evening, while he was out, I packed my bags and ran. I had nowhere to go, but I knew I wasn't going to stay there. After quite some time, I ended up at the local boarding house, where many of the students lived. For the next six months, this was my home. I took up hospitality, learning to be a little bit of everything; a cook, barista, bartender, and waitress. It was here I discovered my love of cooking, specifically desserts. I resolved to move to the city to study to be a patissier. At the beginning of the following year, I left the town which had been the scene of so much pain and started afresh.

For a while, things were going well. Until the darkness returned and started to chip away at the pieces I had so carefully constructed. I fell behind in my rent and was threatened with eviction, but managed to scrape through due to the kindness of a friend. The stress of a commercial kitchen wore away at me as well. One day as I was tempering chocolate, I just couldn't get it right. This feeling of doing something wrong triggered a panic attack, and I wound up hyperventilating and crying on the floor. This was the death knell for my career as a chef. It was then that I asked myself what I truly loved, and there was only one answer. Music. I therefore decided to combine my love with my skill in science and technology and become an audio engineer.

A short while before I embarked on the first degree I was truly passionate about, I met D. I had always been something of a wallflower, and had never really had a proper relationship. But I had lost a lot of weight, and was finally starting to feel good about things, and my new confidence showed. He was nice, funny, and intelligent. Sure, he could be a little abrupt at times, and sometimes implied that I was bothering him, but that was ok, right? Anything was better than being alone.

For a while things were going well, or I thought it was. I was getting fantastic results in my degree, and made many new friends there. And after a rocky start, my relationship with D was working out well. Then, after about six months of dating, he pulled me outside one night. "My life is pretty *^($*. If not for you, I'd have killed myself by now"

Snap.

From that moment on, I was trapped. My empathetic instincts kicked in and the need to care for him and 'make it all better' overwhelmed me. It took a few more months for things to get really bad.

At first, it was little things. "Go get my dinner, *! Haha, I'm just kidding." "You know, biologically, men can have more children than women, so it makes sense to have multiple at once. You wouldn't care, would you?" Then, nine months in, disaster. His father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Only a few weeks later, his elder brother died suddenly of heart failure. He got depressed, and started drinking heavily. He became more abrasive, more critical, and more dangerous. What was I to do? He wouldn't let me help him. And I couldn't leave him. What if that was the last straw and he killed himself? So I stayed. As his father's health worsened, so did his anger. He punched holes in the walls, took a swing at my face, and pulled entire bookshelves onto the floor. I had to wear long-sleeves in summer to hide the bruises on my arms. When his father finally passed away, he was left with the care of his mother, who was disabled and needed help. He broke windows, smashed the paving with a crowbar. One day, as I was cowering in the corner of the living room, he locked her in her bedroom, screaming through the door that he was going to kill her.

We were together for almost a year and a half until he broke up with me. It was at the end of my third semester in my degree, and I went through the last week in a daze. I got through it with stress and caffeine. After it was over, I crumbled.

What I had once breezed through, I now struggled with. I was repeating the same pattern I'd been caught in before. For the first time in several years, I missed assignments and couldn't bring myself to do the work. I had to retake units. My lecturers were thankfully kind to me as I had been such a good student up to that point, but to no avail. After over a year of languishing, I had to quit. I knew that trying to push myself was only going to make things worse. Thankfully, I had learned enough to get by as a freelance recordist and mixer, so it wasn't all in vain.

I found myself moving often, either from falling behind in rent, or being unable to connect with my housemates. A few months after I quit my degree, I once again was evicted from the place I was living. Homeless, and with nowhere else to turn, I moved in with a friend and her twin sons.  The months I spent with her were the most stable I had been in years. After a while, I travelled to Europe, hoping that I would be able to settle in the UK to further my career in audio. But visa holdups meant I ran out of money before I could get everything sorted, so I was forced to return, once again, to live with my father. For practical purposes, I couldn't live with my mother. She had moved to a farm with her new husband, and as I don't drive, staying with them was unfeasible.

For six months, I struggled to maintain some sense of normalcy. I began a new medication to try to stabilise my mood, and for a while it worked. But as it made me feel better, it also magnified my depressive episodes tenfold. What had once been thoughts, now became actions. What had been difficult was now unbearable. Just before Christmas, almost two years ago, my father yelled at me for buying pizza for dinner. And that was when I decided to die.

I was hospitalised, and put into a psychiatric ward. I had texted two of my friends saying simply "I'm sorry", and they figured out what was happening and managed to distract me long enough to call an ambulance, and to keep me from taking too many pills. I took enough to make myself feel sick, but not to do any real damage. Ever since then, I've been in and out of various different cares. My mother is still my primary next of kin as I have nobody else, and I spent some time under conditional release with her, but I also was well enough to live by myself for a period. I was living with her when I was hospitalised again in March after she discovered my stash of medication. I had hoarded over 100 pills of varying types, and wasn't far from using them. It was this that led to me being referred to my current psychologist, and a top-to-bottom overhaul of my medication, both of which have helped tremendously in my recovery. Oddly enough, I now find myself back in the very same boarding house I ran to all those years ago, once again preparing to take the plunge back to the city I love, to finally finish the degree I'd fought so hard to stay in.



Well done if you made it all the way through! This turned out WAY longer than I expected, but I don't really talk about this part of my life quite as much, even though it's had as much of an impact on me as my childhood did. Thank you for taking the time to read my story, it's rather enlightening to have it all out of myself at last.

[clarity]

Songbird, you have my absolute admiration, and my unwavering support.... if you do not yet comprehend your own strength and resilience then I pray that day will come along fast!  When it does, you will be amazed.... 

[songbirdrosa]

Thank you, clarity. People have told me for quite a while that I'm strong, but I'm only just now starting to believe them