Untitled: The Life Story of a Writer

Something made me remember a whole bunch of shit I never wanted to remember, yesterday, so this is me getting it out of my system. This is my story: 

You know, some times life is just... It just is. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to it, so carelessly brought into a world of savage beauty. It can be so many things that defy explanation; ups and downs, etc. Each persons story is different, if only in the slightest of ways; but those slightest of ways can make the world of difference. This is the story of my life and everything I've gone through. I don't seek your approval; I don't seek fame or fortune. I just want to tell my story the best I can and get it out. 

My earliest memory is actually of the second day after I was born, my mom was wheeled out of the emergency room holding me in her arms and I saw my Dad holding my older sister. What I saw distorted and blurry and the sizes of the bodies were all wrong. I have no idea why I remember that or how, but I do. I don't have too many other childhood memories from before I actually became conscious and aware of day-to-day events; just a couple thrown in over the years.

I don't remember my mother and father ever being together. They split up when I was born and went their separate ways. My mother would later tell me it was because my Dad was a sick fuck and violent and drank too much. She told me at a young age how he admitted to her that he had fucked a dog. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's definitely not something you tell a child. Most of what I remember of my early youth was moving in with my step-dad in his mobile home and having visitations with my Dad, who was in the Air Force at the time and dating my step-mother who he had knocked up at the same time as my mother, when she was pregnant with my older sister. I later learned that the reason he married my mother first was because his mother wouldn't let him marry my step-mom; viewing my mother as the lesser of two evils.

Moving in with my step-dad was. It just was; I have nothing to describe it with because it seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. I didn't know much. In fact, I still don't know much. My step-dad was a great guy; he told my sister and I from the very start that we weren't his kids, we weren't to call him Dad because he already had two kids of his own and didn't need any more; he made sure that we knew that. Not Ever. I'm not sure if he was trying to be reasonable and let us know he wasn't taking the spot of our father, or if he actually meant it the way he said it. It was the start of the abuse, at any rate.

Adults were Gods to us at that time. All-knowing beings. So, if they were mad or mean, there had to be a good reason for it, right? That's what I thought back then. He used to drink Tequila and would get so mean and vindictive and petty. He would let us know that our whole family was shit and that we were shit because we were a part of it. He thrived on putting us down. Him and Mom fought a lot to the point of exchanging physical blows. We did what was natural: we cried. It would get so bad at times that Mom would go out in her car and start to leave and he would come in and tell us that we better go with her to make sure she didn't kill herself; and frightened of the possibility, we did. We would go to our grandparents house for a few days or simply go sit at a park somewhere in the middle of the night and watch Mom balance her checkbook.

What Mom didn't get to see was how we were treated when she was gone at work and we were home alone with our step dad. During those times, we were subjected to his insanity. I understand now that he suffered similarly at the hands of his father and was never able to rise above it, but it still hurts a lot. I looked up to him and wanted to make him proud of me, even though he never wanted to recognize me as his son; I felt like he was my father, cause he was the only father I really knew after my Dad went out of my life for molesting my sister and I. At least my step-dad never laid a hand on us whether sexually or to hit us, though he had to put a lot of restraint into himself for not hitting us some times, I'm sure; but the mental abuse was worse than if we were beaten.

Mom wouldn't believe us, though. She always said she would talk to him and then she would tell us that everything was fine, but it only got worse for a couple days each time, so we just stopped telling her and it kind of killed any relationship I had with my Mother, because there was just nothing to talk about. She was abused in her childhood and continuing to be abused and I was just being abused not knowing any of that and not trusting to tell her because it did no good. No matter how much we begged her to leave him, she never would. What twisted part of our souls yearns for abuse; feels that we deserve it? I don't know, maybe when she talked to him, he apologized to her; maybe he broke down in tears and cried for her and promised her he would change and get better; that he wanted to but it was hard. I don't know. It would have been uncharacteristic of him to do so, but maybe...

By the time School started, I was already problem child. I was hyper and destructive; odd and highly reactive to bullies, which meant that my future was sealed as far as being a bully magnet. The teachers thought I had ADHD and went above my parents head to put me on Ritalin, which didn't help at all. I was never Attention Deficit in any sense of the meaning. I was always the one paying attention to multiple things at once and making it look like I wasn't. I did well in school, always, when I tried. If anything, I think I may have been high-functional autistic. They didn't know how to diagnose it back then and it can be similar to ADHD in many ways. I also may have been a bit bipolar. I really don't know. Nobody cared enough to try to get me the help I actually needed; just stuck me on some pills and shoved me off.

After a while, they noticed the Ritalin wasn't working so well and had me placed on Silert instead, which made me a zombie and was later recalled by the FDA for being an unsafe drug. I was taken off of it by my Dad when I went to visit him in Virginia in second grade. At that time, I was a very violent kid and was visiting the Principals Office at the least 3-4 times a week. My teacher was scared of me. But, I had straight A's because I was made to do all the school work while I was there, something that my Mom and Step Dad never stuck with me on.

Life with Dad wasn't all pleasant. He still drank his gin and scotch and was gone working a lot to provide a place for us to stay in, some times driving over 100 miles a day to go to work. This lasted until he received a letter from my mom. Apparently, when he broke up with my step-mom in Virginia and moved, he failed to tell my mother where we were moving to so she could keep in contact; and she managed to get a hold of him through someone else and threatened him with kidnapping charges if he didn't send me back. About that time, I was being a handful and one day when yelling that I wanted my mom, he decided to send me home. I didn't really want to leave; I loved my Dad; course I didn't really know about the molestations at that point and he was never really an attentive father; just came down hard on me when he needed to and made sure I did good.

Shortly afterwards, he moved back to our state and tried getting visitations again, but my sister had been found with scar tissue inside of her that could have only been caused by rape and it came out that my Dad had done and I had mentioned at that point how he had once showed me what 'semen' was. Mom and Step Dad got custody of us and we were adopted shortly after, but Dad was gone for a long time with a no-contact order placed on him. I didn't see him again until about 3-5 years after that. I think I was 12 or 13 at the time.

I didn't really understand it and somehow got the feeling that he had never wanted me in his life. I came to know differently later, but this feeling stuck with me for the longest time that I had two fathers and neither one wanted me. Kids at school made fun of me and wouldn't be my friends because other people made fun of them for being my friend; so I was outcast and I hung out with other outcasts. I made friends with the disabled kids because I knew my sister had done the same thing when she was in school and I looked up to her.

Keep in mind that I wasn't an innocent and perfect angel throughout this. I did my share of fucked off things. I locked myself in the bathroom at one time and my sister was trying to get me to come out and she asked if I was possessed (we were young at the time and Mom had been teaching us the bible.) I said 'yes' and came out of the bathroom, grabbed a crutch and started beating her with it. She doesn't remember that at all. I tormented our cats and I think I may have ultimately been the one responsible for my cats death, though they said it was some sort of kidney or liver disease that took him, and I felt really bad about that for a long while after I found out; but that was years later. I would put them in the freezer when they misbehaved; to 'chill out'. I would choke them and exert my dominance over them. It's nothing I'm proud of and this is actually the first time I've ever said anything to anyone about it. I just started remembering all of this again out of nowhere and I really wish I hadn't. I don't know why I made myself remember any of this.

I kept acting up in School and just about everywhere I went. I hated my life and began to wish for death. I cried myself to sleep a lot of nights and some times would just sit in the dark, crying and listening to Mom and Step Dad fight and I would feel so helpless about everything. It didn't help that during this same time, I was being babysat by our next door neighbors' kids. Both of them older boys and they would make me do sexual acts to play video games. This happened about the time I was in third grade and I didn't really know any better. I didn't want to do it, but I really wanted to play video games. I knew something was wrong about it, but I didn't know quite what and it took me a while to be able to say anything about it.

When I did talk about it, my Mom and Step Dad had some heated words with our neighbors but nothing was really done about it beyond that. It went this way for a long while. Not the molestations, but the general degradation on a sliding scale. By the time I hit middle school, I had barely any self esteem at all. all shit did was just get worse. I tried fighting back a couple times, but I never won so I stopped fighting back and mostly just wished for death. I was I was still in the 'outcast' crowd, but it wasn't by choice and they didn't really choose to like me either. We were the outcasts, though; we were all we had.

The friends I made outside of school all picked on me a lot and were mean and torturous, including my cousin that I hung out with when visiting with my Grandma and Grandpa. Sometimes they would beat me up for the sheer hell of it. They'd always put me down and pick away at me and I think the only reason I kept hanging out with them was because they allowed me to and I so desperately needed to be accepted somewhere. One of my best friends in school during that time actually tried choking me to death over a minor little annoying thing I was doing. It was my fault; he told me to stop and I kept doing it knowing it was pissing him off; and he was dealing with his own problems. All I could really do was laugh, so I laughed in his face while mine was turning blue and continued laughing even after a teacher came up and tackled him off of me.

I had my head rammed into a lot of things, from brick walls to lockers, for no other reason than because people could do so. I started picking at people at that point in the hope that they would do it really hard just one time and I would get amnesia and not be able to remember anything. No such luck. My Sister ran away from home when she was 15 or 16 and I was 12 or 13. She started staying with friends here and there, popping back and forth until she got a job and a place of her own. My step-dad continued his psycho crap throughout it all, some times being nice and friendly, but mostly just leaving hateful little notes around the house and hounding me incessantly when I was home and Mom wasn't, or couldn't hear.

I started to step between him and Mom when they fought and he started waking me up in the middle of the night to cause an argument and then tell me to get out of his house. I wouldn't ever last long in a fight against him, though it was mostly words a lot of the time. He only shoved me once, and I flew backward from it. He was just vicious no matter how he fought and had a way of knowing what your secret weaknesses were and went right for them to make you cry so you would shut up. After knowing someone for a while, it's a very easy thing to do, and I did it for a time as well, having learned how. I began to escape to my sister's house on weekends from time to time to get away from it all and see my Nephews.

My first Nephew was born when I was in eighth grade and I was very proud of him. I did manage to get a girlfriend that year, as well, but it didn't last even a week because she couldn't put up with all of the harassment she was getting from everyone else. It didn't really help my self-esteem much. I began to be kicked out of school for the first time ever. In Elementary School, they were more tolerant of my actions and just put me in a room in the office or the counselors office, away from the other kids. The Vice Principal took a shine to me, though and did his best to help me out when he could.

When I got into an incident at lunch that I should have been kicked out of school for, I was put into an isolation room for lunch time for a couple months after that. I was allowed to have one person join me if they wanted to, and was lucky enough to have a good friend at the time who did so, which is kind of funny because we met in a class where I was kicking the back of his chair. But then, we were both in the outcast crowd and mostly got along Ok. I can only say so much about Middle School because it was just the same as elementary school, but worse. Same type of stuff happened, but it was amplified because it was a continuation of everything else and kids became a lot more violent. That, and it only lasted two years, thankfully.

In High School, it was really bad for the first two years as things amplified even more. I hadn't cared about doing well in School for quite some time and wasn't pressed to be, so I only did well in classes I liked. Even then, the only reason I didn't get A's in those classes was because I didn't care to do all the work, not because I couldn't do it. I kept getting picked on and kept getting kicked out of school until I eventually got a teacher that hated me and went out of her way to target me out of all the rest of the class. Easy enough, I just stopped going to that class. As a result, I got suspended from school after the fifth day when they managed to catch up to me. I knew it was coming because the class I was skipping was in the middle of the day and I still went to all my other classes. I actually got called into the office on the fourth day and wasn't got to by the time the lunch bell rang, so I went to lunch and continued my day as normal. The next day they were ready to deal with me and I basically got expelled for the rest of the school year. For skipping class. Go figure.

I didn't have many options at the time, having just turned sixteen, so I went to Job Corps. It's a good program, definitely, for anyone age 16-24. It's structured to give you job training and schooling and is government ran. You get paid while being there and you learn how to deal with the reality of society if you have a mind to. I wasn't mentally prepared to to follow it through and it didn't help matters any that I was told as much by my Step Dad before going. I mean, even though it turned out to be true, he could have at least tried to be supportive. I might have done better then instead of having to deal with a stigma while trying to prove him wrong.

I only lasted a month and three weeks there, but I had already managed to get most of my trade training done in Business and Clerical and obtained my G.E.D. They wanted to put me on this center contract thing where if I screwed up again, I would be kicked out, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to stick to it, so I opted to go home. After that, I had the choice of finding work or going back to school. Since I couldn't find work, I decided to make another go at School and attended a challenger school until I could be placed in regular school again, at a grade lower than I should have been. Things did pick up in school kind of after that because the people I went to class with didn't know me and didn't know they should pick on me, and those who used to pick on me had grown up enough to not do it as much and they didn't see me as much; except for my cousin who continued to get worse and he and his friends broke me quite a few times.

I fell into stealing from stores for a while during one of the times I got suspended and did that for a long time. I'd go to the store about every day to steal something; anything. I kept myself in cigarette tobacco and cigars and came across a lot of new books to read amongst other things. I eventually got arrested at a different store for stealing about 6 dollars worth of stuff, which was ironic considering the thousands of dollars I stole from the other store. Only time I've been arrested and I just did not like it, so I've made sure not to have it again and gotten pretty lucky that one my mistakes since hasn't gotten me landed there.

Around that time, my step dad finally got arrested for beating my Mom, thanks to a neighbor making an anonymous call, but he was made to go to Anger Management instead of jail time. He saw a video there of guys who beat their wives to death and it changed him a little. He told my Mom that he had never meant to hurt her, he just wanted her to shut up. He only hit her a time or two after that, but he took it out of us in his other ways, increasing his efforts in mentally screwing with us. I was getting kicked out of the house more and just decided to stay at friends houses for the night or a couple nights and my Mom started having my Sister track me down. My step-dad told her I was running away.

I had my first nervous breakdown at 17 and my step dad just thought I was faking it. I could barely make the call to my sister to have her come and get me because I just couldn't pull myself together. I had lost control of myself and had wrapped my arms around my legs and rocked back and forth with tears rolling out of my eyes like rain from the sky. It is impossible to interact with anyone at that point with any semblance of pride, because you're blubbering like a baby. Not that I had much pride at that point, anyway.

I mean, I've always known I was intelligent and that I had potential, because people always told me that, but I was also always told that I was worthless and would never amount to anything, so I never had the motivation to do anything with it. I had reached the bottom and I knew I was going to die, when and how. I knew that when I was old enough to buy a gun that I would do so and blow my brains out. To me, it was the most painless way I could think of and it seemed quick. Ironically, years later, I found a really good and painless way to commit suicide, but only after I started wanting to live.

School went well enough up until it came to the year I was supposed to graduate. Things were still going much the same at home and with my friends, though it had cooled down a bit at school and with my friends. I knew I wasn't going to do the Senior Project for my School that was necessary to graduate so I withdrew myself at the age of eighteen with the consent of a parent. I thought I could do it without needing parental confirmation because I was eighteen and was kind of upset when I found out otherwise. Sadly, though, it wasn't the first time I was allowed to give up on myself.

I worked odd jobs for a bit after that, here and there and mostly tried to spend all of my waking hours away from home, but it still came down to a head one night at three in the morning. Apparently, I had said something to my step dad's pot dealer that he didn't like and he woke me up to confront me about it, forcing me to give him my key to the house and to get out. At that time, I thought I was homeless and was going to have to live on the streets and I didn't have much of a plan. I think I probably would have despaired at that point and found a way to end it, but Life is funny some times.

The night before, I had managed to track my Dad down on the internet at the community college that one of my friends and his Girlfriend went to and had gotten his address and phone number. I walked around for a couple hours until about six and went over to my friends house to wake him up to hang out. Wasn't the first time for that, either. I was constantly waking him up to hang out over the years and only recently have I learned how annoying that can be. I had also spent a good number of nights trying to sleep in the backseat of his moms car because I'd been kicked out of the house by my step-dad and she always left the car door unlocked. I went around with him job hunting and did despair on that point because I didn't have an address I could put down on an application.

After we got back, I gave my sister a call and told her what was going on and she asked me if I had a plan. I still didn't have one, but I showed her what I had found. I didn't know how she would react, given her history with our Dad, but I don't think I would have had the courage to contact him if She hadn't made the call for me. Only now do I realize that she must have had a way to contact him before, having been in contact with other people who knew where he lived and that she must have passed it up. It makes me appreciate her even more because I know she only endured visiting with him for my sake and probably to try to get closure in her own life.

Getting back in contact with my Dad was a life-changing event. Before then, I had gotten the thought stuck in my head that I had had two Dads in my life, more than most people, and neither one had wanted me. I found out differently the first weekend and also found out I had a little Brother and Sister. My little Sister is only a week older than my oldest nephew and my Brother is three years older than her, the reverse of me and my older sister. By that time, my older sister had four kids, two boys and two girls and I loved them a lot, but I was filled with a love I had never known before then because I had gone from being the youngest child to finding out I had a little brother and sister. I finally understood what it meant to be an older sibling and my respect for my older sister just grew enormously.

I was so happy and the happiness was just so overwhelming and foreign to me that after that first weekend, I had to to sit for a couple hours just to absorb it all and I finally got to understand what people meant by the term 'happy tears'. For once in my life, I was accepted right off the bat and held in high esteem for being the one to track them down on the internet. As I said, it was life-changing and I began to get a whole new outlook on life because of it. But it didn't all happen over night. I had to go back home to my Mom and step dad's house for a week or two after that, but I knew I couldn't stay there. To this day, I would still rather live on the streets than go back to live in that house for any length of time.

After that, it was arranged that I would move in with my Sister and she would put in a good word for me at her work. So it was that I wound up working the morning shift at McDonald's, with her as my manager. We clashed heads a lot because we would push each others buttons and I was still trying to reign in my anger and learn to feel other emotions again. I got laid for the first time, by a co-worker, and I learned what it felt like to be used for sex and when she started playing games with me, I played them back on her. She ended up quitting work because of me on a day when I actually handled a problem like I was supposed to, which I got commended for by the managers who were working at the time. She threw her name-tag in the garbage pail and walked out and I don't think I saw her again after that. I didn't much care, either.

I fought with my sister at work and at home and just about everywhere and it came to a head finally; she just couldn't take it anymore. She was living in a two bedroom apartment with her fiance and her four kids and I was just the seventh person adding stress. If I had got caught staying there, she could have been thrown out. I had been offered a couple months before a place to stay at my Dad's if I wanted it and hadn't taken them up on it because I wanted to make a decent run of things instead of just running to an out. I learned something about myself from fighting with my Sister, though. She did point out to me one time that when I got angry I acted just like our step dad and after a long walk I decided that she was right and I've been working on changing that ever since then.

I got work for a couple weeks at my Dad's house, but I couldn't deal with the different pace of the McDonald's up in their area. It was too stressful for me and I quit to avoid another nervous breakdown, having had a couple more since the first one when I was seventeen. We were a bit out of town and it didn't make it easy to go look for jobs because both my Dad and my Step Mom worked and I used that as an excuse to stay home and hang out with my little brother and Sister more often. I kind of took over my little brothers World of Warcraft account during that time.

After a month or two, though, my Dad and Step Mom broke up after having been together for eleven years. I didn't see it coming and it really tore me up for a while. I decided to stay with my Step Mom while my Dad tried to situate himself so I could help out with watching my little brother and sister and spend time with them. I kept slipping back into depression, though, and I really dropped the ball while watching them one afternoon when I decided to get into my Step Mom's Valium. It was like God wanted to get back at me for all those years I spent wishing I was dead and grabbed my hand, because I only had control over myself for the first pill. I remember taking four more after that, but it was like watching something from a distance that you have no control over.

What I don't remember is the other thirteen Valium that followed after that or the six anti-depressants I took on top of it. I blacked out, so I don't remember much of anything until I woke up in the hospital over a day later. Apparently, my little Brother, who is high-functional autistic, made the call to my step mom to let her know that something was wrong with me, because I was acting all weird. She rushed home and saw the state I was in. I was still conscious at that point, but I wasn't there. I don't remember it at all. She said I swore at her and called her names when she asked me what was going on. She took a look at her pills and saw how many were gone and made the call to the paramedics, who showed up right as my systems started failing.

When I woke up in the hospital, I didn't even know what had happened. I was confused and wanted to get out of there and told them that I would just take the IVs out of my arms and walk out, but I couldn't even move to do it. My Dad and his new girlfriend; who was the sister of my first step-mom and the best friend of the step-mom he had just broken up with; decided that I needed to be placed in a halfway house, so they ditched me there while barely explaining anything to me, which was when my mom and step dad tried acting like parents again and came out and visited once a week or so and called. I let them because I was all alone and scared and confused; though I tried to make the best of it. I knew that they did care about me a lot and just never really knew how to show it. I consider my little Brother a hero. He saved my life and doesn't even know how much that means to me.

I spent two months in that halfway house, where I found God. Actually, I realized that he had been walking along beside me the whole time. I still don't believe in any one religions view of God, but I believe in God. I had to leave, though, because nobody had paid the rent on the second month and I didn't remember being told that I would have to pay it and hadn't been looking for a job. I ended up moving in to my grandparents, where I found work and continued to work on myself. I still hung out with old friends but being picked on was losing its appeal to me. I've moved around a couple times since then, but it's where I hang my coat again at the moment.

I continued to visit my Dad until I got drunk one night while staying over at his house and fondled my 12 year old half-sister. This was.. 4 or 5 years ago. I don't know what I was thinking at the time, but it just sickens me every time I think about it. My Dad and Step-mom dropped me like a sore habit and the Counselor that my half-sister had to go to was forced to alert the authorities about me even no one wanted to press charges. I faced responsibility for it when a Detective came out to ask me questions; I never ran from it. Since then, I've learned why I did it and I've made strides to make sure it would never happen again by fixing parts of my brain that were damaged. The detective was nice and I was honest and he said that most likely nothing would come of it; that even though it seemed like a big deal to me, was nothing major (not to downplay it).

I still run the risk of being swooped up by the DA if he decides to go after me and that's a risk I may run the rest of my life, now. Not worried about it, though; I will serve whatever punishment they give me if they do decide to come after me.

For the most part, even though I haven't been able to find work in the past couple years and have had this huge mental block in place stopping me from doing much of anything for myself and the fact that I have a decent-sized hospital bill to pay along with recurring bouts of depression, my life has been pretty good. I've got a long way to go, but I've made some significant gains in the past 7-8 years. I've learned a lot about life and I'm still under thirty years old. I feel weak at times and defeated, but I'm getting better. Two steps forward, one back. I've learned so much about psychology and people in general just by working on myself and then observing other people for similarities and differences.

I can't really regret my past, though, because it's made me who I am today and I'm stronger and wiser for it. It has defined me in ways that I'm still trying to figure out (though I've come a long way in finding myself and getting to know who I am) and it has made me unique in ways I never really wanted to be. Not that my life has been all bad. I make it seem like that, but there were up-points mixed into it. Times when my step dad and I really got along, times that kept me hoping, but it wasn't enough at the time to counter all the bad. I remember deep philosophical conversations and fishing and a great sense of humor.

I did my best just to hold on and I did. I don't want to think about what would have happened if thing didn't go the way they did; I might have killed myself any number of times. 27 years old and I've survived 19 years of pure and utter torture; taken 8 years since then to work on myself and I still have a long way to go before I'm completely able to deal with depression; but I've made so much progress. I have my confidence back and I've been able to grow a lot, even though I was diagnosed with GERD and Gastritis and still can't really gain a pound. I've had a really bad stress migraine that felt like a blood vessel had popped in my head and I lost about 10-15 lbs in a week that I could ill-afford to lose, being 6'3" and 140 lbs. I dropped down to 121lbs and I don't think I've ever recovered that weight.

I've loved a few times; messed up a lot and so I'm single and alone; which is nothing new, but it does get frustrating at times. I've seen friends move on to better lives; people I went to school with and grew up with start families of their own fresh out of school; seen people I knew become famous, and still here I sit; the outcast loner. I have few friends, and that's the way I like it. The few I have are the few I trust and love. I've struggled with issues of sexuality and gotten them sorted out. I smoke a lot of pot and try to be happy by the end of each day at the very least. What I've learned in life is that happiness is entirely your own responsible; you can't expect anyone else to make you happy; you have to find it and fight for it; you have to literally fight yourself for control of your mind against depression.

I think I'm a little crazy, but who isn't, right? I see so many patterns in the world around me from behavior patterns to world events; I have a habit of seeing through people instead of seeing them. I can see through to their heart and soul and peg them fairly accurately. I'm way too damned intelligent, though and it's fucking me over; I think too damn much that I over-think things and what I think about, nobody really wants to hear or talk about; so it's a fairly lonely existence; but I've found purpose in it. My life has to mean something; my suffering and pain and everything else must be paid for. The only way I can think of to get back at them is to spread as much positivity and hope as I can before I die. I know; usually people seek revenge against the ones that tortured them; but I can understand not only what they went through themselves; but what their parents had to have gone through and their parents parents; I see the trail leading up to them and I've realized that it's nobody's fault; but everyone's to blame, and the madness has to stop somewhere.

It's definitely not easy, though; I'm strong-willed and I'm still not quite over being angry or petty and I tend to say things I shouldn't when I'm trying to be positive and helpful. And, with the world moving ever closer toward what seems to be war on the horizon, It just looks like things are going to get a lot worse before they actually start getting better. Anyway, that's my story up to now. I've missed telling about some things, but you know, it's just more variations of the same. Thank you for taking this ride with me.