 

Foreword: I have talked about my own past and traumas before; however, I have always left out details or stretched the truth out of the fear I hold for my own role in my past. Even if I was a victim, I was also a perpetrator, and I have realized that my feelings of guilt cannot protect me from the truth; my admission will never remedy the wounds I have caused.

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I was raised in a broken household. My mother and father divorced when my big brother and I were both still babies; they had an extremely abusive relationship with one another. From what I have been told, they both became abrasive to each other slowly, each one becoming a little worse and worse to the other until it elevated to the point where my mother stabbed my father in his leg with a pen and threatened to take the kids and leave the country. In the divorce settlement, she got pretty much full custody (aside from weekends), and full child support even though she was making more money than my father.

These were my early years. The next stage of my life was my early childhood, around the time my mother met a man eight or nine years her junior, who I will call Mr. X. I was four years old when I met X, and he changed my life. Within a year or two, I began calling X my dad. I don’t know what I would say about the man at the time; he just seemed genuinely misguided, and at a stage in his life where he wasn’t mature enough to have his own kids. He wanted to be the cool dad, which I guess was alright. However, to him it meant constantly talking about naked women, how many naked women he could fit into different places, showgirls, and showing me gory live leaks on his computer to teach me about how savage people from other countries were.

In the following years, four main events took place: I got my own tablet, my mother went through several different dogs, X had a kid with my mum, and X’s brother died. These four things are important because, around the age of eight or so, I began conversing with strangers online sexually, met Kay, got my second sibling, and X began to crack. 

X’s brother: When I was eight, X’s brother died, which caused him to regress into prior mental states. According to my mother, he was suicidal, manic, anorexic, avoidant, and paranoid. This was probably around the time he turned away from the church and began his decline into workaholism and abuse towards my mother.

Sexuality: As soon as X gave me a tablet I began to avidly look up anything sex related; keep in mind, this was twelve years ago, before youtube was filtered and everything online was childproofed. As I was literally in Year 1 at the time, I did not understand anything about sex, and nearly sexually assualted my own family members on multiple occasions.

Kay: Kay was the name of the last dog my mother owned. She kept it in a cage, in the garage, far from the rest of the house. Every time she went into the garage we would hear screaming, so loud that it would echo throughout the house. I was eleven during this, and my mother taught me to do things like hold the dog’s mouth shut and hit it. 

There were many things that elevated this. Not only were X’s suicidal tendencies and fighting with my mother growing worse, X’s workaholism led to our family moving three thousand km for his job. I began self harm, started hitting the dog even when my mom didn’t ask me to, and hanging out with the “bad kids” at my school. Eventually, X convinced my mom that she shouldn’t be allowed to own pets, and she decided to take the dog to the pound on her own. This only made matters worse, and as their relationship worsened, the responsibility to take care of the family fell onto myself as the “oldest” sibling.

In the earlier years I got in several physical altercations with my brother, yelled at him for having autistic fits, and I neglected my sister, letting her watch tv all the time. Then I saw how they were breaking down and tried to step up. I became something of a confidant for every member of my family; my mother would tell me secrets she kept from X, X would do the same. I would cook dinner for my family, clean, hold my little sister as she tried to fall asleep, and convince my brother to put his knife down every time he had a panic attack.

I began keeping my own knife, to protect each member of my family from the other. I knew everyone’s secrets and after seeing and experiencing so much violence, I had convinced myself it was necessary. My mother manipulated me, she told me that X was dangerous, and then turned her back on me whenever he was around. X himself began trying to get at me, constantly calling me gay and rubbing my thighs and smacking my butt and shit. I wanted to kill him; I thought that if I did, maybe the rest of my family could be happy.

I told my father about this, and after four long months he had full custody of me (not my brother since he was 18). I haven't heard anything from either of my siblings in nearly three years; at the beginning, I thought that I had abandoned them. I heard from an extended family member that my mum and X’s relationship has apparently improved; they have had more kids and my siblings seem happy. So maybe I didn’t abandon them, I’m not sure.

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Now I’m in Year 12. I’m going to be an adult in six months, and just kinda messed up I guess. I talk a lot about my trauma to people I hardly know, and it’s not okay. Maybe I should go to therapy or something sometime; I don’t know. I don’t really find myself to be a good person and the last therapist I went to told me that they couldn’t help me. I’ve been to six different therapy offices and it just feels like a crock of shit at this point honestly.

I still make bad decisions. Even if I’ve never actually dated or done anything sexual before, almost all the conversations I have turn sexual and looking back on it I feel nothing but disgust for my past behavior. I have flirted with Year 10 students and it just doesn’t feel okay considering I’m two whole years older than much of them. I don’t want to overshare or talk about sex or be pushy.

A few weeks ago, a close irl friend of mine blocked me, but before they did, gave a speech in text about how I was emotionally overwhelming them and that they could not trust me because of my mood swings. I should have woken up after this, learned from my fuck ups, but I didn’t. I still swear about my mother in public and talk about sex with my friends and push boundaries, but like, I don’t want to be like this anymore. I don’t want to hurt anybody the same way I’ve been hurt growing up, and I don’t want to continue down this path or become anything like my parents were.