I'd just like to say, before I type out my wall of blather, that reading through all of your stories over the last few days has done wonders for me. Between this thread, Katawa Shoujo, and my general reflection over the past few months of my past, I believe that I've broken through moreso than I ever have in the past. You guys have really helped me to "put everything in it's place" so to speak, so thank you all!
And now the blather. Word of warning, it's going to be long. Read if you want to, just need to vent all this out on something, and this seems to be the best place.
Well, I guess I'll start from the top. I was lucky enough to be born to good parents. They did everything that they could for me, Mom stayed home to raise me, while Dad worked at the nearby oil refinery for every penny he could bring home. I love them very much for that, but even so, it also brought about events that have stuck with me until now. And honestly they probably won't ever stop bothering me. Everything was well and fine for what I can remember up until I was about 6-8 years old. At the time I didn't understand, but now that I look back on it, it's a little clearer. My parents started drinking heavily, probably from stress, which made them fight a lot. It was a constant thing, every night I would lie in bed and hear them screaming back and forth, though soon enough it just became the normal routine and it stopped bothering me. Or at least it became more natural to me. Now, again, I love my parents. I know now why they did what they did, though I also know a lot of it was wrong, they really did try their best. They worked hard, just for my sake. They dropped their own life plans and lived just to raise me. And there are no words that I can use to express how grateful I am for that, even though I wish they hadn't given up so much. Because if they hadn't they could have avoided all the problems that came with it. Right about this time in my life, my father, who worked as Team Leader at the refinery by our house non-stop to bring in a good pay for us, was diagnosed with a degenerative disk in his neck. I only found out later that he had been born with a crooked spine, which made him prone to this ailment. Though even knowing this, he pushed himself over the limit, just to support the family, to support me. He could have either had the disk removed and replaced with metal, or he would have had to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He picked the former, just so he could continue working. Which he did, he got out of the hospital and everything seemed fine and well. But he kept working just as hard as he had been, which was a bad idea, as soon more of these disks had to be removed. He lost 3 in the end, and now he can't move his neck since it's pretty much held together by metal rods now. I still remember going to visit him in the hospital with my mother when I was little, he had tubes everywhere and he looked nearly dead, probably from heavy doses of morphine. It was painful to see, and I know that sight will be burned into my memory until the day I die. In between the surgeries something else happened as well. Dad and my mother got into fighting and drinking again, and it ended in Mom shoving my father away, causing him to trip and fall over. I remember that night quite clearly. I heard a huge crash and they both stopped talking after arguing right up until that point. I remember being terrified, jumping out of bed and running down the hall to see my father (who's quite a big man, mind you. About 6"2' or so, and bulky) half laid out on the floor, propped up with his back to the wall. He was just staring. I'd never seen him ever look like that. His eyes were empty of all life. I thought for a second he was dead, which scared me even more of course, but he wasn't. To this day I don't know what he was thinking right then. Maybe he was angry at Mom. Or, maybe he was ashamed that I saw him like that and froze up. I'll probably never know. Anyway, I immediately grabbed a phone and asked if I should call an ambulance because of his neck, and in a burst of rage he grabbed the phone and huffed it at a wall. The next day though, he felt so bad about it that he told me to stay home from school if I wanted to, so I did ( I was a kid, after all. Wouldn't pass that up.
) But we never really acted the same around each other. Even today, he's there for me, but it still seems to me that he feels something. Like he's too ashamed still to even talk to me like a father should. He lost his job at the refinery as well, and because of his disability, he never got another one. He lost all hope for himself. His disability cheques were adequate though, so we could keep our home. But he was never the same man after all that.
And then there was school, which was different. I never really had a problem in school. I was always the tallest kid in my class, but I rarely smiled and never really hung around anyone else besides my one closest friend, who'd have me over to his house a lot to hang out and play video games. I just didn't like people, I wanted to stay in my own little world. It was a nice place where I didn't have to be afraid of anything or anyone. So elementary school was uneventful. Now, about the time I got out of elementary school, my mother had to have a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), and then after that she suffered a blood clot in her lung, which luckily was caught before anything bad happened. In that time that she was in the hospital, it was just me and Dad. He drank, a lot. More than I've ever seen him drink. He didn't cook anything, he ordered out for me instead, and he was never around. He didn't have the evil father thing going on though, more like... more like Tomoya's father in Clannad. Except his wife wasn't dead. But at the time it probably seemed like destiny was giving him a great big F U after everything that had happened. That lasted a month or so, and eventually Mom came home. Well, kinda. I can't remember why, but she stayed with her parents for a bit... Might have been marriage related, or might have just been for her nerves after the operations. Maybe I blocked it out, I don't know. But she ended up with huge anxiety problems. Like, Hanako anxiety problems. Which I later picked up as well. She couldn't be out around people, she hated it. So she stayed home all the time. Just to put it into perspective, I was about 10 or 12. She's only just getting out and looking for a job now, and I'm 20, already graduated, and I've moved away to a different city. It's that bad. Anyway, sometime after that I managed to get into grade 6. I fucking hated grade 6. Worst time of my life. First off, I began to develop serious anxiety problems. I was afraid of people too by this point. I could stand being around them, though I much preferred being alone, but I especially hated being picked by teachers in class to read, or being given any attention at all. Now, there were these idiots in my class who had realized that I was shy (probably wasn't hard with my anxiety issues practically seeping out everywhere) and so they took advantage of it. They took my stuff, made fun of me, that sort of thing. Though for the most part, I blocked them out. After everything that had happened up to that point, those runts meant very little to me in life. Still though, I did bring it up once to my teacher. Big mistake, as right after talking to her, she brought them out and got them to apologize to me. Needless to say the name calling and crap continued through the remainder of that year. Then there was grade 7. That's when things turned around drastically. I met this other guy in my class after being moved for talking to this acquaintance of mine. He was an oddball, the type of person who didn't give a damn and said what he wanted, even when it sounded dumb. We hit it off immediately, he introduced me to his friends, and soon enough I had a big group of 8 caring friends who I'd regularly hang out with when I could. I still have a photo of us all grouped together, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy whenever I look at it. Though one thing that still puzzles me today is that for about a month and a half in that grade, I had random bouts of not being able to breathe. Hyperventilating, I mean. I was in and out of the hospital a lot that year over it, but the doctors couldn't find a cause. It was frightening, and even now I get it every now and then. I just blame it on nerves though. Eventually, I got into the wonderful years of high school, but nothing really happened for the first few years, besides learning to overcome my fear of people a bit. I could stand talking to people now, at least. Though I still couldn't maintain eye contact without looking away or at the ground. Now, high school was.. weird. I had never had a goal or purpose, no drive for anything in high school. I just wandered around the school, or around town, running into people randomly, chatting with them, then wandering to the next group. (Another Clannad reference here, but picture Tomoya's attitude about school. Except girls weren't all over me.) Though I couldn't bring myself to care about anyone. It felt like I simply lacked the ability to care, to feel for anyone after spending so many years trying to avoid people. I thought I was fine then, but in hindsight, I was dead. Just going through the motions, coming home, then going to sleep just to repeat it the next day. It was a hollow existence. Then grade 11 came, and that's when I met this girl, who for this story of mine I'll refer to as Natalie. We met randomly in a social arts class (oh, the irony). I had been reading the S.D. Perry Resident Evil novels, and I overheard her talking to one of my buddies about Resident Evil. First off, I was dazed and confused that a girl was talking about kicking zombie ass. And second off, I was put off when I saw her. She was this cute, short blonde girl sitting a few rows behind me. I was expecting the stereotypical nerdy girl honestly (Please don't hate me, I try not to judge!!) I was bored that class, so I decided to jump into the conversation. That was the one best decision I've ever made. At first I expected her to ignore me, or to be at least a bit put off by someone just joining in that she didn't know. But nope, she talked to me like we had been friends for years. It was unbelievable. All my life, up until then, I just thought that human nature was to be cold hearted and uncaring. But she was the very opposite. We became friends that very second, and we sat beside each other from that moment on whenever we had classes together, and we ended up sticking around each other at lunch. Hell, I spent 90% of that following summer break with her. She re-introduced me to anime, and we shared that hobby together. But more importantly, she went out of her way to try to help me. She saw that I was.. broken (to be very melodramatic). We would talk over MSN every night, and we'd have these deep, meaningful conversations. Though I didn't tell her about my past until about 4 years into our friendship, she seemed to just pick up on it from my behaviour. it was nice.
And yes, I did ask her out, and I was friendzoned immediately. She knew it was coming, everyone did. I wasn't even going to ask, but it was bothering me so much that in the end I had to. That's a whole other story, but it's also pretty run-of-the-mill. She was a lesbian, that's really all I need to say. However, the worst part came after that. She started smoking, drinking, and getting high out of depression due to a previous relationship. And so, being as protective of her as I came to be, I started to do the same. I couldn't let this girl destroy herself alone. I'd talked to her, she refused to stop, so then I decided to do the same thing in hopes that she'd snap out of it and quit that crap. And so I jumped into the fire with her, so to speak. Though, It was also an excuse on my end to stop caring about life for a while. I didn't plan to do that stuff for long, but everything from my past had been weighing me down for so fucking long that I just wanted an escape. And that was it. Only marijuana though, nothing hard. I knew my limits, and anything more would have ended me. But my plan worked eventually, and we ended up both guilt-tripping each other into quitting all of that and starting our normal lives again. After that, there isn't really much to say. Both of us live together now, sharing an apartment. Which is nice, as we support each other all the time. I still have my issues, and I think just now I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I probably will never rid myself of them. But I can embrace them as parts of me, which is what I do now. And it's made a fair bit of difference for me. She also helped me get a job for a retail electronics company, so now I'm a salesman. Which is pretty damn funny, considering that I still have my fear of people. I've learned to handle it now for situations like that, and I can put on a good act if I have to talk to people. I was surprisingly good at Theatre Arts in school, so I just try to play the role of a good salesperson and my anxiety goes away. But only in controlled situations, when I get an angry customer or even a sketchy looking guy in my store, I freeze up and start stammering when I speak. Which is terrible when you're trying to thwart a shoplifter. ("S-Sir, I'm going to h-have to ask you to l-leave the store." Yeah.. intimidating.) I've actually been thinking about quitting and getting a job out of the customer service field, since I really don't enjoy it for obvious reasons. Preferably someplace quieter.
Anyway, I've been thinking about all of this my whole life really, but the reasons behind my own mental scaring really hit me not too long ago. I was out for a night-time walk, and it just smacked me in the face like a brick wall. I've felt guilty, my entire life, for what my parents went through. I could never place it until now, but I've always had that feeling that I did something wrong since I was young, but it was only when that thought came to mind that it all suddenly clicked. I can't stop thinking that what happened to them was my fault. And that's why I've always avoided people, I think. Not because I'm afraid of them, but because I don't want to be a bother to anyone else. Hell, I get really, REALLY upset when I find out that I've burdened someone else. That explains that as well. My mother had a great life, lots of friends, good job, all that stuff. And then she cut all that just to move to a new city and raise me. And Dad worked so fucking hard for a good income that he just about killed himself. He tore himself apart for me. They both did. Neither of them even wanted to stay married. I know that for a fact, I've overheard them say it multiple times through the years. But they've stayed in a dead marriage for me. That's been even harder on me, because I've felt guilty for that my whole life as well. I've kept two people in a miserable marriage for 20 years. And they tore themselves apart for me, practically ended their lives. That's just not fair. I mean, yeah, I do realize that I'm not to blame for it in reality. But still, I can't help but think that if I hadn't have been born, everyone would have been happier.
But yeah, that's my story. Don't get me wrong, I'm not overcome with despair over here. It's depressing, though it's something my mind tends to bury. Even now, after realizing it, it won't hit me unless I intentionally dig up the thought again or somebody says something that drudges it up. OR I play a game like KS that also brings those kinds of memories up.
But when it hits me, I have to go off on my own if I'm not already. I just about broke down when I first realized it that night. But all that aside, I'm in a fairly comfortable place in my life now. I just moved in with that girl, in a new city. My biggest hurdle here is making friends. I really want to meet new people, but it's harder for me than most other "normal" people, given the fact that I tend to shy away from the public. I've been thinking of joining something. Like Karate, I used to enjoy that as a kid. And getting involved would certainly help me meet people I think. Maybe some of you have been in this boat and can give me a few pointers on how an introvert can meet new people. Also, thank you all for taking the time to read this, I know not everyone will of course, that's a lot of rambling up there. But it's damn nice to get it all off my chest. I think this is the first time I've actually told my whole story to anyone at all. I don't think I've even told my best friend and room-mate here everything that I've said in this post. It feels nice.
This is an amazing thread, and your all amazing people! You can bet I'll be sticking around on here to give my thoughts and advice to you guys too!