Notes

I don’t really know where to start, exactly, considering what an absolute pile of garbage I have been as a person, I’ll be honest. I know looking back now a lot of my actions were out of trauma from growing up in abuse, but equally, sin is still sin and there’s no validation for that much.

I’m just gonna be short and informal with what I have, because they’re all really complicated and massive on their own and it’s a lot to relive at once. If you want more information or to tear me apart over anything specific you can ask me about it.

When I talk about being a severe disappointment, I’m not kidding.

I guess I have 3 main things. The first is my first joining the internet. I’ve struggled with loneliness and suicidal ideation my entire life. There was a period, about age 13, that we were entirely isolated from, well, everyone and everything. That was after we went to the prosperity gospel church and they made me believe my dad being sick and our family’s poverty was my fault. I didn’t have anyone or anything left. Well, I had my family, but admittedly even though I didn’t realize it then, they made me want to die even more. So when we finally had computers for our schoolwork and could get online (with heavy restrictions and monitoring), I joined a forum dedicated to a Christian kids radio drama I had grown up on. Everything was fine at first, it’s not like I could do or did anything wrong to begin with, one because I was so sheltered I didn’t know about anything regarding the world, and two, everything was monitored. It was tied to content and figures that they knew and trusted, and all was good.

But as time went on, I was still planning on killing myself, and instead of being the surface kind of person I had been, I started letting information about my situation slip into my conversations and stuff. That was the first time I had learned that what I was going through was actually abuse and depression and stuff. But I became addicted to finally having access to the outside world, finally having meaning and purpose, having knowledge outside of my isolation, having the chance to talk about things I was threatened of like scripture and different beliefs and all. And it was all until I was gonna kill myself anyway, so what did it matter. My family just..really changed during that time. They became more paranoid, more hateful, more controlling, more isolating. The psychological damage of our situation wasn’t only affecting me, I can look back now and say. But I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t understand why I was such a problem as a person back then.

One day they snapped, and they took it all away. They acted like they never knew, and they went in to everything I owned, they deleted my stuff (or rather, thought they did. I had contingency plans for everything by the time I got scared of what they might do to me on a bad day eventually), they blocked me out, they took away my computer and any access to the outside world. It wouldn’t have been as bad had I not admitted I was planning to commit suicide and my community kept me from it. That was the worst sin and slap in the face to my parents, how dare I question their parenting or God. That made the grounding worse. 6 months, entirely isolated in my bedroom. Only out for hygiene and food, when I was allowed. They didn’t look at or speak to me for months at a time. Then I was forced into a church and youth group to “get back to God” that..came with its own problems.

It’s so strange because now they just kind of act like they never did that, and that never happened. Now I’m friends in person or at least on Facebook with people I knew back then, my mom adores one friend I had who I know in person now. Now they act like they never hit or threatened me or locked me in my room. But I’m also not allowed to talk about it, I have to act like it didn’t happen. It’s really strange to feel.

But regardless of all of that, the fact was I wasn’t supposed to talk about my life and get as involved as I did, but I did. I went behind my parents backs.. a lot. And then after the isolation was over, and I had access to things again, I went right back. Not often, not directly, but I couldn’t stay away from the only place I had ever felt slightly home, or like there was a chance I could get out of things. It came with its own set of stuff and people and experiences that I learned from and messed up in and became who I am. But I still wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t supposed to talk about home, or my parents. I technically am still not supposed to talk about them I guess, but it’s difficult when it’s such a big part of your identity and raising.

After that I was really damaged. Losing my church and feeling at fault. Being assaulted at 16. Losing our house and being homeless during senior year. My friend and leadership group and worship bandmate getting killed. The abuse getting worse. A lot of things happened. I had definitely gotten to the point that I believed I wasn’t good enough for God anymore, or ever was, and had messed up beyond repair. I let that control me and my existence. I’m not excusing it. I want to make it abundantly clear that I’m not excusing anything that I’ve done or let happen. Abuse isn’t an excuse for sin, and shouldn’t have dishonored my family by talking about what was happening or by going back where I was banned from. I shouldn’t have dishonored them by being as scared of them as I was. And I shouldn’t have let my fear of them or of God or anything else direct me into so much sin going forward. I want to make it abundantly clear, I don’t excuse that. Especially moving forward.

I was so ready to commit suicide. I wasn’t planning on making it to 18 but I did. I definitely wasn’t planning to make it to 20 or 21. I attempted suicide quite a few times over the years, but for some reason (heh. God.) it never worked.

I was at my most vulnerable when I did my worst. I’ll just be blunt and honest and be prepared for whatever reaction this gets, and I won’t blame you for it. But I’ve struggled with bisexuality in my life. There was a while that I was admittedly just like “screw it, I’m going to hell anyway, let everyone love who they want, no one will ever love me anyway, so it doesn’t even matter. nothing matters.” That was about when I met my friend grace, who quickly became my closest friend. She was not shy about her feelings towards me, or about how she wanted to “help fix me”, but I was very hesitant because deep down I knew that it wasn’t right even if it was different than how my family had always believed and threatened my life about. Eventually I realized I was (or rather realistically struggled with it) bisexual, and caved.

It wasn’t really sexual or anything, I was still both scarred from assault, not really a sexual person at the time, and super sheltered, so it was “innocent” albeit not because it was wrong. It didn’t last but just a small handful of weeks, not even 2 months, because we were both toxic and broken at the time, she treated me like a project and not a person, and I struggled the whole time because I knew deep down it was wrong no matter what excuse I could pull. It ended very very badly and really screwed me up for a long time. By that point, I knew any hope I had of being loved by or gained back by God (especially according to my raising) was entirely gone now. I lost my friend, I lost my faith, I lost my salvation, I lost my family (they would very much harm me if they ever knew, to this day. So I still live with that fear even though it’s been like 4 years since all of this was a thing). I didn’t really have any reason any more.

After this, I fought hard to go to college. I had wanted to go to college before, I felt called to business school and to do things to help people who struggled, I wanted to go into media and arts and be able to tell stories and create art that mattered how it had when I was a child. I still was hoping to do something that mattered. I was fighting to try to get back to God some how, I never stopped *believing in God*, I just couldn’t believe in my faith or salvation or worth to God, and much like my parents, I was trying to work for it. For worth. For purpose. For anything. I had to do everything myself, but I did manage to get into school. I didn’t think I was going to. But I did. And I fought for it. I had no friends, no self care, no anything, but I got my grades. 4.0. Everything.

That’s when I officially Richard. Well, sort of. He worked at the dollar store down by my house, and that’s where we shopped most. He was my friendquaintance there first, I had known him for three years by that point. We connected over video games, he was playing dearly beloved from KH over the sound system in the store when we first met. My mom had knownish him longer. Anyway I had lost my job at the time, and DG was hiring, and he told me to put my info down on a card and he’d make sure the hiring manager got my application if I went home and applied. I did. But a short time later he wound up texting me apologizing that they weren’t hiring any more and he didn’t know. We wound up continuing to talk and become friends, and I could definitely tell he wanted to ask me out but I felt really weird about it and actually shut him down the first time.

However, I’d gotten a lot of pressure about it, especially from my mother. She never knew I wasn’t fully straight, but she was definitely obsessed with making sure I was NOT a lesbian (she worried about it from me cutting my hair, to not being boy crazy [because of how weird and threatening they were about everything and hypersexualizing everything from my very childhood, despite not actually giving me the talk or anything. I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans tucked inside my boots during elementary school because it would make me look like a prostitute, for example. so even looking at a boy felt like a sin, even though I also wasn’t developed as a person to even experience attraction], to my obsession with hoodies.. like all the things of my entire life, prior to grace, and that had nothing to do with sexuality 😅) and I was attracted to him despite the back minded red flags, so eventually I caved and dismissed the red flags, and went out with him, so I could make everyone happy. I reasoned kind of like in your story, there was no harm in going ahead and opening the box.

I was.. very much wrong in that. Very much.

I don’t..want to go into detail about any of that. A lot of stuff is unresolved and still makes me want to just.. I don’t know. He went from kind friend and caring father to abusive dominant partner very very quickly. Any friends I had, isolated from. Spent more time with him than with family. A lot of boundaries in morality and sexuality and things completely destroyed. Self worth gone entirely. He..did things. He made me do things. I know the effects of pornography and masturbation and just sexual addiction and disorder because I was forced to confront it all at once. I was a victim of the former, forced to do the latter, definitely potentially targeted for a kill if I had stayed longer. I wish..I wish I had never met him. I wish I had never laid eyes on the man. I definitely wish he had never laid eyes on me. I still struggle not to feel everything. I don’t..I don’t know why I let it all happen as much as I did, because I was ultimately the one to put my foot down and say no and break things off. I did get brave. But I guess for a long time I believed I deserved it. My mom wanted me to stay with and marry him. He wanted to marry me. I had already messed up with God. I had already committed the worst sins of Christianity. It was better for me to be raped by a man than to have been with a woman so this was what was necessary. I deserved it. So I stayed. I stayed despite all the hospital stays and the brain cyst and stuff he wasn’t there for, despite the fights and gas lighting and him making me believe I wasn’t functional because of my mental health. I stayed because sometimes he was still sweet, sometimes he came and sat at McDonald’s with me while I used their WiFi for homework when I had none, sometimes he would let me go with him to do errands so I wouldn’t have to be at home, sometimes he texted me back quicker. I stayed because of his son, and being his mom for 6 months. I stayed because his family loved me and wanted me to stay. I stayed because he told me he loved me. But I knew and soon found out he didn’t. And it made me wish I had never known him at all. The stuff I participated in, despite managing to stand up for myself about not participating in some things, not letting him get away with everything *yet* (he was getting aggressive and impatient and that’s around the time I finally left him), not sending certain things, I still let him and participated in and caved to doing so much, and it made me feel like I would never be worth anything now. I broke up with him over refusal of unfought consensual sex and refusal to 100% step away from God even though I believed I had no right to hold onto God and no place in His plan anymore. And that was that.

After that there were a couple brief interests that quickly died as soon as they showed interest because I either didn’t believe the same or refused to participate in sexual activity.

and then the last one, the things I most recently walked away or am in the process of walking away from, was the overall friend group I got involved with, and the person I caved into dating from it. Not everyone in it was bad, or is bad, I still am there for a couple people. But it was overall just a messy group. A lot of immaturity, a lot of drama. I fell pretty prey to the religion of social justice and anything goes during the last year. I let people walk on and use me. I acted like things were fine that weren’t. I stopped trying to vocalize my boundaries or my faith because I felt like I wasn’t actually a believer or didn’t have a place with God still, and I was seen as a religious threat, and I didn’t want to get hurt anymore. I still said I was a Christian and didn’t deny God or anything, but I wasn’t very open either. My recent ex got really attached to me as a “reason to live”, and by that point I just didn’t have any boundaries left. I thought he believed in God but was proven wrong. I let him use me for a lot, and coerce me into some things, and I didn’t even try to stop it until quarantine hit and I was so sick. We think I had Covid, but it was before testing. After that, and the isolation, I was forced to get my act together. To confront demons I’d had for years upon years. To recognize boundaries I needed and didn’t have, or had and shouldn’t have. To recognize my own sin and screw ups and doubt and disbelief. To recognize my fear and how it had become my god and directed all my running away in life.

I started picking back up the shattered pieces of myself and my faith. I recognized that I’d let my fear by my god. My parents be my god and religion. My academic position and education. My friends. My fear of failure and authority and loneliness. My trauma. My need to please everyone. My need to be enough. My savior complex.

I had to balance my beliefs and logic and common sense. I had to try to put God at the front again. I had to stop self harming in the millions of ways I had done so over the years, from cutting to being people’s play thing to school over self worth and health and well being. I’m.. still working on it.

I had to start facing a God I had become terrified of, and still am, and still struggle with. I had to beg for help getting on the right track again. I was..am. So lost and vulnerable, I had truly hit rock bottom, and needed Him to rebuild.

It was after I started that, that I changed my major. It was then I reconnected with a couple of my God friend’s again. It was then I was given the idea to randomly look at Levi’s server, and wound up talking, and becoming involved there a lot out of the blue. It was then God gave me the new group of friends and game that I got to participate in. And it was then that you messaged me, when I needed a friend most, and that you’ve helped me more with my faith than I’ve felt or had in so many years.

So that’s where I am now. I’m not proud of the messed I’ve made. I’m not proud of everything I’ve done or allowed to be done or happen. I’m not proud of where or how I’ve fallen. I’m not excusing it. I’m thankful for the boundaries I’ve been able to make with help, and still am. I’m thankful that the people I had messed up with or lost once are now back on the right path with God too, and we are proper friends again (like grace, she’s married to a very good Christian man now, and she and I are good friends again now that we both learned we were wrong). I am thankful that I am in the degree I am meant to be, and as soon as I was, God started providing for me 10 fold. I know I’m going to have to take steps forward away from my family and stop making them my idols, and hopefully eventually we can have a stable relationship together again. I know I still have a long way to go in discovering and developing faith and trust again. But God willing and merciful, I’m trying. I’m not who I was. I won’t allow boundaries to be crossed again. I don’t let others become my god so easily.

It is not easy. My self worth is still not existent. I still feel incredibly broken. I wonder if I’ll ever be normal, or worth loving, or getting to have a relationship where I’m not used or fixed or expected to fix. Where I can just enjoy someone’s company and it be mutual and do dumb things like go to the park or museums or something instead of sneaking around or playing therapist or demanding things and having to give so much of myself away all the time. I wonder if I’ll ever get to be a person. Sometimes it’s hard not to get to be. I don’t even get that of my family.

But in the mean time, I am just me. I am stupid and human and trying to rely on God to the best of my abilities. I am grateful for who is in my life. I am grateful to still be alive and have the chance to right my wrongs or live better as a person and Christian. I am grateful that I’ve learned and am able to help others. All I can do is press forward and keep trying to have faith. And that’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’m here for.