Chapter 8: Food for thought

when life throws you curve balls, whether it be a family members death, a serious illness that befalls you, when a person forces themselves onto you, you must not let these things get you down. i have experienced more physical and emotional pain than most 20 year olds have in their lives, but i choose to keep going forward and not let what others have done to me, what others have said to me, what others have said about me. it is all irrelevant because unless you let another persons opinions affect you, than people have no control over your psyche. only when we finally accept ourselves, faults and all can we live truly honest lives, and be our true self.

Chapter 7: GroundWork

             Freshman year at the university of Kansas was filled with as many UP’S as there were DOWN’S. I lived at Naismith hall with one other roommate and two suitemates. So, two of us shared a bedroom but four of us shared a bathroom. I didn’t get into habitually smoking pot until my freshman year at the university of kanas when I realized that it was much more commonplace that I had previously thought. I found that its natural chemicals produced made me feel better and more at ease than any lab made pharmaceutical I had tried to that point in my life. I got a fake ID my freshman year just like so many others in my dorm, because if you did not have a fake ID in Lawrence you had no social life outside of the classes you went to everyday. If people at the university of Kansas actually studied as hard as they partied maybe they wouldn’t have had such a high dropout rate

Chapter 6

The summer before i would move to Lawrence to begin my freshman year at the university 

of Kansas i worked as a waiter for the summer at a steak house where i became quite good 

and made some decent money. that was probably the first summer i really got into smoking 

pot which has now become a habitual habit of mine. i find that marijuana takes care of 

every physical, mental, or emotional problem i could ever deal with. that summer i started to 

branch out more making friends with people i would have never thought to. my first week at 

the university of Kansas started a week before actual classes began. you could move in 

early into my dorms so i took the chance so i could explore Lawrence as much as possible 

before the school year began. that first week i met more people and drank more alcohol in 

my life to that point. i was very hopeful and excited for the year to come. and through out 

my first semester which i will digress more in to my next chapter meet all of my 

expectations. but like life had done so many times before in the past. my happiness would 

not last for long.

Chapter 5: Truth

            Through my life has been filled with struggles that I can barely explain how hard they are to even write about let alone speak about. I have had things done to me that were absolutely deplorable and the people responsible should rot in hell for all eternity. I know that my language is strong but only those who have experienced true trauma true hurt true pain inflicted upon you viciously repeated again and again will than you realize our contempt for these perpetrators. Who thought of nothing but themselves and only of their pleasure and power and they watched us suffer under their control, as we suffered and are still suffering a piece of our soul begins to get smaller and smaller till it is just an ember glowing slowly in the corner of our souls. For some this ember represents the last bit of unanimity they have left. For other this ember can represent all the love the person has left to give after such an incident that destroyed her once roaring fire. The ember may represent a depression that just starts as an ember and grows into a flame of utter despair till it is a roaring fire of emptiness. These are what our attackers want us to feel, like we were nothing, but that cycle needs to end these embers though similar are different in every one person. and for every person it can take a long road to recovery and some more than others. Though so called people who think they’re better than everyone else simple because of some self-lacking they have in themselves it needs to stop. And those who have been attacked and are still alive with us today we must  put an end to this violence we need to speak up and not be afraid of these persons for they are nothing more than dust in the wind blowing through the earth never leaving a mark and we must become strong like steel to stand forever that nothing and no one will ever hurt us and only by the sweet hands of white head we be able to bend back to our true selves never to forget the horrible memories but instead let them make you stronger so that nothing and no one will ever take a piece of your soul again.

Below you will find  a link to a photo of surviors of sexual assult standing on stage with lady GaGa on stage during one of her performances.

 http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/02/29/taking-a-stand-against-sexual-violence-with-lady-gaga-on-the-2016-oscar-stage/

Chapter 4: The letter

When I was 15 my cousin who had molested me sent me a Facebook message asking me to forgive him for what he had done. I tried to blackmail him and said that if he told anyone what had happened that I would tell my parents. now this was probably not the smartest way to handle the situation but I was beyond livid. I remember my parents calling me into their room on that fateful day. my parents were more upset with the fact that I had tried to blackmail him than the fact that he had admitted to molesting me. I was beyond outraged and still have not fully processed my feelings. to understand why my parents were upset with me blackmailing him was because I had gotten off of probation about 6 months’ prior from a stupid incident that had happened in the 8th grade. my parents in their own way were trying to divert the blame off of them and onto me as if I had done something wrong. this started a year’s long rage I was constantly angry at my parents and didn't know how to handle all of the emotions I was feeling. I remember a couple months after my cousin had admitted to his crime, and my parents mainly my mother thought this was the reason I was interested in guys and they sent me to therapy. not necessarily to deal with me being gay but because they did not know how to handle me. I wasn't some little kid anymore that they could put in a timeout. I was growing my own opinions of the world and how it worked. I told my mother I would never say the words "I Love You" again if she persisted with her inquiries into my sexuality because at the time I wasn't even able to admit to myself that I was gay. it was and still is extremely hard for me to separate out logic from emotion. I could disassociate myself from the situation and try to see it through my parent’s eyes. but I always came back to the fact that they were my parents so logic shouldn't have played a role in how they handled their son. up until my senior year of high school I had told my parents I was bisexual to give them some semblance of hope. but two weeks before my 18th birthday I told everyone in my immediate family that I would be coming out on my birthday. sort of like a two weeks’ notice for a job but instead I was leaving behind a younger more naïve version of myself and becoming who I really was. when I decided to come out I did it in the way of a Facebook post and when I pressed click to publish the post it was one of the most terrifying and one of the most liberating things I’d ever done. when I came out I sort of adopted a self-motto that if someone had a problem with me I didn't really care because I had enough of my own problems to deal with and didn't need their added shit. most people will never understand the depth of the emotions that I have felt. to have such conflicting feelings of loving a person so much you would die for them but at the same time feeling that if they died my life would be far easier. I do not pretend to be an optimist or a realist I am an extremely cynical person and my life’s events have made it so. the last three months of my senior year went by well at least in the perspective of school. I graduated with a B average GPA and was excepted into all the schools I had applied. I was ready to leave behind the crappy existence that had been my high school and formative years to become a new person. but as time would tell my struggles were just beginning.

Chapter 3: Fast Forward

It was my first year at a new school, I was entering first grade, the pivotal first step into educational matriculation. I had managed to block out most of what had perspired just months ago. I was an awkward child after what had occurred my natural curiosity for things turned sour, and I found it hard to make friends. From a young age I knew I was different from other boys and after the abuse that had been to me I had been hypersexualized. I had complex emotions that a six-year-old should not have been having. Unlucky was my lot in life that after I was not believed by my mother, I turned to trouble making to get attention from them. I felt that the only way I could be seen or heard was to act out and it work, all be it bad, but it was attention none the less. My best friend who would grow to be more than that in time never asked anything of me and simply let me be a kid. Growing up in Maryland from the first grade until we moved to Kansas I would spend nearly literally very weekend at my best friend’s house. His name was Conner, I loved going over to his house because he helped me forget about the hollowness that I felt whenever at my home. One weekend day around the time I was 7, I believe it was the summer before second grade. My family was invited over to another family’s house for dinner, they had three children. One a boy who was around 15 would become my next abuser. I remember he took me up to his room after dinner, which apparently to my parents was not odd. I remember him asking me to take off my clothes and I was brought back to that dark horrible place. After this second abuse occurred I thought so little of myself that in the years to follow I would be repeatedly sexually abused by this horrid person and would say nothing for fear of repercussions. I was an extremely emotionally tortured young boy, my parents who both worked full time and had three other children to care for simply thought my acting out was due to me being a rotten child and not something deeper. I grew to tell grander and grander lies more intricate than the last about things that were so trivial just so as to give the illusion of blatant innocence. I had a very warped sense of how the world worked, and I did not have the knowledge at the time to discern everything in my mind what was happening. And it took me even longer to admit that it wasn’t my fault what was happening to me. When we moved to Kansas I was heartbroken, more so than I had been with any move so far in my life. We had been living in Maryland since I was 5 years old and it was 8 and half years later and we were a thousand miles away in a strange and boring place. I cannot stress enough the hatred I have for the state of Kansas, it has been the bane of my existence for the last 7 and half years, but we will get more into that later. When we first moved to Kansas it was the summer before my 8^th grad year, this summer was particularly short because east coast schools let out later in June as opposed to the Midwest that got out mid-May. School started up around the second week of august and I was as awkward as ever. I had gone to a private school the seven years prior and this was my first year at a public school, well if you don’t count kindergarten which I don’t. toward the end of the school year I had failed miserably at making friends. So in a last chance before high school came I tried to make some friends all bite in a very stupid way. I had procured certain pain killers and gave them out to several kids at school so they would be friends with me. In the short the kids got sick and I was suspended, they wanted to expel me but I had not even had a tardy to that point. In the long I had to endure some legal fees and legal obligations, but in the end it remained off my record and stayed with me as a lesson well learned. Right before freshman year started a most indecent event occurred. I had recently discovered the wonders of gay porn online and used my camera to record a particularly steamy 5-minute video that I used for personal reasons on several occasions. On this unfortunate day I decided to have some me time in the afternoon around 4, my mother who I did not hear and would come to regret. Opened my door which I had stupidly forgotten to lock. Unlike most mothers who would have been petrified and slammed the door, decided to run in and take the camera out of my hand and then turn to run and close the door. I was frozen in terror that my parents had just discovered at then what I believed to be my biggest secret. My parents later that night confronted me about the incident that had occurred. My mother was terrified being raised as a devout catholic that things like I was doing were very grotesque. My father on the other hand was just more concerned that it was gay porn rather than regular porn. At the time I was not ready to deal with my extremely complex sexual feelings, and told them that I was simply curious and that ended that for the time being. It would be another year before a revelation would come that would begin to eat away at the ties that bound us as family started to reveal themselves in their true form.

Chapter 2:Ignorance shattered 

The day after my mother had told us what had happened to our grandparents, was filled with somber conversations, and talks of what they had done and who they were. We had one of my mother’s siblings and their family stay with us. They had three children the youngest a boy around 14 and two girls who were two or four years older my memory is a tad hazy on them. I had my own bedroom so I stayed in there mostly during the next couple of days because I could not understand everything that was going on. I had always pestered my older brother about wanting to play games with him and his friends but he always ignored me. I should mention that we also had my great aunt sue staying with us as well as some of my mother’s cousins who were quite young. They were around my brothers age and all male between the ages of 10-13. I was six years old at this time. On around the third day I pestered my brother to let me play a video game with him and my 2^nd cousins but he said no. I asked if I could just watch and he said no. on the fourth day my cousin who was 14 and a boy asked me if I wanted to play a game. I was so utterly gleeful because he was older than my brother and he thought I was cool. Little did I know that my merriment would soon turn to ash. I asked him where we were going to play and what were we going to play. He told me we were going to play a question game and that we could play it in my room. I being the naïve 6-year-old I was didn’t protest and was intrigued. He took me to my room and locked the door, he then sat on my bed, I had a bunk bed with Scooby doo sheets and pillow cases. I stood in front of him. I asked him what the rules were for this game he said that he would ask a question and if I got it right he would take off a piece of clothing, but if I got it wrong I would have to take off a piece of clothing. We played the game for about 10 minutes. First I had to remove my whinnie the pooh t-shirt, then he took off his shirt. I only had underwear and pants on so when I lost those he still had clothes. He told me I would have to play with his special area if I wanted to win the game and get to leave otherwise he was going to tell my parents I had done something wrong. I have blocked out most of that day. I remember waking up the next day and not knowing if what had happened the day prior had actually taken place. I told my grief ridden mother about what had happened, I remember her asking my cousin if he did anything and he said no. I remember my mother believing his lie over my truth. And I can remember my heart shredding to pieces’ as I felt like the most alone person in the world. On the 5^th or 6^th day a little glimmer of light shined my dad’s parents were there, and best my fantastic loving grandmother was there, still shaken up from the day’s prior events I did not hug my grandmother and was at first worried she would be mad at me. Than my grandfather told me that it is perfectly polite to greet someone with an extended hand too. He made me relaxed so for the rest of the time before the funeral I stayed in my room with the door locked, plagued with nightmares when I slept or even closed my eyes. Over time I had learned to block out the event until an incident much farther in the future made it return in splendid horror. But back to the funeral, thousand upon thousands of people came to the funeral of my mother’s parents. They had been missionaries who had traveled to over 150 countries, they were great philanthropists. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon as well as an author. My grandmother was always a missionary and loved her work. Sadly, they passed away on the 14^th of May in the year 2002 just two days before my eldest sister’s birthday. During the funeral I sat by my grandmother who I let hold my hand because I always felt safe with her whenever I would see her or even hear her voice. We listened as family and who I assume were friends came up on stage to glorify my mother’s dead parents. When the funeral was over I went home and sat on one of our couches just talking to my grandmother as she told me stories of her youth. These were my favorite times with her growing up because I always felt almost ethereal like my problems floated away and I was just in her stories without a care. My grandmother and grandfather left two days after the funeral and we said goodbye to them. It was and still is always incredibly hard for me to have to say goodbye to my grandmother, even if I know I’m going to see her again. She will always be the most important person in my life forever and always. For the next year life seemed to go by as normal, I had moved to a new school and had made friends and life seemed to be going well. But as you will learn my life only went well for very short periods of time.