So I came here from the AILD video. I felt something pulling on my heart to share my story and what I am going through now. I do not believe that I can give an idea of what I am going through without the background of my life and the complete shit show it has been. It may as well be fiction but its not, so grab some popcorn and enjoy the chaos that is my life. I will try to cover the most important parts and cut to the chase as much as I can so that its not too long and painful.
I was the second born into a young family. My father worked full time and my mom raised my sister and myself. From a very early age we were both subjected to my father physically and mentally abusing my mother. He was abusing steroids at the time and even though we were unaware was also a paranoid schizophrenic. My childhood years were spent being called a “momma’s boy” because I preferred music and video games to getting dirty and doing things my dad expected me to do. The first time I remember being physically abused by my dad was right before my 6th birthday. I am sure there was mental moments before but this was the first one I remembered. My dad was teaching me how to tie my shoes and said “I will show you how to do this once, if you aren’t paying attention you won’t learn how to do it.” He tied them, I untied them. I tried to copy what he did the first time, I messed up, he slapped me across the face. I started crying. He untied them and told me to start again. I did, I messed up, slap. I am completely sobbing by now and can’t do it. I make a couple more attempts with the same ending. Finally he gets so frustrated he tells me he will do it for me. He tied my shoes so tight that I could feel my heart in my shoes. Throbbing. I went upstairs to my room crying and scraped my shoes off my feet without untying them so that I wouldn’t have to ask him to show me again. I had this flashback when I was 18 drunk in a hotel and I slipped my shoes on (still did it out of habit 13 years later never knowing why) and the memory came back when I scraped my heel on my shoe. My high school sweetheart and fiance at the time watched as I lost my mind and started sobbing uncontrollably as this memory unlocked itself. This is just one example of the things I went through as well as the rest of my family. The mental and physical abuse was ever present. My mom and dad separated when I was about 8 years old. My mom came back after a week or so and was trying to figure things out of they got a divorce. She mentioned child support and my dad beat the shit out of her. My sister and I were in bed but we came out and saw the whole thing. Its the first time I saw my father cry. He had been seen for what he was for the first time. After that they got divorced and my dad left it up to us how much we wanted to see him. Needless to say it was few and far between. When I started getting bad grades in middle school though he made sure to stop by with a 2x4 with my report card that had 5 F’s on it and gave me 5 hits with it for every F. Didn’t matter that I was being bullied, came from a Christian school my whole life, had no idea that public school would be so difficult with other kids. I had a hard time.
Fast forward to High School because hell, this is already long and we aren’t half way through. I liked school, I goofed off a bit. Enjoyed being in a band, playing football, having good friends, partying (little too much) and all that other fun stuff. I met my first love there in my Junior year. She was a cute cheerleader who also played the alto sax for the marching band. It was new fresh love and it was fun having someone like that in my life for the first time. We had the typical good/bad HS relationship. We had a lot of fun but when we got drunk we fought or got on each others nerves. We drank a lot too because my house was the party house in high school and her parents were cops who never cared that we drank. The drinking is what started a new addiction for me. One night we were in the hot tub at her parents house and we were house sitting and she had friends from work and we were all kinda tipsy in the tub. She was massaging some guys feet right next to me in the hot tub and I had no idea until someone else mentioned it. I pulled her hands out of the water to see it and asked her “What the **** is this?” and grabbed the guy by the throat and threw him out of the hot tub. I had some choice words with her and then I went to the house to the bathroom and slammed the door behind me not knowing she was following. I smashed her finger in the door and thought that I broke it. She was crying and I was losing it. I had become the very thing I never wanted to become, my father. Hurting the woman that I loved because I was upset. It didn’t matter to me that it was an accident. I asked her to leave the bathroom after apologizing and crying for 10 minutes. I found a sharp pair of scissors in a drawer after she left and started my first addiction. I cut my chest in about 8 spots then went into her room, fell apart again and punched myself in the head until I blacked out. It was not a good night. Other things happened with our relationship and after 4 1/2 years and an engagement we split up. It was the hardest thing I had been through up to that point in my life.
I was 19 at this point. I was drinking every day and cutting every day. I had no job and I lived with my mom while my sister had a life and a kid and everything I wanted. I had to get out. I had to hide and be the loser I was and disappear. I got a job and moved into my managers house with her and her boyfriend. It was far from a city or people I knew. I would go to work every day and not eat anything. Just drink tons of espresso until the work day was over then I would go home and drink and carve up my arms, legs, chest, whatever wasn’t infected. When I was in high school I weighed around 300lbs and I had started noticing that I was putting weight back on from all the drinking. Here comes addiction #3. I started realizing that the beer was what was putting on my weight so my brain said “Hey if you feel drunk the alcohol is already in your blood, just force yourself to throw up when you feel drunk enough.” That’s when I became bulimic. This period of self harm, alcoholism, and bulimia went on for about 9 months solid. Until I found my next girlfriend who I could unload all my issues on and completely destroy. We were together for almost 2 years and I lied about my drinking the whole time. I destroyed her trust in me and she inevitably ended things due to not being able to trust me and a lot of mental issues I put her through with the self harm and other things of that nature.
I was about 21/22 at this point in my life. Lost my temp job at a very good company and could barely afford to pay for anything being on unemployment. I could afford to pay rent at my new place but not much else. I started apprenticing at a tattoo shop just to see if it was something I could manage getting into. I am a shit artist (SHIT I AM SERIOUS) yet I still tried. I was there for about a year and a half and had learned nothing except how to clean. I was just being used for free labor and nothing else. The owner hired a new artist and him and I became good friends and massive drinking buddies. We egged each other on and our lives got worse and worse. From girls, to bar fights, to pranks and fun it was all too much and chaotic. This was the life I was living when everything changed for me. One night I invited my married friend over to drink, we had been flirting a lot for a long time and had known each other for years. I knew her and her husband had been unfaithful to each other a number of times. I knew what I was planning on that night and so did she. I had stayed a virgin through both of my long relationships, not due to lack of ability to do so…I actually thought that would be my one saving grace. I had sinned and been so screwed up and such a bad person for so long that I thought, “Hey if I get to heaven and held out for my wife at least I made it through that. Maybe God won’t judge me so hard.” But on this night I was ready to throw it away for this girl. She brought her friend over that had a flight to Hawaii later that evening. It was her excuse to stay, she was going to make an excuse about staying down by the airport because the flight or something. After about an hour of hanging out she left to take her friend to her car and then she was going to come back to my house and stay with me. I couldn’t handle the shame and reality that I felt as soon as she left. She sent me a text about coming back and I told her not to. She said “You know what I was planning right?” and I said yes and told her not to talk to me anymore. I drank a bottle of JIm Beam in about 3 minutes that night because I was done. I sat in the shower crying and asking God why I had to feel like this all the time. Why is this my life? I had always thought about killing myself and knew I would feel too bad for my family or for the person that would find me that would be scarred for life so I never did it and would self harm instead. This night I didn’t care about any of it. I had a plan and I was going to do it the next day. I said one last prayer of “God I have followed you my whole life in some capacity, I have never seen a miracle and you have never shown up for me when I have asked. If you don’t do something to fix my life in 24 hours I am going to walk into that garage and blow my brains out. If you are there, do something.” I woke up the next day in pain. Not just pain but literally the worst pain I had ever experienced. Went to the hospital 7 hours later and I had been diagnosed with Pancreatitis. Something that will trigger literally the worst pain you can feel for about 7 days straight that you have to get pain meds and IV liquids for and rest in a hospital bed for a week to make go away. If you drink any alcoholic beverages you can re-trigger the attack instantly. Literally unfix-able. God answered my prayer, not the way I wanted but he did. I wanted a family, or joy, or a girl to fix me. I asked God to take away my depression, he took the one thing away from me that kept me in it. Alcohol. With each give there is a take, insert my newest addiction and the worst one. Addiction #5: Pain Killers.
At this point I was 22/23 and I had gotten away from the tattoo shop because I had wanted to continue to drink because of the friends I had made there. They didn’t understand I had to stop. I would drink again, and I would be in the hospital again. I tried 3-5 times after my original diagnosis and every time I drank = 7 days in pain in the hospital. I managed to get into cosmetology school at this time and got very back into church. I was committing my life to God because hell, he came through for me when I asked. He actually showed up so it was my time to do the same. I got baptized a couple weeks after I started going back which was neat because they only did baptisms once a year. I got involved in the Jr Youth program and started playing music for the kids and my heart felt like it was on fire for the first time. I am crying writing this because I haven’t felt that in so long. The joy, the love, the burn for God, to help and be there for people who needed it. I was happy, I belonged, I did it all without alcohol or anything. After about 6 months of this I hit a speed bump that would forever alter the course of my life, for better and for worse. I had 60 girls running around me every day at cosmetology school and I did my best to ignore the majority of them. But there was one that would not leave me alone. She was nothing if not persistent. She had a bad reputation but I felt something in her that drew me to her. I took her to coffee and church one night despite what everyone that knew her was telling me. I didn’t care. I felt something in her, something inside her soul that I didn’t ever feel in anyone else.
We were dating for about a year. The beginning was very hard. She was addicted to meth and had a lot of really hard people in her life. She struggled making it through every day just with the simplicity of knowing right and wrong and choosing wrong because it was simple. I sat and thought that I was some knight riding in on a white horse to rescue this poor girl that just needed some moral guidance. Some direction in her life to get away from this shit. I had her crush her meth pipe in front of me, delete all the dealers out of her phone, kick the bad people out of her life. I was her parent, not her boyfriend and I never paid attention to it. I was her boss not her equal. This led to whenever I did something that was wrong and she called me out for it that I would just turn it around on her. Why? Because she was the screw up and I was the one who saved her. We split up almost a year after we started dating. I knew she had cheated on me the first week we were dating with some guy from her school. I had seen it, she lied about it for months. I let it go. She finally admitted it when I fell in love with the real her. When she became clean, when I could see that thing that drew me to her to begin with, when I truly saw her for who she was. But I was immature and insecure, I had slept with this girl. The one thing that I said I would never do until I was married. I did it, I did it to keep her because I knew she would leave me if I didn’t. So I was broken when I found out she had slept with someone else even if she was a different person now. All trust was gone, I became a spy. I would go through her phone, her purse, her facebook, anything and everything. It was no longer a relationship. It was anger, it was control. She ended things a couple months later due to the fact that she tried and I hadn’t. I couldn’t let go of my insecurity and my control.
We went our separate ways for a few months and she then started working her way back around in my life. She was, as I put it, circling me like a wolf. She was talking to all the people in my life and not me, I would attack her if she tried to talk to me. She would reach out in a text and I would call her a whore or slut and tell her to **** off and die in so many words. I wanted to hold onto my hate because if I didn’t I would realize how much I loved her and how screwed up I was from all of it. After another month or so of this she asked me to do her hair. I said it was fine. While she was in my chair she told me that she wanted to start her life over and wanted to get baptized…she wanted me to baptize her because she felt I led her to God more than most people in her life. How could I say no to that, its kind of a sacred thing and I was good again and clean so I figured I was thinking with a straight mind so why not just do it. I was so happy to be part of it and it affected me deeper or as deep as losing my virginity to her. I think that those two things are what keeps my soul with her to this day. I took her home from the baptism after staying at the river and talking for a bit that day. We pulled off before her house and just talked. I didn’t see the girl I knew at all before and thats when I knew I wanted to marry her. So much had changed, she wasn’t the druggy girl I knew, she wasn’t the cheater, she was a beautiful reborn child of God and I was in love with her. I kissed her in that moment, and I can tell you this honestly, I haven’t felt joy or happiness matching that moment since then. Its been 8 years and I think about that moment still. So we were back together, later engaged, then married. That woman is the love of my life. Now you will see how I destroy everything I love.
*I intended to do my whole life in one post but honestly this took a lot out of me emotionally. I will upload the second part probably at some point later today. My testimony has a lot of positive a lot of struggle and I want to touch on why I am on here and what brought me here. I will finish this I just need some time after reliving this stuff today.