What I recall most about my life until I was twelve, was mainly the fact that I would wake up most of the time to hearing my parents arguing in bed, yelling in the living room, or waking up just in time to hear their conversation turn into an argument. For a long time, it really scared me and made me think that I was too small, too weak to do anything since my parents were arguing so much. However, by the time I was six, I was jaded to the fact that my parents argued at home and acted like everything was fine outside of the house. By the time I turned seven, I finally realized that it isn't great for parents to argue, mainly by going over to a friend's place and not hearing a small argument and being apologized to for being able to hear the argument. The look of concern from the mother and the shock on my friend's face when I told them that my parents often yelled at each other and was used to it, that is what clued me in on the fact that I had no clue how messed up my family was. When I turned eight, I was still trying to make my parents happy, despite never really feeling safe, happy, or loved at home due to all the yelling, fighting, and harsh words that I would often hear when my parents thought I was asleep or unable to hear them. It took me so long to finally realize that because of all the yelling I heard, the fighting the happened, and my inability to receive comfort from either parent after the fights is what led to me not feeling safe at home, feeling alone even in the midst of crowds, and what has led to me feeling hesitant when it comes to opening up to people and letting them see how broken, messed up, angry, and devastated I am from what my parents decided to do when they thought I wouldn't know about it. I remember waking up to my mother yelling out in pain, thinking she was hurt, only to hear them arguing about her not wanting to be loved a certain way at that time. When I was twelve, I still wanted to be like my parents, but shortly after following what my parents wanted of me, I realized that I wanted something different than what they wanted. So, I decided to observe other people, get to know them, and learn from them what love, communication, and living was like. Yeah, even at that age and being jaded as I was, I knew that there was more to life than fighting since I never saw much of that at school. For about four years, I went to a school where the kids got to pick what they wanted to do. I was about three when I started at the school, and I enjoyed the reading, the writing, and the play time, but I never really did much of the work I was actually supposed to do because I just wanted to play and be a kid. My parents often got told about that, and eventually I had a teacher who sat me down and talked with me like I was eight or nine, and struck a deal with me. I got the bare minimum done for the day, and I could read as much as I wanted to. We agreed to that, and I would get my work done as fast as I could while getting it right so that I could get back to the books that I loved so much. By the age of five, I was reading above my age level as I could understand and enjoy the books meant for kids who were ten or older. True, this led to me getting bullied because I would get as little work done as I could to get back to the books that let me escape from my troubles, but my books were always there to comfort me when that happened. A lot of times, I wish I could go back to that stage of my life and encourage my younger self to spend more time outside the books and learn from the way the adults acted, observed my classmates more so that I was better prepared for the chaotic change that happened in my life after I turned seven. You see, around the middle of the school year, my dad was upset enough that he kicked me in the butt with enough force to send me flying for a few feet before I landed on my already bruised tail bone. I had excitedly told a friend about it later that week, as I really enjoyed the sensation of being weightless and flying for a time. This however, caused CPS to come to the school and ask me about it. Being a naïve child and thinking nothing of it, I told the lady that met me about what had happened. A couple weeks later, my dad was upset with me for blabbing about what he had done and getting CPS to come to the house. For a few weeks, a woman in low cut shirts and short skirts came to the house every week or so for various talks with me and my siblings along with my parents. At the time, I just thought the woman was in weird clothes since I had never seen things like that before, and thought she was really weird about asking me each time how I was and what had happened since she last came over. Once the school year ended though, my family and I moved out of state since CPS was close to taking my siblings and I away from my mom, and my dad also had a job he had just gotten that was out of state. That was my first major move, and it scared me that we were moving far away from the friends I had made. Luckily, I made a few friends there that helped me out long enough to feel comfortable being myself at school, until they left me for being an introvert and being more interested in books, learning, and gaming then I was interested in making friends and interacting with people. See, when I was five we had a PS2 that I would often wake up in the middle of the night to play on. I loved playing the first Final Fantasy game on that system so much that I ended up having to break the controllers, console, and snap the game disks myself as punishment for not sleeping and choosing to play games instead of being a more "normal" kid. As a little kid, I couldn't really say no to myself when I wanted to play games, ignore the crap going on around me, and just enjoy the story, the act of making choices in a fantasy world where I could just pause the game, reload a save, and continue from there if I made a choice I didn't like or something happened that upset me and made me frustrated. To this day, I still struggle with saying no to gaming to get away from things, but now I have another reason for gaming, which I will explain at a later time. My main point in all of this, is that as a child, I was naïve, desiring to leave behind a crappy existence, and developed a strong passion for learning, gaming, reading, writing, and creating. Because that is what I learned as a kid, and I never felt supported at home, I ended up growing up in a way that set me up for the next stage of my life in a not so great way.
YOU ARE READING
Growing UP
Non-FictionA story detailing what I grew up with, how that has affected my life to the present day, and what I have done to try and deal with the issues that have come from my childhood.
