Psyke.org

Newt

Life Story

Copyright, Newt

Here is my self injury story. I was born premature and not expected to live to a year, raped repeatedly dozens of times before I was four, I think because my father expected me to die and thus considered me expendable. My father is a Nazi sympathiser and is currently being investigated for the murder of this kid… Anyway and my grandfather was a high ranking SS officer and I got to hear all about what happened in the camps before most kids could read. I had bad nightmares about a war I was much too young to know about, and I still am obsessed with the holocaust.

My mother is probably borderline, she was always going off on me. From the earliest time, I can not remember a single day when she wasn’t screaming obscenities at me and telling me to die. My parents separated and I’d spend the weekend with my Dad. He’d lock me in the closet, threaten to bury me in this pit he dug in the backyard if I told anybody, threaten to blind me, dismember me, kill the family, etc… My mother used to pick me up and I’d be ravenously hungry as he wouldn’t feed me. She also told me she’d find red cigarette-shaped marks on my chest and arms as if I had been shocked with electricity, but my mother is weird so I don’t know if I believe that. She said I’d put my stuffed toys around me in a circle and curl into a ball and not move for days, not respond or blink or anything, except maybe to scream and go hysterical.

I only remember being very scared at this age, thankfully, the details are blurred. One day I vomited in the sink after being forced to give my father a blow job and swallow and I remember cleaning the sink with tissue paper so he wouldn’t know and punish me. Later that day I vomited when I saw milk… One weekend when I was about three I stole some of his breakfast when he was out of the room. He took me into the kitchen and stood me before the element on the stove. As a punishment for stealing his food (I was hungry) I had to put my hand on the element. I can remember the confusion and starting to blubber, I was trying at three to figure out whether to let him do it or do it myself. I did it myself and barely touched it, but my pain seemed enough and he took care of it and told my mother it was an accident. I don’t think I ever stole from him again.

Also, sometimes he’d take me to the pool and hold me under while I thrashed. I think he got off on how scared I was, that he had the power to kill me. When I was little I thought I saw him murder someone in cold blood, but that sounds so preposterous that I think it must’ve been a nightmare. Anyway, by the time I was four and in preschool the shrinks were involved, I was a basket case, prone to fugue states, whatever. They managed to figure out (geniuses, they were) that I was abused and my father lost his parental rights but never did a second in jail and began stalking the family around the country, eventually turning up on my grandpa’s porch and scaring him into a heart attack.

He tried to kidnap me out of a restaurant when I was five while my mother went hysterical. Sometime around then I became certain he was coming back to kill me for “telling” and I tried to gouge my eyes out and was put in therapy. I was self destructive before the age of four, biting myself, pulling my hair, hitting things.

I cut for the first time when I was six, in the bathroom, but the cuts were light and I had been dressing and bathing myself for years so nobody figured it out and the cuts faded and nobody ever knew. Between that age and about thirteen I was self destructive, but mostly in the dare devil sense — doing dangerous things to intentionally hurt myself that could be passed off as accidents. I managed to give myself at least three concussions, split my teeth through my lip two or three times, was hit by a car, etc…

My mother, during this, was really unpredictable. She didn’t hit me often, but she threw dishes at me and once tried to hit me in the head with one of those little kid doll strollers and took a chunk out of the dry wall (I ducked). As I grew older, she told my sister not to pay attention to me, that I was bad, etc., and started talking about how if I disappeared nobody would notice. I was taken out of school and not permitted to go out or watch TV, etc.

I started to get very depressed. I tried running away twice and was brought back. One night I decided my mother’s crap was killing me and I tied a belt around my neck and crawled into a closet, looping the end of the belt inside the closet so that when my mother tore the door off, it would choke me to death. It almost did but I obviously got it off, I started panicking. I wanted her to be responsible for my death. She did so many weird things (like pretending to die in her sleep) that reality started to turn into one long, neverending nightmare and to this day I struggle with dissociation.

My mother always threatened to kill herself and shit, and threatened, indirectly, to kill me. I slept with a knife under my pillow for a year before graduating to an unheated shed. Sometimes she’d come after me in the middle of the night and I would run away and sleep anywhere it was safe. I slept in the neighbour’s crawl space for a wall (under their house) before they found me and booted me out. I slept in a little boy’s tree fort, etc. She chased me with her car. I remember one night when I was fourteen, I was losing it. I was carrying around a razor because I wanted it to defend myself if she was going to choke me again. I spent time hiding in the garden and under the porch.

Then one night, I think my mother was telling me she was going to have me put in a foster family with a rapist foster father (“because you are such a little slut”) and I was seriously depressed. I wanted to die, I couldn’t escape. I ran away to a basketball court near my house and was crying under the lights. A teacher at school tried to help me after I was beaten once and I got taken out of school. Under the lights that night, I cut into my arm for the first time in a long time (I also cut the palette out under my tongue when I was three). My mother had been screaming all night stuff like how I wasn’t worth beating. I was so tired of hurting and I almost wanted to be beaten, wanted to be worth beating, and I was so confused and mad. I started cutting like crazy. It got worse and worse.

In the years following I left home as a minor and almost lost my eye and my arm to self injury. Blah blah blah. I feel very old and I am only twenty-two. I feel lost and old and alone, but I don’t feel weak and I know I can explain myself. I don’t want attention, I just remember “you aren’t worth beating” and the hollowness of this world — now that I am out people expect me to be fine, a productive member of society, and I never got to be a kid or learn the rules or grow up, and I don’t know what I am doing. I cut because it is familiar, and as weird as it sounds, I was never (positively) touched by my parents, hugged or comforted. When my mother found out I cut at seventeen (I think she knew but was in denial) she called me a “self mutilating freak” and went and got me a razor to “kill myself with”. This sort of thing was a daily occurrence.

In the time I was a kid I was pulled out of the shower naked (after the door was broken down) and beaten naked, I was chased in a car, told to kill myself and publicly humiliated. I was nearly beaten to death once and left in bed for months and lost so much weight my mother said I looked like a skeleton and that she was sure I would die. I didn’t care at that point and the pain went on for weeks at a degree where I was constantly fainting and would scream if someone sat on my bed. The first night of my “illness” I was told to gag myself with a sock if I couldn’t shut up. I didn’t have any energy to be terrified of death the pain consumed anything and all I could see for weeks was a black haze. Everything hurt. This is when I believe I first developed a real taste for pain. After I began to get better (it took me about six months before I could walk upright, my neck and back were black) I began really craving pain and blood. As sick as it was, the fact that my mother had nearly beaten me to death made me feel wanted, loved, that she had expended that much energy on me.

The only time they touched me was to hurt me and now they are gone, and I miss them even though I am scared of them. Feeling pain is the closest I know to feeling wanted. I don’t do it as self punishment, but to comfort myself. Sometimes when I cut deep and I can feel the blood pounding out in every heartbeat, I pretend it’s my mother’s heartbeat and I am a foetus and everything will be fine. Today, I get mad at many things and like to be “a shit disturber”. People who bring children into the world enrages me, the police, the law, anybody telling me what to do or trying to “help me”. Sex bugs me and advertisements using sex bug me. I bug myself for being unable to forget. I get banned from most online groups for breaking rules and I simply don’t care. People who don’t cut “deep” enough piss me off, even though I realise this is irrational and it’s not a contest. Sometimes I feel like I was forced into this behaviour directly by being made to put my damn hand on that element and other things of that nature and sometimes I get mad at people who started this stuff when they were old enough to know better (I was self injuring in the crib, hitting my head against the bars until there were bruises). I know it’s not my place, but I just feel so much anger at everyone.

That is all.

 

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