I started seventh grade in a typical middle school and on my first day met Greg. He is still one of my dearest friends and I have known him longer than just about anyone else in my life outside of family. He was a bit of a loner like me and we had a lot in common. He too was an egghead, somewhat quiet and reserved and we became friends. He liked girls, but was very shy so I didn�t have to talk too much on the subject and therefore didn�t have to confront my own sexuality around him until much later in life.
Things at home started getting sour. The house we moved to only had one bedroom and rather than crowd in with my brother and sister to sleep in the living room, I slept outside under the trees in a sleeping bag. My parents bought a trailer eventually, but my sister stayed in it. I slept outside, rain or shine for the most part of four years. My dad seemed to be more bitter overall when he was home and I naturally distanced myself from him. My brother and sister were both older than me (2 and 3 years) and they were into their own lives. And my mother just started getting more and more on my nerves for some reason and I didn�t want to be around her. Over the next several years they stopped being my family and in my late teen years they were not much more to me than �the people I lived with�.
When I was around 14 or 15 my dad bought a machine that plucked chickens. We raised animals for butchering and I got to be pretty good at it. So much so that one of my mom�s co-workers convinced me to start up my own business. I advertised in feed stores and by word of mouth and after a while I was spending my weekends bathed in blood and feathers. At it�s height I could bring in between two and three hundred dollars a weekend. But mostly I did it to get out my aggressions, anger and frustrations with my life. I became quite desensitized to death and killing. But killing only satisfied the anger in me for a short while. It didn�t solve the problems at the root and I soon got tired of the job and so I let my sister take over. The death and gore didn�t bother me, it just became too much work every weekend and in the summer. Funny, these days I even have trouble killing flies. I will often catch them and throw them outside unless they won't leave me be. But not mosquitos. Attack me and you're toast!
My dad wasn�t really around all that much for me to get to hate him, but I do remember his abusiveness became steadily more consistent. Not only toward me, but everyone else in the family too. I did my best to avoid him. My mother seemed to begin to play the victim roll and was always complaining about her aches and pains, constantly wanting us kids to give her massages. By the time I was seventeen I had pretty much lost all respect for them both. I would on occasion be in the living room watching T.V. and would look into the kitchen. My father would be drunk and I remember two times in particular. Once he had my mother bent over the sink, choking her. Her face was purple and her tongue was sticking out. The other time he had a hunting knife at her throat. Both times I walked out, knowing that if he killed her, I could very well be next. And even though he had not touched me since I ran away as covered in the last entry, I didn�t want to take the chance. Otherwise I had become pretty indifferent to such things going on. They became all too common at that point in my life.
The anger and frustrations mounted and over time I began a quick descent from there to states of depression. Depression began to take full hold on me around my sophomore year in high school. The common stresses of teenage life, my father�s abusiveness, my increasing contempt and disgust for my mother and my repressed sexuality probably all played a part in it. So many derogatory comments made by my father while I was growing up sank in over time and I had developed a pretty strong inferiority complex. By the time I was into my senior year of high school, I felt that much of the time I was walking around in a big black cloud. Colors seemed dull, memories of that time are dim, and I was so completely a pessimist. If there was a negative way to look at something I would find it. And it only got worse as time went on. I would also have these times where I would get very excited and things would seem great, but they were few and far between the depression cycles. I came much later to know that it was bi-polar, manic-depression.
The depression cycles were so bad that my family and many of my friends believed I was on drugs. I actually never in my life took drugs however. I never even smoked marijuana, even though it was always readily available. I had grown it, rolled it and even sold it to friends, but never once used it myself. By my late senior year the depression was so bad that it began to affect me physically. Friends and my mom to a degree tried to help but didn�t know what to do. I did my best not to let it show, and most of the time did so quite well, but when the cycles were at their worst, even my best efforts were in vain. In that senior year was when I had my first blackout. I remember having gone to bed only to wake up three miles from home in my bare feet, standing at my favorite fishing spot looking out over the river in the moonlight. I walked back home and went back to bed, never telling anyone about it. The next ones I will mention in the next entry, as they occurred in my twenties.
One day during that year I sat alone in the living room in the reclining chair. The only thing that gave me a sense of comfort in that house. I had my father�s .22 caliber rifle and placed the barrel in my mouth, my thumb on the trigger. I remember that I wasn�t scared, I just couldn�t deal with the constant onslaught of sorrow that was attacking me. I sat there for at least a half an hour going over in my mind what the consequences would be. I kept coming back to the fact that I would be dead and therefore it wouldn�t matter anymore what happened. I would not be there to face those consequences. But through an experience I had which is detailed in the next entry, I had developed within me a growing sense of compassion at that point. I would see the faces of the people that I did care about and just knowing that my actions would bring them great sorrow filled me with doubt. Not surprisingly, my family was not among those I did not wish to hurt. I had no one I could turn to and God was not a part of my life then. I had no strength or resolve left. In the end, after what had to be close to an hour of contemplation, I decided that I did not have the right to hurt those that cared about me by killing myself. But I knew that I could not continue this way. I had to find a way to somehow go on. I had to find something that would serve as a grounding for me. A foundation to build hope on. I decided that it could be only one thing. It was that day that I dedicated my life to the pursuit, acceptance and understanding of Truth. Not my own personal Truth, but undeniable or ultimate Truth. That Truth that is pure and underlying all things. It was only many years later that I came to know that Truth by a name.
My life continued on, quite miserably like that for some ten years. Life was a roller coaster that I couldn�t get off of. Sometimes life wasn�t so bad, and there were some happy times when the cycles of depression weren�t raging, but for the most part it was hell on earth. I was walking in darkness with no hope in sight. There were times when I might have a few months where things were all right, but more often I would be hiding the underlying despair I almost constantly felt. It was my compassion for those I cared about and my sense of inferiority that kept me from seeking help. I felt that if I burdened them with my troubles they would not like me anymore and would end up avoiding me. Then I would have nothing good at all in my life. So I suppressed it the best I could and I think that most of the time I was convincing. But I could not do it forever. Something would have to give eventually, and it did. Though not entirely like I thought it would. But that happened in my late teens and twenties and will be discussed over the next two entries.
