Title.
When I was 12 I hid under the couch while my Grandpa violently beat my grandma to death over the course of about 6hrs overnight.
What?! where is grandpa now?
He died of Covid in prison in 2020 after serving 20 years of his life sentence, thank God.
He had been fighting for parole and never got it.
He was a psychopath and very well could have hunted us down for putting him in jail.
I’m so sorry you had to experience that. I’ve experienced some wild things as an adult and had/have a hard time with it. I probably wouldn’t have made it as kid. It’s hard enough as an adult… The extreme confusion and betrayal is all consuming. Then you have to live day to day around people that have no idea of how real life can get.
Being a child with an ear infection, rather than take me to a doctor to get antibiotics, my parents had my grandmother come over to pray for me and she told me that Jesus was my physician. I just remember wondering why my physician wasn’t fucking doing anything about it.
Shit parents, shit grandmother. Hopefully they’re not past of your life anymore.
I’ll just go with a tame one (Edit: I have a lot to pick from and most are really hard to put into text due to the trauma)
My firsthand experience with police brutality
For context I was 15 at the time and still in highschool
When I was homeless I slept on some benches in my hometown and one night I slept on the bench behind the local library because it was one of the few that was covered and it was raining that day.
I was woken up by being tazed by a police officer.
He was screaming and I couldn’t do a damn thing because I was getting tazed.
After finally falling off the bench he stopped but was screaming that he could kill me and leave my body in the woods (the town is basically right on the border of a national forest) and no one would find me.
He was screaming that if I didn’t leave he would.
I took off like a bat out of hell.
He followed me with his car from a distance for a while before finally taking off in a different direction. He he took off I stopped walking down the streets and made my way to my school through less conventional means and slept there that night under one of the buildings.
That’s awful. I’ve seen some cops tuck their tails. It’s just a paycheck for them or even worse a power trip like you’re case.
Are you American?
Yup, I’m American
Small Town cops are a special kind of power tripping bastard
Basically think of an area that is really red already and then the people who are those people’s bullies become cops
I had no job, no money and no family. I was young and had no identity documents, and was knocked back from government services because I couldn’t prove who I was. I took the first safe shelter I could. With the benefit of many years experience, I know there were other options but at the time it seemed like the only option. There are ways of accessing help without ID, but I didn’t know where to look.
It was a small, dodgy outbuilding at the back of someone’s property. It was clad by nothing but tin. The wind would lift the rusty roof up and slam it down with a deafening crash for hours at a time. No insulation, no services of any kind. I slept on an old mattress, just laid on the floor. It had a slope to it and the springs were poking through. I had a single, sweat-stained blanket.
I lived there long enough to experience both an unusually cold winter and a heatwave. I remember the sound of the frozen grass crunching beneath my feet. It was the first time I’d ever experienced temperatures that low, having grown up in a hot climate.
The owner would occasionally let me use the facilities inside their house, but only ever during the day when it was unlocked. They gave me enough food to survive which they’d leave outside for me. We’d have a very brief exchange maybe once a week. Apart from that I had a total absence of social interaction. The property was isolated if you didn’t have a car - which I did not.
It was a trap. It seemed better than the streets, because I had relative safety and a roof over my head. But it also left me totally unable to change the situation I was living in. I couldn’t go anywhere to find help, I couldn’t contact anyone. I didn’t want to leave because the alternative seemed worse. I was stuck.
The owner had meant well. They had their own mental health issues and, even if they had been high-functioning, they had no idea what to do. They were a hoarder and the inside of their home was somehow filthier than my “living” space. The situation was a result of the contradictions between their heartfelt desire to help, their own anxieties and other mental demons. They were trapped too, in their own way, and had barely more contact with the outside world than me.
Isolation destroys your mind. You can’t think straight, you lose your ability to solve even basic problems. You become paranoid. You hallucinate. Your memory is obliterated, not just for the period of the isolation but the memories formed before and after too. I had to piece together a time line of major events in my life from a couple of years before and after from little scraps I kept.
I lost my inner monologue during that time. The voice in your head. My thoughts became sensations and movement, like water being poured into a network of branching channels and spreading amongst them. They’d remain that for years and even more than a decade own it’s still not the ‘same’.
I was almost non-verbal at the end - finding even a few basic words, to say “yes” or “no” to a question was exhausting. My manner of speaking is not the same as it was and my accent isn’t quite like anyone else who was born here. For at least a year later I was still losing time, hours or days, and was unsure of how I got there.
I was aware I was losing my mind throughout the process. I’d try to force structure and logic upon what I was processing but it doesn’t work. The information you’re receiving is already corrupted, then it gets further twisted in your mind. There is nothing more terrifying than being trapped in your own mind.
Eventually the owner, in a more lucid moment, managed to get mental health services to come out. I felt so betrayed at the time. I was terrified of them, unfamiliar faces after so much time alone. I was deeply ashamed. I’d come to realize this act saved me, but I hated the owner for it at the time.
Wow what a read. Thanks for sharing your experiences and perspective.
Shit, that was tough, I hope you’re fine now. Accepting help is pretty difficult sometimes.
Testicular torsion. As a teenager, I woke up early in the morning with the worst back and stomach pain I had ever felt in my life. I remember thinking I might be sick, vomiting, then passing out from the pain. My parents found me later that morning because I was delirious and moaning. They took me to the hospital and it was fixed.
Just kidding! My parents are shit bags so they told me I just had the flu and I was being dramatic. After my testicle swelled up to over double the size later that day, they called our family doctor who said I probably had a hydrocele and he’d look at it when he got back from vacation. For the record, mine was textbook testicular torsion, my doctor was as idiotically negligent as my parents.
The pain again became excruciating that evening and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, so I started yelling and demanding my parents take me to the hospital, which they did the next morning. There was TV to be watched, they couldn’t bother with taking care of their children. The ER determined my testicle was quite dead. Surgery was scheduled for that evening and I’ve had one testicle since. Get fucked, mom and dad.
Damn, your parents were S+ tier assholes.
I don’t have children, but I have niblings and my heart goes to my throat every time they fall down or get a bruise, I can’t even imagine letting my child stay in pain for anything.
I hope you’re better now.
Your parents suck.
Agreed. I’ll never understand why people who don’t actually want children have children.
Free senior caretakers.
Pretty expensive way to get free labor
Most likely society’s response to the time I was sexually harrassed.
Like it wasn’t straight up rape, but I got touched in bad places and boundaries disrespected. I was 16, the girl doing it to me was 16 too. To this day I have no idea if she was into me or if she just got off on how I’d completely bluescreen whenever she did it as a powertrip.
So anyway, being a teenager and certified “good kid”, I didn’t fight about it, I just knew I hated it. So I went to the adults in my school for guidance… And got laughed out of the principal’s office. Because “I was a boy, of course I liked it and I had only gone to the principal as a way to humblebrag”.
Got a similar reaction from the other teen boys.
So anyway it took me 10 full years to even start opening myself back up to human touch in general, as I spent that decade terrified of human touch in general.
I’m sorry
Public school. Everyone hated me, I never made any close friends, I was almost killed by my classmates more than once. One time I was pushed down the stairs another time I was shoved in front of an oncoming bus. I’ve become permanently depressed and have deep trust problems because of it. Years later when I was holding someone I loved in my arms as we fell asleep watching something together I realized that I felt happy for the first time in my life. Before then I had felt amused, vindicated, or excited but never happy. It’s such a strange thing to realize that you’ve never been happy once in your entire life and had just never realized because you had no way to know what you were missing.
I relate to your feelings. In my twenties I took a small dose of mushrooms and had that same epiphany. It actually lasted for a few years and I was hopeful but then people still fucked with me. Now I’m back to being numb constantly. I hate when there’s a school shooting or some kid whyling out and society actually has to ask why? Society creates the people it hates.
Lived through and ethnic cleansing genocide. I always laugh when western keyboard warriors start talking about how war is “needed” or “coming” and larping out their movie fantasies. Real war is nothing like TV. Its hell all around. There are no victors in war. Everyone loses.
War is sometimes needed; it’s a necessary response to aggression. The genocides in Bosnia? Without a war, they would have murdered all the Croats. One of my teachers in school was a survivor of the Bosnian war, and her family absolutely would have been killed had they not gotten out. Without the Allied forces waging war against the Axis, Jews in Europe would have been completely eliminated.
The option to war is to curl up and hope that you can survive the bear mauling you.
War is never needed though, is my point. Yes unprompted aggression deserves a response (I’d never advocate for just laying down and taking the fascist boot), but war itself only produces destruction, broken homes, and broken families.
My comment was more about those who have not been through an actual war but romanticise it. There is nothing romantic about it.
I think you’re missing their point a bit
True true. Even though I do express my feelings like that sometimes. It’s more expression that should be transfered to art.
Living through fall of communism in USSR and the start of capitalist era. One of the memories I have from the period is when food shortages started happening. All the families in my neighborhood would end up lining up at the store early in the morning like black friday, and then the store would just wheel out a cart with whatever they had that day, and people would rush in to grab it. Me being a small kid at the time, I could squeeze between people and get to the cart quicker than my parents. So, I was basically risking my life being trampled to death just so I wouldn’t starve that day.
TLDR: fuck capitalism.
This thread really makes me appreciate how good I have it…
Marriage. Don’t get married. I am not kidding. Tie yourself inextricably to someone and discover hell.
I was a delivery driver once, I loved the job. Until they made us follow their crappy routing system called “ORION”. Problem was you can’t implement it in real world settings. Since we were forced to follow it, I argue it put our personal safety at risk due to increased turns and overall time driven. Quit because I’m not dying over it. But it was the most frustrating, hellish thing I ever had to do.
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Oh man. I’m so sorry you had to experience that. I’ve seen the footage and it’s heart breaking. I know what it’s like to deal with wild stuff like that. Keep your head up. Other people’s actions aren’t your’s.
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Being robbed late at night on a deserted street fucking sucks.
Yeah even just having shit stolen from you feels so rapey. It sucks.
I’d probably avoid describing it as rapey since that word has a specific meaning - but it absolutely felt like a violation.
In this specific case my phone was stolen while I was moving luggage, I felt a hand drag my phone out of my chest pocket (and, for reasons, I really dislike unexpected physical contact) and then two folks fled on a scooter in front of me. My phone is pretty fucking worthless except it had a few gigabytes of photos I hadn’t been able to backup… it felt like a futile and pointlessly destructive act.
Being sexually assaulted. I feel like in terms of things that are top tier awful experiences I would probably rank any unwanted sexual experience worse than pain or death.
I’ve been manipulated by people. I was of age though and kind of too depressed to care because I live in a shitty small town. My sexual manipulation was as bad as some other stuff though. I’ve been manipulated hard in a non sexual way. So many kids go through shit some adult literally can’t even fathom. It’s sick. Even as an adult people don’t get it.
I remember an older guy that weighed probably 250 laying on top of me doing stuff and I couldn’t move. He shoved poppers in my face. I was so depressed and dead feeling back then I didn’t care. I felt like I was in a movie. looking back that person obvious would get me liquored up and have his way. It hurts to know someone would actually act like that in real life. On the other side of things… No regular people in my life gave me a minute. No one cared for me. It’s fucked to think that same guy did more for me than regular friends or family. Everyone else would have just sat back and watched me and egg me on to kms. Because everyone else I knew were just naive, entitled, and privileged.
That is terrible to read, I hope you are doing better now though