Breaking The Illusions - An Autobiography - 1. Chapter 1

A Confession

I am not a good person. At least, I don't see myself that way. While I have done good things in the past, I have also done more than my fair share of terrible things. Most of the latter have been directed toward myself, but some have been toward others. I have treated many unfairly, to differing degrees, and in some cases I helped make lives miserable as a direct result of the darkness that lives within me.

Please forgive me for this side of the story. I don't mention it seeking any form of pity or to play the victim. This section is a true confession of some of the things I've done, in order to provide proper context for who I am. I believe this is necessary, if I am to accomplish what I wish to accomplish here.

The experiences in my life led me to become a codependent. This is at the core of most of the harm I've caused others. I only truly came to understand this recently, but it has been a wake-up call for me. I have, at present, an unusual friendship with my best friend of seventeen years. He and I are undoubtedly codependent upon each other, in a strange blend of sociopathy, empathy, and nihilistic appreciation for the other's worldview, while we face the world together. From the outside, our friendship looks quite odd, and it is, indeed, unique in its function. This is the one relationship I will hold onto until my death, for it works for both of us. He and I have already spoken about the need to unravel our codependency as much as possible while preserving our friendship. Thankfully, he and I are on the same page.

My compulsion toward codependency has affected the majority of my other relationships, most notably my romantic ones but a few of my other platonic relationships as well. If I ever dated you and acted obsessively, then suddenly closed myself off to you because I wasn't getting the specific things that I needed from you, then I apologize. You all know who you are if you're reading this. I am working on this flaw, and hopefully I will never do it to anyone else, though I cannot currently guarantee that.

If you are a friend I reached out to in a time of my need and then wouldn't leave alone… well, you know who you are too. Thank you for the support you so freely gave me. I apologize that I latched onto you too tightly, and I'm working on this too.

Please know that, if I have created distance between us, and you fall into either of these categories, it is not because I dislike you or don't want to be friends with you. Instead, it is because I want to be able to address this issue within myself, before beginning to connect to others again, in the hope that I will not travel down these same mental hallways, always past the same rooms I ignore, but shouldn't.

I'm cleaning out the storerooms and lighting my dark corners. I'm opening the windows and letting fresh air in while I sweep up the dust.

It's time I learn how to be human again.

The Beginning

I think I was a normal child. I honestly couldn't tell you for certain, as much for the fact that "normal" isn't directly quantifiable, as that I don't remember much at all before I was five, but I do remember being five. There were a few things I really enjoyed, some of them physical and some of them mental.

I liked to swing. I'm pretty sure I loved it, actually. I don't remember anything from that time—as well as I would like—except for maybe some of the bad stuff, but swinging was definitely a major part of my childhood. I know I used to ask my parents if I could swing whenever we passed by a playground and I noticed the swing set. When I finally went to elementary school, it was my activity of choice during recess. I remember seeing tire swings in media, either children's shows or just randomly on the TV, and I always wondered what swinging on one would be like. I never got the chance, nor did I ever swing from a rope into a lake or river, which often seemed like fun as well.

The irony of that last one is striking to me now. At some point over the course of my childhood, I developed a profound fear of water, as well as a distinct fear of falling. The likelihood of me choosing to willfully swing over and into a body of water in my present state is lower than the chance of me marrying a woman and having children. As a gay man, I'll let you do the math.

I also had a very active imagination as a child. I think most children do, though I don't have a great deal of first-hand experience in that matter. Most of my imagination was stimulated during my alone time, which was quite often. I do not believe that my parents were willfully neglectful, nor did any of the harm they caused me originate from any desire to inflict it upon me, but I was nevertheless left to my own devices far too often.

In many ways, this impacted my development in social relationships, especially in how I view family and friends. I don't have any particularly strong ties to my family, not the way it's supposed to be according to the common social understanding of the concept, anyway. They are present in my life, but they are distant. Even those I'm closest to geographically, I see rarely, and I do not often reach out to them when I am in need.

Instead, I am far more likely to reach out to my friends. When I was young and alone, I had to search outside of my family for emotional connections. This led me into trouble at times, but also into some of the greatest platonic relationships I've ever had, many of which I still maintain.

However, it is necessary to begin with one association that came from such exploration, which left me with many of the issues I have today.

Enter psychopath, stage left.

For the sake of giving him a name, he will be named Jackson. This was also the name of a neighborhood dog growing up; one whom I was somewhat scared of despite his friendliness. It's an apt name for the psychopath in that regard, as the juxtaposition would fit the psychopath better; I was friendly with him, despite the fear.

Jackson and his younger brother, Timothy, were both older than me; Jackson to a significant degree, at least when I was that young. They lived in my neighborhood and knew my brother, whom I often tagged along with, no matter where he went. My brother—as do most older brothers when they have younger siblings following them around—tolerated my presence at best, but under the instruction of my parents was often forced to put up with me.

Please don't misunderstand; I hold no ill will against my brother for this time in our lives. We were children, and it's difficult to assign blame for a kid wanting to be with his friends without someone constantly following him around. My brother is now the person I confide most in, as far as my family is concerned, and he has been a loving caretaker of most of my family for the bulk of his life. None of what I describe here is meant to malign him in any regard.

As previously stated, Jackson and Timothy were friends of my brother, and they also tolerated my presence, at best. They would often prank me, were determined to call me any name other than the one I was given at birth, and made fun of the way I spoke. While I don't remember much before I was five, I do remember a string of incidents when I was three, in which I hadn't yet mastered the 'th' sound and always told people my age was "free". That was my first nickname in their presence, but it was far from the last. I was routinely mocked for the things I said in their presence, yet I kept hanging with them.

Quite simply, I had nowhere else to go.

At home, my best option was to play by myself with a small collection of toys. I liked to build things with blocks, and later I developed an obsession with Lego. I don't know if the stories I made up as I played with these things came before or after my abuse from Jackson began, but there is a distinct correlation between the two, nonetheless.

My timeline is a little screwy. Memories are fickle, but sometime between the age of five and seven, I started to get more attention from Jackson. I looked up to him, as he was obviously the oldest member of my 'friend' group. I'd been taught to respect older people, and since my parents weren't really involved much in my development, Jackson was the de facto authority figure in my life. I trusted him implicitly and wanted to be just like him.

He started to notice, and he took advantage of this regularly.

It started near the swing set. I don't know if it was a day that there'd been talk of trying to swing over the bar or not, the impossible thing that kids always talk about trying to accomplish. We had many such talks in that back yard, and I thought Jackson was so cool for trying to achieve the impossible. My brother and Timothy were both there as well, of course, but the conversation soon shifted as Jackson said, "I think we should all wrestle."

My brother didn't like the idea. He'd seen how Jackson and Timothy had wrestled in the past, and he didn't much care for it. He refused and suggested that they keep swinging instead. I don't know if Jackson pushed him or hit him, but my brother ended up on the ground, hurt and crying. He went home.

I didn't follow.

Jackson again suggested we wrestle. I didn't really know what the problem was, so I decided it sounded like fun. I'd wrestled with my dad and brother often enough, and it had always been a good experience.

But this kind of wrestling was different. Jackson grabbed my crotch and directed me to do the same to him. When I didn't immediately comply, he stopped and grabbed my arm.

"I'll break it if you don't do what I say."

Those words scared me. I didn't really understand what they meant, but he twisted his hands and it hurt. I knew he'd hurt me more. When I started to make a sound, he threatened me again, and told me to be quiet.

Then he reassured me that he just wanted to have a bit of fun. That's all, and if I did what he wanted, we'd all have a good time. I agreed, not wanting to be hurt again. The three of us, Jackson, Timothy, and I, wrestled for a little while, with Jackson repeatedly clarifying that the rules were to grab each other's dicks through our clothing. When he would get ahold of mine, he would squeeze hard. When I got ahold of his, he coaxed me to grip him 'the right amount', squeezing me harder if I didn't do it exactly the way he wanted.

I don't know exactly what I expected to come from all this. At my young age, the world still didn't really make sense in a lot of ways. It wasn't until after this moment that I remember the first discussion from my parents about what to say if someone asked to touch my 'private parts', and how to react. By that point I had already been conditioned, because we kept wrestling, and bit by bit, Jackson controlled me through pain.

It's ironic that he didn't really need to. I looked up to him so much that I likely would've done what he wanted anyway, if he'd used a softer approach. But that pain came to be symbolic to me, even after the wrestling stopped and he moved on to other forms of torture.

He locked me in a crawlspace once, in the dark with clutter and spiders. He kept me in there for the better part of a half hour, and no matter how much I protested, he wouldn't let me out. I don't know if it was before or after the wrestling, but it remained with me for the rest of my life.

He wanted me to know that he made the rules, and there was nothing I could do to change that.

Timothy wasn't like him. He had some issues of his own, surely, but he was definitely acting at the behest of his older brother. The same things done to me were almost always done to him as well, and I'm certain much worse occurred outside my view. A few things I know about, and I'm certain there are a lot more I am unaware of. That isn't my story to tell, however, but it is important to note that Timothy is a major part of this story.

He was older than me by a few years, bigger than me as a result and certainly stronger. He bullied me directly more than Jackson did, at least in our early years, but his bullying was unquestionably the result of what was done to him. Later, he became a source of strength for me, but that is getting ahead of the story a bit.

Jackson was the leader of the group. This was, again, an unquestionable fact that we children could only accept. He determined what activities we would do and how we would do them, and he would take no suggestions as to anything different. His rule was absolute. Resistance was met with pain. It was never enough to cause lasting physical harm, only enough to remind us of who was in charge.

And he told stories. We went on hundreds of different trips through his imagination as he spun the tales. I know a lot of people who liked to roleplay as kids, and we were no exception. Jackson called it "The Game of Truth", an ironic name for a fictional game wrapped up in dogma of his unquestionable authority. We would use wooden dowels as swords, and fight each other in epic duels. We would walk around the neighborhood as Jackson described fantastical scenes and us as the heroes moving through them.

I think I gained my love of storytelling as much from these experiences as I did from my own parents. My mother loved to read and even wrote a children's book, which she never had the opportunity to publish. My father was a writer, who has always wanted to have a novel in print but hasn't yet had that chance either. I certainly gained an appreciation of stories from them.

But with Jackson it was different. With him, I lived the stories. I had a chance to escape into them without doing anything other than listen and let my mind wander. It was the most magical experience I'd ever had at that point in my life, and in my eyes, it made the pain worth it.

Of course, it wasn't worth it. That was my naivety and nothing more. The pain was unnecessary, and I could've had those experiences without it, yet it was there.

For awhile I struggled with the idea that I couldn't appreciate my love of stories while simultaneously hating their source. How could I love something so much that was spawned from someone who abused me so readily? Yet that dichotomy existed within me, and to some degree still does.

I've learned since then that just because a situation tore me to pieces, doesn't mean nothing good could come from it. My mind was opened to such creative leanings in those days that I began to see the magic in everything, and I can create characters on a whim. I cherish those gifts.

If only they hadn't come at the cost I paid.

I spent more time with Jackson than I can possibly recall. For a decade I spent the bulk of my time in his presence when I wasn't at school or at home. He sculpted my development as surely as anyone did, and I learned how to manipulate others as a result. Bit by bit, as he tweaked my reactions, I learned how to be a subordinate sociopath to his psychopathy. When he rebelled, I cheered him on. When he manipulated others, I sneered along with him.

He would continue to bully me, as I aged, most notably making fun of my weight. I took all his remarks to heart. He was, after all, like a god to me. Every single thing he said about me became a burden of shame that I carried with me everywhere. I became so bogged down by it all, that I felt bound to the earth, the weight becoming truly physical as I ate myself into misery, the gluttonous appetites of a boy who had a hunger for something he didn't understand, and a hole which would never be filled.

The tides began to shift, however, as a small spark within me turned on. It was not a resistance, but a change in the power dynamic. I was certain that Jackson would only give me more shame if I showed parts of myself to him, and so it was Timothy I began to trust more.

It was the summer when I was nine, I believe, that we were going to have a water fight. Everyone took off their shirts, but I was starting to feel self-conscious about the weight I'd been putting on. Unwilling to show myself to anyone, I left my shirt on. They bullied me about it, but I pulled Timothy aside and took my shirt off for him.

For the first time since I'd begun to hang around them, there was no malice in his eyes. He was confused at first, then told me it was okay, and then said we should join the others. I left the shirt behind and we went to play.

That was the moment my perspective began to change, and Timothy moved past being a bully to me. He was now a friend.

The next six years were still hell, but at least we had each other.