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Hello CC. For those who don't know I am a schizophrenic with a history of homelessness. I have written a number of popular threads in Debate and Discussion over the years and have been continuously encouraged to write a book about my experiences. I have been trying to do so on and off but lately I seem to have found my voice as it were. I am going to start putting some of what I have so far in this thread for feedback. "I suppose if i were to be honest, I have probably been hallucinating my whole life. While the confused thoughts and delusions so typical of schizophrenia did not emerge in force until alter in my life, the hallucinations have always been there. I can remember being a small child, perhaps three or four years old, experiencing what I now know to have been hallucinations. At night I would wake up and hear people talking, adult voices coming from downstairs. I knew they were talking about me even though I couldn't really make out what they were saying. In the mornings I would quiz my parents about who the strange men they had been talking about me with were. My parents were off course quite baffled and had no idea what i was talking about. Being a trusting child I believed them. At my 3rd birthday party my Grandmother bought me a talking teddy bear as a present. It was quite an advanced toy for the 80's. It would repeat a few seconds of speech when spoken to and its lips would move in a jerky animatronic fashion. My grandmother placed this toy in front of me on the floor with a "Say Hello Aaron." So I did. When the teddy bear said "Hello" back I was so surprised I bolted to my feet with my jaw wide open. "I'm Aaron,". I said, testing this strange thing. "I'm Aaron," the toy croaked back, its strange voice coming out of its chest even though its lips moved. I jumped back, this thing was alive! I was positively nonplussed and said a few more things, pacing back and forth, keeping my distance while I sized this oddity up. Every time I spoke to this teddy bear, it spoke back. Then I recognized that this toy was playing the repeat game with me, just like I sometimes did with my parents. A wicked grin spread across my face as a genius idea struck my mind. "I eat poop," I said, focusing intently. "I eat poop," came the response. The big people all laughed heartily. I laughed too, and though the toy was soon taken away as my experiments with what I could get the teddy bear to say involved more and more words I wasn't supposed to say, I was delighted. This was my introduction to the concept of recording. So it was that when my parents told me that there were no big people they were talking to last night I believed them. My child's mind instead decided that like my toy, walls could record sounds. So the voices I heard sometimes at night were the walls playing things big people had said before. Sometimes when i would hear the voices at night I would sneak downstairs, the voices always seemed to be coming from the next room, never the one I was standing in. And there were other sounds too. Mechanic hums and strange flute like music that I called "the angel flute" because I believed it was an angel playing just for me. Not all my young hallucinations were so benign though. I can remember other times when instead of curiosity and wonder, my hallucinations inspired terror. Perhaps one of my most vivid of such memories involves a toy rocking horse I had at perhaps at three or four years old. It was a simple thing, a black mare made of resin on a firetruck red metal frame suspended by springs. I played with it often and even learned how to rock in such a way as to make it slide on the carpet, I would cross entire rooms this way, turn the horse around, and ride back the other way. One late afternoon I was laying in bed in my room for a nap, sunlight filtering through the Venetian blinds and casting long strips of light on the floor. As I lay staring at the light strips a strange sensation came over me that I couldn't identify. I started to feel very afraid, and I heard the wall recording voices again. They were angry at me. I clapped my hands over my ears but couldn't shut the voices out. They were very angry at me, I had been very bad. They were screaming the way my Mother did when she hit me. Waves of fear mixed with guilt washed over me, I didn't know what I had done, but the voices were very angry with me. Near the foot of my bed was my beloved rocking horse. I looked to my favorite toy for respite, but none came. As I looked at the horses face suddenly the eyes looked back at me. I was paralyzed with fear, the horse was angry at me. It slowly pivoted its head to look strait at me, eyes bristling. Its mouth opened and without moving it said "Hello Aaron" in the crackly voice of the teddy bear. I buried myself in my blankets too terrified of the demon at the foot of my bed to even scream. After this incident my parents were quite puzzled when I refused to go near my favorite toy ever again and insisted it not be kept in my room." Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Nov 29, 2014 |
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Nov 27, 2014 03:03
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 That's too little to give any concrete feedback on. I need about... 50,000 words more. (You've got some missing capitalization and punctuation, though.) (Also, «"I'm Aaron[comma]" I said».)
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Nov 27, 2014 14:02
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Edit This has been completely redone from the ground up, see "Reworked Part 2" below Thanks for the feedback so far, I have made the grammar corrections. Next installment. "I have always been prone to altered states of consciousness, and in my life I have experienced many varieties of altered states. Some of which I have experienced only a few times, and others which have been a consistent occurrence throughout my life. I would like to now describe one particular such altered state that I have experienced probably thousands of times. For lack of a better term I call it "Bi-Infinity Awareness".The first time I can recall experiencing this particular altered state I was 9 years old. I had a mild cold at the time and my mother gave me a small dose of NyQuil, not knowing it contained a sedative. I went into my room (which I shared with my two younger brothers) and lay down in my bed, the bottom bunk of an old wooden bunk bed. The sedative acted to relax my body but put my mind in a state of delirium. My Mother, though well intentioned, suffered tremendous abuse in her own childhood, and is probably a Schizophrenic much like myself. (More on this later) At this point in her life my Mother was starting to buckle under the stress of raising four children and homeschooling her two oldest. Prone to unpredictable outbursts of rage and violence, my Mother was introducing my siblings and I to a world of constant terror and irrational authority figures. At this time one of my Mother's recent innovations when upset with us had been to create gigantic messes out of our homeschooling supplies, screaming and swearing the whole time. She would fling the carefully organized supplies around the room, pencils and papers and flash cards and erasers, all of it. We would then be punished if we did not clean up the mess quickly or accurately enough. As the real point of the exercise was to find an excuse to beat us, there was never a single occasion where we ever came close to performing well enough to avoid a severe spanking administered while my Mother swore like a sailor. "gently caress MY poo poo gently caress MY poo poo gently caress MY GODDAMN poo poo gently caress MY gently caress MY FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!" my Mother would scream at us, her face twisted into a terrifying visage of naked hatred, her voice cracking with unconstrained rage. She would tear around the room paddle in hand, alternating between beating us and swearing at us, demanding that we stand up strait the entire time and descending on us with a fury for every perceived slight. The faintest hint of disrespect in our voices when we said "Yes Ma'am" being enough to get us shoved across the room or bent over her knee and beaten, or sometimes when she was feeling particularly vindictive she would charge off to our bedrooms and we would stand their listening as our toys and treasures were smashed to bits with the wooden paddle. Often times these incidents would end with the four of us each consigned to a separate corner that we had to sit facing until our father returned, often 5-6 hours later. Upon our fathers return our Mother would recite a litany of charges against us, some often completely imagined, and our Father would beat us for the same offenses all over again, although in a much more controlled and less severe fashion. Being children with no contact with the outside world whatsoever (the world was the domain of Satan and we were taught to view all non-Christians with suspicion) we blamed ourselves. After each and every beating we were reminded that our Mother's behaviour was our fault. If we would just be good kids for her then she wouldn't have to get so angry at us, we were constantly told. Even our Father, the one adult that could be sometimes reasoned with, would sometimes react to the state he would return home to find his wife in by demonizing us kids, accusing us of having plotted to do this to our Mother on purpose out of malice. At times our lives seemed to only alternate between shame from knowing we were "bad kids", to terror as we witnessed our Mother become unhinged with salivating rage. And so it was against this backdrop of constant tension that I began to hallucinate as I lay in a NyQuil induced delirium. I hallucinated that my Mother was on the top bunk above me tossing out flash cards. (These cards were a particular terror for me as they were individually numbered and had to be put back into an exact order when she tossed them out, or we would be beaten.) I knew I had to get up and pick up the flash cards, but I was nearly paralyzed, I could barely move at all. So I watched helplessly as the pile on the floor grew bigger, into the thousands. My Mind reeled in terror, I couldn't count that high, there were so many cards, I couldn't comprehend it all. All the while my Mother kept giggling and throwing more cards into the pile. It grew to an inconceivable pile, and I knew I was going to be punished for each and every one of them. Then the room grew hazy. I cannot say exactly how it started or what the first image was, but I remember the sensation quite clearly. One moment the pile of flash cards was unfathomable, gigantic beyond description, and the next it was tiny, insignificant, microscopic. Then the pile was hopelessly gigantic again. Then it was both, at the same time. I closed my eyes. Images flashed before me, geometric symmetries arced across my field of vision, at once gigantic beyond measure and tiny, insignificant. A spherical shape was at once the size of a planet and at the same time the size of a marble compared to the ocean. Waves of a sensation that I can only call "unreality" rolled over me. The world felt fake, all this was fake, synthetic somehow, none of it was real. And at the same time these images kept flashing before my eyes, changing in an electric fashion, constantly both gigantic and minuscule. Anxiety of such an intensity that I was nauseated rose up within me, I was growing terrified and confused, but I couldn't move. Everything was happening so fast, nothing was making sense. The pile on the floor kept growing, my mothers taunting laughs became the geometry that flashed before my eyes. Everything was confused and sounds became symbols and fear became a flavor and my terror was written on the flashcards. Mercifully, I eventually blacked out. Ever since that day I have experienced this particular altered state many times throughout my life, most often when I was some combination of tired and stressed, although not always. Usually a mild form of it will start when I lay down after a long day, but I have also slipped into this altered state while having sex or driving. (One time I had to close my eyes and make up an excuse to end the sex, poor girl knew I was being evasive and strange but didn't know why I suddenly needed to stop. I think she took it personally.) Like many aspects of my hallucinations it occurs usually, but not exclusively, at night." Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Dec 8, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 20:32
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General comments: how old are you? Unrelated to that, I don't think prefacing the passage with "my mother was buckling under the stress" works. I don't think there's any way you can soften up the impact of scenes featuring the abuse of children. As a lead-in to my next suggestion, were you raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, by any chance? So, this still reads a bit like a post from E/N. You're kind of keeping an inconspicuous veil of anonymity, by omitting any names or dates. While that's understandable on an Internet forum, you're eventually going to have to provide personal details if you plan to publish the book. It's my preference, and I've read some autobiographies, so it seems it's considered a good practice in general, to provide a geographical and a temporal setting (up to you how specific), also maybe come out up front with the reasons your parents had for homeschooling their children. For flavor, consider adding their particular branch of Christianity. "Mother" and "Father" shouldn't be capitalized if still used with possessive pronouns. My grammar's failing me right now, so I can't give you the term for that, but you'd capitalize the words on their own because now you've basically given the persons the names Mother and Father, the same way as the Christian God is capitalized. quote:And so it was against this backdrop of constant tension that I began to hallucinate as I lay in a NyQuil induced delirium.  I wouldn't characterize the situation like that. Constant suffering? Abuse? Terror?  You've already dropped the F-bomb, there's no need to mince words.
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Dec 4, 2014 19:13
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supermikhail posted:
I am currently 33 years old. The bit about my mother buckling under the stress is actually a really good catch. I suppose minimizing the effects of the abuse I experienced is something of an old defense mechanism. When I wrote that I wasn't intending consciously to minimize things, although now it is clear that is what I was doing. supermikhail posted:As a lead-in to my next suggestion, were you raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, by any chance? No, but i was raised in an authoritarian cult that was basically a fundie version of 1984. I've previously written a popular thread about it, which you can check out here. supermikhail posted:So, this still reads a bit like a post from E/N. You're kind of keeping an inconspicuous veil of anonymity, by omitting any names or dates. While that's understandable on an Internet forum, you're eventually going to have to provide personal details if you plan to publish the book. It's my preference, and I've read some autobiographies, so it seems it's considered a good practice in general, to provide a geographical and a temporal setting (up to you how specific), also maybe come out up front with the reasons your parents had for homeschooling their children. For flavor, consider adding their particular branch of Christianity. This is really good. I have been avoiding specifics, almost as a force of habit I suppose. My next installment will try and address this, and then I will go back and see if there is a place to insert that information a bit earlier. I've been pondering when to delve into my parents exact religion and how to address that issue. Its quite complicated. And it gets really complicated with the way my illness interacted with finding my parents cache of demonology books (my parents were dabbling exorcists) when I was nine years old. supermikhail posted:I wouldn't characterize the situation like that. Constant suffering? Abuse? Terror? You've already dropped the F-bomb, there's no need to mince words.
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Dec 6, 2014 01:05
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Aw, shucks.  On your part, you're an awfully gracious reviewee.Prester John posted:No, but i was raised in an authoritarian cult that was basically a fundie version of 1984. I've previously written a popular thread about it, which you can check out here. quote:This is really good. I have been avoiding specifics, almost as a force of habit I suppose. My next installment will try and address this, and then I will go back and see if there is a place to insert that information a bit earlier. I've been pondering when to delve into my parents exact religion and how to address that issue. Its quite complicated. And it gets really complicated with the way my illness interacted with finding my parents cache of demonology books (my parents were dabbling exorcists) when I was nine years old. Yeah, that seems hell of a complicated thing. But obviously I expected you to dip into history in the second entry. Maybe it's because I'm used that there's a prolog (first entry), and then after a break the story will take on a regular chronological sequence. And to be fair, by omitting details, the first entry reads like a prolog. One suggestion I can make is to weave your parents' beliefs in organically, that is, in the sequence that you became aware or found out yourself. So demons naturally come later, while stories about Jesus and Satan probably quite early in the narrative... Well, I guess you're doing this very thing, albeit somewhat clumsily. However, you should definitely pin down time and geography as early as possible.
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Dec 6, 2014 05:27
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I am sorry that you've suffered and I hope you're in a better place these days. At the same time, this is honestly fascinating material, and I can relate to some of it (especially an unwell parent). Is writing your story helpful? Something I would suggest is grounding more of the details of your mental state and abuse in chronological, concrete events and less in abstract summary. I think this is what supermikhail is also suggesting, so chalk that up as two of us thinking similarly. If you want to preserve your anonymity for now or forever, you can use pseudonyms for people and just make up town names while still using the same state/region these events happened in. I do not thing the real timeframe would really compromise your identity and would add some extra context for why some of these things went the way they did. I happened to have read some of your P.A.C.E.S. posts and the political setting of the time, which was articulated in that thread, really helped explain why. For names, I've usually found behindthename.com to be really useful--especially for anything Biblical or Hebraic. Given that a lot of this arose out of fundamentalist Protestantism, you could re-name real folks and composite characters built on real folks using that index. I also grew up in a pretty fundamentalist area. Pretty rural and in the southeast. I was fortunate that my immediate family wasn't into that good old timey religion by the time I was born, because we actually have a (terrifying) family church that's all but built on the bones of our kin. That sort of thing scares the poo poo out of me. I knew a lot of kids whose parents and churches directly said to not trust reason, not believe in themselves, and not embrace any self-expression because questioning, individuality, and critical thinking were literal tools of Satan. Drawing on those conditions and really making clear what your parents believed and what other people around you (especially authority figure and peers) believed can be a powerful element of your story. People who don't come from that environment rarely know about that perspective, and people who have come from it will recognize what you've seen as terra cognita. The parts of your tale so far that are more traditionally story-like (like the teddy and the flash cards) really pulled me in, and I think would do the same for any reader. They make the hallucinations more "real" and add more to my understanding of what you've been through than the explanations of the hallucinations. I look forward to reading more of your writing, especially because 
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Dec 6, 2014 17:44
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RedTonic posted:I am sorry that you've suffered and I hope you're in a better place these days. At the same time, this is honestly fascinating material, and I can relate to some of it (especially an unwell parent). Is writing your story helpful? The trouble is those threads centered on my homelessness, my mental illness in a more abstract sense, and some of what happened at the cult-school. While very personal and very painful to me, those subjects felt much "safer" than what I am writing now. I am going in to a couple areas I've never explored in writing before. I've never written about the abuse I suffered as a child from my parents (in particular my mother, my father's main sin was checking out and not confronting my mother), so that is incredibly intimate for me to discuss out in public. Its honestly hard for me to even think about it still to this day, and every time I write about it I get about 900 words in and have to stop for three days. I have a ton of leftover anger, and now that my illness is under control and I am no longer homeless, dealing with that anger is my biggest current struggle. The other area I am writing about in detail for the first time is the internal dialogue my mental illness created and the double lives I've lived. (On the outside I was Aaron Osif, mediocre employee, but on the inside I was Aaron Osif, reincarnating servant of Enoch here on Earth to prepare for my destined role in the final war between Heaven and Hell.) I've had variations of such delusions, supported by hallucinatory "visions" ever since I was about 12 years old. When Enoch (or whatever I was calling the "entity" that I believed put thoughts in my brain at the time) said to do something, generally I did it. And I wasn't alone in these delusions. There was a small group of us in High School (all of us have wound up in mental health treatment at this point in our lives) that created an incredibly elaborate and rich fantasy world for ourselves. And we embraced it fully and ran with it and truly believed every word of it and oh sweet Christ we were loving DELUDED. We were all reincarnating friends who had spent literal hundreds of lifetimes preparing for this exact lifetime. This was it, the war to end all wars between Heaven and Hell. Our psychic powers were awakening and we were training ourselves, but we weren't alone. We had enemies in the area, the other sides champions, awakening just like us. We would track them psychically to forests and charge in late at night ambushing their demons and shooting kemehameha's everywhere. I'm not making a word of that up.  And that isn't even the most insane poo poo we did, but the rest requires a great deal of explanation. Those of us who still speak to each other just refer to that whole loving thing as "The Age of Crazy" and we go years without even speaking about it. So I've never really explored any of that at all, and I'm still in the process of remembering everything that happened so I can put it in a chronological order. My hope is that I can show at least what was going on in my head as this group emergently created its own religion and started to behave like a proto-cult. We had detailed internal rankings based on importance of destiny and accomplishments in past lives, all of us had just fantastical background stories. We were avid readers of alternative history authors like Graham Hancock and we inserted ourselves into an alternate history of Earth that featured us popping up in ancient myths over and over again.(Spanning tens of thousands of years) We read occult books extensively. We were active online and were part of the first wave of "Otherkin" on the internet in the late 90's/early 00's. We believed 9-11 had been a plot by the enemy to militarize American Police the day it happened, and we believed groups like ours to be priority targets. (none of us would ever hear of Alex Jones until about 2006, so you can imagine how deeply we lapped Loose Change up). So far this project has been pretty agonizing to be honest, and it requires a great deal of focus. Its like stirring up the scum from the bottom of a deep pond. The old emotions and pain gets stirred up, as well as anger. I have to spend hours a day meditating and doing grounding exercises, and even then I sometimes am so agitated that in the evenings I will cut myself off from social contacts so I don't start behaving irrationally at perceived slights from friends. My hope is that writing this book with put at least some portion of all this to rest for once. I also want to humanize mental illness, to show its inner workings in a way that many people have not encountered before. I want to expose the cult I was raised in and I want to expose the bullshit curriculum program the cult school used. I want to show from the inside how directing physical violence at a child as a way of gaining pain compliance is absolute poo poo at accomplishing anything good. I want to show the consequences of raising children to believe the world will end in their liftime, what it does to the thinking of a child when they speak of what they want to be "if" they grow up and not "when" they grow up. I also want to bring some public exposure to the motherfucker that leads that nasty little cult. I am going to use his real name, I'll disguise everyone else but him. Beating me when I was 9 till i was 12 was bad enough. But that motherfucker beat my sister when she was a 15 year old and the last beating one of my brothers got was when he was 20. If nothing else exposing him would be worth the pain writing about it will cause ten times over. I also want to bring my readers in to the internal world of living with the kind of hatred a childhood like that breeds. I want to show how hard it can be to stop hating and let go of the anger, no matter how hard you want to and how hard you work at it. Its like an addiction. I'm hardwired for it and I am just learning to maintain a constant state of vigilance, ever watchful for signs that my temper is starting to slip. Although it has gotten easier over time, I have spent every day of the past two years struggling with hatred, rage, and a deep seated fury. I'm really hoping this project will vent a shitload of steam because I am just sick of living like this and would rather mellow out and do something productive like learn a programming language. RedTonic posted:Something I would suggest is grounding more of the details of your mental state and abuse in chronological, concrete events and less in abstract summary. I think this is what supermikhail is also suggesting, so chalk that up as two of us thinking similarly. I'm working on a complete rewrite of the second part, and what I have above will be altered into a part three that starts to lay out some early childhood events in chronological order. I will also do my best to express what living with people who have a pure authoritarian mindset is like and how it affected my own thinking as a child. From there on I will try and stick to chronolgocial order strictly because my life's story is really two overlapping stories. The first story is my bizarre childhood and even more bizarre adult life. Beyond the cult I attended a very unique public High School that was bizarre in and of itself, I've held a wide variety of jobs, everything from wedding DJ to stagehand at America's largest dinner theater to 18-wheeler over the road trainer to behind the scenes positions at the worlds largest roller coaster park. Interwoven with that is the second story, the internal story of my mental illness and its various delusions. Of how I went from fundie baptist at the age of 13 to full blown occultist by the age of 17, of the hallucinations and visions that fed into that. How the Age of Crazy played out from start to end, how the religious system evolved via conversations and groupthink, how we all eventually moved past that and then into being hardcore conspiracy theorists, and then how I recreated the entire thing all over again in the context of conspiracy theories. Next I will take the reader into the internal world of a schizophrenic mind going psychotic, as I became unable to hold down a job over the years and eventually wind up homeless. How my suicidal ideation began to emerge, how intrusive thoughts started to occupy me for days at a time. Of how I squatted for years without a job, earning money doing everything from growing magic mushrooms to selling World of Warcraft gold to being a webcam tarot reader. And then how eventually that became impossible to maintain, and driven by visions I chose to trust, I jumped on a bus for San Antonio Texas to go live at a homeless shelter that I had found on the internet. Finally I want to take the reader through my experiences homeless and then receiving my mental illness diagnosis. How long it took me to really accept that diagnosis, to really accept that it hadn't been real, that the visions were false and the commands mere hallucinations. That the psychic powers were delusion. The simultaneous pain of that realization and the ecstasy of self discovery and hope for freedom it brought. My goal at this point is to try and present these two separate stories as I experienced them, both separately at times, and inseparably at times. Of how suggestion became talking in the open became accepted dogma. Of how my fantasy life guided my real life at times, and of how I kept throwing away fantasy lives only to reinvent them.
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Dec 8, 2014 20:48
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Prester John posted:My goal at this point is to try and present these two separate stories as I experienced them, both separately at times, and inseparably at times. Of how suggestion became talking in the open became accepted dogma. Of how my fantasy life guided my real life at times, and of how I kept throwing away fantasy lives only to reinvent them. This sounds like the beginning of a cool plan for your narrative structure. If you have the time, you might check out Haruki Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The structure of the story begins with two split narratives that combine in the end. You might find something useful to your non-fiction writing in his fiction. That novel has been out for a while and is relatively popular, so you can probably find it at a local library or through inter-library loan. All of your goals for this are strong, but please take care of yourself and take your time while you write. Not putting too much pressure on yourself is also important. If writing this is stressful, take breaks and do something you enjoy; making sure you have a good mindset and aren't miserable for hours after every writing session is maybe a kind of "mental hygiene," analogous to showering after a long run. If you gotta take a break for a few days or more, do that. Be kind to yourself and give yourself credit for doing something that is actually difficult.
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Dec 8, 2014 21:16
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Completely Reworked 2nd part: I was born Aaron Osif in November of 1981 in the small rural town of Wooster, Ohio. Primarily a Mennonite and Amish community, Wooster represents the communities of Central and northern Ohio that exist in the spaces between the major cities. Rural, family oriented, neighborly, and often passionate about the Old Testament religion that made this country great. Culturally cut off from the rest of Ohio, a fiery brand of christian fundamentalism with ties back to the Burned Out District of New York state thrives. Pulpit pounding orators passionately preaching about God's wrath and God's rejection of modern society dot the landscape, as they have for 100 years now."The City Council of Orrville invites you to worship at the Church of your choice!" reads a cheerily painted sign at the entrance of neighboring Orrville, Ohio. Church's in these communities are often much like their surrounding communities, insular, passionate, and nearly invisible to the outside world. My Parents, Robert and Kim Osif, were young newly married christian fundamentalists. Aged 20 years and 19 years old respectively, they brought me home from the hospital on the day of their 1st wedding anniversary. They had had a whirlwind romance, marrying only 6 months after they first met. In accordance with their religious views, my parents declined to register me for a Social Security number at birth. They distrusted anything to do with the Government, having been taught to view it as Satan's attempt to undermine America in the days leading up to the Tribulation. This distrust extended to many areas, but in particular Social Security, as they were worried that it was a precursor to get everyone to accept the mark of the beast. And even if it wasn't "Social Security Numbers are just for getting a job and paying taxes, the government has no business knowing anymore than that," my father often gruffly remarked. They would do this for me and my three younger siblings, and like my siblings I would not receive a Social Security Number until the age of 18. In the post 9/11 world this has made it very difficult to pass background checks, and many is the job offer that has been rescinded once the results of the check are in. Many is the times I've had to give someone "the talk". "No, I didn't have a Social Security number until I was 18. No, there are no schooling records for me that exist until I entered public school at 14, all those records were destroyed in a fire at the cult that ran the "school" I attended from K-8th. Yes, I am well aware how bizarre that all sounds. Yes, I've heard before that it is impossible for someone my age to have not gotten a SSN at birth, but your going to have to trust me when I say I come from a strange place." They have often not trusted me. And all this is just the tip of the strangeness iceberg. Like most victims of childhood abuse, my abusers were themselves victims in their own childhood. The generational chain of abuse is a very real thing in my experience, and it is a point of personal pride that my siblings and I have broken that cycle in our own lives. Even though at this point that means it is unlikely that any of the four of us will have children of our own, I am proud that we will be the last victims of our families cycle. My mother was born Kimberly ("Kim") Ruttsch in 1954 in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio called Parma. She was the eldest daughter of two girls. Her own parents were a working middle class family, her father a Korean War vet turned clerk for the railroads, and her mother a cashier at a union store. They were strait blue pro union Catholics, and they hated each other passionately, adn this was taken out most often on my mother. My mother had many learning disabilities as a child, but being this was the 1960's, these difficulties were never recognized. Instead her problems in school were chalked up to laziness. Her younger sister had a much easier time with school and became clearly favored by her parents. Kim's father is a seemingly affable man, but the abuse he inflicted on his eldest daughter was tremendous. My mother has told me of being beaten so severely that she would suddenly awake miles from home, having fled her father's fury in a blind panic. My Grandmother was little better, coming herself from a cycle of abused children going back as far as my great-great-grandmother. Whereas Kim's father used his fists, her mother used her words. This trauma has left a lifelong mark on my mother's psyche. My father once remarked to me "Your Mother has a voice in the back of her head screaming at her every moment of the day, and that voice is her Mother." My mother's childhood was chaotic and lonely, despite being from all outward signs typical of a working middle class family in the 1960's. They had a tidy house in a (at the time) well regarded part of Parma Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland that was populated largely by various ethnicity's that were just starting to join the "White Club". Having spent some time in that neighborhood and speaking with a number of people that lived there at the time I have heard many stories like my mother's. Abuse in that period and community seems to have been just accepted, or at least a blind eye was turned in a sort of old timey "that's just the way things are" sort of way. Although it has never been confirmed, it is my suspicion that, among other things, my mother and I share schizophrenia. After graduating High School my mother was under a tremendous assault from her parents. She has told me of this period in her life and her "visions" that started to appear, visions she believed came from God. She has described to me seeing colored dots chase each other around her bedroom, which she believed were angels and demons fighting over her soul. She has stories of feeling like she was near an out of body state and seeing demonic white hands waving her away from her body. She said during this time she was under such "intense demonic attack" (her words) that she had a hard time understanding conversations around her and it would take her minutes sometimes to respond to a simple question. She has told me of being easily confused and having difficulty keeping a train of thought during this period, of strange smells and tastes and hearing footsteps from demons walking through her house. She struggled with thoughts of suicide. Years later, while homeless and seeking mental health treatment for the first time in my life I would experience very nearly these exact same hallucinations and states of confusion during a period of intense suicidal ideation. Eventually, barely able to function and not understanding what was happening to her, my Mother packed up her belongings and went to college in a small rural town in northeastern Ohio that had a considerable population of Amish and Mennonite's, and a slew of passionately on fire for Yawhweh churches that made their Amish counterparts seem laid back and liberal. This was Wooster (Pronounced Wuh-ster) Ohio at the end of the 70's. The newest part of town looked like it was strait out of an Andy Warhol painting and horse buggies were as common on the road as cars. The hospital was still acquiring electricity and it was not available in the whole building when I was born. It was Wooster that my mother chose to build a new life for herself in. Always a lover of nature, my mother enrolled in the local community college for a horticulture degree and worked in a greenhouse to put herself through school. When she graduated she found work as a florist. In this community rich with old time religion, she also soon found a church that welcomed her in with open arms, an experience that I am sure was a first for Kim. This was a church where speaking in tongues was a part of the background noise of a worship service and exorcisms were performed on members struggling with Satan's minions. A church with big arms and jubilant worship, and a passionate belief that prayer could cure any ailment and Jesus could wash away the stain of any shame in your life. (A profound sense of shame is almost universal among survivors of severe child abuse, I can only imagine how appealing this would have been at the time) Here my mother accepted Christ into her heart and started a lifelong passion of seeking God and following his teachings with her every fiber. Sitting in this passionately fundamentalist church was a handsome young singer/guitarist that lead the worship services named Roger Osif. Six months after being introduced they married. My father's background is very different from my mothers. Middle son of four boys in a family with Appalachian roots, his childhood seems to have been much more pleasant than my mothers, and though there was not much abuse I suspect that there was some emotional neglect. My paternal grandparents were both products of the Great Depression, extremely frugal, kind-hearted and sharing, but mostly having skipped their own childhoods. My grandfather (well call him Bud) was raised in a notorious den of crime called "Rogue's Hollow", a sort of West Virginia coal mining town translocated to north-eastern Ohio. My Grandmother (Gladys) was part of the notorious James clan of West Virginia, a tough bunch of coal miners and outlaqs that included famous outlaw Jessie James. Both of them had to grow up before the age of ten. His father having passed away at the age of five, my grandfather became man of the house and last surviving Osif male at the age of seven when his three older brothers all died within days of each other on the beaches of Normandy. He had a mother and several sisters to support, in a village named "Rogues Hollow" in recognition that law enforcement had refused to police the tiny coal town for generations. Here the Great Depression had never really stopped. Bud quickly learned to work on cars and started hiring himself out to make money for the family. He discovered an unusual talent for all things mechanical and by the age of nine he had moved to California to work as a mechanic and send money back home. He traveled around the country finding work wherever he could and soon established himself as an extremely talented mechanic and bodyman. During the Korean war he was drafted and served two years working as a mechanic for the army in West Virginia, where he met my Grandmother. My grandmother was a West Virginia original. Middle daughter of 11 children, her Father was a coal miner that often moved the family around. It was often my Grandmothers job to buy groceries for the family and she became an extremely frugal budgeter. She enlisted in the Army to recieve medial training to become a nurse, and during her stateside assignment she met my grandfather. They soon married and served their terms together, and after being discharged they moved to the outskirts of Wooster Ohio to raise a family. They had four children, all boys, and all Osif to the core in their stubbornness, their strength of will, and their intelligence. My Grandparents were workaholics, often working two jobs apiece or earning money in some other way in their off-time. My grandfather worked as a bodyman at local dealerships by day and worked on junkers he bought from scrapyards and rebuilt into working order to sell by night. My Grandmother was likewise often busy in the evening furthering her education as a nurse. They both seems to have had little time to emotionally bond with their children. My grandmother became an OSHAA nurse with a reputation as a vicious fighter that you did not want to tangle with. Early in her career she was hired as a compliance assurance nurse by one of the largest employers in the area, a chemical processing plant. Less than a week into her new job she had the entire plant shut down and a federal probe was launched. Millions in fines were assessed, and my grandmother retained her job. She stayed two steps ahead of the company for years before they found a pretense to fire her under, but her reputation by that point assured her easy access to other jobs. She worked in a variety of positions in Akron Ohio as an OSHAA compliance nurse. Rumor has it that when the occasional family member had to appear before a judge downtown my grandmothers testimony on behalf of the accused and polite requests for mercy were considered because the judge's all knew that "Ma Osiv" was not worth the trouble. A coal miners daughter through and through. she had a pragmatic sense of motherhood and the unhesitating ruthlessness of a mama Pit-bull when confronted with a threat to her own. Although physical discipline was used on my Father, it seems to have been a far rarer and much less severe variety than what my mother had endured. Notoriously bright, my father "slept" his way through high-school and still received top marks. (Legend has it he was something of a stoner during this period as well) Raised a country boy, he put himself through electronics school by hunting and trapping, selling the pelts and meat to local merchants. Every day, in all weather and all seasons, my father got up at 4:00 am to go check his traps and put down any animal caught in his traps with his .22 (mostly muskrats, raccoons, beavers, and the like). He would reach out towards the animal with his rifle and bait it into biting down on the end of the barrel. This provided the animal an instantaneous death and preserved the pelt. He then took the kills home, butchered and skinned them, took the products into town and sold them. Then he would go to school. Despite my fathers country roots he has never really been a great lover of nature and he soon tired of this life however, and dropped out of school. After dropping out his junior year my father found work as a copier repair man for ABDICK, where he distinguished himself as being able to figure out solutions to problems that left the other technicians baffled. In his off hours he became heavily involved in the ministry and worship of a local fundamentalist church. He dedicated his life to Christ and seems to have been sincere in that, his singing and guitar playing worship services are still remembered to this day. It was here, at this point in my parents lives that they met. And it was into this atmosphere that they welcomed their first son. They named me "Aaron" after the biblical prophet and older brother of Moses. On the morning of their first anniversary they brought me home from the hospital and into their rural apartment on the outskirts of Wooster. It was late November, and my mother would have had the Christmas tree and the house decorated top to bottom. They stayed warm by the fireplace, snowstorms raging outside during their first Christmas together, this tiny newborn family. All seemed idyllic at first. My mother had her dream home in the country and her dream of a child of her own, and she doted on me by all accounts. Her husband had a good job despite the Carter economy, and they had a welcoming extended family in their church. I am sure that life must have seemed almost perfect for my parents. I find this perspective helpful because it humanizes my parents, and puts context into what happened next, for the bliss of living out their personal dream would be short lived. My mother's unrecognized mental illness and abuse filled past would soon catch up to her, and she would start abusing her children in inventive ways for every perceived challenge to her authority. She would involve the family in an authoritarian Baptist cult and force us to attend its school where all four of us would suffer vicious abuse from our peers and teachers alike. My father would struggle to maintain employment and try to get by mostly through a combination of self employment and speculating in damaged office supplies. As his wife's deep seated issues began to manifest, he would choose to mentally check out and throw himself into work rather than have to side in a war between his wife and his children. A war lead mostly by me, his eldest son."
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Dec 8, 2014 22:27
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I remember this from when you posted it a few months (?) back. There's still a way to go, but it's a definitely a lot more coherent, and I can see you've taken everybody's advice to heart. Great work so far.
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Dec 9, 2014 01:37
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RedTonic posted:All of your goals for this are strong, but please take care of yourself and take your time while you write. Not putting too much pressure on yourself is also important. If writing this is stressful, take breaks and do something you enjoy; making sure you have a good mindset and aren't miserable for hours after every writing session is maybe a kind of "mental hygiene," analogous to showering after a long run. If you gotta take a break for a few days or more, do that. Be kind to yourself and give yourself credit for doing something that is actually difficult. Thank you for the advice. I am doing my best to avoid pushing myself over the edge on this one. It is proving to be quite a tightrope act though and this project is starting to turn into the most painful thing I think I have ever done. At least that has held true as I have started to explore the abuse I experienced from my Mother and at the hands of the cult school. I am hoping that it might become a bit easier once I move past that and into the adult stages of my life. For now though I seem to be holding strong, just dealing with tremendous anxiety and stress by reliving all of this. It has been kind of strange, I haven;t experienced any of my usual schizophrenic or bi-polar symptoms. I haven't hallucinated or had delusions or been unable to get out of bed. I haven't had a manic episode and I haven't felt any signs of panic attacks. I have however been dealing with a tremendous amount of anxiety that makes it hard to eat some days, and the flashbacks have of late been more frequent and vivid than they have been in years. I receive weekly visits from a case worker and have alerted her to what I am doing and asked her to monitor me for signs of psychosis as a precaution. I've been trying to work on a part three but it just won't come out yet. So for the moment I want to put up a small thing I have written to explain the title. "In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire execution became a commonplace way to control the public. Any man or woman could simply be executed for any reason at any time. If you were a peasant your head was simply lopped off. If you were a government official however you were granted one tiny sliver of hope. There was a maze leading to the execution grounds, and if you could win a footrace with your executioner you were free to go. The most famous of these executioners was a man named Souflikar, who won this race over 5,000 times, ambushing and strangling each of his victims to death with his bare hands. I like this as a metaphor for my experience of being raised in an abusive cult and developing schizophrenia over the course of my life. Blind panic, rushing through a dark maze, taking random turns, my executioner lurking somewhere in the shadows, terror driving me forwards as hope dims. That has been my experience, that is Schizophrenia, that is being raised in a cult. I have spent my whole life racing Souflikar." Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 19:55
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Every time I sit down to write part three this is all that comes out. It will probably be the basis for part five or so. When this material is introduced to the reader it is my intention to have already described the odd conditions of the cult school I attended from k-8th. I've touched on some of this before but this represents my deepest exploration of the corporal punishment at the school I have done so far. "The worst part about living with a bruised rear end was never the pain. While the pain was plenty bad enough in its own right, I learned to cope with it over time. A practiced stoicism, never betraying my emotions and never letting the pain show on my face was a skill I had mastered by the time I was ten. For me, as bad as the pain was, the real worst part was the constant intrusive reminder of my shame. The pain served as certain proof that I didn't deserve to be happy, a constant nagging reminder that I wasn't as good enough. The pain I learned to tune out, the shame I struggle with even as an adult in my 30's. Whenever I was beaten at the school there was sort of a rhythm to it. A ritual of abuse if you will. The paddle, when wielded with such force against nine year old me, created a distinct process of pain that developed in stages over the course of several days. There was usually a great deal of buildup to these beatings. Although not always the case, I often knew days in advance when a beating was going to occur. I remember lying awake at night, dreading the morning, clinging to every moment of night so taht the morning would never come. But the morning would come. I would get up and desperately wish that I was living in China, because in China it was already tomorrow and this would be over. The day would creep by slowly as the appointed hour approached. I ate very little on such days, my stomach was too upset. Sometimes I crept into the bathroom and vomited on such days, and although this relieved some of the stress it made the shame worse. When I was finally summoned into the office I felt a mixture of stark terror and strange relief. At least the waiting was over. The Pastor would be there waiting for me, as well as whatever elders were handy and occasionally my parents. My crimes would be explained to me for the third or fourth time and Bible verses supporting spanking were read to me. It was then explained to me that this was all part of God's perfect plan, and that God had designed my body so that no real harm could come to me from this. There would be a prayer, the Pastor implioring God to impart the lessons of understanding the justice of this punishment. Then i would be bent over the radiator in his office. The pastor kept a collection of paddles in his office, different types depending on the age of the child. For kindergartners a switch was used, teenagers got an shellacked oaken paddle with holes drilled in it to reduce wind resistance. For my age group a smooth wooden paddle about the size of a breadboard was used. As I was bent over the Pastor, a solidly built black belt, would slowly trace a path from the ceiling to my rear end three or four times, winding himself up. The technique was to sort of skip off the rear end, striking it at an oblique angle. A solid connection would have slammed my head into the wall. I was warned not to flinch under any circumstances and especialy not to lift my head as this could cause the paddle to strike me in the back of the head and hurt me very badly. I would hold myself, terrified, quivering, waiting torturous moments for the impact, promising myself never to sin again. In the first moment after the paddle struck there was nothing. Everything froze. A tingling numbness would start in my back and rapidly envelope my body, a momentary reprieve caused by my young nervous system being overwhelmed with stimulation. In this moment the anxiety went away, everything went away. Then came the first stage of pain. Loud, harsh, penetrating, and all encompassing. This pain was too much to bear at first, there was no reprieve from it, no way of understanding, no way of coping. This pain thrust itself front and center into every aspect of my awareness and would not leave. I would be panicked, overwhelmed with pain. And then the arm of the pastor would force me into a bear hug and I would be forced to pray with him, to thank him for loving me enough to discipline me in a godly way. All the while I would be writhing, struggling with an instinctual desire to bolt for the door and run strait out the front door of the school. I would tear up and I would sob, but I never surrendered myself enough to fully cry in front of the adults. I was too ashamed. To this day I have a hard time tolerating the touch of another male and unexpected hugs from friends have nearly resulted in fistfights. I would go into the boys bathroom afterwards and hide in a toilet stall, choking on my sobs. I would be breathing heavily, tears running down my cheeks and onto my heaving chest. When I heard footsteps in the hallway outside I would hold my breath until they passed. I felt humiliated and as much as possible I didn't want anybody to know. And there, sitting on a toilet with my face pressed into a corner to muffle my breathing better, I would stay until I had calmed down. When my gasping had become manageable I would step outside and return to class. The first few steps out of the bathroom would be harsh. My legs would feel wobbly and my knees were often shaky for hours. The pain would still be very present, throbbing and pulseating, it would often take a few dozen experimental steps to find a way of moving my legs that caused the least pain. And then there was the shame. Worse than all the pain and crying was the knowledge that I had deserved this, the sense that everyone in school from the teachers to my classmates knew what I had done. To me, the beatings felt like a personal moral failure. A blemish. A shame. I had disobeyed so badly that the adults had been forced to discipline me this way. I didn't want anybody to know how rotten I was. The sense that I had been exposed as a sinful creature not walking the righteous path was palpable and I would often avoid eye contact, feeling lesser and unworthy when around my peers that had not been (recently) beaten. When I would re-enter my class I would do so as discreetly as possible. It didn't really matter though, everyone knew. Everyone always knew. There were fewer than 100 people in the school, including staff, in all 13 grades (k-12th) combined. In such a small student body everyone knew everything that happened. I avoided everyone's gaze and looked only at the ground in front of me. Quiet as a mouse I would return to my desk, slide my chair out, and slowly sit. The chairs were cheap, flat metal affairs. No sense of cushioning or comfort had really been thought of in their purchase. This made them unpleasant in the best of circumstances, but with a freshly beaten buttocks they were almost intolerable. My breath would catch as a hiss in my teeth when my butt first made contact with the chair. I hated the attention this brought me. I learned that holding my breath just before I sat down was the best way to keep that first involuntary gasp as quiet as possible. I also learned that the normal "scooching" movement of pulling my chair back into my desk could cause tremendous pain, so whenever I had to move my chair in or out I would clutch the base of it with both hands and lift it up held against my backside. This was a very awkward movement and made noise, but it felt less humiliating than sobbing, so I did it that way. Once seated the throbbing would start to subside and, with careful experimentation, I could usually find an exact way of sitting that minimized the pain. My breathing under control at this point I would then try to focus on my schoolwork. My mind, racing at first, would quiet gradually, and I would think only of schoolwork and trying to minimize the pain. Its a curious thing after a beating- there is a sort of emotional exhaustion that would set in on me, a feeling of being too tired to do anything but what I was told. It was all so overwhelming emotionally I would enter a sort of dead zone. I had no curiosity, no excitement, nothing. All I wanted was to be a good boy, and I would do anything that I thought made me a good boy. I just did whatever was asked of me by adults. If they told me to work I worked. If they told me to play I imitated [play until they left the room. I had no energy to do anything else but obey. As I would sit at my desk I would just put my head down and work as hard as I could, it took my mind off of things. Working made me a good boy and good boys didn't get whacks. Anyways as bad as all that was, it wasn't the worst of it. A few hours later, after the throbbing had long subsided would start the stinging. The pain would move from outside on the surface of my body and inside my body as the deep tissue damage set in. Whereas there was once a broad and flat pain, there was now a sharp stinging pain. A pain that cut right through me, a wincing, taunting, spiteful pain. It would start out small at first, barely noticeable, barely distinct from the shallower pain. Just a pinprick in size at first. But over the course of time it would spread. But this wasn't the worst of it. The worst was the reminder this pain brought, the proof of my brokenness this pain represented. Being inside of my body this pain felt more personal, more intimate. Like a firm voice whispering a reminder in my ear. Your Bad the pain would remind me. You deserve this. I would shut it out as much as possible, and often I could find a seated position that allowed the pain to recede far enough away for me to concentrate on my workbooks. But each little shift of my young body, each squirm or fidget or moment of inattentiveness could cause a sudden shaft of pain to shoot through me. My breath caught in my lungs, the unwelcome agony would thrust itself into my mind, only a moment behind was the shame. Fidget, wince You don't deserve to feel good. Reach, gasp, You sinned. Stretch, whimper God doesn't love you. At night, when the stinging had spread from my butt down to my thighs and sometimes my legs, I would only be able to fall asleep only by laying on my side or stomach. Rolling over in my sleep would cause a thunderbolt of pain and i would waken with a yelp. Some nights sleep was a balancing game, finding a position to fall where I felt the least pain and hold it till I fell sleep. I would be jolted back awake the moment I moved wrong. Then I would try to find the position of least pain and hold it. Rinse repeat. Some nights passed in dreamless misery in this way, the first few nights after a whack being always the hardest. This intimate pain, this pain inside me, this was from God. It was a personal reminder from God that he was angry with me, a reminder of the cost of my disobedience. God had made buttocks safe for adults to spank children, that is why God instructed us to be spanked. It was all part of his personal plan. Butts could be hit as hard as need be, you would never harm the child, God had said so. Adults knew exactly how much spanking the child deserved, God said so. "Spare the rod spoil the child" the Bible said. I believed it with all my heart, and with all my heart I wanted so badly to be a good boy like the other kids. I wanted to feel like one of them, to be treated like a good boy by the adults. I knew how lucky I was to have Godly adults in my life. Adults who loved me enough to discipline me in the way a perfect God perfectly commanded. Public school kids never got spanked, and they were unruly and almost certainly going to hell because of it. Without these adults God had put into my life, I would be blindly going to hell as well. And so it was that whenever this deep stinging pain hit me, I was reminded of how close I was to burning in hell, damned because of my rebellion and sin. This pain from God, this was his warning to me. If I continued to disobey I would burn in hell for eternity, and this pain was only a tiny taste of that. God wanted to love us all, but he couldn't love us if we went to hell. I wanted to be worthy of God's love, but I knew for certain if I were worthy God wouldn't be putting this pain inside me."
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Dec 17, 2014 20:08
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 Well, I avoided investigating the title, and it has paid off. Anyway, Wikipedia has nothing. Also, Google Translate pronounces it as "soo-luh-CAR". Is this correct? To clarify a little on the emoticon above, drat this stuff is heavy. You might want to experiment with some extra punctuation. For example, quote:You don't deserve to feel good. Reach, gasp -- you sinned. Stretch, whimper -- God doesn't love you. Finally, I have a suggestion with regards to the general structure. The narrative exclusively consists of negative memories. You've felt the effect of this on yourself already, and your reader might become too depressed to go on, or it could just turn monotonous. So, you could try to come up with some positive, comical, or absurd experiences to intersperse in the story. The Souflikar story is a good interlude, too. Plus it would make your writing process less torturous. Another thing I can suggest is to include philosophical observations, such as about the real effect of this system of punishment on the development of people based on the examples of your peers... Of course, it could actually make the process harder. Personally, comedy is my nemesis as far as writing it goes. But it's worth a try, I'd say.
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Dec 22, 2014 14:42
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supermikhail posted:
This is really good feedback, thank you. I've sort of stepped back from this project for a moment. Writing it has been tremendously cathartic and I've been able to think more objectively about the situation as result of getting this out there. That said its still really painful for me to think about it all and just at this moment in my life I've got something else really important I need to be focusing on for the next few months. After March though I intend to pick this right back up and finish it. Thanks again for the feedback, its extremely helpful.
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Jan 1, 2015 15:56
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Cut out this section right here:Prester John posted:All seemed idyllic at first. My mother had her dream home in the country and her dream of a child of her own, and she doted on me by all accounts. Her husband had a good job despite the Carter economy, and they had a welcoming extended family in their church. I am sure that life must have seemed almost perfect for my parents. I find this perspective helpful because it humanizes my parents, and puts context into what happened next, for the bliss of living out their personal dream would be short lived. My mother's unrecognized mental illness and abuse filled past would soon catch up to her, and she would start abusing her children in inventive ways for every perceived challenge to her authority. She would involve the family in an authoritarian Baptist cult and force us to attend its school where all four of us would suffer vicious abuse from our peers and teachers alike. My father would struggle to maintain employment and try to get by mostly through a combination of self employment and speculating in damaged office supplies. As his wife's deep seated issues began to manifest, he would choose to mentally check out and throw himself into work rather than have to side in a war between his wife and his children. A war lead mostly by me, his eldest son." Reason behind it being that you really do not need to remind people that things are going to turn to poo poo, they already know where things are generally headed. You end on a good positive note which makes it a greater tragedy when they go on to read in the next section/chapter/whatever.
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Jan 18, 2015 08:38
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