The whole bloody story.

So where do I even begin?

This will not be coherent. The problem is that there weren’t many specific incidents- just spiralling patterns, day in, day out, for twenty odd years.

I was never a wanted child. Our blood family- we call them such because blood is our only bond- I don’t know why they had us.

Were we an accident? Was it our blood father doing his charming thing of not wanting something, then completely breaking down the person who approached him wanting something, before forcing them to go through with it anyway after he’s made them back down and agree with him?

We don’t know.

What we do know is that even as a small child,we were hated for even the slightest mistake. We only got adoration and appreciation for when we went above and beyond.

Our household was volatile. There were fights and arguments every other day, either our mother fighting our father or us getting in trouble. These lead to some truly absurd outcomes. We grew up in a room we were expected to tidy and clean ourselves without ever having been taught how, so it ended up with what we now know is a black mould problem, and our sinuses were constantly streaming, so we ended up wiping our nose on anything available. Did our family look into why we were struggling? Did they offer help? Did they try and get us any kind of help?

No. Instead, they constantly shamed us as filthy for “not bothering to blow our nose”- we couldn’t, our sinuses were inflamed and blocked- and eventually they woke us up to seize us out of bed, strip us, and wrap us in tissue paper and tell us this was all they’d ever let us wear if we kept wiping our nose on things.

This is just one example of the humiliation and terrorising they put us through to “raise us properly”.

At some point- we must have been between three and five, we got taken away by the police. I don’t remember much, of course, but I remember being taken from the house while our blood father was restrained for trying to lash out,and then I remember the next day when our blood mother came for us. One of the police officers gave us a Mars bar. Our blood family denies this ever happened, and calls us crazy and claims we made that memory up.

When we were very young, they called us a nightmare child, and acted like we were some sort of divine torment inflicted on them for some unimaginable sin, and generally they treated us like some sort of horror they were obligated to put up with. During this time, they went through about four to six months of spanking and beating us whenever we “acted out”- which as far as we remember, was having screaming fits and not wanting to do things. They also got in our face, screaming at us, telling us it was our fault they had to do this.

Nowadays they downplay it to weeks at most, and act like it shouldn’t have had any long term effect. So when we reacted to them in fear- they punished us for that too and treated us like an abusive monster.

A large part of why we are writing this blog- and why we’re reporting this to the police, a year after we left them for good- is to have our side of the story heard and matter. It has never mattered before. Our attempts at advocating for ourselves were treated as disobedience, and what we argued was discarded in any way necessary- often forcing us to cite specific incidents (“name one time”). If we could, they’d just- forget the incident.

Reality and the past were what they said it was, and if they didn’t remember something, that means it never happened. We were an unreliable narrator, and they considered us disconnected from reality because of our disability- we’re autistic. Diagnosed at around eight years old, after things got unbearable for them, they dragged us off to be evaluated “so you can be fixed”.

Specific incidents are hard to remember. It was more a pattern of abuse day in day out, where our issues and problems and struggles invited punishment and intervention and their control over us. We tried so hard to bottle our feelings up and keep control of them, but the expectations and pressure were constant.

See- when we were diagnosed with autism, our blood family seemed to ignore the disability part or the accommodations needed, and only focused on the fact we could be some kind of prodigy, so they constantly pressured us to engage in sanctioned interests, and hated us taking time for our own interests. They wanted us to be some one in a million worldchanging genius, but refused to account for our issues or give an inch in how we wanted to be treated.

During the time they were violent with us, they had a fun little habit of grabbing us by the hair and smacking our head into the wall, and they would get violent over the tiniest infractions. We remember our blood father deciding to spank us over us mildly worrying about being unable to find a belt.

Their feelings were our problem, our feelings were our problem and they did not have to care. Our wants were our problem, their wants were our problem and saying no just led to negotiations, then arguments, so we ended up learning to have no boundaries just to make our life less painful. But if we went along with something and clearly didn’t want to be there, “you should have said something”. We weren’t allowed to win, ever.

There was also the funny problem of- if we got upset or didn’t do what they wanted, we were immediately five years old again. And they used that to argue we weren’t sensible or worth listening to, or even really human. We were just an annoying burden.

On top of that, they used both the law and physical intimidation to make us feel helpless. Between what they stated was the law around disability (that if we left, they could just claim us missing and have us dragged back as having a “psychotic episode”) and what they stated was the law around children- that they were legally obligated to keep us, and if we left or tried to get away we’d just be forced back. We were just a burden, and just something they had to put up with, and we did not have rights.

Additionally, if we tried to insist we *did* have rights, including to things like rest, food, and water, they would remind us we were *very* far from help. That we were defenceless and they could just kill us and hide the body and no one would ever find out. They made the point that lime can destroy a body in two hours or less, and the police would take that long to be here.

When we were very small until we were a teenager, they tried to control our sleep because we struggle to sleep thanks to insomnia. The way they did this was ban all light in our room- despite us protesting we saw ghosts and monsters in the dark, an early symptom of schizophrenia, which they disregarded as childish fear of the dark we had to be forced through – and then, while we should be sleeping, opening our door which was very loud, and staring at us. Sometimes they would step into our room, loom over us, and poke us until we reacted. If we didn’t react enough, they’d leave us alone. If we moved, they yelled at us for being awake. We learned to corpse and play dead, and not react.

We were often denied food as punishment. As well, we ended up dehydrated a lot because we didn’t like tea. So they didn’t give us anything to drink, and we were expected to handle ourselves- except they’d long since abused us out of asking, which was *never* safe and could earn us a lecture and threats for asking at the wrong time or for the wrong thing- and that meant we ended up drinking very little. For large swathes of our childhood, we were dehydrated.

On top of that, our family never really increased our portion sizes from eight years old and on. Our appetite was odd and off, and we either ate a lot or very little, and nowadays our appetite is very weak. As well, we often avoided eating as much as possible to avoid sharing space with our blood family, in order to avoid possible conflict.

They often treated us like we were never capable of flourishing or even living without them. They refused to let us do anything, or listen to us, insisting we had to learn their way to do anything. We were incapable of thriving, so we had to learn the tough lessons from them, and were not allowed ideas or dreams of our own, or to follow our own passion.

When we became 18 or so, we were heavily pressured into smoking cannabis, to “make us more manageable”, and it *did* make it easier to cope with our blood family. They eventually forced us to pay for our own, taking from our money, which they also smoked out of.

Speaking of money, our money was their money, even when it was benefits for us. They expected the lion’s share of it.