Forums / Discussion / General

The earliest years of my life I remember living in a trailer park. I had a lot of friends there. I would either be playing with them or be at home playing nintendo. After a few years my mother could no longer afford to live there and we had to move into grandma's. My mom refused to work and kept picking up guys at bars. We'd move in with each guy for a while, mom would start to treat him like shit, and then he'd kick us out, leaving us back at grandma's. The last guy she went with she decided to marry and we went live with him. I lived out the rest of my childhood there. My mom and that guy got divorced last year.

I seriously cannot remember.
I am dead fucking serious.

Are you having a hard time remembering or is the memory just not there?

I'm having a hard time.
no repressed memories, though. I can guarantee that my childhood was good.

Oh thank god, I was starting to worry.

I was born in April 1995. It was pretty awesome because we lived in the coast, and the city wasn't so big. The thing I remember the most was the N64.
My parents divorced when I was 10, and one year later, we had to move to another town. It was kinda rough at first, but eventually I got used to it.
Not as rough as Ashbot had it, tho. And I see you were worried about Captain Falcon's childhood.
I got you, bro.

Here is a crude summary:

My parents divorced when I was 5. Sad part is, the day after my mom left the house is really the day my brain started to record events, so I didn't even understand there was anything going on up to that event.

Then a painful game of tennis began, being shot back and forth between their two houses. Both of them trying to win me over in court and in person. Both of them got re-married shortly afterwards, and suddenly I was not only being tennis'd, I was being tennis'd between a house with 2 other kids and a super "healthy lifestyle" mom and a house with step siblings all already grown up.

As it turns out, my step dad had really good relations back in the Middle East (but to be clear, he is Caucasian American), so he moved there with my mom to work as a manager for an Oil Plantation. She only ever returned during the summer. I nearly committed suicide when they did, though I feared death, and made a vow to do better than my parents. Never to let them no this pain…

My Dad had another kid with my step mom, and we moved from California to Oregon during the time she was pregnant.

I only had one friend, so that move was surprisingly easy on me. Which it's actually odd to think that my step siblings had it better off due to their utter lack of friends….

There, I continued my lifelong struggle with School vs my ADHD, and eventually was homeschooled for a very large extent of time. It wasn't until I transferred to a private school when I gained another set of real friends. Hell, that entire classroom was my friend, it was so tight knit at it was all a very happy experience that I really never had before.

I don't think I was ever truly happy until I befriended those people.

I was born in Texas, raised on the west coast. Moved around a lot. I had few friends, on account of my Trollian heritage and random acts of insanity. Fortunately, I discovered wizardry. I spent much of my childhood learning about magic, nature, and lore. Went to school also, but didn't learn as much. I used to go on little quests with my sister and our friends. Good times. When I was 13 King Diamond took me as his apprentice, so I studied magic under him for a couple years and became the diverse spellcaster I am today.

I was born in the Philippines, and for the first two years of my life, and never knowing who my father was. My mother conceived me after her first time. I was born sickly, with difficult breathing, but that got better as I grew. My mother and I lived with our family which was a poverty stricken family at the time. Soon my mother married an American WWII veteran, He was a wealthy man with his own pharmaceutical company. We moved to Florida. I was showered in gifts for the next 8 years, and my mother divorced him once, and then remarried him. For those 8 years they argued everyday. The screaming was too much, and I shut myself in my room with all the nice toys, and video games. I watched anime a lot as well being inspired be the heroes with there shonen anime views on life, and friendship.

When I was 7 the company started to go bankrupt, and by the time I was 8 my mother divorced him again. My only friends were the ones that I was able to make through money. I was a social wreck at this age. Adjusting to life of the middle class was difficult, but after a few years I was like any other middle class child. I was in middle school by the time I embraced that I couldn't always get what I wanted anymore, and I took to reading, and drawing. Books were no problem since every school has a library. Around this time my mother married another older man.

After a while we moved to Texas. During my high school years I was an emotional wreck. I was a failure in many things that I believed myself was. It wasn't until I was 16 that I found KYM, and named myself ANN HIRO. Around this time I was emotionally unstable, and have jumped in front a car once.

It was around the age of 17-18 that I stopped worrying about it, and take it like a man.

In west Philadelphia born and raised, on the playground was where I spent most of my days. Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool and all shootin some b-ball outside of school. When a couple of guys ,who were up to no good, startin' making trouble in my neighborhood. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared, she said 'You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air'.

Alright alright I will tell you the truth damn it…
I HAPPILY SPENT MY CHILDHOOD WITH BOTH OF MY PARENTS
A total of 4 dead pets, never played anything from Sega/ Nintendo/etc..I got a barely working Windows 98 from my sister and I had to live with that shit until 2007, watched some animes but saddly I was in love with those golden 90's cartoons
I will miss the TV of those glorious old days, now it's just…something good, shortly followed by shit, and shit, and shit, and something good! Shit again, even more shit, end of the day…

I did nothing but gorge on starburst & skittles, and play Nintendo 64 games.

Most of the time nowadays I regret most of my childhood because after watching some movies, I was acting like my brother Nathan, in that I had tons of bats in my belfry. Though I don't have ADHD like he does, I can pretty much tell that I was incredibly hyperactive back then.

Then.. how old are you!? O-o

My childhood was pretty good, it was full of travel. I actually lived over-seas for my earliest years. My family and I would travel quite a bit, though I don't remember much of it. My parents also thought I was going to be a boy, but whatever.

Good thread, Ashbot. Can someone move it to General before the new JFF comes and ruins it?

Anyway, I had a sort of interesting childhood, though certainly nothing as storied as Natsuru's or Ashbot's.

You know, at the end of the day, I could have had it a lot worse. My parents never divorced, and are married to this day. I have a number of childhood friends that I still keep in touch with, and my father holds down a good job and keeps us in a nice neighborhood.

But we all really, really need shrinks. My father was born into a soon-to-be broken home, where his mother disappeared into the Midwest (and later reappeared, a better woman, but that's another story) and HIS father had a hair-trigger temper. My grandfather was not a bad man, but he was no saint. The important thing here is that he was totally unable to control himself in almost any situation. He was physically and mentally abusive to my father, though, to his credit, he did genuinely love his sons. Again, a total lack of self-control. My father discarded all he could of his father's shortcomings, but couldn't deny his natural disposition forever.

Mother lived in a much more stable home. She and her brother had vicious, destructive arguments, even if she idolized him. The worst my mother received from her parents was an emotional distance from her parents. She couldn't really live up to her father's expectations, but neither could he. It sounds worse than it is to put it that way. She turned out more or less stable.

When my father and mother first married, my dad's temper was already the stuff of legend. He has never, ever laid a hand on her; don't get the wrong idea. My dad is to be admired in the treatment of his wife. He's a darn good husband. But yeah, he had a temper. This he tended to take out on my brother and I. He'd yell, remember what it was like for him growing up, get depressed, and come apologize to us. Sometimes he really flew off the handle, and those are the worst nights I remember. He and my brother have typically not gotten along well, and the older my bro gets, the more he stands up to my dad, typically with disastrous consequences.

Before you're ready to condemn my dad, though, let me tell you this: he was almost always right. There are very few times he was objectively wrong in whatever he argued. His presentation needed work, though.

Aside from dad's occasional outbursts/knockdown-dragout fights with my bro, life was pretty chill. I had a Nintendo. Heck, I've always had a lot of things. I've got my share of nostalgia and childhood friends, dreams, etc. But the best part of the story is this: my grandfather died a good husband to his final wife, well loved and respected by the community. My grandmother is alive and well; my dad pays her mortgage because she lost her job, but she's okay. Dad has significantly mellowed with age, and loves his children dearly. Brother has made amends with him, though they still butt heads on occasion. Mom has adapted over the years to the weirdness that is my father's side of the family, and both of her parents died peacefully. And I'm the young one of the bunch, laughing at all the crap that's gone down because there's not a thing I can do to change it.

My childhood was pretty bad actually.
I was a really rotten kid. School was especially hard for me. I would bite and spit at the teachers and constantly get in trouble.

Then there was a big turning point sometime around 7th grade when I realized that this was getting me nowhere. I turned into a star student practically overnight.

… Or maybe I'm actually just imagining that I did, and I'm actually locked in Solitary Confinement somewhere, just sitting out the rest of my days, seeing what life could have been…

"Lawl, faggot!"

Yeah.

A haiku:

Suburban Florida

Jewish Preschool with no friends

I repressed it all

Well, I grew up on the streets. Friendly, upper-middle-class streets. My parents were married in the 80s, and are still married. I spent a lot of my childhood in pretty nice neighborhoods, always considering myself quite poor.

See, my Dad made some pretty decent money, but he also has a lot of kids. Ten, to be exact, of which I am number four. Thus the money got spread pretty thin. So because we HAD to have a house big enough to fit all of us, we lived in pretty upscale neighborhoods, but never lived like the other upscale kids did. I always thought I was poor, because I didn't have all the neat toys everyone else had. I had to play a second-hand Pokemon Red on a broken-pixeled fat yellowed-screen game boy. We certainly never had cable TV, so it was PBS all the time. We ate lots of oatmeal and bean soup growing up, and to go out to eat was always a special treat. But we grew up together, and let me tell you, despite having way to many squabbles and enough drama to sink a high school, having that many siblings creates a unique camaraderie.

I've realized since that the embarrassing amount of babysitting I did when I was younger helped me a lot. And having since seen much more of the world, I've come to almost resent how cozy my lifestyle has always been. But I can never thank my family enough for having been there for me.

While my childhood was ANYTHING but regular, it was most certainly awesome.

I was born with glass bones and paper skin. Every morning I break my arms, and every afternoon I break my legs. At night, I lie awake in agony until my heart attacks put me to sleep.

I remember spending the first years of my life in a pretty decent house. It was actually going well until one fateful day….
At first, I couldn't understand what was happening. My parents went from happy couple to arguing every day. The arguments always got out of hand, one time I was even forced to call the police. It turns out that my father became a drug addict. He would leave for long periods of time and each time he came back, my parents argued. Not much longer later, they divorced.

After that, my mom had moved us to our grandparents' house. Things started to pick up, until my brother's anger problems started getting really out of hand. Turns out he's bipolar. For a while, we began to live with that, knowing how he couldn't control his anger should he get mad, but that went too far at times. Then my mom met her current fiancee, and he seemed cool, but nowadays, I feel like he resents me.

But then my mom started to change. She spent less and less time with me and my brother and more time with him. Eventually, we met his daughter, a spoiled-rotten little bitch. She gets what she wants, and they do whatever she wants. But each time when me or my brother wanted something, it was almost always no.

Not much longer later, we moved with my mom's fiancee to our current residence. Me and my brother still visited our biological dad at times, and we had a good time, but eventually that stopped when he died. (It was the drugs that killed him, even though he tried to get help.) Eventually, everyone on my father's side of the family stopped keeping in touch with us. All of them except for one of my uncles.

Things just began to go further downhill from there. My brother moved away to live with my grandparents, I am never really home anymore because I hate being there. My mom has all but neglected me and my brother with the attention we needed as children, instead spending all of her free time with her fiancee. Our step-sister gets in trouble with the law, and still gets what she wants.

On the outside, it looks like a good family, but it won't take much investigating to see that on the inside, it's a dead relationship between parent and children. I feel like my own mother regrets that I didn't turn out to be the really popular, sports-loving guy at school. I actually turned out to be quite the opposite.

The sad thing is, I actually almost committed suicide at times during my middle school years. Though it was the few friends I made that saved me. And they have done more for me than my own family has. I consider some of them to be my family, for it isn't blood that makes family, it's what you do together.

It's odd how Derpy said that he wasn't the really popular, sports-loving guy at school. Because that's something like who I saw myself as.
 
The short version is
I WAS AWKWARD
THEN I HIT PUBERTY BEFORE OTHER GUYS
THEN I WAS A BULLY
THEN I WAS LESS OF A JERK
THEN I DID ALL THE THINGS
And then I was awkward again.

Longer:

• I was awkward

I don't have a memory where I didn't know how to read. Apparently, I was reading around age 3. I remember reading to some guy at the local elementary school at about that age, because my grandmother asked me to. I remember him asking me to skip around in the book as well to read. No big deal. I just read it.

Apparently, their principal skipped around, because he thought that I had just memorized certain areas of the book. Anyway, my grandmother keeps telling me about that day. The principal said I needed to have my gifts encouraged. I earned the most Accelerated Reader (dating myself) points in my school. Had the highest IQ for my grade. Was praised for my articulate speech. Took gifted classes.

Blah blah blah that cute girl didn't like me in elementary school blah blah blah.
 
I played baseball. Made All-Star team once out of three years. Broke an ankle.

• Then I hit puberty early and I was a jerk

My voice started to change in 5th grade, and all of those strange "feelings" that I have for girls and women now kicked in. Fortunately, my voice didn't crack all that much, and the light baritone I have now was the voice that I had in 6th grade. People encouraged me to speak and praised my maturity and intellect. Things like that.

Of course, being hopped up on hormones, being in middle school, and being the inquisitive kid I was, I asked questions about other people. If I didn't know why, I wanted to know why. Especially if I thought there was a better way to be. Just didn't make sense.

"Why do you walk funny? It'd save you some trouble if you could…not look at the ground."
"If kids pick on you for playing with your Pokemon cards at school, then why are you playing with them right in front of everyone? You're just asking for trouble."
"Why does your face look funny? Like, seriously. Your face is literally pink. (goes to find pink colored pencil and holds it to face)"
"Why do you smell so bad? In fact, all of the kids who are over here smell bad, even when I see you by yourselves. Maybe you should use deodorI was a bully of one of the worst kinds.

I remember once asking to hold a Pikachu card from a guy (pink face) and I threw it on top of the school. He got mad and got in my face.

I just smiled. And dared him to hit me, even if he was bigger than me. He and I both knew that if he tried to fight me, that I was still strong enough (puberty gave me a good bit of strength) to beat him pretty soundly. He walked away fuming. Yes, Verbose was a jerk.

My goal wasn't to insult someone for my own benefit. It was because I just didn't get why some kids were just so darn weird and to their own detriment. So instead of being able to simply ignore me because I obviously lacked self-esteem (which I didn't at the time.) They actually considered what I said, because it held some merit. I still maintain that if kids give you grief for playing Pokemon at school, then you don't play with Pokemon at school. Wait until you get home.

What made it worse was that I was an active, relatively popular student. I got good grades, won spelling bees, sang in state choruses, participated in quiz bowl, was on Student Council, was asked to read for radio spots at school, was chosen to run in the 100 yd dash during field day (got third place! Yeah!)…So because I was such a "good student," no one really called me out on all of that. I still regret it.
 
Blah blah blah the two girls I liked didn't like me back.
 
I played football. In recreational football, I was the quarterback. I ran for a couple of touchdowns each game. Ran track, played baseball for another All-Star team.

Got hit by a pitch in the thigh while looking at a cute girl in the bleachers. Scored though.
 
…
 
…in the game. Not with the girl.

• Then I was less of a jerk and I did a lot of different things

I never bullied him, because I knew he couldn't help it, but someone about our age shot himself dead in part due to bullying. Nothing like being beat up each day after school and I wasn't there to intervene or participate, but I knew he had a tough time. I think that sorta sobered me up from being so mean.

As you might be able to tell, being rejected by girls I really liked also helped me be less arrogant.

I ended up doing a lot more things. I played football for three years, I wrestled for one year, I sang in regional and state choruses, I sang for Literary region competitions (won my senior year! Yeah!), I was on Student Council, and was school president my senior year (My campaign was one poster with my face on it. I was lazy,) I was in Anchor Club, had a couple of part time jobs, lifted weights, went to off-season football camps (I have this cool story about getting the attention of Coach Mark Richt as a junior in high school,) voted most likely to succeed…stuff like that.

But in the midst off all of that, I had a unit in Literature about Transcendentalism. We read about Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Via Wikipedia: "Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both people and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions--particularly organized religion and political parties--ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed."

From that, (and a class period where our teacher let us go out and "think." Several people went into the opposite gender's restrooms…) I began to wonder. "What is really important to me?"

"What in all of this hustle and bustle is getting in the way of me being happy?"

And so I began to get awkward. Or at least weird.

• And then I was awkward again.

I came to do whatever I liked. I prioritized my faith beyond all else, and if something got in the way of me practicing it, then I sought to seek it out and address it. After that, I sought to do things I wanted to do. I began to not care that Pokemon was for kids. I didn't care that it was odd to listen to video game music by itself. I didn't care that it was odd to like the themes from Inuyasha even though I didn't like the anime itself.

Just got hit some serious nostalgia feels. Like, in the shin.

But like in middle school, I knew better than to advertise my odd activities and thoughts to just anyone. It's part of the reason why becoming a brony wasn't a problem for me. I liked the show, and I liked the community. It's not hurting anyone. Why wouldn't I be a part of the community. So you can thank (or curse) Emerson and Thoreau for why I'm on KYM.
 
 
And so I took all of that to college with me. I still love sports, I still like talking to people and learning about people (well, those who don't annoy me,) I still have trouble getting along with the kids in anime club, I still enjoy singing and being a part of task-oriented groups (usually,) and I'm still into some geeky things.

I'm just not as much of a jerk, I guess.
 
 
 
 
OH AND THERE'S THARJA OMG SHE'S SO COOL AND CREEPY AND CUTE DUDE THOUGH FOR REAL

No, I never had a thing for Raven from Teen Titans. Why do you ask?

You might notice that I didn't talk about my parents at all. That's because I'm a robot.

Actually, my family life was very chill. My mother and father never fought or argued to the point that they were at each others' throats. My brother was always kind to be despite me being stuck up at times and a prick at others.

They always supported me no matter what. I'm very grateful to have it, but I didn't think it would be as interesting as the rest of it.
 
>implying

Either that's the longest tl;dr you ever made or I just need to hang around these forums more.

Since this thread seems to be a downerfest, I'll recount that aspect of my life because that's what I remember. It probably wasn't all bad, but this is what stood out.

I grew up in lower-middle or upper-low class, I think. Either that, or my mother did a better job of hiding our financial difficulties than I remember. Basically all I remember from my childhood is my parents getting into fights often, my mom being depressed, always being on the verge of bankruptcy, my dad never working and frequently being an asshole, my mom being emotionally unstable, my brother being unmanageable and territorial constantly getting into fights with me over things we had to share, being terrible at school and always falling behind in class because I didn't pay attention, and having my initially sociable personality get turned inside-out by bullying because, to put it frankly, I was a weird kid. I took refuge in games back then, and while it might seem melodramatic to say that they saved me, it seems like an accurate statement to make. I played my way through poor grades, depression, and being fairly ostracized at school. I probably would have found some other diversion, but all I know is that they were my escapist's dream.

Flash forward til I'm 17 and my parents have just recently gone through with their long-overdue separation and I'm happily living with my mom, a brother who I now can successfully avoid and therefore maintain a passing relationship with, a very nice foster sister and lots of pets. I've got passing grades and a much better social life than I had before. Life's genuinely grand now, considering the retrospect.

I hate to sound whiny, because my childhood was definitely not the worst, but it wasn't exactly the best either. Blegh. At least I've got my obsession love of games to thank for it.

Damn, there are some good reads here.

Anyways, my earliest days I can remember consisted mostly of videogames and legos. My mother was absolutely wonderful. My older brother was a dick to everyone in the house every chance he got and my dad wasn't around much. Then I had to go to school. I got terrible grades and made very few friends despite my best efforts to study and fit in and I quickly started feeling pretty shitty about myself. But then I found karate, a cool rival bro and someplace I could go where my learning disabilities that wouldn't be diagnosed and treated until I was 15 didn't hinder me every step of the way. It was great – hell, I was great. I got a place on a special performance team and I even got to be a junior instructor for awhile before our grandmaster or whatever drastically changed the curriculum. Then my rival bro quit without saying anything and I lost interest.

All and all, I think I had a frustrating but mostly good childhood.

Kind of shitty for me when I think about it. My dad divorced my mom and I got joint custody, which fucking sucks when you don't know who's house to go to. I can't remember the GOOD parts of my childhood, especially one thing.
I had an old Playstation 2, but no matter how hard I try, I CAN'T FUCKING REMEMBER WHAT GAMES I PLAYED ON THEM. I only found a few games I played: Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge, some games from the Test Drive series, some Tony Hawk games, and a game from the Offroad Fury series.
If any of you guys could give me any help, you could tell me the name of the game I can't remember.
This game was on this Playstation 2 'hub'. It was something that had a lot of games on it, where you could get more of them. The game in particular I can't exactly remember the name was something on there. I don't remember much, except that it was bright and you were some type of hero. I can barely remember how there was this one level that I couldn't get past. It was in some type of cave with the objective on the other side of a large chasm in the middle. I didn't know how to get over the chasm, so all I did was try to jump over it. I remember how when you would fall, the death scream would be the hero yelling stuff like "Mommy!" or something similar on that line.
Also, if you say it was Mario, I will fucking murder you. This was not Mario.

It's story time! If there's one thing I've become notorious for these days, it's storytelling.

I was born sometime in the twentieth century to two parents in the Air Force, which basically means I spent just as much of my life short one or two parents as I spent with both of them present; my dad was in the Middle East my entire freshman year. After I head off to college, I'll have lived eight places before my eighteenth birthday, while I've been through three high schools and just as many accents.

Freshman year, I lived in suburban DC. I was a pretty obnoxious little kid, about five feet tall and ninety pounds, but I still thought I was cool because, between cross country, wrestling and track, I knew a couple seniors. I cut my hair between middle and high school, thank god, so the luscious locks that fell in front of my eyes were long gone, and my hair's been cropped to about an inch ever since. Really, it was the first time in two years that I'd had friends.

Sophomore year, I moved to rural North Carolina. I was pretty depressed, didn't really talk much, becoming much more reserved and emotional. I started excelling at school after a fairly mediocre freshman year (who gets B's freshman year?), which was kind of cool, but I really had nothing going in my life. I didn't go on the Internet near as much, and I didn't venture much outside Facebook, desperately clinging to my friendships in Virginia and posting status updates with bad grammar and using "u" instead of "you."

Junior year I was still in North Carolina, and the accent had kind of started to set in. I realized that I wasn't likely to ever get along with anyone I knew; everyone was either a spoiled brat driving a BMW bought by parents with more money than I'll ever see in my life or they were the kind of person who carved their girlfriends' names into their arms using knives and made liberal use of the words "nigger" and "nigga." I became even better at school, became a bit of a jock and an asshole as I stopped caring about people and got better at wrestling (I was about five and a half feet and 120 pounds by this point, which was like thirty pounds more than freshman year). I also discovered the Internet, and (wait for it) ponies. I'm not going to go on some long-winded tangent about how ponies saved my life, but I will say that they opened me up to the true joys of the web and, most importantly, animation, which is basically all I do with my time nowadays.

Senior year I live in Seattle. It's pretty cool; I get along with the people a lot better and I have more food options than McDonald's and DiGiorno's. I also started to break out of my shell of introversion; I'm a confident and smug sonufagun these days, and I started wearing baseball hats and dressing myself well in flanel and cargo pants just because I realized I had looked like a slob for my whole life. I don't give school as much thought as I used to, since I've seen that I can do so much more outside of it than I can inside; namely, animate and go on the Internet, which has been more useful to me than everything I've ever learned in BC calc. I've actually acquired social skills for once, and I'm able to hold conversations with women and men alike about many things without saying "uh" or "um" all the time, even if I've found that I speak with a bit of a stutter these days. I'm just a generally happy guy who makes bicycle pilgrimages to the Adobe offices in Fremont from time to time. I'm a lot more positive and optimistic and I actually feel like I'm enjoying my life for the first time in years. Wrestling has also turned me into the guy who always feels the need to roll out his shoulders or stretch his massive biceps and complain about how he's had a recurring back injury for four years. And no, I do not even lift. I went my whole high school career without lifting. Once. Ever.

Couple interesting things to note: I've gone by a different name at each school; everyone at my school freshman year knew me by first name, everyone knew me by last name sophomore and junior year, and senior year I told people I've gone by my middle name my whole life just because I realized no one would be the wiser and the idea was too tempting to pass up.

I've also lived my life with three or four massive red tumors on my right eye. Those are fun, especially the annual eye doctor visits since I pretty much have a new doctor every few years and they always freak out because they've never seen anything like it.

I've got stories on stories, yo. Idaho, Germany, Las Vegas, Alaska (okay, I don't remember jack from Alaska), Virginny, North Cackalacky, Seattle, and wherever I go to college, since I just threw a bunch of applications to the wind and am waiting to see where they land.

Growing up with Asbergers means that my history, in comparison to Verbose's, never improved beyond the "AWKWARD" part

I WAS AWKWARD
I REMAINED AWKWARD
I WEIRDED OUT EVERYONE AROUND ME
THEN I WAS BULLIED
THEN I WAS A TOTAL COMPLETE JERK, STILL BULLIED
THEN I WAS STILL AWKWARD
I LEARNED TO ACCEPT AND EMBRACE THE FACT THAT I AM AWKWARD
I MOVED ON

Took me 20 years to figure out how socializing works. Goddam.

I don't think I need to expand on that like Verbose did. That was pretty much it. 18 years of pure awkwardness that got worse before it got better

In the beginning I was already off to a bad start. I was so Aspie that my parents thought I was deaf. My hearing was fine, I was just too autistic to notice the existence of other sentient life.

This didn't bode well for school. I could only make one friend at a time. Any more was beyond my mental capacity for remembering. It was impossible for me to meld in with the rest of the crowd, I could never understand what was cool and what was not. All social concepts were entirely foreign. Kids wondered why I had no sense of fashion, why I talked funny, why I never listened or daydreamed a lot, why I seemed to lack a sense of dignity and shame…

At just age 5, I was kicked out of the creativity table by the others for being "different"

Eventually bigger kids notice how different you are and decide that is worthy of punishment so I pretty much had to fight my way through school with a crowbar.

It didn't help that I also became jaded and hateful of absolutely everything as a direct result. I pushed myself away from everyone else entirely. By the the time I was halfway through college I was a social pariah and everyone hated me.

I hit rock bottom when I was finally that kid that always hung out in the Library reading books, refusing to communicate with everyone else as if I was Hanako, but with a burned childhood rather than burned skin.

Nothing got better until I met some friendly people that didn't know I was a pariah and gave me a chance to start again fresh. With their help I finally learned how to make some friends…But by then it was too late. I was already 16.

My childhood sucked.

Man, why do you guys have to all have depressing stories D:

Well I might as well tell mine while I'm here

When I was born, I wasn't even breathing. Great start, right? I wasn't premature or anything either, I just wasn't breathing. My parents were freaking out, the nurses were giving vague answers, and they had to call in a frikin helicopter to take me to another hospital! And then I died And then just as the helicopter was arriving I started breathing normally and things turned out perfectly fine. Moving on to what my childhood was actually like, I lived in a small city in Massachusetts with my older sister, baby brother, mom and dad in a decently sized house. I was such a little shit for the first 5 years of my life. I would always lie to my parents, I would steal from my brother when he was still a baby (I had great hiding places for the stuff, too), and I was just flat out bratty. Eventually I wised up after my parents smacked the back of my hand enough times. From then on I was mostly an obedient kid, except I had a little trouble in school, mostly with homework. Around the time I was 6 or 7 years old my parents started getting into arguments almost every day. My dad had a really bad temper problem along with a drinking problem that he hadn't realized yet. He would yell at my mom for something as small as getting the wrong brand of potato chips. Eventually, when I was 8 years old, my parents finally got a divorce. It was pretty hard to go through that, but there wasn't too bad of a custody war and they came to an agreement fairly soon. My siblings and I visited our dad every other weekend. My social skills really took a nose dive because of the divorce, though, and I became very quiet as a result. My family was planning on moving to an area that was close to my nana and grampy on my mother's side (my grandparents on my father's side had passed away from cancer at this point) but that plan took a slight detour…

Shortly after the divorce, my mom found a man who lived in western MA (my family lives in eastern MA). He deceived my mom into thinking he was a successful man who had enough money to support our family, and so they ended up marrying about a year later. Our family had to move to the western side of the state, 2 hours away from any relatives or our father. As you can imagine, seeing your dad every other weekend is tough when it's a 2 hour drive one way. Especially when your dad is dating a woman who spoils her son rotten but criticizes you for every little thing. On top of that, the city that my family moved to ended up being a really sketchy city. Everything looked old and in disrepair and the people that lived in it weren't exactly the friendly type. The house my family moved into was big, but it really creeped me out as a kid. I had a pretty crippling fear of monsters and the paranormal back then, and that old house didn't help. My siblings and I had to go to a catholic private school (my parents refused to send us to the public schools in that city, with good reason). The school was really small, there were only about 16 students per grade (it went from grades K to 8). My siblings seemed to have an alright time making friends, but nobody in my class seemed to like me at all. I started getting bullied and I was accused of being a copycat by my classmates for small things like the way I wore my hair. After two years of that hell hole, the school closed down due to lack of funding, and I had to go to another private catholic school for 6th and 7th grade. It wasn't nearly as bad there, I was able to make some friends, although I still ran into catty girls. I was also able to get over my scaredy cat tendencies for the most part (although they've somewhat made a return in recent years). All was not completely well, though. My mom and step-dad started having financial trouble catch up to them. It was really causing a strain on the family. My mother ended up having to take a job (after being a stay at home mom for a few years) and my step-dad's business went completely under. Our house was foreclosed on and we decided to move back to the eastern side of the state.

Life got a little worse before it got better at this point. My family of 5 was forced to live in an apartment, and we had to go through the general stress of moving all over again. I started coming out of my shell a bit in the new middle school I went to, but for a while any progress I made seemed to be squashed by the girl that I for some reason called my best friend. I spent a lot of time with her, but she always made me feel self conscious about almost everything. She was the type of friend where we would always do what she wanted, but she made fun of me for my own interests. Needless to say I dumped her before the end of that year. My step-father had developed a drinking problem shortly before his wedding with my mom, and it just got worse and worse after we were forced to move. My step-dad would sometimes stay in the master bedroom all day drinking and would come out at night and start bullying my family. It wasn't until I was a freshman in high school when my mom decided enough was enough and kicked him out of the house. Things got much better from there after he left.

In high school I made a lot of really good friends. I don't think I would trade those friendships for the world because friendship is magic. I really came out of my shell throughout those 4 years. A couple of years after my parent's divorce, my father finally admitted that he is an alcoholic and has been going to AA meetings completely clean for the last 5 or 6 years. He also worked on his temper and is much better at controlling it than he was 10 years ago. He eventually got married with a woman who is also a recovering alcoholic and they've been living together happily for the past 5 years. I had a lot of tough times throughout my life but one thing I never doubted was the fact that my family loves me and my parents would do anything for me and my siblings just so they could see us lead happy lives. I like to think that I got most of the hardship out of my life early and my life will have a more positive light on it from here.

I have been working on writing a response for this thread, and it's way too long.
Me trying to explain everything that has happened in my life up to where I am now is really difficult…
So sorry if I post a tl;dr post.

My childhood friend was my PS1.

Wow, this thread got a lot of responses. I thought it got deleted. I rarely post in general. I feel as though I should add to my original story. This is gonna be a drama bomb. Anyway, I also had three sisters. After the first was born, my mother was kidnapped by one of the bar guys. 3 years later, she came back with two daughters. The first daughter had to live with our grandma until mom came back. The guy that kidnapped my mother was quite abusive and my mother became submissive so she gave up hope of ever leaving. The guy had two sons, they helped my mom escape. After what happened to her, she was very paranoid and had a drinking problem. A couple of years later she met a guy outside of the bar, a nice guy. After a while, he tried to stop her drinking problem. That's when she left him. She later found out that she was pregnant. I came along a couple months later. We all moved to a nice house. At least, that's what I heard of it. I heard two stories from this, one is that my mom passed out while cooking, the other was that my oldest sister got mad at my mom's drunkenness and tried to kill us with fire. Either way, my second oldest sister was the hero of this. She somehow woke my mom up and got me and the youngest sister outside. After that, child services sent us to live somewhere else for a year. I was a baby and didn't know what was going on. My second oldest sister loved the new family and still stays in contact with them to this day. My mother got a job and tried to convince child services that she was good enough to take us back. It worked, but then my mom didn't have the time to look over us and started hiring babysitters. The last one she hired molested my second oldest sister. My sister had to go to therapy for quite a while afterwords. Mom quit her job to keep this from happening again. My mother and us moved in with grandma and the bar boyfriend thing started. The worst guy she was with was malcolm. He had an anger problem. I literally saw him pull a man by his hair out of his house and he also once threw a 24 can thing of beer at his ex. He hit my mom at times. When I was like 7 or 8, I got to see my father for the first time. He married someone and had a handicapped kid. Some holidays I got to spend at his house. It was fun there, away from all the drama. My mom married a guy named Milton. We moved to his house and she later married him. That's when she started getting paranoid. She thought Milton may have been cheating on her or something and started to act cold towards him. She later found him with porn and they started to argue. It became routine that we stay up watching them, ready to break a fight. My father noticed this and said when I became 12 that he will bring us all to court and try to get me to live with him. I planned on doing so. I became 12 and never saw him afterwords. A while after I became 13, I found out that he was dead. When I was 14, I started high school. My sisters moved out and I was left alone with them. I started high school with not a friend to my name. A didn't have any friends my first year. Halfway through my first year, my self confidence died. I started sleeping in class, not giving a shit about my grades. My second year in high school I made some friends. These friends include the KYM users Viral Edge and Derpy Hooves. That was the same year I discovered KYM and got those two to later join. Last year, I got a GED and moved in with my sister. My self confidence is slowly coming back.

In my early childhood not much happened. I was a pretty normal and happy kid. Always smiling and always laughing. My best friend was my cousin and we hung out every single chance we got. All day every day. I can trace a lot of things I’ve done in life/learned in life back to her and my other cousins (her older sisters). Most of the time we spent together was at my Grandma’s house. We’d go for walks down the road to see the neighbor’s horses, cats, dogs, or whatever animals they had at the time. We’d just go crazy with our imaginations and everything was awesome. If I wasn’t hanging out with my cousin, I’d be hanging out with my Grandpa. He’d babysit me pretty much every day while my Mom and my Grandma went to work (he retired at an early age). We’d do cool things together. I was his “little buddy”. He’d take me golfing with him and he’s let me drive the golf cart, it was awesome.

After I started elementary school my mom and dad* got divorced. To be honest, it didn’t really bother me all that much. As long as I got to see my dad and my mom still, I didn’t care. But it turned out to be a horrible, horrible experience. My dad did not take the divorce well at all. He would harass my mom through me. Dropping me off at her house at odd times of day (either really early like 6am, or super late like midnight). He would follow my mom around with me in the car after he picked me up. He would come around at 3am honking his horn like crazy waking up everyone in the neighborhood (my neighbor came over once and yelled at him right in front of me!). He would get shitfaced drunk and drive around for hours with me. He would drink so much. I have an endless amount of stories about my dad being drunk, I seriously could go on forever with stories about him like that. He wasn’t really the best dad without my mom around…but he was still a nice guy.

*=The man I call dad isn’t actually my biological father. But he did adopt me and raise me, for the most part

Then my mom met Mark. They started going on and I started seeing him more and more around the house. He was okay. He also had two kids of his own. Emily and Spencer. At first, I hated their guts, all of them. I wanted them out of my life and to just go away forever. I just wanted it to be me and my mom. But I guess she loves him or something…lol. (Today they’re like my little bro and sis, and I absolutely love them)

moving on…

Middle school was probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to me…I went to the same high school/middle school the rest of my classmates went to in 6th and 7th grade. You know, normal middle school stuff happened. Nothing important. But after 7th grade my mom decided to move forever away from my current school and I couldn’t go there anymore. Changed schools, and I don’t know what it was about me that made these kids want to torture me every day, but I would do anything to go back and change whatever it was. These kids pretty much shunned me. I was picked on every single day. People would call me names and throw everything they had at me, books, food, paper balls, whatever they had in their backpacks. I was so scared to go in the lunchroom to eat, I just decided to not eat at all. I would hang out in my home ec. Teacher’s room. I think she understood my situation because she never asked me to leave, and was actually really nice to me. Through her I met someone else who turned out to be a really nice person too! And we became really good friends. So I’d hang out with her and my teacher every day, it was the only nice thing about my day.

Then high school! Things got a little better at this new school in 9th grade. I made more friends and I started being less shy with other students (who weren’t mean to me). But I was more depressed than ever at this point in my life. I started wearing hoodies every day to hide all the cuts ALL over my arms. I was addicted to cutting myself for a while (I still have marks on my arms from it, tbh…).

I didn’t let anyone about this until it started becoming summer. Then I decided I should probably tell my mom about it instead of her seeing my arms. After that she started having me go see a therapist and a psychiatrist. My therapist is the coolest guy in the world (I even seen him every now and then once in awhile). I got some pills from them and my mood seemed a little better.

After 9th grade my mom finally realized that being at this school was a bad idea, and she let me go to my old school again! (drove me every day on her way to work) Once I got there, everything was different. Everyone I knew was different, and my old group of friends weren’t even friends anymore. I did have one friend who was still willing to hang out with me though, Crystal. She was my bestfriendx100 for the rest of high school. I hung out with her every day. It was like me with my cousin all over again. I loved her! And I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else with me going through high school. After I met her I started feeling better about being back at my old school again.

Of course we had our drama with boys and all the normal teenage girl problems, but I’m glad she was there with me to make my last years in high school fun.

fast forward…

Graduation!

I finally graduated high school. The one thing I wanted most in life! I wanted to get out of there and explore the world. I was super pumped for college and having a fun adult life.
Instead of doing all that awesome stuff, a few months after graduation and girl in my class messaged me on facebook asking if I wanted to be her roommate. NOW when I first thought about it, it seemed like the coolest idea ever. Moving out? Away from parents? Being an adult? Oh boy that’s where I wanted to be. So I told her I’d do it.

After searching and searching for an apartment to live in, we found one! Close to where we were working* and it allowed pets (I have my dog Brandy with me at this point in time). So we moved in and it was cool for a while. I’ve never had a roommate like this before, it was a weird situation to me. I didn’t know how to act or what to do, guh so awkward…

*=Before I decided to move in with her I worked at a McDonald’s a few miles away from my mom’s house. She also worked at a McDonald’s, but in a different city (the one where we’re moving to). So I just transferred McDonald’s so I could live there with her

okay enough of that…

Then I met Rob! He started coming over and hanging out with me, and naturally we started dating soon after. Then he started coming over tooo much, and my roommate was getting annoyed with me for having a guy over constantly (what can I say? I love sleep overs). I don’t know, but something switched in her brain and she turned into some crazy lady who yelled at me about everything. Things I didn’t even do. She was threatening me while I was at work on the phone saying how she was going to throw my dog out and blahblahblah. I don’t know she was just nuts.

Long story short, she moved out, Rob moved in, and I’ve been with him ever since.

Right now, I actually live with my mom in the boonies of Michigan. I have a different job and I’m make pretty good money. I dropped out of college in my first semester, but I’m thinking about going back for business or marketing, I don’t really know. I don’t have a clue what I want to do in life. I probably won’t ever have a clue…hahaa.
I’m usually depressed or tired. Sick of life as an adult already.
I actually miss high school now, haha.

Okay I think that’s enough of my life. These are moments that stick out the most for me. But as I’m writing this tons and tons of memories are coming back. I want to include them, but they aren’t important enough to mention :(

Edit: I realize this isn't just my childhood, but I thought that would be okay.

Is it "Wall o' Text" time again?

Well, my childhood was terrible. The worst. My main defense mechanism is amnesia, so most of my childhood has been forgotten to me. I remember the big things, but all the little stories are simply echoed by my mother or sister back to me.

My father was always moving from job to job because he's a scammer and a scumbag, so I never went to one school from year-start to year-end until I was in high school. After a few moves, I stopped making friends. Apparently I told my mother "it isn't worth the trouble when leaving them hurts so much." So I became antisocial, actively avoiding friendships. Because of this, friends actually began to mean more to me than they do to regular people. The title of "friend" is one that I only very rarely give a person. Since high school, I have never had more than two friends at any one time. Because I am the oldest and probably also the most sensitive and naive of my siblings, this kind of moving around only really effected me.

Around high school is when my memories are clearest. We finally settled in one place long enough for me to gather a group of people who knew me by name, and that name was "the jew." I have Hebrew roots, but was raised Roman Catholic. I also have a propensity for picking up pocket change, sticking to the old adage that "a penny saved is a penny earned." My circle of "friends" at the time also referred to my hair as a "jew fro" and, in retrospect, were never really friend material. They would throw coins, laughing, and I would pick them up. I got a few bruises that way, but it was a nice way to make money. You could say I was an entertainer.

One of the circles I was hanging around was, as I found out far too late, an arm of a local drug cartel. Being the naive child I was, I reported the leader immediately after finding out what was up. For the rest of that year, various thugs would beat me up all the time. I was even stabbed in the face once. He supplied all of my so called friends, and they started to taunt me more and more. After a while I started to realize what their game was. They weren't my friends, and I was their fool! I ditched everybody, and simply hid in the corner of any room I was forced to be in. I've been sitting in the back corner desk of every classroom I've been in since then. I stopped going to the cafeteria for lunch, or hanging around in the hallways between classes. I would spend my free time volunteering to do paperwork in the office, or for a teacher. I was invited to a "teachers only" pizza party once and even got office work put into my official schedule for senior year.

And suicide was a big theme of my childhood. Since middle school, I thought about it a lot. I never tried it though, because of a combination of my Catholic convictions and value of my own life. It is hard to explain exactly, but suicide became the one thing I could never do and simultaneously the one thing I wanted most. I thought I was defective because I didn't have friends, didn't want sex, didn't care about my grades. There was really nothing worth living for, and I didn't see the appeal in fitting into any lifestyles presented to me. My mother noticed how often I cried, broke things on purpose, or hid in my closet; she tried to give me medication to make me feel better. But it wasn't a chemical imbalance, I just hated the world and myself. So I learned to hide my feelings so others wouldn't worry about me. I didn't dress in dark clothes, I didn't cry or hide. I just steeled myself, and stopped emoting altogether.

Around halfway through high school things got REALLY bad on the home front. My parents divorced, and started to unleash a wave of legal and physical attacks against eachother. My father won, because he comes from a rich family. I started discovering things that I never knew, and quite honestly, are so horrible that I wish they were still secrets.

For the following, these are my siblings (not real names) and when they were born:
Bea, male, 1992
Kas, female, 1995
Jae, male, 2000

My father started to show is true colors as an evil man, abusing his children in all kinds of ways. Primarily psychological. He knew that if he hit us, we could report him, and the bruises would be visible. Instead he resorted to establishing a new social order in which the most rotten and horrible children would profit the most from the regime. Jae knew this best, and managed to get Bea (who is an awesome musician and a really cool guy) locked in his room PERMANENTLY. My father would also lecture us every single day about how evil our mother was for "abandoning us" when in reality he kicked her out in the first place and threatened her life on multiple occasions. It was pure propaganda. I, naturally, knew what was truth and what was not, but the other children did not. Jae and I were the only ones that still went with mother when she came for visitation, and Jae only came with us because mother would buy us candy and take us to the movies. Jae's sole incentives in life were power over others, sweets, and entertainment. His father could only provide the first of the three.

My father finally kicked me out of the house (three years ago) when I wouldn't sign up for the army and go to war, instead going to college. He hates educated people, and probably wanted me dead for being smarter than him. He then kicked Kas and Jae out to the streets for reasons still unknown to me. Jae hated me, and was exactly like his father. He came to live with my mother and me. A year of hell ensues before he finally decides that torture and abuse is tolerable so long as he is rich, and he moves back in with his father after begging and pleading with the man for months to take him back. During those months he ramped up his spending wishes, demanding various expensive things such as his own trombone (for band class) and a new TV. When he left, he had a pickup truck full of supplies that went out with him, most of which were purchased for him while he was here.

Kas then came to live with mother and myself, and she realized how horrible our father was, and saw the truth behind all of the lies he told. Unfortunately, Bea will probably never realize these things. He is stationed overseas right now, as per his father's wishes. My father said the only reason he had so many kids with her was so that my mother would be forced to stay home and take care of us, rather than seek a way out of the marriage. He also said we were so many in number that we were expendable; one of us could die, and he didn't have to care.

Now I'm in college. The only people I know who also go to this college are professors and my own mother. All my acquaintances and friends my own age are online. I don't think about killing myself anymore, but I'm not happy about being alive either. Most of the time. My childhood sucks, and I try not to let it define me, but it still does.

My childhood was fine.
I went to school and things.
Yeah.
Awesome story.

"I wasn't breathing when I was born"
Are we fucking siblings or something? The same thing happened to me.

@Crimson

Man, why do you guys have to all have depressing stories D:

Because life is rough on everybody and we all have to deal with crap while growing up. Nobody leaves childhood unscathed. Although most of us still have our privileges too.

But everyone here is expressing the crap they dealt with in their childhood more than anything else because that makes for a far more interesting story.

If its some consolation: I left out the fact that I got a lot of things easy in life too.

Despite the hardship I went through in school, I still had two very caring and understanding parents who I believe raised me right. I had a supportive family including a grandma that made awesome cookies and sent me 20 dollar bills for Christmas.

Yea there was some sibling rivaly with my older sister but not a whole lot. We got along well and still do. I love my sis, she's one of the coolest people I know. Plus things are easier when there was only one sibling to compete with and no a whole bunch.

We aren't rich but we were never dirt poor. We lived in modest settings, not slums. Lived in quiet neighborhoods most the time. Little exposure to crime and violence

School bullies were mostly talk. My grades lacked but at least I stayed in school.

There are a lot of kids who don't even get that much. My childhood is a shitty deal but comparatively luckier than others.

When I was born, I wasn’t even breathing. Great start, right? I wasn’t premature or anything either, I just wasn’t breathing.

Wanna know worse? When I was born, I was purple. Apparently I was losing oxygen in the womb, so before I even got on this planet I had already stopped breathing! Doctors pulled me out just in the nick of time.

By nick of time I mean a week premature induced birth. Sometimes I wonder if that explains the autism and my lack of height.

Because life is rough on everybody and we all have to deal with crap while growing up. Nobody leaves childhood unscathed. Although most of us still have our privileges too.

Maaan, my childhood was too privileged. Really, the greatest hardship I've had to go through was never being able to be friends with anyone for more than two years, what with moving all the time. Over the last eight years, there is only one guy I've seen at least once a year, though he lives in Virginny and now I'm in Seattle so that's not likely to happen this year. Though I did stalk all my old friends from Idaho on Facebook, finding out like half of them were bronies in the process. It was a good day.

I suppose that's not considering absent parents to be a hardship. My dad's been gone for the last month or two; the day he left, he woke me up at about five the in the morning and told me he was leaving. I mumbled some sort of reply and didn't even remember it by the time I was out of bed. Of course, my mom had also just left for her job a week prior, and, to be honest, I didn't actually know where she had even gone. So I lived by myself for about a week before my mom came back. I mentioned that my dad was gone in a casual conversation, and the girl just looked at me pityingly and asked, "Do you and your dad still talk?" I was like, "What? Of course we do." I often forget that parents leaving for months on end but eventually coming back sober isn't entirely normal.

One more fun little anecdote of minor struggle. I mentioned the four massive tumors on my right eye (the existence of the fourth one is in doubt, but since I get a new eye doctor every few years none of them are ever able to confirm is, since it's behind my tear duct) in my last post. When I was a young lad, they severely crippled my vision in that eye, nearly leaving it blind. The obvious solution, when you're a doctor who doesn't know what the fuck is wrong with this kid, is to make him wear an eyepatch over his left eye for two years and force him to use the right. My right eye leveled up and became completely normal, but two years of looking through one eye tends to leave the other somewhat…. less useful. So basically they just switched; my right eye is fine but my left is useless. I wear glasses at my own discretion, but if you were to wear them you would see the right lens is a flat piece of plastic that doesn't actually do anything.

The tumors are called limbal dermoids, if you're interested. Don't look them up on Google; the most common cause of them is getting hair cells in a fetus's developing eye, which results in hair follicles sometimes sprouting out of the eye. Since this is common, that's what the image results are. Fortunately, mine were caused by either skin or organ tissue.

Here's a picture. It's not particularly disgusting, but I'll not post it in case anyone has issues. C'mon, I look at 'em every day.

Holy shit, I just posted a picture of myself on the Internet.