Don's completed backstory I guess.

I’ve been going to therapy since January and haven’t been able to talk to anyone about what’s happened to me in fear that I’m going to get called “edgy” for having nightmares every night on seeing these same damn things. My sleep has been suffering and I’m writing this in hopes that maybe someone out there cares, or would take a second to even care about what I’m writing.

I’ve bottled this shit for too long and need to get it out there.

Been hiding a lot of memories surrounding a lot of what my dad’s done to me, but the effects are there. The lack of confidence often times, pretending to have confidence, and often both failing as I realize the honest truth- My confidence isn’t there, it doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed since I moved out of California.

My psychiatrist asked me about the first and the worst memory I have of my dad.

The first memory I have is my dad slamming a glass door in my face while I happened to be taking a shit. I remember my mom and dad arguing in Tagalog about it, hearing some things from my mom about how my dad was a piece of shit, and didn’t know how to take care of his kids.

This memory isn’t really one that bothers me. My mind fazed that one out, maybe because it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Hell, looking back at it I saw it as normal. I didn’t realize that shit like that wasn’t normal until I was about 16.

I don’t think I have come to terms with it.

Then the memory of the worst came up.

It’s the memory that woke me up on the plane. It’s the memory that causes me massive levels of fear, suffering, and genuine anguish. The memory that made me want to try to enlist so I could learn how to fight against these kinds of people. I better myself, trying to move past this in particular just so I can think that it’ll be just some bad memory.

It was around sixth grade when my dad was still a thing, in 2010 or 2011. My family was struggling to recover from the recession of 2007-2009. Our house had gotten foreclosed and we were living in some rented house out of Indio, California. My dad must have been trying to relive some kind of 1980s dream or something. I lived with my grandma, my great grandmother suffering dementia, my uncle, and my dad.

I’d been abused previously and had gotten to the point where I started to suffer from depression without knowing what it was at the time. I was in a “college preparatory” middle school trying to disguise the fact that it was an inner city school. I had been ganged up by middle schoolers that wished that they were they could be like their favorite rappers.

The bullying set in motion my dropping grades when I was 12 and caused me massive levels of not caring. Being the oldest in an Asian family, I was the one expected to carry the torch of greatness in my family.

The only issue being is that, that was never me. I liked playing games, I wanted to be like those famous Youtubers that I’d grown up watching. TheRadBrad, UberHaxorNova, Skorch82-

Names that seem like a faded memory now.

My family around this time decided to start running a Filipino restaurant with no actual idea on how to run a business. This caused them to often times “forget” that I was in their life. The school library had been open until 6PM on certain nights. The few friends I had were abusive pieces of shit who really took advantage of me around every turn. I was their scapegoat, patsy, and whatever they felt like they needed me to be.

Anyway. grades were in the shit, I didn’t care, and was trying to escape the life that I was stuck living. My mom was always busy, working five or so jobs while my dad’s side of the family worked worthlessly to get an already bad business idea off the ground. Everyone was stressed.

My dad woke me up at 2AM one night in January. He told me to say to all my teachers, my assistant principal, and my school principal, “I’m not coming to school anymore because I am lazy and a useless leech on American society.” If I didn’t, he’d take me out back with his .45 and “do what he really needed to before.”

This is the part people stop believing, mainly because it’s so astoundingly incompetent and retarded on the part of the school. I tried to tell one of my counselors my dad was beating the shit out of me. All I got in response? She pulled up my grades and said, “I can’t really blame them with how your grades look.”

The library closed at 6PM that night. It had to close early because the librarian had some things going on- Shit, if I knew I’d say. Dad said he was going to pick me up that night, so I could live my life “as a dishwasher and offer no value to the world like my brothers did”. What does that mean exactly?

My one brother was three in pre school and at the top of his class. The other had gotten some 3,000 dollar prize for being some god damn prized dancer. Me? I hadn’t done anything noteworthy and that meant apparently that I was supposed to be ignored. I was nothing to them, if I was anything. They treated me like some NPC escort mission, always with scorn, disgust, and annoyance.

That night, I waited at 5:30 PM, texting my dad on my Nokia, during a time when the first generation IPhone was being seen as a luxury versus that of a useful item. My dad called me and he asked me if I’d done what he said to. I said I had and he started yelling at me for being a “worthless piece of shit” in Tagalog and reminded me once again that in comparison to my brothers, my birth was a mistake.

Whatever. Who cared, right? 6PM rolls by.

Nothing, sure, probably just caught up in traffic. I should mention that I was in the 30 degree cold, that it had been a record. I felt the grass freezing as I sat there in my jacket shivering.

6:30, and I called my mom who said to call my uncle. I did that. He shows up, 30 minutes later, yells at me for being worthless. I get into his car and he throws my backpack outside of the car.

“GET OUT!” He shouted at me. I get out, tears running down my eyes, and try to grab my backpack. He guns the engine, drives off, and leaves me at my middle school.

I call my mom after this and lie, telling her that no one has shown up to get me. I wasn’t the kind to cause trouble, I was scared of what my dad would do to me if he found out. No one really ever listened to me during this time, because they all were under the guise that I was a failure, someone to not care about.

8PM rolls around and my phone is dead. I try to talk to one of my teachers who happens to be there and offers to call the local Sheriff’s Department. I was scared of calling the police because they always treated it like they had better things to do. I declined.

My dad had apparently been waiting outside between the time I went to go borrow a phone, and yelled at me for having to borrow one.

I get into the car and he asks me again whether I told all of my teachers I was worthless. I said I did. I’m sitting in the front of the car and he just snaps and smacks me in the face. I’m crying, bawling my eyes out, trying to block him, and he just keeps hitting me. He tells me I’m getting kicked out, reminds me how worthless I am, to pack my shit up, and leave. That I’m leaving first chance he gets. It’s at this point I start to wonder whether he’s going to kill me. If this is the point in my life where it finally ends, without me even getting to actually live and not wonder if my dad is feeding me.

He brings me inside, tells me to pack my shit and go to bed. That was short-lived, with my dad looking at more ways to let his anger out on me. He drags me off my bed, giving me burns and drags me into the kitchen. He makes me take off all of my clothes, punches me in the arm a bunch of times, and gives me two of those large Costco cans and makes me stretch out my arms while I’m on my knees.

Anytime my arms lowered, he’d beat the shit out of me while his family acted like this was some kind of normal occurrence. I watched as he grabbed my mattress out of my room alongside the bedframe and threw them outside. He was throwing everything out in the yard, my clothes, my clothing drawers, to the point I remember trying to sleep in the closet. I remember he picked me up and threw me against the wall.

At some point, he made me get my clothes back on made me sit outside “while he figured out what he was going to do with me.”

I just sat out there that night until my mom came home.