Story of survival

"And from the wreckage I will arise
Cast the ashes back in their eyes
See the fire I will defend
Just keep on burning right to the end"
Asia-"Sole Survivor"


I think I will either regret or be thankful for what I am writing today.


Before I begin, while I would appreciate if everyone would read this, there is one thing I do not want from anyone: sympathy. I do not want it, and I do not ask for it. How you feel about it is how you choose to feel. If you want to speak to me in private about it, my door is always open and my ears are
always open. I am also a phone call away if you want to call me. However, I do not want sympathy. I don't tell this story to provoke an "aww" or an "oh my God!", but to hopefully give others courage and to not let it affect your life if it happened to you.


I have locked the more vivid details away in the deepest darkest parts of my soul for years, a little over 25 years. I knew none of you back in those days. After my dad committed suicide in September of 1998, I have endeavored to split my life into two halves: before he died, and after he died. There
were many things that happened in the years 1976 to 1998 that caused me great pain and have caused me to adopt strange emotions and reactions as defense mechanisms that still bother me to this day. Many of those events I have shared. Some, I have not, because I wanted to forget they even happened. Yet, no matter how hard I try, I have to realize that it all DID happen, and the most important thing is that I survived it. Despite it all, I am still here, still standing, still surviving, and I have a wonderful wife, an amazing daughter, a great home, a decent job, the band of my dreams, and the best friends and family that anyone could ask for. I am blessed.


Thanks to therapy, I have summoned the courage to face past traumas head on. It has been a harrowing fight. A fight I thought I haven't had the courage to win. Yet, by just facing them head on, I am winning. It also opened my thoughts to happy days and happy times, like my best friend growing up and my memories of playing in the dirt by the tree in my back yard and walking to my first day of school splashing along in my yellow slicker. Happy days. The bad times made me want to block out all the happy ones. There was one thing I admired a lot about my younger self: I decided the world was not for me, so I went and created my own world, where I made the rules and decided what made me happy and what was fun.


Remember, do not cry for me. Do not feel angry for me. Yes, I will write with emotion and feeling, but that is because I need to write that way. I can't write the way that Joe Buck calls a baseball game; with no excitement and no drama. I have to write with color. I want you to feel the wind in your hair and the rain on your face with my words.


Before I get to the bad memories that spawned this entry, I did see my old friend/neighbor by chance in the elevator at my work. We embraced and I regret that we could not talk longer. If my old neighbor and friend reads this...I miss you and love you my friend. Come see me and my family. You live close, just hit me up. Lots of laughs and tears need to be shared. We have years to make up and families of our own that need to be met. I have always prayed for you and will never stop.


School days, school days.


By 1990, the happy memories of splashing through the fall rain to my first day of first grade were long gone. First days of school were now days of terror, because I knew that beatings would be dealt to those who weren't cool, like myself. For a while, I had managed to avoid being teased on a
regular basis by keeping a low profile. Yet, by the end of my freshman year, I was tops on many people's beat-up lists.


Yet, physical confrontations of that manner can be dealt with and can be brushed off. If I knew then what I knew now, a fight I would be involved in would look like an ECW match, because anything not nailed down would be used by me. No matter how big you are, a chair shot to the head puts you down.

Physical confrontations of another nature can mess you up in the brain.


When I was in my early to mid-teens, most of the guys I knew were into video games or sports or music. A few had started getting interested in the opposite sex. I wasn't too interested yet in the matters of relationships. I didn't care. Due to my lack of girlfriends (none) during those years, many
of my schoolmates and some friends thought that I was a homosexual. I was teased unmercifully with slurs because of it. Other guys would try to forcibly kiss me on the lips. Some tried to "jokingly" forcibly violate my rear end. Some would smack my rear end when I walked by because they said
it looked like a woman's. One time, a guy tried to kiss me and I shoved him away, only to be punched in the face several times and have my head slammed into a desk. Due to this hazing and abuse, I never took a shower after gym class. I stopped bending over to pick things up, and instead kneel down to do it. I still do that to this day due to being "programmed" by that treatment by my school mates.


I thought about going to a teacher or principal and saying I was sexually harassed, but was warned of reprisal from others. I also didn't want to be called a "pussy" (forgive me for using that word. I hate using it, but had to so I could illustrate my point). Besides, I'm a guy, not a woman. Guys don't get sexually harassed, I thought at that time. I could never understand why anyone would do that to me. I never had any sexual feelings towards the same sex.


This treatment caused me to have a very unhealthy view towards same-sex lifestyles for a long time, because I thought many of them (people in same-sex relationships on the male side) acted the way these assholes acted towards me, but as time went on I realized this was just very extreme hazing bordering on sexual harassment from "macho"heterosexual males who wanted to prove how alpha they were by picking on me. It wasn't a representation of the truth, it was a bunch of idiots getting their kicks by picking on me in a perverse manner. After my mom revealed her bisexuality to me in 1998, we had a long talk about issues I had, and I have to say I have had no prejudices since then.


I refuse to call myself a victim or say "me too". For me to do that is an insult to anyone who has truly been sexually harassed, who is a survivor of domestic violence, or is a victim of rape. I was on the receiving end of a very sadistic and cruel form of hazing that I cannot find the right definition for. How do you define a heterosexual teen boy been hazed by other heterosexual teen boys who thought he was a homosexual just because he didn't have a girlfriend or even think about girls in a
relationship manner until later in his teens? There's no definition for it.


Thanks to my therapist I have learned that it is not something to hold me down. My life and my family are a testament to that. I went through those times and I survived them to have the best family anyone could hope for. It has made me do a lot of thinking though, and caused me a lot of introversion as I battled these horrible memories.


I haven't mentioned anything about it with this much detail until now. I didn't feel comfortable enough to say anything in more detail in public until now. Men like Terry Crews deserve all the credit in the world for talking about harassment they experienced. It doesn't make you less of a man to admit it. So, I have to thank Terry Crews for his courage, because he gave me courage too.


I also wish no ill will towards those who mistreated me in school or sexually hazed me. Holding grudges and seeking retribution is not the Lord's way. I just pray that they have reformed their ways and treat each and every person they meet with respect.


So please, do not cry for me or pity me. No sympathy is needed. I just hope you read this and it gives you courage that you can win your fight.