This Is My Life’s Story Part 9

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This Is My Life’s Story Part 9
I will be discussing my home life during high school and why I had a major meltdown and refused to go home short after graduating high school. Some triggers may be present.

My Stepmom and Why I Refused to Go Home

When I was fourteen, my dad had begun to talk to a woman who lived in China through emails and formed a relationship with her. Before that there was really only one woman that he had been dating for a year and a half and lived with us and another that he only dated I think for a couple of months since my mom had left us. The woman that lived with us I even didn’t know that she was even in a romantic relationship with my dad until I got older and had left because my sister really did not like her and drove her away. I was happy for my dad as he had been alone for so long. The woman he was talking to had a daughter three years younger than me. He even took a couple of trips over to China to meet her and get to know her. So in May of 2000 and before I entered the ninth grade, my dad took one last trip to bring over this woman and her daughter to move to the US and they got married in July. I had no issue with the idea of having a stepmom or even a new stepsister, Annie. I knew and even understood that this was a huge adjustment for Annie because she was now in a new and unfamiliar place and also because she was an only child up until then. I gave her space and was really nice towards her but she wasn’t the same towards me. Annie always acted like she was better than me and sometimes even got me into trouble by tattling on me. I had wanted to make things fair for both of us by deciding to leave the private Christian school and go back to public school so that it wouldn’t seem like I was getting special treatment. I even allowed her to use some things off my desk as long as she had returned them. She took the electric pencil sharpener off my desk and put it in her room without my permission and kept it there for two weeks until I complained to my stepmom and dad and she gave it back to me with this look on her face like it was inconveniencing her and then I found out it didn’t work anymore when I knew it was perfectly fine before she had taken it. I knew she had broken it on purpose just because she was forced to give it back to me.

Annie yelled at me once because I was just reading the tag on a bag of jellybeans that were hers. I had only wanted to see what the flavors were as they were the very first flavors for the Harry Potter Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans. I wasn’t even eating them. She screamed at me for touching her stuff without her permission while she did the same to me and I never yelled at her for it. I said nothing to her when she did this to me because I didn’t want any conflicts but I knew that this was wrong for to do as I hadn’t done anything wrong. She could cl see that I wasn’t eating any of her candy and the bag was closed. Looking at a tag isn’t crime and something not yelling at a person for doing yet I was being treated like I had eaten the entire bag of Candy. Annie got mad at me once for answering a question for he4 yet she did this to me all the time. She kept getting special treatment from her mom and I knew that this was unfair and I had tried to say something to complain about it but I was just dismissed. She acted sweet and friendly in public and made it seem like she was so nice and helpful when she was really mean towards me and even lazy at home. I had to put up with this for three years.

As for my stepmom, she acted so kind and understanding for an entire year until she began to change and start making up all these unfair rule that only I was expected to obey while Annie could do whatever she had wanted to do without getting into any trouble for it. Sometimes I’d make a simple mistake and then be punished for it without being allowed to explain myself. One of these incidents was when I had mistaken her Game Boy Color for mine and had taken it and kept using it. It was an honest mistake once you knew my side of the story and anyone would have made the same mistake. A year prior I had a translucent purple Game Boy Color taken from me as a punishment and never had it returned to me. Well during the summer I had found a Game Boy Color that was exactly like the one that had been taken from me in the basement and I noticed no one was playing it for over a month and I thought it was mine and there was a game that I didn’t remember getting in it but I thought maybe this was a reward for being good and didn’t question it. So I kept using this Game Boy for months not knowing that it was my stepmom’s because like I said it was exactly like the one I had taken away from me and even in the same exact condition and I honestly didn’t know it was hers because I never saw her playing with it before I had found it and it was in the basement in the same exact spot untouched for weeks. But she just assumed that I knew it was hers and accused me of stealing her property when that wasn’t the case. I mean if you had seen an iPhone that looked exactly like yours down to the same condition out on a table and you noticed you didn’t have yours on you, you’d think it was yours, right? It’s an honest mistake anyone could have made. My stepmom then created this extremely unfair rule that I couldn’t watch more than a hour of tv per 24 period and that meant that I had to wait exactly until the time that I had previously watched it and this included movies on VHS tapes because I was still using the tv to watch it. But Annie was allowed to watch tv all day long and never got yelled at for it which I knew was wrong and I tried to call out how unfair it was and even complained to Maria that it wasn’t fair that I couldn’t watch more than an hour of tv but Annie was allowed to watch six hours of it without moving an inch off of the couch and I literally saw her do this multiple times! I was just told to obey my stepmom and that’s when something inside of me snapped and I figured why should I have to follow these rules if I’m the only one expected to obey them if Annie didn’t have to? Why should I put up with this favoritism? So I started going through my dad and stepmom’s room constantly because well I was bored and I also justified that to myself as it being fair because my stepmom always went through my stuff so it should be okay to do the same because if she didn’t want me to do it then she should just leave my things alone and also notice the pattern that I only did this when I was bored and wanted something that she took away from me back. My stepmom wanted me to do nothing but read and sometimes people don’t want to read no matter how much they like it. This was my way of protesting her unfair rules and show that I wasn’t going to have any of it. If she had changed the rules to be more fair and stop the favoritism then I would have stopped. Thing is with me is that I always follow the rules unless I know that they aren’t fair or don’t make any sense. All I really wanted was to stop seeing my stepsister getting away with everything and being allowed to do whatever she wanted. No one but my sister truly understood why I was suddenly acting out and refusing to behave. My sister was the only one who tried to fight for me and told our stepmom that she needed to treat me better.

As I said before, Annie was extremely fake outside the house to the point that people favored her and acted like she was perfect. At this day camp we went to the first year she was in the US, the counselors even favored her which annoyed me greatly. I would always see trash on the ground and pick it up and throw it away after lunch every day and two of my friends there saw me do this and I never got any recognition for it or even one thank you and then the days when I refused to do it because I was tired of not being recognized for doing it, Annie would pick something up off the ground and the counselors would see it and then guilt trip the rest of us by saying, “You should be ashamed of yourselves. Annie is the only one picking up garbage and you are all here doing nothing!” And that infuriated me because I never saw her doing this any other time and I knew that I did it more often than she did and no one ever thanked me for doing it. Well the final day of day camp I saw a piece of newspaper and I immediately crumpled it up and threw it on the ground when the counselors had their backs turned and I then picked it up just as they turned around and finally got a thank you for picking up trash and it still made me feel hollow because I knew that I literally had to throw garbage on the ground just to be recognized for doing something that I did the entire time but never got any credit for. Even in school teachers loved the fake Annie. The IEP teacher was the worst because she’d always tell me how “sweet” Annie was and asked if I agreed. I wanted to tell her so badly to try living with her for an entire week and then come talk to me but I didn’t. There was one girl in her friend group that was in my Spanish class who did confide in me that she didn’t actually like Annie and was only being nice to her because her twin sister was friends with Annie. Senior year was awful for me because the kids that didn’t bully me or say those five little words to me only wanted to talk to me about Annie and wouldn’t drop the subject when I told them that I didn’t want to talk about her.

I was just becoming more and more miserable at home that if I had a reason to get out of the house, I made sure to spend as much time as I could to avoid going home. I just needed to escape from everything. The only source of happiness I had was Pokémon and the characters had this extremely calming effect on me to the point if I was crying thinking about them soothed me and made me calm again. This is why I chose Jigglypuff to be part of my username. My reality had gotten so bad that I came up with an imaginary world full of Pokémon that loved and accepted me for who I was and didn’t try to force me to change who I was just because they didn’t like things about me and wanted to completely control me. It was my happy place and no one understood that. I had to use escapism just to cope with my daily life. But of course my family (with the exception of my sister) had to take away anything that made me happy and wouldn’t even let me enjoy Pokémon which just made things worse for me and leaving me with no actual way to cope with my depression and stress. I just wasn’t allowed to be myself anywhere. I had bought some magazines with nude men in them as a way to release any sexual frustration from hormones and also as an outlet to explore my homosexuality and I did it legally because I was 18 when I was a junior and senior in school and I kept them out of sight from my stepsister. But everyone kept saying it was wrong of me to do this when I was only keeping the magazines in my room and I wasn’t showing them off to my stepsister and besides I wasn’t breaking any laws because I did buy them with my own money and I was legally an adult. The magazines were mainly why I went through my stepmom’s things because she’d take them away and I just wanted them back. So on top of being extremely depressed and stressed out constantly, I had hormones building up inside of me that needed a way out.

A week or two after graduating high school, I went to California for two weeks to visit my aunt and grandma and I flew back home with grandma to help her celebrate her 90th birthday. My mind had reached a serious breaking point and things kept spiraling out of control for me. After we had a big party in her honor and to celebrate my sister graduating from Harvard the year before, I was enrolled in some program to help get me ready for college by getting tutoring. I went to the place where it was being held only once and that day was when I finally snapped and having a major meltdown. It was in Latrobe and on the way to the city and school, I’d see this adult bookstore. I had made a plan to try to shoplift from this store and was hoping to be caught so that I could finally have someone to talk to about how miserable I was and maybe get away from everything at last. In my mind I figured if no one stopped me and I got away with getting free magazines then at least I still have something to use for awhile to escape from my reality. It was an extremely desperate cry for help no matter what. So I went in and looked around for a bit and when the guy at the counter wasn’t looking I just grabbed some stuff and ran out the door but not too fast that he couldn’t catch me. He did scream at me to stop which I did do and allowed him to grab me and take me back inside. Once inside I finally broke down and explained that I was just so unhappy living at home and I was desperate to escape from everything and how I hated my entire life and that I didn’t think anyone really cared about me. The guy did feel bad for me and did call my dad who still doesn’t understand why I did this. My dad tried to intimidate me by taking me to the police station but I think that they could see this was more of a cry for help than a simple case of shoplifting and my dad ordered me to go with him and go home which I refused to obey. That is when the officer asked me the one question nobody had ever asked me before which was “Do you want to go home?” A light switch went off inside my head and I told them that I didn’t want to go home at all. I just couldn’t go home because I couldn’t handle living in misery there. Not even my grandma was enough to make me not be so miserable inside the house. I just couldn’t handle living life the way i had been living and I needed to get out and this was my only chance and I wasn’t going to let it go away. So my dad left angry that I refused to go home and I started to wander around Greensburg slightly happier than before because I didn’t have to go home now. Eventually I got a ride to the homeless shelter for me in Latrobe but after I had finished talking to the guy in charge there, he figured that he was capable of giving me the help that I desperately needed and that there was severe psychological issues that I was having and so I was sent to live in a group home in a nearby town called Mt Pleasant. It was here that I could finally start recovering from the many traumatic things I went through the past four years.

Next time I will be talking about my time inside the group home and specifically about two of the guys I lived with in the home.
 
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