[NOTE: This has some pretty unpleasant themes and I'm not sure everyone will be comfortable with what I have to say so I have hidden some stuff]
Now there’s a question with a long and detailed (boring) answer. It would really help to break it up into little bite size sections and make it easy to digest even if it isn’t always easy to swallow. Since this is a pseudopsychological exploration that really just mimics a memoir of all the bits that made me this way, I’m going to do this is chronological order because that way, we can see how it built me up into being fucked. Since we’re trying to understand being fucked, I am going to focus mainly, but not exclusively on the negatives of life. Having said that, it might read as a sanitized version of what I would say in real life.
It all started when I was born. OK that’s not necessarily true. But really, I didn’t have the worst start. In fact, even though I was shy, unpopular and silly, my days in primary school were alright. I was teased a bit and there was a spot of bullying and threats here and there but I got through it well enough and by the time I got to grammar school, I actually kind of missed the place. I had a couple of good friends, one of which I’m actually still in contact with now (an epic achievement if you read on to find out what happened to most of the others), a girl who had a crush on me and I was smart, at least for the kids that were there.
When I got to grammar school, something peculiar happened, I began to change my spots. This was inevitable, you might say, mimicking Freud poorly, and you would be right, but not necessarily for the reasons you think. I started to change my accent, not on purpose but since I was made a people pleaser, I had to fit in somehow. This is where my proficiency for learning and using accents came from. I have recently figured out that when I am hyperemotional, a trait I possess and even show from time to time as a sensitive soul, if I change my accent then I stop the outward show of emotion. Not every time, but most times it has worked like a charm. I have done accents for so long that I forgot why I even learned to do them. I’m miming someone else so I don’t have to be myself.
If I had been myself, where would it have gotten me? Probably not very far, as that was the first thing I tried when making new friends. And make friends I did, all over in different groups, and I didn’t really spend a great deal of time with any of them so I didn’t really get that mixed up with them. This made for one lonely Sam, but he was too popular (I use that term loosely, think popular like syphilis rather than popular like Mandela) to notice. Of course, this did all come crumbling down when I was made to pick sides. I picked right most of the time as many of those who had been “friends” at one point soon showed their true colours. The friendship group I stuck with made me as popular as fart in an elevator with almost everyone else. I just wish I had waited to get closer to my floor before I shit my pants.
With unpopularity comes its own issues. Of course, you won’t be getting any prizes with the in groups and you won’t be getting an easy time when your time comes. The problem is, that when you get into this situation, you don’t realise that it is a constant barrage. There are so many of them that there will always be one there to get you. On separate occasions, I was pinned down and drawn on which I had to obviously wash off before *I* got in trouble, poked in the eye in front of a teacher, had one sadist cut his hand up with a razor from a pencil sharpener and tell me that was what would happen to my face and my least favourite of all, I was punched in the kidney (I was always getting punched in the back) which meant I lied to my mum about having a urinary infection. What fun!
When you get home from that, all you really want to do is play video games, ride a bike or maybe read a book. I did all those things, but of course, this is all too antisocial. So, I would text a friend to see what they were up to. Most of the time they would be busy with the huge amount of homework we all had to do (apparently a 12-year-old is supposed to do an hour and a half a night and it goes up every year) so I would try and watch TV. Being in a communal area has drawbacks however. Fighting with your brother and sister over what we’re watching, only having the TV until 6 because then the news would be on, then the soaps etc. but the major problem was dealing with my dad. At first, being the people pleaser that I am, I would agree to what he told me or begrudgingly acquiesce to his wish for me to get on with my homework. Fair enough.
Later I would challenge the wisdom of the things that he was telling me. This was a mistake. It is normal for children to resent or be angry with their parents. But I was scared of my dad, and not in the “if he finds out what I’ve done, he’ll kill me” sort of way. I don’t know if he knew or understood but he always had a way of making me feel small. Constantly, I would have my way of doing things or understanding things but I could never be right. I felt stupid in a place where I was supposed to feel clever (grammar schools really do like to talk themselves up). So, I’d go to school, get bullied, feel small; come home, get belittled, feel small; repeat. That’s without mentioning the physical side of things. A little while ago, my dad, a man who had lifted me by the ears on multiple occasions (these were the butt of many taunts and I’m still sensitive about them today), told me that he used to use me as an example to my two younger siblings, because he knew that if I was going to be punished publicly then the other two wouldn’t do the same.
As a result of this I was fearful of conflict for a very long time, I had witnessed and been a part of conflicts, as everyone else has, but I never felt like I would be heard or have my point of view respected. Not only that but I was immensely forgiving and have been ever since. Whilst I do like this about myself, it comes from the same place as the fear of conflict, I don’t feel like I matter so why continue the ill-feeling, I’ll end up losing out because of it anyway. I had a pretty warped understanding of masculinity from looking at the men around me but since that was what I knew, I thought that’s what I had to be. Deep down though, I wanted to have been born a girl at that point. I didn’t typify many of the male traits that I was supposed to and I found them to be totally contrived and pointless. Even now when I think about masculinity and being a man, it haunts me and makes me realise how I once acted and what kind of person I had been. I regret many of the things that I did at the time, in anger, rage, fury and with violence.
Now I haven’t been open about this with many people because I’m not particularly happy with it being common knowledge but I need to write it down because it hurts to think that it has taken a hidden toll on me for the past few years. When I was 14, there was another guy in my PE class who used to hang around and make jokes with me and a friend of mine called Matt. During the summer, we would sometimes be sent to the cricket nets to do practice, which would mean that the teacher would go off for forty minutes to do actual sport with the athletic/popular guys. That’s when things began to be a problem. This guy used to make sexual jokes with us, like teenage boys do but then he’d proposition us. At first, he said it was a joke but later on, when it was just me and him, he pushed me up against the wire fencing and grabbed me in places I don’t really want to describe. I can’t really describe how I felt. When he knew he could get away with it, he’d do it again over the next few PE lessons and it progressive became more depraved. After a few weeks, I fought him off and he never bothered me again at school. I have since found out that he did the same to Matt, and I’ve felt a strange sense of guilt ever since.
Moving from year-11 to sixth-form felt great. We had left behind the heteronormative masculine bullshit of an all-boys setting and returned to a mixed-sex group that was free of much of the cliquey nonsense that had preceded it. That’s not to say that cliques were not around, just their significance had diminished. It wasn’t weird to talk to people outside of your normal friendship group, it was normal to get along with people who had completely different interests and popularity wasn’t governed by rules around what the latest trends were. A lot of these people were actually pretty cool.
With the choice of a variety of different subjects, I decided to take a smorgasbord approach. What this did for me academically is not too clear, but what it did for me socially was expand my horizons. I met more and more people during this period and even though I was not particularly sociable, which is not a great surprise given the circumstances, I managed to have a wide and interesting group of friends and acquaintances. They mainly consisted of two distinct groups. One the one hand was a group of people who I had known of from 11, but had only just come into contact with on a regular basis because of a circumstance that I’ll discuss soon. They were mainly very artsy, and usually pretty conceited but actually they were lovely people. We used to talk a lot about different things that we were interested in and they would invariably have different interests to me. Then there was the group of friends I made in my history and politics classes who were all pretty similar to me but were usually younger. Musically in particular, they put me onto things that I would have come too maybe a decade or more later they were so ahead of the curve.
The first group of friends I came to hang out with by chance. One of the friends in particular, I met up with purely by coincidence. This coincidence led me to hanging out a couple of times with them in Rochester and so I met their extended network. That’s when I met my first girlfriend. She was interesting and we had a fair few things in common. For the first six months, we were having a blast but then three issues came into play. The first was me. I was trying to act out a masculine persona that was never me but it was the mask that I felt I had to wear because I was a “man” whilst simultaneously trying to deal with the toxicity of my past. The second was that my then girlfriend was difficult to please and took to using numerous emotional tools as a weapon to punish or scold. For a long time, I thought that this was normal, but it took me a long time to find out that I was very wrong. Thirdly, a very dark figure reappeared in my life. Unbeknownst to me until it was too late, I stayed at the house of the very person who had assaulted me when I was 14. I had a total breakdown. For something that had such an effect on me, I had just put it out of my mind, as I have tried to every other day of my life, largely successfully.
So, when things fell apart, there should have been a feeling of inevitability about it right? Oddly enough, if I had stuck to my guns it may never have happened. Or more likely it would have been worse and I wouldn’t be writing this. My girlfriend asked me if I wanted to go to a friend’s party, but I really wasn’t interested, I just didn’t feel up to it. She insisted and I caved. When we got there, I started having a good time but there was an edge and a bitterness that I couldn’t understand to me. I felt isolated and angry and with the conceited, bullshit entitlement that only heteronormative masculinity [I paid for my degree, and I’m going to use it, damn it] can provide. I started an argument with her. Then when it didn’t go my way, I pushed and pulled her. Then I messaged for her parents to pick her up, probably the best thing I could have done. I remember walking home and realising that I had fucked up. Really fucked up.
So, I went to stay with my grandparents after the inevitable end of the relationship. First it was to get me away from Chatham, but later it was so I could just have the time and space to focus on things. I had finally broken down completely and I had to rebuild myself. The main problem was figuring out if I even wanted to. After what I had done, how the fuck could I forgive myself? That became a recurring thought over the next couple of years. I was finally beginning to understand that all of the things that has been going on in my life up until that point has had an impact on putting me in the position that I was in. I reached out to friends but they were not interested by and large, and who could blame them. This was the beginning of a larger problem that would plague me later in life.
So, the process began with trying to free myself from the shackles of anger. When I spoke to the Samaritans, they would ask me where I thought my anger came from? I would always answer, “my dad”. He’s an angry and, in some ways, paranoid man and has no issue with dressing people down in public; he’s the perfect candidate. Of course, it was far larger than that but he was and is the key figure. The fact was that my anger was really just a way of my depressive tendencies to unleash themselves upon the world. The other major way was lying, whether it be my impulsive, compulsive need to tell lies at times, to the accents and acting that I performed for people. It was a horrible period to go through but after a year of having no school, no job and no life [apart from visiting Simon in London, I’ll never be able to thank you enough] it was time to move on.
In September 2010, I moved to London to study history at UEL. The first week was a bit much but after I settled in, I found a good bunch of people on and around campus to hang around with. It was great to be sociable and talk about anything without actually worrying (too much) about my past. Having gotten through it all, I didn’t have to share it with anyone else. At first, it was a disparate bunch who really just loved doing what everyone loves doing at that age, getting drunk, going to parties and having fun. It was good fun, but me being me, I had to go and get involved in something else. I started going to talks and lectures with a socialist student society and met with a few of the group socially later. Towards the end of the semester, the cuts to education and the tripling of tuition fees led us to protest and to occupy part of a main building on the campus. We obviously weren’t successful, but many of the friendships I made there have changed my outlook on life totally.
We all ended up moving in together in a huge house in Leytonstone. Having such a radically different life to the one I had been leading, I started to feel a confidence that I never really had previously. These people were great fun to be around and I tried my best to impress them and to keep them entertained at times. The truth is that I looked up to most of them as they appeared to be so at ease with the world whereas I was constantly worried about the metaphysical substance of the world, or whether or not I had much of a place in it or mostly, experiencing the moment for what it is. About half way through my second year, I was with someone who they didn’t really get along with and so I ended up trying to work with both sides to make them happy. Thinking back now, I shouldn’t have carried on with the non-relationship I was in as it clearly wasn’t going anywhere, I remember remarking on it at the time, but also because she bit my penis. Yes, you read that correctly, she put her teeth into my penis and bit down. It is any wonder I’m fucked up?
It was never going to be enough though. The summer of my second year, I really felt awful about everything. Depression had returned and really sunk its teeth into me. I was barely sleeping, not really interacting with people as much as I had done and I felt like my world was coming to an end. This should have prompted me to seek help, but instead I decided to try and get through it in my own way. It worked for the time being and when I moved in to a new house with my friends that December, I was happy and set for a new place to discover and I had gotten closer to another group of people through these friends who were amazing people, who really were great fun to be around. One friend had always been fun to be around, but things had started to change for him, as they had for me. He was beginning to have a crisis at the same time that I was and it made for a terrible situation.
Firstly, I lost my dissertation just weeks before the hand in date. I panicked. I tried so many different ways to get it back that I had run out of animals to sacrifice and was having to move on to people. At one stage, after realising it had all gone wrong, I just laid down and thought, “there is nothing left”. Depression was back, and it wanted to take me as low as I could go. I went to the doctors and they prescribed me citalopram. This was a mistake, if my GP had looked, he would know that there are serious side effects to taking it if under 24 and they proved to be huge. At the same time, another friend was having a schizophrenic episode and was ideating in an odd way. He came around the house one day and after a short discussion, I thought I would go for my daily walk as I always would with citalopram.
He asked if he could come along too and I obliged. When we got to a point along a main road, he stopped. I stopped and turned and he said that this was his house. He invited me in and proceeded to sit and look at me in silence for a few minutes. He then told me, “I keep thinking I should kill myself”, part way through a conversation about the horrible things that he had been told to do. I was worried, but in a zombie state. I went back to the house and tried to slowly and calmly explain what had happened and we all returned to his house. Upon returning to him, he accidently took an overdose of sleeping pills and they had to take him to hospital. A few days later, I tried to do the same. I tried but the impulse to live kicked in at a critical point. It is the only time that I have ever felt like that in my life, like I had reached the bottom and bounced so hard that I was almost in a normal space for an hour. It wasn’t euphoric, it just felt like a switch had been turned back on.
But that wasn’t the end of this particular saga. One of my very best friends in the world was having a torrid time and her boyfriend, as I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, was really starting to feel the strain. At one point, I was down again and walked around Hampstead Heath trying to find something to make me feel better. After failing miserably, I decided to return home. Upon getting back, I sat down and started to contemplate a few things. Soon after, my friend’s boyfriend came through the door. To put a long story short, he wanted me to conspire with him to kill another friend of mine. I was dumbfounded. Another friend of ours came in and asked why we weren’t watching the football. That break in things allowed me to think and when he left, I did shortly after. I walked up to the house of my threatened friend and all seemed fine, so I called my mum and explained what was going on and that I would be returning home tomorrow.
The next day, I got up and went downstairs and all my roommates, apart from him were there, stone-faced. I only needed to enquire if it was about him before we all looked at each other and saw what was going on. I explained what had happened to me, and they were gobsmacked. We all went to check on our friend and I explained what had happened. What I saw hurt me deeply, he was distraught. It was then decided that I and another housemate would confront him. I stood facing him and explained that everyone knew. I have never seen someone physically shrink before my eyes before but he almost cowered. I still wasn’t stupid enough to think that we were safe though, so we carried on talking until his partner came and took him to hospital. I know that this hurt all of my friends there at the time, but it really tested me and my ability to function. I was broken again.
I returned home, tail between my legs, broken, dishevelled and lacking the one thing that I relied upon to keep me going when I was in London (and anywhere else for that matter), companionship. The friendships that I had made in London gave me a tremendous sense of support but after the events that took place, I knew that I could neither stay there, nor talk to them for a while as we all tried to come to terms with the trauma of it all. In fact, this was the last time I actually had any friendships this tight and this strong and I miss them immensely at times. This isn’t to say that many of the friendships that I have now aren’t meaningful, it’s just that the experiences we shared certainly drew us together and that experience helped push us apart. As such, I have to say that with no guilt or shame, I do bear a strong amount of ill-will to the person who managed to put us all in the situation we were in. I understand that many will sympathise with him, and I have no qualms with that, but what happened throughout those years, unbeknownst to me, shook my ability to trust.
I had to retake part of my course in my fourth year of university because they wouldn’t give me an extension on any of my final modules. As you can probably tell, I have strong resentment towards the university for that still. In having to commute from home so much, I realised that I needed a job to keep me going. I got a job that Christmas working as an elf in Santa’s Grotto at a local garden centre. Yes, I was living the dream ladies and gentlemen. Whilst there I met a guy, and we went out drinking a few times. After our time at the garden centre, I met up with him a couple more times and on one occasion, he invited someone he was interested in out too. She brought her friends along with her who didn’t look overly impressed! One of them I liked immediately. We all had a few drinks and then the woman’s friends left and we drank as a trio. After a series of conversations, the girl I liked was witty, interesting and always had a great point to make. After I found out that my “friend” intended to cheat on his girlfriend with her friend, things ended up being even more interesting. Eventually we all ended up out together one night and we got quite tipsy. That was the beginning of our relationship.
After a little while together we became inseparable. We went away together a few times and tried to spend as much time with each other as possible. The natural progression therefore was that we move in together. Just a few catches to that. Firstly, renting in Maidstone was so prohibitively expensive that it really wouldn’t have been worth our while doing so. Secondly, I didn’t have a job and was trying to save up with whatever cash I could scratch together. Finally, we were so absolutely done with having to be around our parents and families that we decided we couldn’t just stick around for a while. We decided on Liverpool, a fun, metropolitan city with a great culture. Great to visit, many things to see and do and easy on the eye too.
It took me a while to find my feet but after a four-week unpaid work placement, I was given a job in accounts at a fast-growing hotel chain. It took some time to get into the swing of how it all worked and what I was really doing but when I got into it, it was a pretty decent job. The problem was that me and my other half just didn’t really fit in. We liked the place at first but began to really dislike it towards the end of our first year there. Our relationship was going strong but there was strain being placed on it by being stress by what was going on around us. I was irritable and she was nearing depression. It was getting to be too much and we needed to get out. Luckily, we had both come into some money after our families had saved for us. We were coming up for a healthy deposit for a house and although we looked at a few different places in Liverpool, we ended up saying to each other that we needed to leave, and so we returned to Maidstone a little over a year after we had left.
Returning to live with your parents is never easy nor fun, but when you have spent so much time with someone who meant so much to you, everyday for the past year, it was pretty torturous, not to mention the fact that we had two dogs that we adopted in Liverpool with us too. After a brief debate, we settled on buying in Maidstone. After a while, we got lucky, found a place, bought it and moved in. It felt like the start of something huge. I was not wrong. A couple of months after we had moved in, I began having mental health issues again, but I couldn’t really find solace or help anywhere. In the end, I was told by my other half to sort myself out because she was worried about me. In a panic, I did entirely the wrong thing and buried it away. After changing jobs and earning more I started to feel better for a while but it had come back as an irritability again that I just couldn’t shift. After the previous time, I was having issues being open and honest. It was at this point that my other half was having health problems of her own. They started out as one thing but then became multiple issues. In the time that she was ill, she spent sometime alone. With this time, she made a decision; after 4 and a half years, it was time to go our separate ways. I can’t say I understand why still but I accepted that I couldn’t change the way she felt. I was back in 2013 again. Broken, alone and in need of answers.
That’s why I am writing this. I don’t know where to start and I have no idea where this will finish but I need to find out why I am still having these doubts about myself and why I cannot seem to find my place in the world.