i will not share any of my names on here for anonymity reasons; but you can call me whatever you want. i have no control over you, as it should be. but they say that naming things makes you look at them with more compassion, and i want you to see me as a person with thoughts and emotions, so name me as you see fit. now, let's get to the question at the top of this page.
i was born and raised in the swedish countryside. i'm autistic, but nobody suspected it at the time. i did not go to daycare, instead i went with my parents to their office jobs, and played on the computers there. i don't remember a whole lot from this time, except knowing that i should keep to myself and avoid bothering those with more imporant things to do. my older sister and other family members were my only friends until around age 5. that was when my mother wanted to introduce me to the daughter of one of her friends. this daughter was the same age as me. the issue was that i didn't want any friends. the thought of having to socialize with someone my age was scary to me. i couldn't grasp the social codes and cues that seemed so innate to other children. but we became friends and i got over it to an extent. then at the age of 6, i started school. this was a horrifying experience. i made a friend, a girl who lived close to me, but i was afraid of the boys my age, and every child older than me. the kids there were mean to me quite a lot, so i guess it was warranted, sort of. i used to get sick and vomit almost every day on the bus on my way to school, so they thought i was gross because of it. i was chubby and shy. quiet. a pushover if you will, and i still am. at least now i've stopped being chubby, instead i worry about every calorie i consume, more on that later. when i was 7, i got transferred to a bigger school, and despite having a few friends, the fear persisted. it did at home too.
my parents never divorced, and i'm not exactly sure why. my father drank a lot when i was growing up. he probably still does. i still remember being too young to understand why he was suddenly acting so weird a couple evenings every week. nobody cared to explain anything to me. that was kind of a trend with my parents, not explaining things. sometimes he'd touch me in strange places despite me telling him not to. i still don't know what his intentions were with smacking my ass all the time, but i know how it made me feel. i remember not understanding that it was a problem, because nobody treated it as such. not him, not my mother. she let him do whatever he wanted to me and my sister. sometimes i wonder if she feared him like i did. she should still have stepped in, but i wonder either way. then there was all the yelling and arguing, when he was hungover and hated everyone and everything. so i learned how to move silently as not to provoke him. to just stay out of his way as much as i could. to hide away and not bring any attention to myself. i protected and parented myself. my parents didn't seem to mind. to them i was just a quiet and easy child to deal with. i suffered in silence and didn't ask any questions. i forgot about the worst instances of touching, for a few years. then it hit me like a truck, from nowhere. to try and deal with it in a way that seemed accessible to me at the time, about age 12, i became hypersexual, and started watching porn. this was a bad idea, but i didn't know that back then. i wanted someone to take care of me, because i was tired of doing it myself. i wanted someone to want me. boys my age didn't want me, so instead i started talking to older guys and men on the internet. i felt fun i guess. exciting, because i knew that i wasn't supposed to.
i don't remember many specific events before my 14th birthday and a little bit before that, but what i do know is that i felt ugly. so ugly. i had to fix it. i tried to stop eating, but i hadn't figured out the methods and tricks yet, so i wasn't very good at it, so i only lost a little bit of weight, if any at all. i got drunk for the first time when i was 13. it was whiskey. it was january. i was outside but i didn't feel cold. me and my mother had a habit of watching true crime documentaries together, even when i was too young to see them. my parents thought that as long as i wasn't watching alone, pretty much nothing was off limits. either way, a couple of months before my 14th birthday, i saw a documentary about the columbine shooting, and it interested me like nothing before it ever had. i felt the need to get to know the shooters. to know why they did it. i never really wanted to do it myself, despite not having the easiest time at school. i made a tumblr account on the day before my 14th birthday so i could find likeminded people, and i asked my mother for a book about one of the shooters as a birthday gift. i got it, and i cried rivers while reading it. i fell in love with him through pictures, videos, his writing and what the people who knew him said about him. he was long dead, yes, but i felt like i knew him, and i missed him. in my mind, he was the only boy for me, and when i had lived exactly as many days as he did, i'd kill myself. i didn't. i'm not 17 anymore, thank god. but i obsessed over him for years. now i look back on it and cringe a little, but i understand why i was the way i was. he felt lonely, and so did i. i hoped that he would see me and visit me in my dreams. that he would be the one to accept me with open arms into the afterlife and heal my sliced up wrists because he'd know that it was for him i had lived and died. again, i do not feel this way anymore, and i don't excuse the acts of violence he committed. i was just weird. he was an outsider and so was i.
moving on from that, i met a girl on tumblr when i was 14. we're still friends. i have still not met her, but next year i'm attending her wedding. time flies. when i was 14, i had my first kiss with a 17 year old boy who i dated very briefly. he was mean to me. i turned 15. at this point i had been sending pictures of myself, barely clothed, to guys my age and men decades older than me. i kept at it umtil i met a boy i liked. his parents were jehovah's witnesses, and i wore a pentagram necklace at all times. i think he dated me because he thought i was cool. he didn't really care about me all that much, but i loved him. we attempted to take each others' virginities, but i was nervous and it hurt too much. we never tried again. then came january. i started talking to a guy i met online, just being friendly. at the timem i didn't know how old he was. then i found out that he was 28, but that didn't matter to me, because we were just friends. my boyfriend told me that i was too much for him to handle, and that he didn't love me anymore. he wanted me to seek help for my depression, self-harm and disordered eating, but i wasn't ready, so he left. i was heartbroken.
i told my 28 year old friend about it. he said that he felt bad for me. we started talking more after that. he was a cocaine addict, but i didn't care. he was nice to me, so i didn't judge him. we met up on a spring day. early afternoon. i was 16, barely. he had booked a hotel room. we did coke together there. it was my first time. i was scared of him. he got on top of me suddenly, and put his hands around my throat. i thought he was going to kill me, and so did he i think. there was nothing i could do but look into his eyes and pretend that i wasn't scared. it worked. he let go. he kissed me that day, before i left to be picked up by my parents, still high. they didn't notice. my heart was racing all night. is slept 2 hours, in a cold sweat. cocaine is not that fun. i came back to him, like a fool, the day after. i felt obligated to do so, and i skipped gym class. we kissed, he bought me cigarettes and got on his train back home. i went back to school. i met with him again the next weekend. he got me drunk and took my clothes off. i didn't want it, but i was too scared to say no, so i said nothing at all. i still can't decide whether or not i was raped, but i know that it hurt. i met with him again the day after, he cut my leg with a knife, and then never i never saw him again. we kept in contact over the phone. he isolated me from everyone else. he wanted me to be his girl and talk to him all the time. he kept me up all night. i was burned out, but i still graduated 9th grade with good grades.the summer passed. i started attending a new school. got a crush on one of my female classmates, and quite frankly i was sick of him, so i told him that i wanted to break up with him. that's whenthe death threats started. he'd call me all day and all night. i had to tell my school counselor about it, and she told my parents. i couldn't do it. i dropped out not long after, from the stress. i couldn't sleep. i was scared all the time. i started seeing a counselor, she was very nice but it didn't help. i was so convinced that i was going to die, that i started to believe that i was dead.
i stopped talking to people. there was a boy i had come in to contact with via a site for people with alternative styles, but i stopped talking to him too. it was just too much, so i fell out of contact with everyone. i stopped going out, other than to see my counselor. then came the news year. a few weeks passed. my abuser stopped contacting me, but that didn't matter. i was still scared. then the boy from the site contacted me again, and i replied. he asked if i was alive, and i told him about how the past few months of my life had been. we started talking on the phone for hours every day. he was nice to me, and i fell in love with him. this would turn out to be a mutual feeling. he lived a few hours away from me, but he took the train to come see me the week i turned 17. we had a great time. consensual sex and so on. he understood me. i cried when he had to go back home. in fact, i cried every single time we had to leave each other for at least an entire year. one time, i was crying on the train back to my hometown, and i was scrolling tumblr in an attempt to distract myself. it wasn't really working as well as i hoped, but i saw someone with a profile picture from a movie i had seen, and we seemed to share similar interests, so i commented on one of their posts. on that day, i met the person who would become my best friend. without them, i would have been dead by now. later that year i got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (asd) and began to understand myself better. eventually i just stopped coming back home, and instead moved in with his father's family. they didn't mind. they liked me, and i was glad to have escaped my parents. i lived there until the year i turned 19, but by then me and him had gotten our own apartment. we were having some issues in our relationship that had started before we moved out, such as my sex drive dying, and we figured that getting our own place would fix it. we were wrong. we stopped being intimate with each other. i let my eating disorder escalate to the point where i was underweight and too weak to walk up or down the stairs to our apartment building, so i was stuck at home for almost 2 months. we were both unhappy. i had started to suspect that i might have borderline personality disorder (bpd), due to the strong emotional reactions i often had to trivial things. both of us suffered from poor mental health, and it took a toll on our realtionship. in may of 2023, i saw a doctor for my eating habits and mental issues. he referred me to a psychiatric clinic that i started going to in september of that year. on the same day aas the doctor's appointment, i started bing eating almost daily, and gained all the weight back. i was at a normal bmi, but unhappy with my looks. i thought that eating more and having more energy to do things would help our relationship, but it didn't. i felt disgusted by my appearance and didn't want him to see or touch me. i ended up disliking the psychologist who i had gotten assigned to me. she didn't understand me, and i felt like she didn't want to.
christmas came. new year's came and went. i started seeing a different psychologist whom i ended up loving. she diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), an eating disorder, and depression. i broke things off with my boyfriend. not because i wanted to, but we were bringing each other down, and i couldn't take it anymore. i felt guilty for not wanting to be intimate. i felt guilty for having gender identity problems (i identify as something between a girl and nothing at all). i felt like i shouldn't keep him tethered to me if i couldn't give him what he needed. he started staying with his mother more and more, so i was alone with my own thoughts for most of the time. i thought i was a lesbian for a while. then i fell in love with a man on the internet, who ended up ghosting me, and it broke me for a month. that is possibly the single most embarrasing thing i've ever felt. i hoped that he would reach out to me again, but he never did.
i spent my birthday drinking alone in my bathtub. the only person i spoke to was the man behind the counter at the liqour store. i was afraid to leave my teenage years. i felt that my youth and my identity would disappear overnight and take my beauty with them. that i would suddenly be expected to be well-funtioning, and that my problems would suddenly go from making me worthy of compassion, to making me pathetic. i thought that i would no longer be desireable or interesting. i was afraid. so very, very afraid. i vowed that i would kill myself not a day after my 25th birthday. that way i would at least know for one day what it's like to have a brain that has cooked to completion in the cerebrospinal fluid. so there i was, with makeup on, wearing a vintage nightgown, passed out face down in my bathtub, vomit in my hair and burning on my skin. i wasn't planning on getting that drunk, but i hadn't been drunk since the day i was sexually assaulted at the hotel almost 4 years prior, so i had no idea what my limits were. i must have been in the bathtub for 3 hours at least, unable to get myself out or even see straight. eventually i was able to take my nightgown off and wash the vomit out of my hair. then i got out and put a pizza in the oven. i felt like shit, but i was sober when i went to bed. it was okay. i see my therapist every other week. she's worked wonders with me. i'm no longer afraid of bald men, not even the ones with goatees. i still don't answer the phone when i don't know who's calling, but then again i naver did. i'm able to go outside by myself and walk around town after 9 pm without fear. i've started journaling. i can sit with my thoughts without wanting to die. i've stopped looking for parental figures in men who want to fuck me. i've stopped looking for someone else to complete me. i am a full person. i just have to wait and see where all the pieces fit. i don't know whether or not i'm going to die when i'm 25. but i do know that i want to make things. movies, art, maybe even music. i want to write and talk to others who think like me. i want to experience things in life. i want to learn things. i want to know how things feel. i yearn for knowledge and understanding. i know that i can't have it all, and it tears me apart, but that doesn't mean i'm not going to try. (1/6/24)