Welcome to Part 2! If you haven’t read Part 1, you may wish to go back and read it.

Trigger Warning: I will discuss attempted suicide and sexual assault in this post. If you are triggered by these events, please do not continue to read this blog post.

Setting the Scene
We are starting in the second half of 2002. I am 16 years old. I have left school and isolated myself from the world.

Event 1
We will go back just a little bit. I have spoken about my father in a previous post. He was absent for most of my life. My mother finally got the courage to leave him completely when I was 3. At the age of 13, I wrote to him. I wanted to know who my father was. We went and met him. I invited him down to Melbourne for my 16th birthday, which was a waste of time – he spent the entire day in bed. After that, my mother took him back and he moved in with us.

From memory, he moved in with us after I had left school. I was working with my mother, cleaning hotel rooms. That was the deal for her allowing me to leave school at 16. The job did not last long, as my father made my mother quit her job. It should have been the first warning sign he hadn’t changed, right?

My father had been diagnosed with drug induced schizophrenia some years before. He was also on strong pain killers for a back injury, which he sustained in a car accident, where he was thrown out of a stolen car’s front window while being chased by the police. There was other medication he was on as well. I don’t remember what they were all for. It was a cocktail of prescription drugs, given to a drug addict.

It didn’t take him long to start showing his true colours. He would pick fights with my mother. He started drinking and overdosing on his medications. They were giving him some drug each month, but he was taking it all in one hit. My mother and I walked in on him in the bedroom, and he was literally talking like the devil. It freaked my mum out enough; she made us all pull our mattresses out of our bedrooms and sleep in the lounge room with her. It wasn’t enough to kick him out though.

He was also abusive towards my brothers. He had isolated my eldest brother, who is also his son. He was nice to my youngest brother at the start, who isn’t his son. He would spend time with him, teaching him about computers and such. It would make my eldest brother jealous, but he quickly started to hate him. I didn’t know why – and I’ve never really got an answer from my brother, but I am pretty sure I know why now.

Home was quickly becoming a place that felt extremely unsafe.

Event 2
I don’t really remember when this happened. I blocked it out for decades and some. When the suppressed memory started to come up, I would talk myself out of believing it. I didn’t want to. It is hard for me to bring it up, even now. I have only told two people. One being my old boss, who asked me straight out. The other being my youngest brother – we were both high at the time. Yes, I remember what I said in the previous post! It took me 38 years, and a lot of crap to get there. Give me a break!

It would have been within the first few months of him living with us. I had some issues with my computer, and he was fixing it. Usually, he would have taken the computer out of my room to fix it, but this time he was in my bedroom. He had been in there for most of the day and evening. I was tired and I wanted to sleep, but he didn’t leave. He said he was almost finished, so I went to bed with him still in the room.

I am not going to go into too much detail about it. The memories are still very much suppressed. I don’t know if I was drugged, or what, but I don’t recall everything. At some point I woke up, but it felt like I was dreaming. I had my father and my eldest brother standing at the side of my bed. My brother was crying, and my father was forcing him to do things to me. I believe that my father also did things. It felt like I dreamt it, but I know it was real. I still don’t want to believe it, but I know it was real.

When I woke up the next day, I felt shame and guilt. I told myself that it was a dream and that I was weird for having such thoughts. As a 16-year-old, I didn’t want to believe it had happened. Why would he do that to his children? So, I buried it. I didn’t tell anyone until I was in my early 30s. I wish I had because maybe I could have saved my brothers from him.

Event 3
After that, my depression grew worse. My doctor had given me medication for migraines, which were sleeping pills. I decided one night that I couldn’t cope with life anymore. So, I wrote my note, and I sat in my room, alone, and I started to take these pills. It wasn’t the first attempt, but it was the first time I was serious. I would have succeeded that night, but for some reason my mother decided to walk into my room, and I wasn’t able to continue. I had taken enough to feel extremely drowsy, but not enough to end my life. Because I was so drowsy, I couldn’t keep my eyes open while she was talking to me. I don’t know whether she knew what I had done. She sat and spoke with me and waited until I fell asleep. She’d never done that before – and she’s never done it since.

She saved me that night. There were so many times in my life where I hoped she would save me, and she didn’t. The one night I didn’t want her to, she did. It is funny how these things work. Sometimes, I wish she had never walked in.

Event 4
Due to my depression, I started to put on weight. At first it wasn’t a lot, but it was noticeable. Previous to that, I was 42kg and I’d gone up to 48kg. My father noticed. We were in the hallway of our house – by we, I mean my mother, my father, and myself. My father stopped, looked me up and down and said, “You need to stop putting on weight. You are getting unattractive.” My mother said nothing. In that moment, my subconsciousness knew how to save me from another attack by him. He had taught me what would make me unattractive to him – and I am forever grateful to him for those words.

I started to binge eat. I spent every cent I had on junk food to make myself put on weight, so he would NEVER touch me again. And it worked. He never did. I piled on weight. Almost double what I had been. I am only 151cm, and I was back then as well. I was no longer attractive to him, and that was all that mattered.

Path of Isolation
After these events, I kept myself pretty isolated. I spent most of my time online. I only had friends online. I had made up a whole new person to present to my online friends. She didn’t have my name, my age, and definitely not my life. She’d never been abused or betrayed. She was not damaged – although, the damage buried inside of me would eventually leak into her world too.

By this point of 2002, it is safe to say that I was well and truly dead inside. In my mind, I had died that night I tried to take my own life. I was just an empty shell. In an attempt to feel again, I turned to the only person who had ever made me feel love – Marcus.