i wrote this about a year after i became a christian:
i guess you could say i had a pretty rough childhood. both my parents had a history of serious drug and alcohol abuse so they divorced when i was 2, and in that process i saw a lot of things that i shouldnt have seen so my sister, who is a year older than me, and i had to go to a psychiatrist. i dont remember much from back then, i just remember that i didnt see my mother very much but i really wanted to see her all the time. one time my dad came and got me and my sister when it was supposed to be my moms turn to have us and i tried to jump out the window of the car and my dads girlfriend rolled my hair up in the window. in first grade, some people came to school and brought me into a room and asked me if my dad spanked me a lot. and i said sometimes and they asked me if it ever made bruises and i said yes, not knowing that it wasnt a normal thing. they asked me to see the bruises and i said no because i didnt understand what they were there for. the same thing happened to my sister and she told them the same thing as me. since neither of us wanted to show the men our bruises, and since my dad is a lawyer with lots of friends in the legal system, my dad never got in trouble for abuse and he never stopped doing it. shortly after that i got kicked out of school for fighting, so my dad sent my sister and i to cathedral carmel. i hated it at cathedral because i didnt make very many friends, where at st. barnabus i had a lot of friends. my dad was always working so we basically lived with a nanny, who i thought was pretty cool, but she got fired and was replaced with a nanny that my sister and i really didnt like. i had continued seeing psychiatrists throughout this time and when i started getting in trouble at school, in about 4th grade, the psychiatrist put me on ritalin. in the next year, my mom had a son with another guy, which kind of made me sad because i didnt want her to spend all her time with the baby because i already never got to see her. also, my dad got married and i didnt dislike his spouse, but as soon as they got married, she started being really mean to me. she had 2 daughters who are a few years younger than me, and she was really nice to them and my sister but for some reason, a reason me and even my dad dont know to this day, she always treated me badly. my ritalin stopped working around 5th grade, so the psychiatrist, who i was still seeing and couldnt stand it, switched me to adderall and that made me act really weird. the adderall wasnt making me behave in class, it was just giving me side effects, and i started to get really depressed because me and my stepmom would fight pretty much every day, my dad was never home, and i never got to visit or call my mom. later in 5th grade my mom moved to california to get off of drugs and alcohol, and my stepmom had two kids, a boy and a girl. by seventh grade i was very depressed, and always punished so i never came out of my room. the summer after seventh grade, when i was 12, my dad and stepmom sent me to a marine corps boot camp in south texas. they liked the camp so much they decided to send me to the military school that ran the camp. it was for 8th to 12th grade. i was really sad because me and my mom were trying to work it out to where i could live in california. i was very small and very young (and not too skinny) when i first got to my military school, so i got beat up a lot. they liked to hit me with hangers, and stick me under the sink and kick me until they got bored. but after a while, i started smoking cigarettes and drinking to try to make people think i was cool. the older kids started to accept me, and before too long i was like one of the guys. one day, my "friends" snuck me off campus and we went to a parking garage and they made me smoke weed. i really liked the feeling of getting high because it made me forget about all the depression in my life. so i spent the rest of the year drinking every weekend, and getting high whenever i could, which wasnt too often because they had random drug tests every week. over the summer i spent most of my time in california with my mom, and it was awesome because i hadnt really ever got to spend so much time with her. the whole time i was enrolled in military school, i was seeing this psychiatrist in san antonio named rick. it would be me, my dad and stepmom, and all my 3 oldest brothers and sisters. the psychiatrist told me that my mom was a prostitute and a drug dealer in california and that they had private investigators follow her all the time she was in california, and all the times she visited with us. it was very shocking to know that i was being filmed and i didnt know it. and even more shocking to find out all these things about my mom. i thought i was going to be able to move in with my mom in california, but after hearing all these horrible things, it was no surprise that instead i went back to the military school. my mom came in for a visit one weekend and my sister and i got to stay with her for the whole weekend. we decided to tell her that we knew everything that the psychiatrist told us about her dealing drugs and being a prostitute. of course she said it wasnt true and we told her a p.i. had been following her and caught her. she told us that she knew about the p.i. and had all the records and none of them had anything to do with that. she said she never knew the psychiatrist told us that and that it absolutely wasnt true. she went to san antonio and met with the psychiatrist and straightened out all the facts, showed him that all the p.i. documents had no evidence of the things he told us. and he took her out to my military school to personally apologize for telling me the lies and that he didnt make sure that they were true. he told me he was going to help my mom sue my dad for custody and get me to live with her in california. my dad had him banned from the trial and i never saw him again. which i thought was like the worst thing in the world. to top all of this off, my dad held me back to 8th grade because my grades werent good enough my first time around. so i went back to school, and my best friend from the previous year, who had left after my first semester, all of a sudden came back so i was really excited. him and i hung out like all the time, and he taught me like, everything there was to know about drugs, alcohol, how to fight, and how to cheat in school. in the middle of my second eigth grade year, i got kicked out of school for smoking weed. that was the first time in my life that i felt absolutely no hope. i came home, my dad beat the crap out of me like he seemed to love to do, and he sent me to teurlings. after about the first two weeks, i couldnt stand taking the adderall anymore so i started flushing it down the toilet. all through 8th grade, i made some pretty good friends, one who i still consider one of my best friends. i stopped doing drugs but i still drank about every weekend and i was always punished because my stepmom and i fought non-stop. my dad was never home but we got a nanny named linde who lived next door and took care of all of us kids after my stepmom got pregnant again (if you lost count there is now 7 of us). the nanny tried to treat me nice sometimes, but my stepmom told her to stop giving me treatment i didnt deserve. my mom got me an email address so we could talk, since the phone was pretty much off limits, but my stepmom figured out my password and she would try and delete all the emails i would get before i could read them. so every time i would talk to my mom she would be like," hey did you get my email", and i be like," no." so it was extrememly frustrating and sad for both me and my mom. summer of eigth grade my mom had just gotten married to a guy in california and they moved to la, so i spent the weekend there. my stepdad was like my best friend, we would work out together, go snowboarding together, go to the beach and everything. i loved my stepdad. we made a plan to get me to go and live with my mom and stepdad, but of course my dad found some way to make it look like a bad idea. my freshman year i got involved with some bad people, and started doing drugs again. it didnt go on too long before i got caught. i just kept on a downward spiral and i just stopped caring about anything. i got caught doing drugs twice and my dad decided to let me spend the entire summer with my mom because he trusted her to make me go to alcoholics anonymous with her and help me get away from drugs and alcohol. i went to california, got a job on the beach, made some cool friends and everything was going great. i lasted about 2 weeks drug free, but then i went to my job and everyone there smoked weed. i started doing it a couple times, and quickly escalated into doing it all the time. by the end of the summer i was doing it about 5 times a day. i never got caught doing it over the summer, and when i went back home, the plan was for me to finally get to move in with my mom in california. i went over to a friends house, and i had some weed that i had brought back from california. my friends mom found my weed after i fell asleep, and i knew i was busted. my dad got really mad at me and the plan to go to california was obviously not going to happen. it was so devastating to me when everyone found out that i was on drugs. i had betrayed anyone that had ever trusted me because i had always told everyone that i wasnt on drugs. i had totally fooled and lied to my mom, and she looked like an idiot because she was telling everybody how good i was doing and how she was doing such a good job keeping me clean. about 2 weeks into my sophmore year, my dad said we were going to miami for the weekend. i had no idea why but i was going to object, so we spent the weekend in miami. when it came time to come home, much to my surprise, we stopped in gainesville georgia instead of louisiana. my parents dropped me off and left me. i was stunned i just got tricked into going to a boarding school. the mental abuse that was put on me there is unmatched by anything ive experienced to this day. the school is in the process of being shut down right now for innumerable illegal actions. i got sent to the wilderness program associated with the school for 76 days and i spent 10 months in the boarding school. i could talk for hours and hours about the insanity that went on at this boarding school, but i dont have enough time to do that. the only thing you need to know about that place is that it really messed up my brain. also, while i was there my mom came and visited everytime she was allowed, and my dad only came once. the meeting with my dad was after i fan away from the school. i didnt run away because i wanted to actually escape, i ran away because my mom didnt know that i had gotten sent away, and the school refused to let me call her. so after 2 months i ran away just to talk to her. my dad and my stepmom came to the school, sat me down and told me that i was never going to get out of the school, and that my mom didnt love me and she never would love me. he said that the sooner i realized that, the better off i would be. that was really devastating, even though i refused to believe it. my mom was there for me the whole time i was at that place. she came for a visit over christmas, and she brought me some horrible news. she said my stepmom was diagnosed with cancer. i didnt know what to do at first, because i never really liked my stepmom and it was like karma was coming around to bite her in the butt. but once i started thinking about my little brothers and sisters and my dad, i started to get really sad because i wanted to be there to support my family but i was stuck in this horrible place. a few weeks later my dad and my mom showed up out of nowhere and said it was time for me to go home.(explain how it happened). i was home for about a week, when one night my dad called me and told me to come home quick. i got home and there were cars all over the place and the hospice was there. my stepmom was lying on her bed, completely incoherent. we stayed up all night with her and at about 3 a.m. i was about to fall asleep, but i decided to go in the room for some reason.(explain what i saw).it was sort of a traumatizing experience for me. she died at 3 a.m. and at eight that night i got on a bus and headed out for a 19 hour bus ride to a christian camp in north carolina. the week that i spent there was the most amazing week of my life. it was so much fun and it gave me a lot of time to think about the chaos going on in my life. while i was there i decided to give my life to jesus christ and to stop living the way i think i should live, but live the way god intended for me to live. when my stepmom died, i felt a similar feeling to the feeling that i felt when i got kicked out of school. its a sense of hopelessness that is just an aweful feeling. i could only compare it to the feeling someone would get when a jury says they find the defendent guilty. its a sinking feeling that is just horrible. one of the most powerful quotes i have ever heard is "you never know that god is all you need until god is all you've got." it is so true, because when my stepmom died, i felt like it was the end of the road. i couldnt even imagine what was going to happen to my family. but once i let christ into my life i immediately felt a calming feeling, and i just had to trust that god was in control and that he would not steer me wrong. God has made my life a thousand times better than i ever thought it could be. the peace that i feel on a daily basis, even under the most stressful circumstances is the greatest feeling in the world. God has given my life value and hope and most of all unconditional happiness that i would not trade for anything. some of you may think that i am exaggerating, but im going to tell you that i could not stress this enough. there is no doubt in my mind that a life without christ is not life. when you except jesus into your heart, there is nothing greater than that.
i guess you could say i had a pretty rough childhood. both my parents had a history of serious drug and alcohol abuse so they divorced when i was 2, and in that process i saw a lot of things that i shouldnt have seen so my sister, who is a year older than me, and i had to go to a psychiatrist. i dont remember much from back then, i just remember that i didnt see my mother very much but i really wanted to see her all the time. one time my dad came and got me and my sister when it was supposed to be my moms turn to have us and i tried to jump out the window of the car and my dads girlfriend rolled my hair up in the window. in first grade, some people came to school and brought me into a room and asked me if my dad spanked me a lot. and i said sometimes and they asked me if it ever made bruises and i said yes, not knowing that it wasnt a normal thing. they asked me to see the bruises and i said no because i didnt understand what they were there for. the same thing happened to my sister and she told them the same thing as me. since neither of us wanted to show the men our bruises, and since my dad is a lawyer with lots of friends in the legal system, my dad never got in trouble for abuse and he never stopped doing it. shortly after that i got kicked out of school for fighting, so my dad sent my sister and i to cathedral carmel. i hated it at cathedral because i didnt make very many friends, where at st. barnabus i had a lot of friends. my dad was always working so we basically lived with a nanny, who i thought was pretty cool, but she got fired and was replaced with a nanny that my sister and i really didnt like. i had continued seeing psychiatrists throughout this time and when i started getting in trouble at school, in about 4th grade, the psychiatrist put me on ritalin. in the next year, my mom had a son with another guy, which kind of made me sad because i didnt want her to spend all her time with the baby because i already never got to see her. also, my dad got married and i didnt dislike his spouse, but as soon as they got married, she started being really mean to me. she had 2 daughters who are a few years younger than me, and she was really nice to them and my sister but for some reason, a reason me and even my dad dont know to this day, she always treated me badly. my ritalin stopped working around 5th grade, so the psychiatrist, who i was still seeing and couldnt stand it, switched me to adderall and that made me act really weird. the adderall wasnt making me behave in class, it was just giving me side effects, and i started to get really depressed because me and my stepmom would fight pretty much every day, my dad was never home, and i never got to visit or call my mom. later in 5th grade my mom moved to california to get off of drugs and alcohol, and my stepmom had two kids, a boy and a girl. by seventh grade i was very depressed, and always punished so i never came out of my room. the summer after seventh grade, when i was 12, my dad and stepmom sent me to a marine corps boot camp in south texas. they liked the camp so much they decided to send me to the military school that ran the camp. it was for 8th to 12th grade. i was really sad because me and my mom were trying to work it out to where i could live in california. i was very small and very young (and not too skinny) when i first got to my military school, so i got beat up a lot. they liked to hit me with hangers, and stick me under the sink and kick me until they got bored. but after a while, i started smoking cigarettes and drinking to try to make people think i was cool. the older kids started to accept me, and before too long i was like one of the guys. one day, my "friends" snuck me off campus and we went to a parking garage and they made me smoke weed. i really liked the feeling of getting high because it made me forget about all the depression in my life. so i spent the rest of the year drinking every weekend, and getting high whenever i could, which wasnt too often because they had random drug tests every week. over the summer i spent most of my time in california with my mom, and it was awesome because i hadnt really ever got to spend so much time with her. the whole time i was enrolled in military school, i was seeing this psychiatrist in san antonio named rick. it would be me, my dad and stepmom, and all my 3 oldest brothers and sisters. the psychiatrist told me that my mom was a prostitute and a drug dealer in california and that they had private investigators follow her all the time she was in california, and all the times she visited with us. it was very shocking to know that i was being filmed and i didnt know it. and even more shocking to find out all these things about my mom. i thought i was going to be able to move in with my mom in california, but after hearing all these horrible things, it was no surprise that instead i went back to the military school. my mom came in for a visit one weekend and my sister and i got to stay with her for the whole weekend. we decided to tell her that we knew everything that the psychiatrist told us about her dealing drugs and being a prostitute. of course she said it wasnt true and we told her a p.i. had been following her and caught her. she told us that she knew about the p.i. and had all the records and none of them had anything to do with that. she said she never knew the psychiatrist told us that and that it absolutely wasnt true. she went to san antonio and met with the psychiatrist and straightened out all the facts, showed him that all the p.i. documents had no evidence of the things he told us. and he took her out to my military school to personally apologize for telling me the lies and that he didnt make sure that they were true. he told me he was going to help my mom sue my dad for custody and get me to live with her in california. my dad had him banned from the trial and i never saw him again. which i thought was like the worst thing in the world. to top all of this off, my dad held me back to 8th grade because my grades werent good enough my first time around. so i went back to school, and my best friend from the previous year, who had left after my first semester, all of a sudden came back so i was really excited. him and i hung out like all the time, and he taught me like, everything there was to know about drugs, alcohol, how to fight, and how to cheat in school. in the middle of my second eigth grade year, i got kicked out of school for smoking weed. that was the first time in my life that i felt absolutely no hope. i came home, my dad beat the crap out of me like he seemed to love to do, and he sent me to teurlings. after about the first two weeks, i couldnt stand taking the adderall anymore so i started flushing it down the toilet. all through 8th grade, i made some pretty good friends, one who i still consider one of my best friends. i stopped doing drugs but i still drank about every weekend and i was always punished because my stepmom and i fought non-stop. my dad was never home but we got a nanny named linde who lived next door and took care of all of us kids after my stepmom got pregnant again (if you lost count there is now 7 of us). the nanny tried to treat me nice sometimes, but my stepmom told her to stop giving me treatment i didnt deserve. my mom got me an email address so we could talk, since the phone was pretty much off limits, but my stepmom figured out my password and she would try and delete all the emails i would get before i could read them. so every time i would talk to my mom she would be like," hey did you get my email", and i be like," no." so it was extrememly frustrating and sad for both me and my mom. summer of eigth grade my mom had just gotten married to a guy in california and they moved to la, so i spent the weekend there. my stepdad was like my best friend, we would work out together, go snowboarding together, go to the beach and everything. i loved my stepdad. we made a plan to get me to go and live with my mom and stepdad, but of course my dad found some way to make it look like a bad idea. my freshman year i got involved with some bad people, and started doing drugs again. it didnt go on too long before i got caught. i just kept on a downward spiral and i just stopped caring about anything. i got caught doing drugs twice and my dad decided to let me spend the entire summer with my mom because he trusted her to make me go to alcoholics anonymous with her and help me get away from drugs and alcohol. i went to california, got a job on the beach, made some cool friends and everything was going great. i lasted about 2 weeks drug free, but then i went to my job and everyone there smoked weed. i started doing it a couple times, and quickly escalated into doing it all the time. by the end of the summer i was doing it about 5 times a day. i never got caught doing it over the summer, and when i went back home, the plan was for me to finally get to move in with my mom in california. i went over to a friends house, and i had some weed that i had brought back from california. my friends mom found my weed after i fell asleep, and i knew i was busted. my dad got really mad at me and the plan to go to california was obviously not going to happen. it was so devastating to me when everyone found out that i was on drugs. i had betrayed anyone that had ever trusted me because i had always told everyone that i wasnt on drugs. i had totally fooled and lied to my mom, and she looked like an idiot because she was telling everybody how good i was doing and how she was doing such a good job keeping me clean. about 2 weeks into my sophmore year, my dad said we were going to miami for the weekend. i had no idea why but i was going to object, so we spent the weekend in miami. when it came time to come home, much to my surprise, we stopped in gainesville georgia instead of louisiana. my parents dropped me off and left me. i was stunned i just got tricked into going to a boarding school. the mental abuse that was put on me there is unmatched by anything ive experienced to this day. the school is in the process of being shut down right now for innumerable illegal actions. i got sent to the wilderness program associated with the school for 76 days and i spent 10 months in the boarding school. i could talk for hours and hours about the insanity that went on at this boarding school, but i dont have enough time to do that. the only thing you need to know about that place is that it really messed up my brain. also, while i was there my mom came and visited everytime she was allowed, and my dad only came once. the meeting with my dad was after i fan away from the school. i didnt run away because i wanted to actually escape, i ran away because my mom didnt know that i had gotten sent away, and the school refused to let me call her. so after 2 months i ran away just to talk to her. my dad and my stepmom came to the school, sat me down and told me that i was never going to get out of the school, and that my mom didnt love me and she never would love me. he said that the sooner i realized that, the better off i would be. that was really devastating, even though i refused to believe it. my mom was there for me the whole time i was at that place. she came for a visit over christmas, and she brought me some horrible news. she said my stepmom was diagnosed with cancer. i didnt know what to do at first, because i never really liked my stepmom and it was like karma was coming around to bite her in the butt. but once i started thinking about my little brothers and sisters and my dad, i started to get really sad because i wanted to be there to support my family but i was stuck in this horrible place. a few weeks later my dad and my mom showed up out of nowhere and said it was time for me to go home.(explain how it happened). i was home for about a week, when one night my dad called me and told me to come home quick. i got home and there were cars all over the place and the hospice was there. my stepmom was lying on her bed, completely incoherent. we stayed up all night with her and at about 3 a.m. i was about to fall asleep, but i decided to go in the room for some reason.(explain what i saw).it was sort of a traumatizing experience for me. she died at 3 a.m. and at eight that night i got on a bus and headed out for a 19 hour bus ride to a christian camp in north carolina. the week that i spent there was the most amazing week of my life. it was so much fun and it gave me a lot of time to think about the chaos going on in my life. while i was there i decided to give my life to jesus christ and to stop living the way i think i should live, but live the way god intended for me to live. when my stepmom died, i felt a similar feeling to the feeling that i felt when i got kicked out of school. its a sense of hopelessness that is just an aweful feeling. i could only compare it to the feeling someone would get when a jury says they find the defendent guilty. its a sinking feeling that is just horrible. one of the most powerful quotes i have ever heard is "you never know that god is all you need until god is all you've got." it is so true, because when my stepmom died, i felt like it was the end of the road. i couldnt even imagine what was going to happen to my family. but once i let christ into my life i immediately felt a calming feeling, and i just had to trust that god was in control and that he would not steer me wrong. God has made my life a thousand times better than i ever thought it could be. the peace that i feel on a daily basis, even under the most stressful circumstances is the greatest feeling in the world. God has given my life value and hope and most of all unconditional happiness that i would not trade for anything. some of you may think that i am exaggerating, but im going to tell you that i could not stress this enough. there is no doubt in my mind that a life without christ is not life. when you except jesus into your heart, there is nothing greater than that.
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