I'm from a suburb of Chicago and northwest. I'm from a town called Wauconda. Yeah, I had a mom and dad growing up I thought everything was normal that was kind of going on I realized what I was like 13, 15 that everything I had been experiencing when I was young was anything normal, I grew up my dad was an angry guy he was pretty secretive, he actually had a fake for insurance sales but our house was custom made and the crawl space was converted into glow room and this was 90s is for weed so we weed was still pretty illigal and that was kind of what he did under the table for work. I didn't find that out till I was about 15 or so and... My dad was also pedophile growing up. He is a sadist, you know. He likes children and I saw the bed and of that. Not that I know of my dad's not convicted, my dad got away. He's still out there I confronted him about all this.. about a few years ago.
He admitted to it all over camera actually he learned in the camera he kind of didn't confirm nor deny it first and I know a little bit about how these people work so, I had my phone rolling and I kept on pushing my accusations at him calling him a pedophile and eventually he leaned the camera and he said and so what get over it he said I did and he doesn't care and that's that I gave it to the authorities and they launched an investigation but I guess the authorities, we know how that goes, you know,
My childhood was, it was good and bad. I hear of some people's childhood they didn't have good on the table, constantly beating and neglected that wasn't really my childhood. My mother was around somewhat, my das was around someone in the day in the light, what people saw I was a well-taken care of kid... and I'm thankful for that I never went hungry, I wasn't beat for no reason but in the dark my das was getting a hold of me and doing some really really just pure evil. I don't have any words for it other than this was pure evil. This was even past pedophilia and having sex with a child this was sexual child torture, dilating me making fun of me... having sex with me. My dad had friend too, who. They would take me off to I think hotel rooms or maybe it was and the guy's house and just stripped me down, beat me, humiliate me, pinchi me and penetrate me. My mom eventually obviously found out I'd repressed a lot of these memories until I was in my teen years and what opened them back up for me I remember growing up I always had such a hard time going to the bathroom it hurt really bad going to the bathroom and my mom found out about this and she hated my dad we all kind of hated my dad but we had lived with him. Yeah, the abuse kind of stopped around the age of eight or nine from my recollection and I think my mom had threatened to call the police or what he was doing, and that put an end it from there - as for back as my memories go I remember he was being he was doing wrong things I would assume from infancy but I have a two-year-old in my life he's almost three, and I know what was going on when I was two or three. I remember quite a bit from being a kind so.
So it went on for quite some time I can even remember not visually recording but they would take audio recordings of me getting raped and just screaming bloody murder in these audio recordings.
I'd actually bit one of these pedophiles on the side of the face while I was getting molested once and I think my punishment for that is my dad took one of these audio recordings of me getting raped and he sat me down and he had me listen to them when I was just for four or five years old and I grew up hunting and stuff it sounded like someone was killing a rabbit over this audio recordings just gurgling screaming.
And I remember my dad was looking at me and laughing and I brought him the recordings and I set it on his desk. I was just a scared kid I don't know what was going on he looked at me and he kind of laughed and he says you don't like listen to that do you.
I like to play with those voice recording tapes I know if I talked into it I could play it back but it was an old school visual recording thing so you could play it in reverse too and it would kind of sound like weird sort of demonic thing. So my dad had given me these audio recording of me getting raped by growing men and the first time I listened to it my little kid brain I guess I was an intelligent kid I said well it must be in reverse because this just sounds like gurgling and I would play it both ways and it still kind of sounded the same that some of the harshest memories.
That I have and I don't have any understanging I guess sadism he was a sadist he liked hurting people and he liked watching all that so.
Yeah, I had an older sister, from my momeries I know... she didn't have there's somethings happening to her too. But I also remember my dad explaining to me that mom was a lot protective of my sister than she was of me. So I guess I'm not sure I knew a lot of bad stuff happened to me but I actually haven't been in contact with my older sister since about age of 12 or 11 I've only spoken a handful of word to her since then so.
The abuse stopped when I was around life 9 or 10 and I noticed ral quickly that both my parents were being exceptionally nice to me whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and I wasn't stupid I knew what was going o they were getting ready to have a divorce and both paties wanted custody of me.
Divorce happened when I was 12 and I actually choose to go with my dad, my mom was really angry woman she screamed a lot. She hit sometimesand my sister went with my mom. I choose to go with my dad simply because he was nicer tome and I had forgotten some of the harsher abuse I remember having to sleep with him and stuff but I didn't remember a lof of the sadist style behavior that come back when I was older and started having sex with people and like I said earlier it came back through me remembering my childhood and just it hurt so bad to go the bathroom and I thought that was normal it's I talked with other people, I talked with some of my girlfriends when I was 17 or 18 growing up and as far as my childhood was like with my dad and they told me that not normal and it just bad to a lot of investigating my childhood and these momeries slowly came back so.
But that time I had already found out what drugs were I grew up playing basketball so, I kept it pretty straight until about the age of 16. I put my frustrations into basketball and I was realy good at basketball. I mean I wasn't a very articulate high IQ player.
I was more the Dennis Rodman kind of Kevin Garnett. I was a mean basketball player and yeah, I could drink the ball at a young age. I'd get a lot of rebounds and I continued playing through high school but I had already started using drugs at that point and they started take their toll on me.
Yeah, I had met a best friend when I was 14 or 15. I already hated my dad at that point and I think he knew I hated him. I didn't even stay in my own house at that point I stayed at their house for most of the time.
My basketball uniforms were there, my school clothes were there. Yeah, I called this friend's mom "Mom" she was not my mom but she called me her son so. I kind of stayed with that family for most of my upbringing went real downhill with drugs after graduating high school. I started shooting heroin I started smoking crack I learned the layout of Chicago. I'm not familiar with the south side of Chicago. I'm familiar with the west side of Chicago, Garfield Park, Austin cicero and just learning street life. I was never an addict that went sick I always kid of I don't want to say I'm and intelligent addict but they are out there. We look at addicts and we think these people are stupid and a lot of them are but for some of these old drug addicts people that have been in the game for 10 15 years.
The amount of IQ they need to sustain their habit to not die to live this street life they are actually smarter than in my opinion they are smarter than a lot of working class people. It's just their habits and who they are. They choose to use that intelligence in all the wrong way and that was me in my earliy twenties I sold a lot of things allegedly and I used a lot of drugs I stopped using drugs when I was about 26 years old. I'm 29 now.
It's just likethe negative started to outweigh the postives I knew quite a few homeless people I had friends that started to go to prison for different things the first time I got clean it seems you know 50 60 70 times and every time I relapsed but I kept on trying and I got back into working out I got back into playing pick up basketball and at this point I've been sober about, you know, two and a half three years I don't have an exact date and there was a relapse about a year and a half ago with some hydrocodone they were from a doctor for a surgery but I didn't need them so.
Yeah, relationships I had a girlfriend for most of my drug addiction. I grew up with a lot of gender dysphoria too, I was a pretty queer kid growing up until I started getting made fun of it for like the long hair and the ear piercing so. I pushed that part of me away I got real tough I started lifting weights but the gender dysphoria was always there.
I came out as transgender kind of in the midst of my druy addiction and I had a hadful memories back in my head of childhood I just chose not to acknowledge them or really give them any weight as to who I was as a person right now sitting here I can remember there was a lot of weird stuff going on with my dad a lot of costumes I mean there was a puppy costume which was naked with a collar. There was a little girl costume, there was a little boy sailor costume that I would have to wear when I was these pedophiles whether it be my dad or acquaintances, friends of my dad.
So now I kind of attribute that to my gender dysphoria I'm not I actually don't have a lot of gender dysphoria at this moment here I'm happy being a guy. Maybe I'm a little androgynous some people say YES but some people say NO. But I came out as a transgender when I was 22 or 23 I had a boyfriend. He was really nice smart guy I can actually give him some of the credit for getting me sober I was a drug addict at the time he was sober he is an incredibly intelligent guy and there was time where I would relapse and he would still hang around with me.
Even I was having sex with him one night and another handful memories kind of come back and I was pretty devastated. It led me I could no longer have sex with him just act of having sex with another guy as a guy it was so traumatizing for me I remember one time I had tried because and I had been sober for a few weeks and I had tried having sex with my boyfriend and really quickly I mean, we started making out and I started shaking and I ran to the toilet I threw up.
I threw up a few times I was shaking was sweating and I started to realize that I'm a pretty traumatized person the drug addiction the dysphoria the transgender stuff. Thank G-d I was never incredibly sexually promiscuous and no STDS or anything like that so. I'm really thankful for all that but, I don't do anything very quickly but I started to realize that I wasn't transgender I have a girlfriend now I'm still friend with my boyfriend from that. He is really a smart really intelligent guy and he's been with me from the time I was drug addict till now I'm clean now.
Relationships I've had them with men live had them with women and I'm really thankfull that I ran into a guy like that could be that patient and stuff and.
Yeah, I'm still a traumatized person, I have a bit of depression and anxiety I don't take any medications for it I refuse to be on any doctor's medications or anything. I don't use any drugs any more I'm kind of pothead on an off I do smoke pot I try to keep it to responsible use and I even if I'm not smoking pot I usually take edibles before sleep because my dreams are pretty rough. Just some of the dreams that I have to relive while I'm sleeping. I'd prefer not to remember them when I wake up and weed can do that for me.
Yeah, I eat edibles before sleep almost every night because I don't want to remember my dreams a lot of opiates men, piate-based pain killers which kind of let into heroin I started sniffing at first I learned how to shoot up, so I was shooting a lot of heroin until I was 22 or 23. Allegedlly supposedly some people thought I sold a lot of coke. I never really had a taste for coke I had tried snorting it. I had tried shooting it was just not my stuff until one day I had tried smoking it freebased cocain and I actually kind of enjoyed that was when my drug addiction got really bad.
I started smokinga lot of crack with the dope. It only lasted for about six months unti I realized that this isn't sustainable.
And it wil ltake my life if it doesn't take myu life it will take my head and l'll just be left a shell of a person or l'll go to prison for one thing or another I had a few friends go to prison for drug-induced homicides and gun charges and I knew I didn't want that I was kind of in the world alone I had my so-called adoptive family as they call them they knew I was struggling not to the extent that I'm talking about now but Yeah, getting out of it wasn't easy like I said it took me 50 60 tries and constantly relapsing. But it took a lot of acknowleging my trauma that I went through as a kid. A lof of meditation, a lot of yoga and it hasn't been easy even these past couple of years I've had more momeries come back of what my dad was doing and I'm still sober through it now I guess I just found healthier ways to deal with it I play a lot of basketball again in different pick up leagues. I work out I read just a ton I'm an arid reader.
I have tried therapy I've tried not ot any real help I've tried therapists I had one rescheduling me on me a lot I had another one who was like really anti-gay anti-lgbt and I don't really feel comfortable being with her the best therapy that l've had is actually on meditation and yoga live had a few yoga teachers kind of take me under their wing and guide me through some of my PTSD and my flash back and just breathing stretching acknowledging that I'm a pretty messed up person and that's all right there's a lof of messed up people I mean there's homeless people that aren't messed up there's people that are homeless that do drugs that have bad normal childhood and there's other people that are succesful millionars that have had bad childhood similar to mine.
And a lot of us are messed up some of us acknowledge it some of us don't, and it's all right that for me that's been the best therapy is just yoga and meditation.
Well as far as my thoughts on that I mean I grew up being bisexual, I had girlfriends live had boyfriends at this point in life, I'm not sure if I'm only interested in my girlfriend I'm not interested in other women I'm a monogamous person that being said I'm laos not interested in other men. If my girlfriend wasn't around I still wouldn't be interested in men. I would be only be interested in women and as far as my gender I used to be quite a bit more androgyous quite a bit more feminine looking near the end of my drug addiction and now I'm not I mean I view gender as a spectrum I mean and it changes throught on life as close her sexuality.
So I think for must people having some sense of androgyny is healthy. I don't know if anybody, if you just want my opinion I don't know if anybody is transgender or is not transgender as I said, you know, I think gender is a spectrum I'm not out there to hate on the transgender community a call them mentally ill or anything. I don't think hold my any beliefs like that. I, as far as me dealing with some of my issues I think there was kind of a form of mastery involved with my childhood and my trauma that I went through and I had a boyfriend and I read a lot so I read that when something really really bad happens to you when you are a kid, two things can happen.
You will either never want to be put in that situation again You will be a tramatized person or as you grow up you will try to recreate it and relive it and you will probably re-traumatize yourself as a way to master what had happened to you as a kid.
And I see this everywhere I go, I mean I have more than one friend who is a trans woman who was sexually abused by her father when she was a little boy.
They remember it I have another trans woman friend how her mom will swear that the dad was sexually abusing her little boy who is now a woman.
And you know both of whose trans women have a lot of sex and I'm not even here to bash that you know, If that's what helps them live and helps them massive their trauma, you know, it is what it is.
I have no ill feeling in my heart towards anybody other than stutus and pedophiles. My way of dealing with it I guess there was form of mastery involved for a bit unitl I had some memories come back that were so harsh.
I just couldn't be with guys anymore and then I had a rally slow transition kind of back to where I'm now I lift weight I play basketball I paint my nails but I'm a guy I'm happy being a guy I'm only interested in women, that's my way of dealing with it.
The happiest I've been... No, the other family I had a brother, he passed way two years ago, about a year and a half ago. My happiest was just one seconde... 鼻かむ
with my brother He was also a drug addict. We saw eye to eye pretty much on everything I mean we were brothers. We could finish each other's sentences, he was with me through like the whole transgender stuff, too. I remember coming out to him, One day I started being a little more androgynous. He always knew I mean we had been friends sence we were 13 14 years old.
I told him on day that I think I'm transgender and he was right in the middle of talking about one of his favorite animes and I kind of interrupted him and just bluted it out.
And he looked at me and he was like, you know, you interrupted me, he didn't care at all he was just like we can talk about that later but I'm talking about his anime right now I don't even think we talked about it laster, you know, it was just how it was.
We kind of got sober together, we each took our own roads, relapsed separately, we'd gotten sober together the only issue was my brother was a drinker and with the drinking these was some xanax involved if you are familiar with drugs and brain chemistry drinking and xanax they hit the same receptors in the brain so, you can give an alcoholic and withdrawal xanax and it will get them right and conversely you can give a xanax addict alcohol and it will kind of keep them right somewhat much like heroin to pain pills and my brother had never really shook that monkey of dringking in xanax.
I never really played around with much xanax I was much more of a hardcore drug addict and my brother never smoked as much crack as I had smoked but he always had that monkey on his back and he started going downhill really bad about a year before he died I mean he had tried to quite xanax cold turkey he d the seizures
I remember getting waitting for him to get out of the hospital and he came out of the hospital and he was like a different person. I mean to anybody watching this if you're gonna play with drugs, don't even paly with xanax
And I always knew that as a young drug addict you can quite heroin. you can quite crack.
You can quite all these things and for the most part you will go bakc to being the person that you were when you started using drugs. xanax's and meth those two things are different stories. If you get far into those drug, you can get sober but the person that you once were, in my opinion, will be gone.
So my brother got out of the hospital and he was kind of a different person he was nervous all the time, He could barely hold a conversation I tried to be there for him but he always wanted to be alone and he had already had one kidney for drinking and drugs.
And I knew he was fooling around after he got out of the hospital with xanax and alcohol things and he ended up passing away from a he was real drun one night and he was playing with a con of air duster and I guess, there's a chemical air duster tetraflourocarbon it's a very heavy molecule It displaces oxygen from the lungs that's how they get their high on different inhalants. It's accutally not really a high, it's more so just depriving the brain of oxygen.
You can think of the choking game that young boys play in high school which my brother did play O never played the chocking game I thought myself above such activities as a young queer kid growing up.
Yeah, that's how my brother passed away, I actually saw him passed away. I was at a neightbor's house hanging out with their kids and I had gotten a phone call from our dad, his dad. They were on vacation and he said I should go check up on Steve, I guess my brother had called his parents in kind of a frantic state and I came back to the house and were to sound like someone trying to start a car that wouldn't start, you know.
I was with the neighbor at the time and we ran around the corner of the house and we saw my brother there and he had a significant amound of brain damage from the oxygen deprivation already. I got int MMA after basketball so I kind of knew some of the signs of like CPE and when people get knocked out he had some of this going on right before he was dying right before he died. He died there once and then I guess they resisted him in the ambulance and he died a gun on the way to the hospital.
And you know it's funny, my brother was also pretty queer grown up but he was straight he always had beautiful girlfriends surprisingly. We were having conversation about two month before he died and he actually disclosed to me that there are some things he has never told anybody before and his family is Mormon. His mother was a convert into the Mormon religion and Mormons treat converts differently than they do people that are born as mormon. So my brother being born as mormon would spent a lot of time in this churc as a young boy actually away from his mother. And he told me he was sexually abused by the mormon, by someof the guys in this mormon church.
I the town where I grew up in the suburb of Chicago there was actually a higher up of a big mormon collection of churches thats in prison right now for molesting young boys.
I don't like religion, you know, my dad is now a Christian, my biological dad is a Christian. He is pretty devoted about it, too. He has been wandered from his faith and he has come back to it now he says he is a born-again Christian, he speaks to churches about how hard he had it growing up and I'm the evil cross-dressing drug addict that's not a Christian.
Yeah, I'm that's not the case, I'm mostly worried about myself. I will never go back to drugs, I will be honest it's hard for me to hold the job sometimes, maybe it's just the lige that I've live be growing up not working often and doing other things for money that paid a lot better than working.
So right now I'm most worried about myself as a traumatized person, for traumatized people. We can really be our own worst enemies, I mean we are in LA right now I mean you could look outside and see a lot of people that indeed their own worst enemy.
I don't want a normal job I don't want to be a worker be I want to find a way to help people or do something meaningful in the world and that's hard to do.
I volunteered a lot of women's shelter, domestic voilence homes since I've gotten sober because sometimes I feel like if my mom had a sage place to go growing up but I wouldn't have been as bad maybe She would have left my dad, not allowed her kids to be in the presence of a sadistic pedophiles.
He admitted to it all over camera actually he learned in the camera he kind of didn't confirm nor deny it first and I know a little bit about how these people work so, I had my phone rolling and I kept on pushing my accusations at him calling him a pedophile and eventually he leaned the camera and he said and so what get over it he said I did and he doesn't care and that's that I gave it to the authorities and they launched an investigation but I guess the authorities, we know how that goes, you know,
My childhood was, it was good and bad. I hear of some people's childhood they didn't have good on the table, constantly beating and neglected that wasn't really my childhood. My mother was around somewhat, my das was around someone in the day in the light, what people saw I was a well-taken care of kid... and I'm thankful for that I never went hungry, I wasn't beat for no reason but in the dark my das was getting a hold of me and doing some really really just pure evil. I don't have any words for it other than this was pure evil. This was even past pedophilia and having sex with a child this was sexual child torture, dilating me making fun of me... having sex with me. My dad had friend too, who. They would take me off to I think hotel rooms or maybe it was and the guy's house and just stripped me down, beat me, humiliate me, pinchi me and penetrate me. My mom eventually obviously found out I'd repressed a lot of these memories until I was in my teen years and what opened them back up for me I remember growing up I always had such a hard time going to the bathroom it hurt really bad going to the bathroom and my mom found out about this and she hated my dad we all kind of hated my dad but we had lived with him. Yeah, the abuse kind of stopped around the age of eight or nine from my recollection and I think my mom had threatened to call the police or what he was doing, and that put an end it from there - as for back as my memories go I remember he was being he was doing wrong things I would assume from infancy but I have a two-year-old in my life he's almost three, and I know what was going on when I was two or three. I remember quite a bit from being a kind so.
So it went on for quite some time I can even remember not visually recording but they would take audio recordings of me getting raped and just screaming bloody murder in these audio recordings.
I'd actually bit one of these pedophiles on the side of the face while I was getting molested once and I think my punishment for that is my dad took one of these audio recordings of me getting raped and he sat me down and he had me listen to them when I was just for four or five years old and I grew up hunting and stuff it sounded like someone was killing a rabbit over this audio recordings just gurgling screaming.
And I remember my dad was looking at me and laughing and I brought him the recordings and I set it on his desk. I was just a scared kid I don't know what was going on he looked at me and he kind of laughed and he says you don't like listen to that do you.
I like to play with those voice recording tapes I know if I talked into it I could play it back but it was an old school visual recording thing so you could play it in reverse too and it would kind of sound like weird sort of demonic thing. So my dad had given me these audio recording of me getting raped by growing men and the first time I listened to it my little kid brain I guess I was an intelligent kid I said well it must be in reverse because this just sounds like gurgling and I would play it both ways and it still kind of sounded the same that some of the harshest memories.
That I have and I don't have any understanging I guess sadism he was a sadist he liked hurting people and he liked watching all that so.
Yeah, I had an older sister, from my momeries I know... she didn't have there's somethings happening to her too. But I also remember my dad explaining to me that mom was a lot protective of my sister than she was of me. So I guess I'm not sure I knew a lot of bad stuff happened to me but I actually haven't been in contact with my older sister since about age of 12 or 11 I've only spoken a handful of word to her since then so.
The abuse stopped when I was around life 9 or 10 and I noticed ral quickly that both my parents were being exceptionally nice to me whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and I wasn't stupid I knew what was going o they were getting ready to have a divorce and both paties wanted custody of me.
Divorce happened when I was 12 and I actually choose to go with my dad, my mom was really angry woman she screamed a lot. She hit sometimesand my sister went with my mom. I choose to go with my dad simply because he was nicer tome and I had forgotten some of the harsher abuse I remember having to sleep with him and stuff but I didn't remember a lof of the sadist style behavior that come back when I was older and started having sex with people and like I said earlier it came back through me remembering my childhood and just it hurt so bad to go the bathroom and I thought that was normal it's I talked with other people, I talked with some of my girlfriends when I was 17 or 18 growing up and as far as my childhood was like with my dad and they told me that not normal and it just bad to a lot of investigating my childhood and these momeries slowly came back so.
But that time I had already found out what drugs were I grew up playing basketball so, I kept it pretty straight until about the age of 16. I put my frustrations into basketball and I was realy good at basketball. I mean I wasn't a very articulate high IQ player.
I was more the Dennis Rodman kind of Kevin Garnett. I was a mean basketball player and yeah, I could drink the ball at a young age. I'd get a lot of rebounds and I continued playing through high school but I had already started using drugs at that point and they started take their toll on me.
Yeah, I had met a best friend when I was 14 or 15. I already hated my dad at that point and I think he knew I hated him. I didn't even stay in my own house at that point I stayed at their house for most of the time.
My basketball uniforms were there, my school clothes were there. Yeah, I called this friend's mom "Mom" she was not my mom but she called me her son so. I kind of stayed with that family for most of my upbringing went real downhill with drugs after graduating high school. I started shooting heroin I started smoking crack I learned the layout of Chicago. I'm not familiar with the south side of Chicago. I'm familiar with the west side of Chicago, Garfield Park, Austin cicero and just learning street life. I was never an addict that went sick I always kid of I don't want to say I'm and intelligent addict but they are out there. We look at addicts and we think these people are stupid and a lot of them are but for some of these old drug addicts people that have been in the game for 10 15 years.
The amount of IQ they need to sustain their habit to not die to live this street life they are actually smarter than in my opinion they are smarter than a lot of working class people. It's just their habits and who they are. They choose to use that intelligence in all the wrong way and that was me in my earliy twenties I sold a lot of things allegedly and I used a lot of drugs I stopped using drugs when I was about 26 years old. I'm 29 now.
It's just likethe negative started to outweigh the postives I knew quite a few homeless people I had friends that started to go to prison for different things the first time I got clean it seems you know 50 60 70 times and every time I relapsed but I kept on trying and I got back into working out I got back into playing pick up basketball and at this point I've been sober about, you know, two and a half three years I don't have an exact date and there was a relapse about a year and a half ago with some hydrocodone they were from a doctor for a surgery but I didn't need them so.
Yeah, relationships I had a girlfriend for most of my drug addiction. I grew up with a lot of gender dysphoria too, I was a pretty queer kid growing up until I started getting made fun of it for like the long hair and the ear piercing so. I pushed that part of me away I got real tough I started lifting weights but the gender dysphoria was always there.
I came out as transgender kind of in the midst of my druy addiction and I had a hadful memories back in my head of childhood I just chose not to acknowledge them or really give them any weight as to who I was as a person right now sitting here I can remember there was a lot of weird stuff going on with my dad a lot of costumes I mean there was a puppy costume which was naked with a collar. There was a little girl costume, there was a little boy sailor costume that I would have to wear when I was these pedophiles whether it be my dad or acquaintances, friends of my dad.
So now I kind of attribute that to my gender dysphoria I'm not I actually don't have a lot of gender dysphoria at this moment here I'm happy being a guy. Maybe I'm a little androgynous some people say YES but some people say NO. But I came out as a transgender when I was 22 or 23 I had a boyfriend. He was really nice smart guy I can actually give him some of the credit for getting me sober I was a drug addict at the time he was sober he is an incredibly intelligent guy and there was time where I would relapse and he would still hang around with me.
Even I was having sex with him one night and another handful memories kind of come back and I was pretty devastated. It led me I could no longer have sex with him just act of having sex with another guy as a guy it was so traumatizing for me I remember one time I had tried because and I had been sober for a few weeks and I had tried having sex with my boyfriend and really quickly I mean, we started making out and I started shaking and I ran to the toilet I threw up.
I threw up a few times I was shaking was sweating and I started to realize that I'm a pretty traumatized person the drug addiction the dysphoria the transgender stuff. Thank G-d I was never incredibly sexually promiscuous and no STDS or anything like that so. I'm really thankful for all that but, I don't do anything very quickly but I started to realize that I wasn't transgender I have a girlfriend now I'm still friend with my boyfriend from that. He is really a smart really intelligent guy and he's been with me from the time I was drug addict till now I'm clean now.
Relationships I've had them with men live had them with women and I'm really thankfull that I ran into a guy like that could be that patient and stuff and.
Yeah, I'm still a traumatized person, I have a bit of depression and anxiety I don't take any medications for it I refuse to be on any doctor's medications or anything. I don't use any drugs any more I'm kind of pothead on an off I do smoke pot I try to keep it to responsible use and I even if I'm not smoking pot I usually take edibles before sleep because my dreams are pretty rough. Just some of the dreams that I have to relive while I'm sleeping. I'd prefer not to remember them when I wake up and weed can do that for me.
Yeah, I eat edibles before sleep almost every night because I don't want to remember my dreams a lot of opiates men, piate-based pain killers which kind of let into heroin I started sniffing at first I learned how to shoot up, so I was shooting a lot of heroin until I was 22 or 23. Allegedlly supposedly some people thought I sold a lot of coke. I never really had a taste for coke I had tried snorting it. I had tried shooting it was just not my stuff until one day I had tried smoking it freebased cocain and I actually kind of enjoyed that was when my drug addiction got really bad.
I started smokinga lot of crack with the dope. It only lasted for about six months unti I realized that this isn't sustainable.
And it wil ltake my life if it doesn't take myu life it will take my head and l'll just be left a shell of a person or l'll go to prison for one thing or another I had a few friends go to prison for drug-induced homicides and gun charges and I knew I didn't want that I was kind of in the world alone I had my so-called adoptive family as they call them they knew I was struggling not to the extent that I'm talking about now but Yeah, getting out of it wasn't easy like I said it took me 50 60 tries and constantly relapsing. But it took a lot of acknowleging my trauma that I went through as a kid. A lof of meditation, a lot of yoga and it hasn't been easy even these past couple of years I've had more momeries come back of what my dad was doing and I'm still sober through it now I guess I just found healthier ways to deal with it I play a lot of basketball again in different pick up leagues. I work out I read just a ton I'm an arid reader.
I have tried therapy I've tried not ot any real help I've tried therapists I had one rescheduling me on me a lot I had another one who was like really anti-gay anti-lgbt and I don't really feel comfortable being with her the best therapy that l've had is actually on meditation and yoga live had a few yoga teachers kind of take me under their wing and guide me through some of my PTSD and my flash back and just breathing stretching acknowledging that I'm a pretty messed up person and that's all right there's a lof of messed up people I mean there's homeless people that aren't messed up there's people that are homeless that do drugs that have bad normal childhood and there's other people that are succesful millionars that have had bad childhood similar to mine.
And a lot of us are messed up some of us acknowledge it some of us don't, and it's all right that for me that's been the best therapy is just yoga and meditation.
Well as far as my thoughts on that I mean I grew up being bisexual, I had girlfriends live had boyfriends at this point in life, I'm not sure if I'm only interested in my girlfriend I'm not interested in other women I'm a monogamous person that being said I'm laos not interested in other men. If my girlfriend wasn't around I still wouldn't be interested in men. I would be only be interested in women and as far as my gender I used to be quite a bit more androgyous quite a bit more feminine looking near the end of my drug addiction and now I'm not I mean I view gender as a spectrum I mean and it changes throught on life as close her sexuality.
So I think for must people having some sense of androgyny is healthy. I don't know if anybody, if you just want my opinion I don't know if anybody is transgender or is not transgender as I said, you know, I think gender is a spectrum I'm not out there to hate on the transgender community a call them mentally ill or anything. I don't think hold my any beliefs like that. I, as far as me dealing with some of my issues I think there was kind of a form of mastery involved with my childhood and my trauma that I went through and I had a boyfriend and I read a lot so I read that when something really really bad happens to you when you are a kid, two things can happen.
You will either never want to be put in that situation again You will be a tramatized person or as you grow up you will try to recreate it and relive it and you will probably re-traumatize yourself as a way to master what had happened to you as a kid.
And I see this everywhere I go, I mean I have more than one friend who is a trans woman who was sexually abused by her father when she was a little boy.
They remember it I have another trans woman friend how her mom will swear that the dad was sexually abusing her little boy who is now a woman.
And you know both of whose trans women have a lot of sex and I'm not even here to bash that you know, If that's what helps them live and helps them massive their trauma, you know, it is what it is.
I have no ill feeling in my heart towards anybody other than stutus and pedophiles. My way of dealing with it I guess there was form of mastery involved for a bit unitl I had some memories come back that were so harsh.
I just couldn't be with guys anymore and then I had a rally slow transition kind of back to where I'm now I lift weight I play basketball I paint my nails but I'm a guy I'm happy being a guy I'm only interested in women, that's my way of dealing with it.
The happiest I've been... No, the other family I had a brother, he passed way two years ago, about a year and a half ago. My happiest was just one seconde... 鼻かむ
with my brother He was also a drug addict. We saw eye to eye pretty much on everything I mean we were brothers. We could finish each other's sentences, he was with me through like the whole transgender stuff, too. I remember coming out to him, One day I started being a little more androgynous. He always knew I mean we had been friends sence we were 13 14 years old.
I told him on day that I think I'm transgender and he was right in the middle of talking about one of his favorite animes and I kind of interrupted him and just bluted it out.
And he looked at me and he was like, you know, you interrupted me, he didn't care at all he was just like we can talk about that later but I'm talking about his anime right now I don't even think we talked about it laster, you know, it was just how it was.
We kind of got sober together, we each took our own roads, relapsed separately, we'd gotten sober together the only issue was my brother was a drinker and with the drinking these was some xanax involved if you are familiar with drugs and brain chemistry drinking and xanax they hit the same receptors in the brain so, you can give an alcoholic and withdrawal xanax and it will get them right and conversely you can give a xanax addict alcohol and it will kind of keep them right somewhat much like heroin to pain pills and my brother had never really shook that monkey of dringking in xanax.
I never really played around with much xanax I was much more of a hardcore drug addict and my brother never smoked as much crack as I had smoked but he always had that monkey on his back and he started going downhill really bad about a year before he died I mean he had tried to quite xanax cold turkey he d the seizures
I remember getting waitting for him to get out of the hospital and he came out of the hospital and he was like a different person. I mean to anybody watching this if you're gonna play with drugs, don't even paly with xanax
And I always knew that as a young drug addict you can quite heroin. you can quite crack.
You can quite all these things and for the most part you will go bakc to being the person that you were when you started using drugs. xanax's and meth those two things are different stories. If you get far into those drug, you can get sober but the person that you once were, in my opinion, will be gone.
So my brother got out of the hospital and he was kind of a different person he was nervous all the time, He could barely hold a conversation I tried to be there for him but he always wanted to be alone and he had already had one kidney for drinking and drugs.
And I knew he was fooling around after he got out of the hospital with xanax and alcohol things and he ended up passing away from a he was real drun one night and he was playing with a con of air duster and I guess, there's a chemical air duster tetraflourocarbon it's a very heavy molecule It displaces oxygen from the lungs that's how they get their high on different inhalants. It's accutally not really a high, it's more so just depriving the brain of oxygen.
You can think of the choking game that young boys play in high school which my brother did play O never played the chocking game I thought myself above such activities as a young queer kid growing up.
Yeah, that's how my brother passed away, I actually saw him passed away. I was at a neightbor's house hanging out with their kids and I had gotten a phone call from our dad, his dad. They were on vacation and he said I should go check up on Steve, I guess my brother had called his parents in kind of a frantic state and I came back to the house and were to sound like someone trying to start a car that wouldn't start, you know.
I was with the neighbor at the time and we ran around the corner of the house and we saw my brother there and he had a significant amound of brain damage from the oxygen deprivation already. I got int MMA after basketball so I kind of knew some of the signs of like CPE and when people get knocked out he had some of this going on right before he was dying right before he died. He died there once and then I guess they resisted him in the ambulance and he died a gun on the way to the hospital.
And you know it's funny, my brother was also pretty queer grown up but he was straight he always had beautiful girlfriends surprisingly. We were having conversation about two month before he died and he actually disclosed to me that there are some things he has never told anybody before and his family is Mormon. His mother was a convert into the Mormon religion and Mormons treat converts differently than they do people that are born as mormon. So my brother being born as mormon would spent a lot of time in this churc as a young boy actually away from his mother. And he told me he was sexually abused by the mormon, by someof the guys in this mormon church.
I the town where I grew up in the suburb of Chicago there was actually a higher up of a big mormon collection of churches thats in prison right now for molesting young boys.
I don't like religion, you know, my dad is now a Christian, my biological dad is a Christian. He is pretty devoted about it, too. He has been wandered from his faith and he has come back to it now he says he is a born-again Christian, he speaks to churches about how hard he had it growing up and I'm the evil cross-dressing drug addict that's not a Christian.
Yeah, I'm that's not the case, I'm mostly worried about myself. I will never go back to drugs, I will be honest it's hard for me to hold the job sometimes, maybe it's just the lige that I've live be growing up not working often and doing other things for money that paid a lot better than working.
So right now I'm most worried about myself as a traumatized person, for traumatized people. We can really be our own worst enemies, I mean we are in LA right now I mean you could look outside and see a lot of people that indeed their own worst enemy.
I don't want a normal job I don't want to be a worker be I want to find a way to help people or do something meaningful in the world and that's hard to do.
I volunteered a lot of women's shelter, domestic voilence homes since I've gotten sober because sometimes I feel like if my mom had a sage place to go growing up but I wouldn't have been as bad maybe She would have left my dad, not allowed her kids to be in the presence of a sadistic pedophiles.
