Comment on How to stay sane in a hostile environment that you can't get out of?

• bizarroland@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  There was a time during my teenage years where my parents had basically imprisoned me in the house for no fucking reason.

  I was going to a private Christian school, and I had fallen a little behind in my studies. Normally, an adult would say, you have to catch up this year, or else bad things will happen.

  Instead my parents threw away everything I owned except for five pairs of clothes and made me do hard manual labor picking up rocks and carrying them around the yard and digging up tree stumps with a dull pickaxe for a year and change until I graduated as the valedictorian of my high school a year ahead of the rest of my grade.

  There were times when I would look at the pickaxe in my hand and remember that I was 15 years old and that if I took that pickaxe in a fit of rage and drove it through my stepdad’s skull and murdered him with the strength that I had gained from lifting, 90-150 pound boulders and carrying them all over half acres at a go, that I would be out of prison and have a sealed record and a normal life by the time I was 21.

  The only thing that got me through that was the knowledge that once I had graduated, that was the end of it, and I would never have to deal with that shit again, and even though I still have issues about it, I did make it through, somehow, some way.

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