Welcome to Gaia! ::

This might be a pretty long-winded rant, but you don't have to respond to it. I just need all this crap out of my system.

To start off... several years ago, my mom and stepdad got divorced. I'd just recently turned 17 and was getting ready to go into my senior year of high school. Guess who had to move to an entirely different part of the state in middle-of-nowhere hicksville? Yep. Me. I ended up in a graduating class of 25 people, including myself and 4 foreign exchange students.

So shortly after that, instead of going right to college like I would have liked to do, I'm forced into a job, because I'm still living with my mom and she demanded my share of the rent. I got a job at a Sam's Club (after moving into the nearest large-ish city), and worked there a grand total of 6 months before getting on the wrong side of a coworker who was buddy-buddy with the management. After that, I manage to get random jobs through a temp service until early 2006, when my mom gets fed up with me.

What does she do? She cons me into going to live with my dad in another state. I agree, because it sounded better than trying to limp along in a crap economy at the time. Ehh... turns out I shouldn't have ever listened to her. My dad was verbally abusive to me (I don't care what you think about verbal abuse... being called a fat lying b***h and told (while starting to feel suicidal) that your own father would watch you bleed to death before saving you from a suicide attempt is abuse, plain and simple).

Aside from the verbal abuse, my dad treated me like a slave in his house, and expected me to find a job while living at least 15 miles from ANYWHERE without a decent car and without a properly working phone. No. I said screw it and packed as much as I could into my car, and headed out for my girlfriend's place in CT.

Now, somewhere around New York, my car's transmission decided it was gonna die. I managed to push it in second gear until I got where I was going, and it wasn't gonna work anymore. The following events might not have happened to the extent that they did if the transmission hadn't crapped out.

See, my girlfriend's mother was abusive. She tolerated me for a while, but her husband was dying of cancer and her son was (still is) a spoiled rotten brat with a god complex. Her husband was the only reason I was allowed out there in the first place, and when he died... uhm... yeah. Me and my girlfriend both were trying to get me a job (she can't work because of severe back problems), but what it all boiled down to was this: everything was too ******** far for me to walk to, and there was no way in hell I could rely on my girlfriend's mom for transportation, because she wasn't reliable at all, and wasn't willing to go out of her way for me.

Then the b***h stopped mail going to the house, and cut off phone and internet. There was literally no means for us to communicate with the outside world, and winter was coming up pretty damn fast. We looked into shelters, but they were all full and couldn't take more people. On top of all this, my girlfriend's mom and brother were going out to eat every single night and leaving me and my girlfriend in a house with no food. We went a week without eating anything more substantial than saltine crackers.

And then the dogs. >.< See, my girlfriend's family used to train attack dogs, and one of the dogs they kept locked up in the basement had gone through this training. It was common knowledge that she would try to attack anyone she didn't know, and my girlfriend's mom started letting it run free around the house... trapping me in my girlfriend's room and scared for my life.

Finally, she pulls this eviction s**t on me with a three day warning. Remember the suicidal thoughts I was feeling earlier? They kick in full-force and I swallowed 15 extra-strength tylenol. I spent the night in the hospital, drinking liquid charcoal. From the hospital, arrangements are made for me to go back to my mom, with only one suitcase and a carry-on full of stuff.


And then I'm right back where I started, with all of ******** 2007 ahead of me. I slept on the floor until April, when I finally got a secondhand bed and a job at the zoo. From there, I get a job at Meijer (think Wal-Mart, but with a union), which is where I'm at right now - getting paid minimum wage and with not enough hours in the week to make enough just to get by, and my mom bitching at me once more about how I need to give her money that I don't have... and not even caring that I was abused, because I had the chance to avoid it and, in her mind, I could've walked out at any time.


*sigh* There's so much more that I didn't put in there, and probably couldn't explain completely if I did. This is the condensed version of the last four and a half years of my life... let's not get into things further back than that, because that's a whole other rant in and of itself.