Revenge never is the answer.

Stanman May Your Light Forever Shine

dark, but you're speaking for the victim, and thats a good thing.

Dorothycolleen

/

A Nice ride around Manchester to finish off the Sparkle weekend.

As I felt it, was a way to escape my own torment, not punish others for tormenting me.

Those that hurt me, those that practised their 'dark psychiatric arts' on me, could never be 'punished' by me. I was too weak and vulnerable, they were omnipotent and strong. I had no weapons and no defences save that of striving for survival, mostly by simply trying, (endlessly trying) to understand and find an answer to that seemingly endless question, why, why! Why!!

In the end, in those first six years, I simply closed up, I became a 'nothing' no multiple personalities to hide different fears and abuses, no self harming to prove I was ready to die or demonstrate my unworthiness, no outward manifestations of anything for I had learned that showing no response caused my abusers (The doctors!) the greatest discontent when their conceited ideas appeared not to work.

At that time I never even contemplated suicide for I had never heard of the notion of killing myself to escape from hell. Maybe I was just too young or too thick to realise. Additionally, I had no idea that there were ways to kill oneself without excruciating pain. In the end, I just withdrew. Six years of NOTHINGNESS! Until the age of twelve.

Then, somebody, some distant, all powerful and anonymous authority decided that I should be moved out of the 'ward' (prison) and placed somewhere else. I think it was because it was too expensive to keep me there with no apparent hope of a 'cure' but I have no proof at all of that being the reason. There could have been any one of a dozen reasons and all of them beyond my understanding.

At twelve I was transferred to a borstal without a court order, without having ever commited a crime and there I slowly realised that silence was a certain route to injury and probable death. Even then, I didn't want to die. I had not yet the wit to realise that dying was a surefire escape. The incomprehension of adolescence was still with me and the will to live still strong for I had not yet come to terms with puberty and all the complications that would bring. Up until puberty, life for me was cruel, brutal and simple ... eat, sleep, and defaecate, just like some lower life form.

However I eventually learned that in Borstal, no responses would precipitate inexplicable violence and I soon realised that communication was expected of me. The self imposed silence that had served in the psychiatric unit now served to endanger me. Sticks and stones do work or they kill. Between twelve and fifteen I wasn't yet in the right frame of mind to die.

Thoughts of suicide did not arrive until I was out of the cauldron of care and actually experiencing a degree of normality as a deck boy on a merchant ship trading between Liverpool and the Eastern Seaboard of America including the great lakes.

It was then that I began to lose hope and finally tried to drown myself in the St Laurence just as the ice was beginning to form.

Even then I failed dismally for it was a pathetically, cowarly, half-hearted attempt. I was left feeling guilty that I had failed some decent men like the Captain, the mate and the boatswain, who had invested time and care to give me a chance at something.

I realised I was a totally stupid, selfish cunt and that served to destroy what little self esteem I had started to accrue.

It was fully nine more years before I was able to stand for the first time on my own two feet. Nine years of living on the same ship, treating it as a refuge and safe haven until she was sold to the Greeks and I was forced to move on.

No ... suicide only serves the sucessful participant. Everything else is just a bloody mess!

I considered it a couple of times in my later teens but it never came to anything for I was, at last, beginning to garner some self respect.

Suicide sucks!!