Pure Hate

Wow, this is really long. If you are looking for help or advice or just some things to think about, read the last paragraph or 2. Most of this is my life story, enjoy.

I’m Ben. I’m 17 years old, and I live in Dayton, Ohio. Well, where do I start? I was born in Dayton in one of the worst hospitals in the state. When I was a baby, we lived in a terrible neighborhood on the southeast side of Dayton. My older brother, Matt has has high-functioning Autism. All my life he has been my best-friend. You couldn’t split us apart. He was the one that taught me how to walk and talk and make friends. When I started school, I was the youngest in the class because my Mom put me in the same grade as my brother so I could look out for him and help him. At that point in my life, my parents had just split. The earliest childhood memory I have is my Father punching my Mom in the face in the car. I still have nightmares about it sometimes. When I got into elementary school, I was less shy and people seemed to like me. I made friends fast at my new school in a southern suburb of Dayton. I was 5 or 6 years old. I hadn’t seen or talked to my Father in 2 years at that time. I remember praying with my babysitter to God that my daddy would come home. I did that every night for 4 years. In 3rd grade my Father came back into the picture. He was the best, I looked like my Dad and talked like him. Everyone that knew my Dad use to call me “Little Craig”. Well, I started playing football that year and I loved it, football was my everything. I wasn’t very good, but I had the size and the drive to become a better player. I have been violent all my life, I have been fighting with my friends, enemies, and family since I was 4 years old. The two things that my Dad taught me were how to shake a man’s hand and how to fist fight. He always bragged about fights that he had been in, in the past. I idolized my Father, I wanted to prove to him that I was tough enough and bad enough to be called his son. I went around the neighborhood with my brother alot, we played with other kids most of the time. People use to pick on my brother Matt for his Autism. They called him a freak and loser and weirdo. It use to make my brother cry and he would run home. That made me so upset. One day, our next door neighbor called my brother a ****** and my brother started crying. I picked up the hockey stick that we were playing with, and came up behind the kid and smashed him with the stick. His mom chased my brother and I out of the yard hitting me with a broom. I was so proud of myself, I told my Dad the whole story and he said “that’s my boy!”. I loved the recognition that violent behavior brought me. People feared my brother and I. 5th grade was when everything started going down-hill. I had gained alot of weight that year, with me starting puberty and everything. I started getting acne at that time also. Kids at school would pick on me for those thing. Even my own friends started doing it. My self-esteem was destroyed. I started to become clinically depressed and started flunking out, in school.

Middle school was the worst for me. 6th grade was hard, my grades were slipping, my self-esteem was super low, I had very few friends, and I started to not care about anything really. That year was my first suicide attempt. I went to an acute care facility for a week after the counselor at school had found out about it and called my Mom and told her. Acute care’s didn’t do anything for me. They were just a get-away in my mind. Well, that summer I tried again and went back to the same acute care. Then in 7th grade, I started hanging out with all of the bad kids in school. The kids that were doing drugs, fighting, gang-banging, and just didn’t care were all my friends. I got into graffiti art that year because of my older brothers (half brothers from my fathers previous marriages). They both painted graffiti in the 90’s and early 2000’s on the West Coast. That year I tried killing myself 2 times. Both resulted in acute cares, one was different. It didn’t do anything. The summer was okay, I was grounded alot that summer. In 8th grade, I was still playing football, but I wasn’t as into it as I use to be. That would be my last year playing football. That year I had no suicide attempts, things were looking up for me. I was doing decent in school too. My parents were still skeptical of my intentions. They didn’t trust me at all. But, High School was right around the corner.

High School, haha. Freshman year started out okay. I had plenty of friends from the years before. But I ran into an old friend in my Art 1 class that I hadn’t seen in 4 years. Blake, had a step-brother that was on my neighbor’s baseball team. My neighbor and I were close, he played on the football team I did, and his Dad was the head coach. We talked to the land lord of the house we lived in because he owned the house next door and convinced him to let them move in to the house next to us for a really cheap price. Anyway, Blake came to a game that I was at in County Line, Ohio. I don’t know where that is but I know it is in the middle of no where. There was an abandoned elementary school next to the baseball fields that we snuck into and skateboarded in. It was a fun day. Blake was a year older than me, he was in the same art class as me because he didn’t pass freshman year. He was Straight Edge. He told me all about sXe (straight edge) and the way they lived and acted. It was a brotherhood, a sense of family and belonging. I claimed sXe a few weeks later. Straight Edge was my life, I didn’t smoke/chew, drink, do drugs, or have sex. I started going to hardcore shows in Dayton and meeting other Straight Edge guys. Most were older than me, so I was referred to as Lil’ Ben or Baby Ben. I loved it, my friends and I would go around smashing whoever disrespected us or sXe. I got Blake and another one of my best friends, Matt, into graffiti. Matt lived on the other side of town, he was crazy. He loved to steal, fight, and fuck shit up. We all started hanging out together. One, because we were all straight edge, and two, because we all loved to fight, steal, and fuck shit up. We all started stealing spray paint or markers or food or really anything we wanted. We would go on shop-lifting trips and have competitions on who could get out with the most stuff. We were crazy, I am so lucky that I didn’t get caught. That point in my life, I had given up all hope on God or a higher being, given up in school, basically, just gave up on life. I didn’t care at all about anything. I had been in mass fights that year, I started losing respect from my old friends and from my teachers and most importantly, my family. At the end of Freshman year I fell in love. Her name was Angelina, she was my everything. I don’t know really how to explain love. If you weren’t ever in love, you wouldn’t ever know what it feels like. It’s the one thing that can put you on top of the world and you will never come down. It’s also the thing that will make you wish for death. She crushed me. I had ran away from home right before because my parents told me that she would never come over again. I was still a run away when she split with me. I didn’t want to do anything for about 2 days. I sold out, which means I smoked/chewed, drank, or done drugs while I still had the Straight Edge claim. Most of my sXe friends turned their backs on me because I sold out. I got beat up by the same people that a week before were calling me their dude and their friend. Blake and Matt were still my friends. They were all I needed. I came home about 2 weeks after I ran and I was sent to an acute care in Cincinnati. I hate acute cares. That summer, I was grounded for almost all of it. It was terrible. Sophomore year was worse. I had a terrible reputation at my High School. No friends really, and I was tormented daily, seeing my love holding hands with another guy. I wanted to just go up and beat the hell out of the guy, but I told myself, if it makes her happy, then she should do it. I started smoking weed and drinking that year. I started hanging out with dealers and heads alot. I did coke that year and my parents found out, so I ran. I was gone for almost a month. I was out getting high, painting, stealing, fighting. Just out doing crazy things. I got arrested and was booked at the station and my parents came and got me. I went into another acute care and then I was sent to a residential facility.

Belmont Pines was hell. It felt more like jail then a treatment center. There were fights everyday, and staff was crooked as hell. I was told to beat a kid up or I would be on consequence, I did it. In my mind, if it meant me getting out and going back home, I was going to do it. I got out in July of 2010. I was restricted in many ways at home that summer. When school started again, I decided to go back to my High School and try to get my stuff together. It didn’t work. 2 months into the school year I ran away again. I lived on the street or house hopped all the way through December. My life became a massive shop-lifting, drinking, smoking, fighting, and sex spree. On Christmas and New Years, I cried myself to sleep. I felt so worthless, I was wanting to end everything. On January 3rd of 2011, I came home. My parents grounded me and said they were done with me. My brother was so hurt and angry at me he barely spoke to me. It must have been embarrassing to tell people at school that he was my older brother. I often heard rumors about how I was such a terrible person and my brother was so perfect and nice. I hated hearing that, it made me feel worse. Not for myself, but for my family. In March, I was drinking in my room and cutting myself and all other things like that. I came down stairs one morning in mid-March and told my parents that I needed help, real help. I explained to them that I was extremely suicidal and anxious. I had to wait 3 weeks but I was sent to Meridell Achievement Center in Liberty Hill, Texas.

Meridell wasn’t fun. I was over a 1000 miles away from home, I had 2, 20 minute phone calls each week, and I was only able to see one family member once per month (that was because of our insurance, not Meridell). I was homesick for about 3 weeks. I flipped out in therapy many times in there. The staff tested you alot, the were assholes to you to see if you would blow up or get violent or upset. It’s really hard to watch someone get called out in front of people they don’t know and then watch them flip, and you just have to sit there. I made many good friends in Meridell. I mean, if you were locked up in a place that you didn’t want to be in, you were talking about deep deep problems and things that troubled you in your life, and you were with them 24/7 for months on end, wouldn’t you be really close too? The guys in Meridell were like my brothers. I still call some of the guys that I was in with that are out now and talk to them about problems an ask them for advice. They do the same to me. I was in Meridell for exactly 100 days. Yeah, there were times in Meridell that I wanted to kill myself or kill everyone else, but there is always another option. You don’t have to run up in hit someone who is talking crap, a simple “fuck you” and walking away does the trick. Suicide is a touchy subject, everyone’s situation is different. What I didn’t realize and I don’t think others realize is, people do love you. People do care about you and how you feel. It may seem like they don’t or it may seem like you are a waste of life, but you aren’t. Everyone makes mistakes, correcting them and living right makes you a good person. Who gives a fuck about what anyone thinks about you? You are the one that has to decide “Am I a good person?'” or “Is what I’m doing right now, is it really worth it?”. I mean, I know that alot of people are going to read this and think that I don’t understand or I’m just bullshitting you. The truth is, 5 months ago, I was in the same spot all of you are in right now. You have to want to progress and do something about your depression or anger. Yeah, it’s a normal thing to get depressed or angry or anxious, but when it gets to the point where it is effecting you negatively, something needs to be done. Talk to a doctor or therapist or parent or friend/friends parent. Its awkward and hard to talk about problems with people you don’t really know or trust but it does help to talk about your feelings and thoughts. So what if you have to go somewhere to get help? Would you rather take a few months off of your shitty life, away from friends, family, drama, and bullshit to get better and know how to deal with problems for the rest of your life or just say”fuck it” and end it all. If you kill yourself, you are cheating yourself out of future happiness. Your future kids, won’t exist. Holidays with the family, spent wishing you were there. Friends, constantly thinking about how they could have helped you and feeling guilty for not helping as much as they could have. That car or house or whatever that you wanted to fix up or remodel, sits and rots. And you, left your family and friends scarred forever. You think people are going to miss you when you kill yourself, and you are right, they will. You aren’t going to be able to see it though. When you die, you don’t come back to life, this isn’t a movie or a cartoon. This is life, people play for keeps. Just because you are going through a hard time right now, doesn’t mean you will be for the rest of your life. Yeah, getting hurt, fucked over, left, forgotten, abused isn’t right. No one deserves to be in the suicidal state of mind, no one. I wouldn’t wish the biggest fuck-up loser bum to be suicidal. It just isn’t right. I have lost people to suicides and I still think about them daily. I wasn’t even close to them but you just always think, “Fuck, what could I have done to help?”. The answer is, nothing. You can give someone a gun, but it’s their choice to pull the trigger. You can only help someone who wants to help themselves. No one in society that isn’t close to you is going to try to help you more than you want to help yourself. There is this thing that I learned about in Meridell, they are called thinking errors. Psychologists have done studies that show that thinking errors are the most effective ways to treat a depressed/bi-polar/anxious person. They sound dumb as hell and you are going to want to say that’s B.S., but they really do make you stop and think about what you are doing. I hated them in Meridell, but now that I am out, I use them daily. The stop me from avoiding problems and “sweeping them under the rug” and getting into a depressed state of mind. The longer you avoid your problems, the bigger they become, and the worse they get. I am going to post a link with the thinking errors list at the bottom of this post if you are interested. Check it out, try it. What do you have to lose? And for anyone that is Actively Suicidal, I will post the suicide hotline number at the bottom of this post. Please just hold on, things get better, you have to want to get better and take the initiative to do something about it, if you do that, you will see better days. Trust me, I am in my better days now. 5 months ago, I was where you are. JUST TRY!

Here is a list of the main thinking errors, if you are interested in others, google it.

http://www.kmolnar.com/Thinking_Errors.html

National Suicide Hot-Line

1-800-273-8255

Life goes on, why spend your time feeling like shit when you can enjoy it? You only have one life, don’t cut it short because of a bad few months or few years. You have plenty months ahead of you if you keep hanging in there, good and bad. No one ever said that this life was going to be easy. If you read all of this, thank you for giving me time to talk and listening. I hope that this info helped you or made you think about some things. Hang in there! It gets better!