The Life Changing Event

The purpose of this writing is to inform whoever is reading it (you) of my personal experiences and struggles that I endured growing up, a lot of these experience and struggles I tried to handle alone and I didn’t know how to reach out and share them with people. This led me into isolation and I lacked real human connection for a certain amount of time. I believe that in experiencing isolation is what drove me to write this and the many others pieces I’ve written.

I want to clearly state that everything I’ve written is from my own perspective and is what i personally experienced. Honesty it’s caused me a lot of anguish and heartache going through it but what’s really done the damage is keeping locked inside; it has been a difficult burden to carry all by myself.

I know every single person in my family experienced something different and has a different perspective of this story and if something is written about you don’t take it personally it’s in the past. I would also like to mention that this is the best way for me to capture this story as I feel if I verbally tried to explain it, I wouldn’t do it the justice it deserves.

So I’ve done my best to summarize it and piece it all together and I feel it will give you an insight into the life I’ve lived. Let’s Begin...

We grew up on a 70+ acre farm near Garfield and everything seemed reasonably normal growing up except for the usually issues most families experience like issues with money, fights between siblings and so on. There were the more unusual ones like my Dad’s mental breakdown but he was under a lot of stress from the farm and was on medication to help him cope.

My brother and Dad did have their conflict which sometimes got physical. My older sister did start to rebel from an early age but Dad and Mum didn't know what the root cause was. But other than this everything seemed reasonably normal. On the other side are my good memories with family and friends that I cherish. Memories like playing games on our consoles, doing things outside like playing with fire and other mischief kids usually get up to.

There are too many good memories to mention. It wasn't all bad. But the issues with-in my family started to arise when we moved and this is when the true isolation for me personally began at the age of 13. I remember feeling a pain in my chest (grief) that made it hard to breath. I believe this was because of Jasmine, loss of friendships, struggles at school and certain traumas that occurred to us kids on the farm with the old man that lived at the back, he slept on a mattress in a toilet block.

He used to live in a house in front of the toilet block but it was run down, in the house he kept women and children’s clothing. He had a lot of creepy and suggestive things in his possession including naked pictures of people, a gun, a large pile of VB cans near his rundown house and many weird statues. He basically lived in filth. Originally he was from Germany but moved over to Australia during the time of the war, my parents thought that he was just a drunk and a passive man that escaped from the war but in fact he was very sadistic and had hidden motives. He led us to believe that he was a prisoner in one of the concentration camps during the war.

I myself have no memory of these traumatic events but the fact my two sisters do says it all, at times it has driven my mind crazy and I’ve gotten lost in thought about it all. The information I’m about to lay out before you will help paint a clearer picture of how they are linked to me in some way. I collapsed one day in Mum’s arms when I was around the age of three, mum told me later on that I had ran into her arms she was sitting down on the back step, she could see the desperation and fear in my face from this time on she noticed a change in my personality.

I developed speech issues, lost my voice and demonstrated some odd behavior of fear when put in certain situations (e.g. I was at a swimming carnival when I was a child and I hid under a table out of fear so I didn’t have to compete I was under it for a while, I couldn’t tell you why I reacted like this) before this experience my nickname was turbo Mick. This was a life changing event that I believe altered the path I would journey down.