The Pains of Youth

This probably would have been best suited as part of my Reflections series but these were memories that hadn't surfaced until recently.  My brain managed to block them out for a very, very long time.  After sharing this with a D/s friend last night, I figured I may as well pour it out under the anonymity of the internet for all to see.  Nothing quite like feeling awkward and vulnerable :)

Writing this will probably embarrass the hell out of me, but I'm better off getting it out of my system.

First off, I should probably start this out with 2 tidbits of info:
1. My adopted father was raised in a Puritanical religion that treated the Old Testament of the Bible like it was law.  Basically, the longer you lived, the more certain it was that you were going to hell.  Listen to music other than church hymns, bad.  Have sex for anything other than procreation, bad.  Any impure thoughts, bad.   While he converted to a different religion later on, this basically meant that the majority of "father to son" talks never happened, nor could I ever ask about anything.

2. By the time I was 4 years old I had already experienced just about every racial insult imaginable.  I was constantly made fun of for my facial features, skin color, and so on.  I am also not circumcised.  Also at 4 years old, a kid at my pre-school saw my penis in the bathroom and made fun of it.  He also announced it in front of all the other kids while I was present.  This would haunt me for most of my life.

When I look back, I realize that M was my sexual awakening.  You can read about her in Reflections: Part 1B, Part 1X, and Part 1XX if you are interested.  I didn't leave near any other kids around my age so I was fairly isolated unless I made plans well in advance.   Also, I was a late bloomer into puberty.  While I was always muscular and athletic, I was short and due to being asthmatic, what I could do as cardio exercise was somewhat limited.  I got a bit chubby before my growth spurt.  By the time I was the age when M started tying me up, I was already an emotional mess, feeling like some outcast but still attempting to win approval from my parents.  I was top in my class in grades and one of the best athletes in my class, excelling in baseball, basketball, and soccer (football didn't start until later).  I was also constantly bombarded with racial insults and didn't receive much approval at home.

By the time I had my first contact-based erection with M, I had already figured that no girls would ever be interested in someone who was fat, ugly, different, and with a weird penis.  She always showed interest in me.  She became my sex symbol, the dream that I didn't think I could ever have.  I had mentioned once that M hit puberty early... the last few times she tied me up she was over a foot taller than me.

I believe I started masturbating when I was around 12.  I don't really remember.  To be honest, I didn't even realize I was masturbating.  When I thought about M, I would rub myself through the top of a comforter.  I believe I was probably stimulating the glans through the foreskin.  It was so different from what masturbation was supposed to be, I didn't even know that's what I was doing.  In an attempt to blend in I had all sorts of porno mags and the like by the time I was that age.  I could look through the pages and feel nothing.  When I thought about M, I felt something.  We were in the same school for much of this time.  I got watch her blossom into a beautiful woman.  She was tall, blonde, athletic, had a killer body, and still maintained the friendly and outgoing personality that she always had.

The problem was that I really had no idea how to understand the emotions that were brewing inside of me... how all the self-hatred and disgust with myself would eventually play out.  I just knew when I thought of M I felt happy and it made me want to touch myself.  Where I realize things went askew is that I didn't think about M naked.  I didn't think about sticking my penis inside of her or grabbing her breasts.  I thought about M tying me up and mounting me, holding me down and telling me not to talk.  It always came back to those events and often to the more extreme days.

The most extreme case I wrote about in depth in Part 1B, when M bound me and put another girl's coat on me backwards with my arms pinned inside instead of through the sleeve-holes.  M wasn't a girlie girl.  She wasn't really a tomboy, just athletic.  Her clothing was mostly practical but still attractive.  The coat she chose to imprison me in (out of the 5-6 to choose from) was from a girlie girl.  It was frilly and trimmed with fur.

After the encounter, my sister and the girl whose coat it was were mortified that I had worn it... like I chose to wear it.  My mother reamed me out for it as well.  I felt really ashamed.  When I told them that M made me do it, they piled it on and I felt even more ashamed.  That shame would carry over with every successive interaction.

This must really be where it started... rubbing myself while thinking about M doing things to me that made me feel ashamed.  That was the only way I knew how to do it... well, the only way I wanted to do it.  By the time I got a bit older I realized that my sexual wiring had been severely fucked up.  I kept this a secret and just hated myself for being so different.  When I saw M I could wave, but I couldn't speak around her.  I wanted to be with her but I was too embarrassed with who I was.

When my parents divorced my father's mild violence toward me (a punch here or there) turned into heavy violence.  I became a ball of ticking rage that would fly off the handle about almost anything.  I drove away friends.  My father had a prominent role in the community and that led to bullying at school.  My best friend ditched me because I wasn't cool enough to hang out with.

I finally snapped one day after my mother belittled me again and I just started downing bottles of pills.  They tried to hold me down but I was stronger now, I broke free, punched and kicked through a few walls and windows, and ended up shrieking and bawling in a heap in the yard.  I wanted to die.  I ended up vomiting up blood and most of the pills.

The next few years I was forced to take meds and into therapy.  Neither went anywhere.  I was still top of my class in grades but now that I was a foot shorter than most of my classmates, I was still a very good athlete, but no longer dominant as I had been before.  This evaporated my relationship with my father even more.  I hated everyone and everything, hating myself most of all.  The meds ended with another overdose attempt... on the meds.  I wasn't aware that they were designed specifically to not be able to kill someone who tried that.  Another vomit-fest followed.  I learned to "fake it" from then on.  Appearing well enough to get people to leave me alone.

By this time I was masturbating regularly, both in the "old way" and in the "normal way," but I still could only think about M... or someone else in M's role.  This galvanized my self-hatred above all.

Finally, my growth spurt hit.  I didn't get very tall (5'7") but no one could call me fat anymore.  Everything pretty much came together at once and my body became a wrecking machine... a densely packed force of bulk and muscle.  This made me interesting again to my father as I was being scouted by the varsity football and baseball coaches when I was still in Jr. High.  It came crashing down when a freak football injury in the final 2 minutes of a hopeless game cost me everything.  My foot almost got torn off and I had complete ligament damage throughout the foot, ankle, and lower leg as well as severe damage to the nerves and cartilage.  Surgery wasn't available for that type of injury at that time and they treated it improperly.  I rehabbed as best I could because that was what was expected of me if I wanted to earn parental love.  I came back bigger and even stronger... but my heart wasn't in it anymore.  I finally stood up to my father and told him I quit.  This led to a brawl of rather epic proportions, but he wasn't able to beat me into submission anymore.

The emptiness that followed was a new experience.  I already hated myself, but now I had no clue who I was.  My long-standing identity was broken.  I fell in with the drug crowd.  For the next year and a half I missed maybe 3-4 days without getting messed up on something for the majority of the day.  It was when the town ran dry for a spell and I ended up having seizures that I bit the bullet and suffered through the withdrawls.  I turned to booze to ease the burden.  This was harder since I couldn't be drunk all the time so I made up for it with binges when I could.  As my tolerance built up I was soon downing a Liter of 80-100 proof hard alcohol over 2-4 hours in order to get sufficiently numb.  When this wasn't enough it became drinking more of it, or drinking it faster, or both.  I started blacking out.  People started making sure I was still breathing and I was becoming a burden.  I was still top in my class... that was part of the faking it that I never let go of.  I was a mess.  It came to a head on a night where I managed to overdose on codeine and get alcohol poisoning by drinking 750mL of bourbon in an hour on an empty stomach after taking enough codeine to kill most people.  I woke up in the bathroom 20 hours later in a mess of dried vomited blood.  By 17 I was an alcoholic recovering drug addict who hated everything about himself.

I was no longer masturbating about M.  She was sufficiently out of my league by now.  I kept on going with the things that M did to me and continued to feel ashamed about it.

I had a bit of a wake up call at some point.  I had 8 friends die in 2 years from everything from suicide to being killed by drunk drivers.  After the last one died from anorexia/depression/overdose, I got my shit together and sobered up.  I was no good to anyone (even though people thought I was the life of the party).  I made a decision to change.  Even though I couldn't love myself I knew I could make an impact on the lives of others... a positive one.  I knew I had been through hell emotionally and had managed to somehow get through it without dying.  I sobered up completely.  I started reaching out to people I knew that were hurting.  I was their shoulder.  Their listening ear.  I gave advice where I could.  I was there for them... 24 hours a day if needed.

I continued this path.  I got used a lot.  I got taken advantage of.  If I ever fell in love with someone I was rejected.  I buried my own feelings.  I had become someone who was there for everyone but a person that no one cared enough about to keep around once life got better.  I steered the course.  I finally found love at 18 and we had plans to marry but it fell apart when her emotional condition took a severe turn for the worse.  I steered the course.  I kept failing.  I kept revising, I kept improving myself.  I still didn't love myself, but I kept on trying.  Apparently this was my own training to become a submissive.

Eventually I met K (Reflections part 2).  I took a chance on a woman who would probably die because that's the type of person I wanted to be... someone who would be there through good times and bad... I would be there until the end.  It was through K that I learned that I did have worth and I finally started having that feeling some refer to as "self-esteem."  I finally felt like it was a little bit okay to masturbate fantasizing about being tied up by a woman.  It took half my life to get there but I finally did.  The 8 years of intense suffering through sobriety finally paid off as well.  I was the type of man she could love.

As I look back upon what I have just written... it's a big mess... but I guess that's sort of symbolic of how I was over that span.  I don't know if reading this will benefit anyone, but I feel better about things now that I have written it.