The Story Of My Life in Order to Change My Life

Hello citizens of the Internet! I hope you are having a good day/night. The start of this story comes with a disclaimer to explain how this tale will be scripted. I will be talking about every member of my family without mentioning their name out of respect. If you know about my interactions with each member you will know me and that will help you relate to my struggle and hardships. There is a tl;dr if you need a summary. Now let me introduce myself. My name is Stefan Jeanpierre, a 21-year-old Haitian male, that lived a majority of his life in Stafford, VA. I currently reside in America’s toilet, Boca Raton, Fl. I am a passionate and avid music auditor (https://open.spotify.com/user/1231782294). This same passion goes into the video games I play daily. If I didn’t have these things growing up I’m afraid I wouldn’t be typing this story today. My biggest dream these days is to acquire freedom from my parents’ home and become independent. Another person that shares the same aspirations is my wonderful sister. My younger sister has been my best friend and confidant since birth. She is two years apart from me, so it wasn’t a problem for us to be close. I trust her with almost everything going on in my life because her upbringing was so like mine in that we constantly felt like shit. We shared feelings of worthlessness and abandonment brought by our parents when they scrutinized how we were so much worse then our friends growing up. If we did anything wrong it was, “Dylan wouldn’t do that” or “Cedric and Celine don’t fight like you guys do”. They would assume that everyone around us was perfect and that our bickering or play fights were more serious then they appeared. One event that I can’t help to think about when I’m with my sister was in 2006. We were at a family party and I got slapped by this girl because I was being an ass (it was well deserved lol) so I started to cry because I didn’t know what else to do. On the car ride home, my dad asked me why I looked like I was crying. I told him the story and his reaction included grabbing and squeezing my sister’s leg with the intention of hurting her. He also spanked her asking “Why did you not protect your brother when he was crying! What is wrong with you!”. That moment started the definition of who my father would become as I grew up. As we grew up, I went from being mentally weak to strong and for my sister it was vice versa. She is currently severely depressed which is the result of several things. The first one comes from being abused from our cousin/adopted brother Lucino (I used his name because he is shit beneath my shoe at this point). He lived with us for a year and the whole time the three with us were together he was sexually harassing her. I'm not sure how old I was but I know I was too young to remember that he even being so oblivious. I curse my age and the fact that such events happened for a whole year without my knowledge. My sister tried to reassure me that I was just too young to be aware, and maybe she is right. Nevertheless, if I see him again he is getting pounded into the ground with great fury. I’d beat him within an inch of his life that’s how angry this makes me. The second thing that is the cause of her depression (and coincidentally my own) are our parents. The spot for second most important person in my life belongs to my Madre. I would live and die for her for she has been there for me when my father abandoned me. No matter how much I love her though, her parenting style was not an easy one to deal with. The most important thing to note is how over protective she was. I was barred from many social activities as a kid. I never got to go to a sleepover, most school functions like dances or seeing a friend’s chorus concert, stay at a friend’s house for more than an hour and other things most kids my age would do to learn how to be sociable. Growing up, she cared little about how I felt if I was within her realm of control. She believes that school is the most important thing in the world and without it I will be unable to make it in life. While I do agree it is significant in making life easy, I know it is not the only way to be successful in life. While you can measure success by your status and job, personal success is subjective. To her, however, school mattered so much that anything less than an A was unacceptable. It didn't matter how hard I tried, if she didn’t see me work hard and I got a B she would punish me. Nowadays we fight about why I am not going to school since we moved to Florida two years ago. I tell her “I do not want to commit to something like school for two more years when I am living around a man so toxic”. “You don’t even talk to him so what is the problem?” she would always retort. I tell her every time that “It does not matter, being around him, hearing him laugh, seeing him etc. produces all these feelings of anger that I do not want to go through again. The atmosphere of this house has been for the longest time toxic to the bone.” She does not try to understand where my sister and I come from when we say we are unhappy. She can’t believe our lives are riddled with hardships because we had everything handed to us. Being “privileged” does not mean you should be happy because of that simple fact. If anything, it makes you so dependent with little to no opportunities to transition to an independent state. But in her heart, I know she just wants the best for me. I am not deserving of her love, but I’d do anything to make her happy, even if she doesn’t believe in such a concept. For as long as I can remember, whenever my dad was mad at me for something small, He would complain to her about it and then tell me the next day. And he got mad at me a lot, so you can imagine how upset she was from hearing “Stefan blah blah blah it’s your fault he is shit blah blah” after the 100 ^th time. If you want more perspective on my feelings here is a blog post I wrote when I overheard him insulting me to my mom 5 years ago (http://wellfuckallthisbullshit.blogspot.com/2013/11/respect-is-not-gained.html). But again, I love my mom to pieces. No matter how much we bicker she is everything to me. She battled cancer and seizures and she is still here. No matter how weak her soul is from the emotional abuse of my father she tries her best to stay strong. Speaking of the bastard let's transition to him. Imagine the most extreme, bipolar, narcissistic, unsympathetic, cynical human being you can think of. Give that man the silver medal in the League of Curmudgeons, because my father has claimed the gold for over two decades now. One thing I want to note is that this man calls himself a mother fucker in relation to his parenting style. He takes pride in it so much that he is ready to tell that to me before he threatens to take away something I enjoy (i.e. video games). To help paint a picture of his extremism, I will highlight the events that stood out to me the most when growing up. The first thing I remember was when I was playing the Mario Kart 64 and my father wanted to practice my cursive. I was doing everything right, but I was having trouble with the “f”. For some reason I would make “F” into “f” and wouldn’t bother taking the time to change it. I'm sure it was because I was rushing to play more games but that’s normal for all kids in similar situations; my father’s reaction was most abnormal. He banned me from playing video games, watching tv, go outside, or using the computer for entertainment after that day on school nights. This lasted until I got into high school, so it lasted about 12 years. Another thing to mention is his ego. He is the kind of man that likes to hear himself talk. Every "talk" we had was just a lecture. I could ask a simple question about the world and the lecture will somehow shift from that to why I wasn’t doing more to secure my future. I had to hear him drone on for an hour on average about how I wasn’t doing the right things that kids my age would normally do. He has this blueprint of what I should be into or what I should have been doing at every age of my life. If I deviated from these expectations the following lecture included a torrent of insults that did nothing expect, make me hate myself. What made these lectures unbearable was his affinity of taking everything unsatisfactory you have ever done, as well as anything you have said, and use it against you to make you feel worthless. For example, I once said I was going to put my home town on the map when I was happy about getting an A on a project I worked hard on. Ever since that day, whenever I would get more B's then A's or do anything else to upset him like lie that innocent phrase, that was supposed to bring confidence, was used to insult me. He would tell me to be flexible whenever he said no to going out with my neighbors or doing anything that did not include staying at the house. I was not allowed to hang out with my friends at the mall because he equated kids walking around the mall with hoodlums. I was often told not to be excited or act like a clown whenever I was happy to visit my cousins or to go out. For example, I got the certificate for listening to a presentation on becoming a new driver. I was excited because it was the first steps to becoming a driver, so I expressed that toward him. He got mad at me saying I am always getting overexcited and then he began to insult me. After that he would get mad at me when I didn’t show interest toward wanting to drive. My sister and I used to be so afraid of showing him our grades for the simple fact that we knew how he was when he was mad. It started off with him not talking to us for at least a day. When he finally conjured up what he wanted to say he unleashes it with a slew of insults until he felt better. That’s another thing, he may be mad at one person, but he makes sure everyone else in the family becomes victim of his abuse. If he was mad at me he wouldn’t talk to me, but he would make sure he made my sister and mom feel like shit first before he gets to me. And after he unleashes his anger, he acts as if he didn’t kill a part of your soul and act as if everything is normal, showing no remorse for making you cry. The joke about all this was that he believed degrading us and making us feel like the shittiest human beings on earth was going to motivate us to do better if he said, "I know you can do better" at the end of his angry rant (95% of the rants did not end with that though). Now this was me as a kid, while all of this is relevant to how I grew up, my frustration and agony does no intensify until my college years. I want to start of this section by saying that my father’s attitude toward me did not come out of a vacuum. I have lied whenever I have gone out to stay out longer, got caught smoking weed multiple times, getting into an accident or two, being disrespectful when mad etc. I often disobeyed what they asked not out of spite but sheer laziness or confusion. Confusion in the sense of “Why shouldn’t I do this? It brings no harm and I know what I am doing”. I was an average kid essentially behavior wise. If anything, I was like that of a punching bag. In school I got grades that most of my friends wish they could. I always got A's with no effort. School only became a problem for my parents when I started getting B's in high school because I was taking AP (Advanced Placement) classes. You read that right. When I started to get B's here and there I was told a multitude of things from, I'm going to go to jail, I will turn gay, I will end up homeless, that I don't care about my future and that I am retarded. Those are the things my father would tell me consistently because I did not live up to his expectations. My mom would defend most of his actions saying he has a bad temper and we should consider that fact that his mom kicking him out has affected him. Sometimes she would defend my sister and I but on majority she would let him say whatever he wants. And though the years of neglect and degradation of my character I thought I could tough it out until high school. When college came I was forced to stay home with them because they caught me smoking marijuana that summer and felt campus life wasn’t for me. I ended up spending two of the worst years of my life at GMU. My grades dropped along with my happiness. I was with friends and got charged with possession of marijuana. I was so desperate for money I stole from my first job and got in trouble for that. These experiences do not define me, and I will always regret them. I got no jail time, I was 17, but I served my probations with my heart held high because I know that was a moment of weakness that will never happen again. Hopefully you know my father well enough to know that the slew of insults did not change at all. In fact, after I got in trouble the intensity of these defamations increased. This pedestal that I was placed on did not warrant the extreme reactions he had toward even my most benign actions. Now let me get close to the end of this tale with a few events that I will never forget or forgive him for (and hopefully you won't either). One day in VA, we were mad at each other, but the context of the argument escapes me. He continuously egged me on saying things like "Why are you looking at me like you want to hit me?" and "Come on hit me you look mad enough?". As I continued to glare with disdain, he decided to get physical and began placing his hand on my cheek to bait a reaction from me. He wanted me to hit him. He was practically begging for it. The first time this happened I couldn’t imagine following through, nevertheless, he did the same thing again when he found my mason jar full of left over roaches when we were in FL. What’s changed thought was that when he put his hand on my cheek I slapped that shit off. This man shocked but angry cocked his first back ready to punch me. As I reciprocated the action my sister started crying and my mom started to yell at us to stop. We started at each other intensely for a minute or two and the only thought running in my head was “I hope that this mother fucker hits me first” so I could get out all my aggression and claim vengeance for the younger versions of my self who have been wronged by this piece of shit. Another event worth mentioning was when we began speaking to each other again after the day previously mentioned because I was putting my best foot forward to go back to school. The day before this event we talked about me calling the school the next day to get some information. Next day comes and I wake up and start my day like I normally would by chilling’. The man comes in my room and asked if I called the school. I tell him I was going to do it later, but he began to get mad asking why I did not do it as soon as I woke up. I respond telling him that calling them now versus calling them an hour later will make little to no difference. It was that line that caused him to start yelling about how retarded I was, and we started to verbally fight. His ultimate reason for being mad was that “If I really cared about going to school it should have been the first thing I did because it would show him that I cared”. I feel I must rephrase this for a better understanding. If I did not show him that I gave a shit by doing something that he would have done if he was in my position, then it showed him that I do not care at all. He projected his own vision of what I was supposed to do and got mad when I betrayed that vision. And finally, the number one thing I will never ever forget is when he told me to kill myself. That I would be better off dead than alive since I wasn’t going to school and my future was bleak. This is my definition of a human being that is better off 6 feet under. He may have been a decent father when I was in elementary, but his true nature has made me despise his existence. And his life to me can be forfeit. In closing, I am telling this story about my family in relation to me because I am planning to move out during the new year. I don't want to live in a household around my dad anymore. My dream is to achieve the freedom and happiness I know I deserve. My mom believes finding happiness is a fool’s errand, but I am too hopeful to let that bring me down. I am hoping those of you that have been through similar experiences or can at least understand my pain could help me out. My goal is $4,000 to make my trip successful but anything is appreciated. Even pennies. Now I will state that I have a plan regardless to make it out that I am enacting right now. In case I fail thought, I am using this honest tale of my personal life as a contingency plan. I just want to say thank you to anyone and everyone that heard my voice. I wish you all a great day, merry Christmas, and a happy new year!!

Tl;dr: My name is Stefan and I care about my sister and mom with all my heart. My sister is my everything and we share similar experiences in emotional abuse. My mom was tough to deal with but it’s as normal as being annoyed with a parent you love from time to time. Both are healthy relationships. My dad is the definition of an emotional abuser x 100. I have my faults and disobeyed my parents, but it did not warrant the extreme reactions of my father. He wished for me to die and talked shit about me not only to my face by to my mom and my sister whenever he was mad. My dad’s life means nothing to me. I am on a journey to move out of the toxic environment. I would like your help on this endeavor with any donation you can contribute, and I thank you in advance for even taking an interest in my story. Thank you and have a good Christmas and new year!

paypal.me/KingSuperflu for any and all donations