My Dear Cousin - The Sick Young Boy

2^nd May 2021

My dear cousin,

In my last letter I talked about how my parents broke up. The sad truth about that is that you know what comes next. There are still a few surprises in store for you, but I can guarantee you’ll wish they weren’t true.

I started having health problems at this point. I kept puking after seeing my old man. People said I was “throwing up my feelings” but I think he just gave me so much candy that I couldn’t take it. We would go to Pick and Save and buy all the candy we wanted, and I being young ate too much.

Then there was the fact that mom had some trouble finding a babysitter, and my two siblings were rather rough playmates. They had a game where they would ambush me on the couch, strip me naked, and than pull me off onto the floor. This happened over and over, and the part of me that tended to hit the floor was the back of my head.

As a result I have what doctors now call transient brain damage. It impacts my ability to see words. Even now I couldn’t write this coherently without programs to read it back to me. I also lost the ability to see faces for a few years. From kindergarten until high school most people were just lumps of clay to me. I couldn’t see a face on top of a head, and so I would often need to wait for someone to speak before knowing who they were.

I still have trouble with faces to be honest. It’s not as bad, but I’ve adapted. Then part of this may be that (Pickle) and I slept in the same bed, and he would keep me up all night. I’ve never slept well and that can really impact a man’s brain development.

Two years after the divorce the old man remarried to a woman who he knew had been a prostitute in Nigeria. She came with a small army of children older than us and all kinds of problems.

About a year before she died mom had me in therapy for my brain injuries. She never knew how I got them, but to be honest she had her own problems. She enrolled us in music classes and the world was good. Then we went on one last vacation. We canoed the Colorado River. When we got home she had a massive bruise where she had been sitting in the canoe. She went to the hospital where she stayed until she died some months later. 

 

My life just isn’t all that cheery,

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

Battled Bepression

By the fact that this letter has no name at it's end I can tell I never finished it. Well, I was depressed. 

In any case, I hope what is there makes good reading. 

6^th March 2014

Dear Mr. (YouTuber),

It was the fifth of March that you asked your audience, of which I am one, to tell you the stories of their depression. I have battled depression for the whole of my life, and so the story of my depression cannot be held in a comment. So long a story needs thought and introspection notwithstanding the need of all things done by the depressed: time.

My depression found its start in the rough handling I received in tender youth. The youngest of three children in an unsupervised home my older siblings would unite against me as a force of violence and so I would fight until exhaustion against them. This prompted my mother to send my older (sibling) to live with other family members for a summer, but it did little good as (they) had to come back for the school year.

These beatings of youth left me with what is called transient brain damage as a result of trauma to the back of my head. I struggled to read and struggled to write because of this problem, and even now I would be unable to write this letter coherently without a program that reads my work back to me as the written word and I simply do not get along.

My depression worsened with my mother’s second relapse of cancer. She fought the disease for as long as she could but lost and died a week after my tenth birthday. My father was what one may call an absentee parent. He would arrive at my residence on Friday night and leave Sunday evening, and so I would see him for the weekend. This left the home in the care of my older (sibling) who, mentally ill and violent, ruled by needless force.

At the time, in wake and sleep my life was a nightmare. In my waking times I stood silent looking after myself and staying away from siblings as best I could. I often had dreams where my hands were cut off, and I learned in college this is symbolic of the feeling of helplessness.  

By age fourteen my depression had reached its height, and I could hardly lift my hands. I had medical insurance, but my father refused to take me to see a psychiatrist. Why I cannot with certainty say, but he would always dismiss my maladies with “it’s all in your head” or “You’re a hypochondriac”.

For much of my high school years I felt like a piece of dead meat with a soul trapped within. There were times I would sit in bed unable to sleep but unable to stand as if a prisoner in my own flesh. Every morning I would vomit, I’m not sure why, before or when I got to school.

I made it past high school and suffered with depression my whole life finding what friends I made of little help. I learned in psychology that the abusers find the abused and that many of us accept abuse as we think it to be normal. I was twenty nine when I walked away from the abusive people in my life, and I still have trouble making friends often due to my condition. I take medication, and I live with my problem but there is little hope of recovery.

The one great silver lining to my condition is that I can relate to my clients as I work with the homeless population of Los Angeles. Many of them lived a life as sad or worse than my own. They find in me a listening ear and accepting mind a comfort.