>>106551522I know you won't believe me, but I'll tell you anyways.
My parents divorced when I was four. This was before psychological therapy was really a thing, and my mother has bipolar disorder. My dad couldn't handle her emotional bullshit and her frivolous spending habits, and was certain he would win custody.
He was wrong.
My childhood was spent hiding in my room with a locked door, until the door handle was taken away. There were occassions where my younger sister and I would be handed off to our aunt and uncle, or sent to "Sleep-Away Camp", which is where I was first molested. I remember being five and staying awake at night, on guard in case someone would try to take me out of the tiny, cramped crib I was forced into by them. I would continue sleeping with a knife under my pillow even while living at home.
Home life was also less than ideal. My extended family was LDS -- Mormon -- and I was put under extremely heavy social burdens, even at a young age. I was considered "intelligent", which placed me in academic pressures as well. I was expected to be great, and yet I had no support. My mother would work at a call center, come home, and then watch TV in her bed, becoming disgustingly obese.
She would make me massage her naked body, would call me the man of the house, would tell me how much she loves me and how if I ever left her she would kill herself. She would belt me for looking at girls at school, or walking home with one. She put me into therapy for "anger issues" (the business was called Raging Rhinos) and later into sexual therapy for masturbating. Meanwhile, she was giving my younger sister boxes of condoms as a freshman to sleep with seniors.
She would spread lies that I had "social issues", to the point where no one wanted to be my friend. The abuse, psychological and physical, and isolation has given me an abject fear of real-world intimacy. But a cartoon? It's fiction. It's clean. It's pure.
At least, it was.
