October 30th 2011 -remember that I was severely traumatized while writing the last bit on 3/11/11, and although it is still true, I am resigned to my fate and slightly less despairing

Abuse takes the beauty out of beautiful scenery, it takes away smiles and laughter, it isolates people, it shames people, it takes hopes and bright futures. Abuse is bad, and so much abuse is denied at the expense of the victim.

Am I the bad person? my family aren't there for me, and the church condemn my life.
I feel so useless, I wish God would let my life end.

Part 1. Things are grim so let me be grim and share some sad and grim thoughts for a minute.

Because of my autistic background I think I absorbed what other people used to say sometimes and believed things I heard too readily.

 I grew up thinking I wasn’t going to live to be 16, my sister had said she didn’t believe she was going to live to be 16, and when she was 16 she said she didn’t know why she was still alive;
 she was suicidally depressed and she was my role model, so this impacted on me, I think I was suffering depression by the time I was 11, my mother also used to say some very odd things when I was young, she said the world was going to end in 2006, and I believed her and couldn’t see any point in planning for the future of imagining a career or marriage, because there wasn’t enough time in the world.

 I felt scared and helpless, but I plodded on with my education and college, carrying this fearful secret that the world was going to end and so there was no point in all the things that people do and take for granted. My mother also told me that there weren’t going to be any good men left to marry by the time I was old enough, and that the Bible had said that we were to emigrate to Israel one day, a country that would be far too hot for me and a very unsettled unsafe place to live;
 but my mum said maybe we would be the lucky ones who would be picking up the bodies on the battlefield, she expected us to fight in some sort of war for God in Israel.

so I entered adult life with little hope and many problems. Someone on the autistic spectrum needs settledness, peacefulness and a low arousal environment with as little change as possible, I have never known such an environment, in fact my life could not be further from these requirements, so it was a difficult task to try and learn to be ‘normal’ and to educate myself and learn to interact. I have learned that the ‘poverty trap’ doesn’t mean lack of money alone,

it means being stuck in circumstances beyond your control no matter how hard you try, and having to depend on other people, and suffering for it, suffering abuse and suffering shame and being shamed, because you are slated for not doing better, for relying on others in your poverty and sometimes having to rely on the wrong people, and the only people who do understand that it is not about being a sponger, a scrounger, an opportunist, are the other people who have also been down this well, and know the shame of it, and who know that you can try your very hardest to climb the well and you get to a point when you fall down again, poor background, disability and no access to essential educational and medical services are something it takes a lifetime to overcome sometimes.
 Unless you marry  or partner someone with a better background, unless you do have fairytale lucky breaks, and everything turns out right, sadly I tried very very hard to overcome things, educate myself and get the help I needed, but in the end traumatised and breaking down, I was condemned, by the very church where I suffered both abuse ignorant handling and was left broken, there is no way out of the trap now, I am lower than those who can get a council house in W. or S. and call it home and subsist on benefits, they couldn’t aspire to live like the people of L. or O., The Island or The Bishop’s Palace, but in main they are content to have a home and sit in the library of daycentre and chat about life, I cannot sit and chat, I am alone and condemned, so I thought I would share the second chapter of my life, my efforts to grow into an adult and heal myself and gain some quality of life.
 Because no one had heard any of my story until recently and I had never been able to verbalise it.

From what I have experienced at the hands of the church as a vulnerable adult, there is nowhere less Christian and less understanding of poverty and need than the church, the congregations of wealthy, often older, middle class have never experienced hardship and have no empathy for it.
The same denomination is causing confusion now by trying to ordain younger and younger priests and rip the pews out while slating anyone who objects to this sudden and violent change, but that is another subject for another day.

03/11/12

I remember being a young child and being scared and abused, seeing violence and feeling harsh punishments, I remember being on the move all the time, I remember the hostile press and the hysteria, I remember the violence and hostility, I remember my sister being assaulted, the violence in the hostel, the nightmare of the small house and trying to go to school aged 8 and not fitting in, the endless moving on, the hardship, the anger, the violence, the depression, the crazy religeon, the homelessness, the shame and poverty and ragged clothes, the missing out on all the good things, the escape from the family and attempt to sort myself out and do better, the struggles, the failures, the abuse, the condemnation of the church, the destroyal of what I ha tried to build of a life, and the shame as the church continued to harm me after destroying me, and how they blamed me for reacting and denied responsibility.
what hope is there? that is thirty years of fighting against the tide, all the good ambitions I had, honest hard work, hope for healing and a good safe home and family is gone, my career and home and everything I lived for, and the little bit of quality of life that I gained, are gone, there is nothing, and no way of rebuilding it. I cannot live indoors or remove the terrible one sided story that the church have placed there, the bad record they have given me, I am helpless and lost and too damaged to ever heal.