How do you manage to attract all these weird people?
Honest answer?
My father was schizophrenic. When he was growing up, his father took out all of his anger on him and blamed him for everything his two older sisters did, eventually pushing him to drop out of college, go on the run, become a drug addict, and eventually develop schizophrenia.
When I was growing up, he did much the same to me. I became more and more neurotic, as children exposed to that kind of a parent tend to do. When I was 14, I was so depressed that I stayed home from school to sleep on like half of the days because I was so depressed and neurotic stemming from him. On my 15th birthday, he called the cops and had them beat me, drug me, restrain me, etc. Emphasis on the beating part. I fucking hate cops.
Anyway, that compounded everything, gave me awful PTSD, and shattered my personality. For the next ten months I would live in fear of everything, hiding in my room, hoping beyond all else that he would leave me alone. He never did. I slept by day and woke at night, only venturing out to shower and eat when it was pitch black and everybody else was asleep. For all intents and purposes, I had died on my 15th birthday. There was nothing left of me.
After ten months, two goons invaded my room and hauled me off in chains to North Idaho, the most godawful place on earth. I was interned in a behavioral hospital populated mainly by the local juvenile Amerindian tribesmen, mostly there by court order for a variety of drug and assault charges. My first two roommates were Anthony, a pockmarked, tall Cherokee who was in for attempted double homicide, and Shane, a violent schizophrenic with five felony assault and drug charges. He would commit his sixth while I was there.
The place was operated by two royal douchebags, Gary Stanton, PhD (therapist) and George Ullrich, MD, asshole greedy psychiatrist-in-chief. Both of them had worked for and operated an offshoot of the Cult of Synanon. After I'd been there for a few weeks and come back to sanity, these assholes told my parents to send me to a residential treatment center/therapeutic boarding school they also owned about twenty minutes out of town. The place was completely evil bullshit based on cult operating procedures from Synanon and existed to extort 15k a month out of me.
It was terrible in far too many ways to ever really explain to somebody. After a year there, I was turning 17. My mother was in town staying at a hotel, and I had a room there too to as a break from the place to celebrate my birthday. My girlfriend's father had come at the same time after coordinating with my mother; we spent a few days together. She was 18, and I was 17, still a minor. Legal adults of course lived in a separate but jointly owned program, and her father left after dropping her off at the adult house of the RTC a day before my mother was going to take me back to the adolescent house and leave.
That night, she ran away from the adult house. It was the first night it snowed that year; it was dark and cold, as North Idaho always is. She showed up at my door and I let her in, surprised to see her. She was saying that she was going to run away in Idaho, which with her probably meant that she'd be doing meth, heroin, coke, various other drugs, get raped (it'd happened before) and god knows what else. I convinced her not to do it; then my mother barged into the room after Ullrich had called her and told her my girlfriend had run away. My mother saw her and called Ullrich back; he said that there would be no punishments if we took her back in the morning. We did, then went back to the adolescent house. Stanton, that piece of shit, reassured me that as of two months from that point (Decembre 07) I'd be allowed to leave upon completing my first semester of college. Two days later, with no warning and even less justification, they were sending me off to a wilderness program with the intent to get me back for the indefinite future afterward.
The wilderness program (the second I'd been to; earlier in the year Ullrich had had me sent to one that he also happened to own in Idaho) was the first time I'd come into contact with any therapeutic "professionals" who weren't under Ullrich's employ. My therapist there was the first honest man I'd gotten to talk to about the situation, and he was the only one who helped me. He understood what was going on, and convinced my parents not to send me back to Idaho, as Ullrich and Stanton had wanted. Instead, as I was still a minor, he recommended that I go to live in LA at a very loose independent living program mostly for people 19-23ish. I went, it was amazingly lax, open, whatever. Finally I could do what I wanted to do; I had my freedom! Six months later, after my time in the program, I leased my townhouse and moved in. I actually have my shit together, and I have the ability to get various illicit substances, and more importantly, have a massive space where the frat boy crowd from my old program like to come and play Beer Pong and generally trash the place. Aside from the frat boys and sorority sluts at the program, though, there are lots of creepy insane Asperger's/Autistic kids, the furry guy being one of them.
