My life, the open book

I am just sitting here alone in my room which is the norm these days.  I spend most of my days anxious, nervous about my future.  I have lost the will to carry on.  So I distract myself with video games and videos online.  It seems like my only escape, a prison that I designed myself to have some sort of comfort.  My body has given up.  All the anxieties and fears of a life abused have caught up to me.  I have been forced to swallow a lot of poison in my life.  Where to start?  I guess you could say it all started in my home.  The idea of a loving family was lost at a very early age.  I've stopped and thought about this simple fact many times over.  How losing your family at such a young age can effect your security.  I may have been young but I always said I wasn't like other kids.  I pondered death as early as five years of age.  I remember being so terrified of it, I still am.  So naturally I went on to ponder my family situation and it was probably the first of many times I asked, why?  Why when I look around me there are kids with moms and dads, and big houses and cars and money and I had nothing.  So I turned to my imagination to forget these things.  When I was young I loved toys, still do technically.  They were my very first escape from the whirlwind of uncertainty around me.  Oh I had them all, Ninja turtles, GI Joes, Power rangers but my favorite and most beloved are The Transformers.

I love robots in general, something about the metallic jagged edges really seems cool to me.  The idea of robots turning into things like cars and jets even cooler.  I love them still to this very day having amassed quite the collection of transformers and some even survived my childhood.  I love the idea of transformation.  I love to think that we as people can transform for better or for worse.  Take Megatron for example, leader of the tyrannical group known as the Decepticons.  Now depending who you talk to he is considered a freedom fighter.  He was a miner from Tarn, who well, mined, that was what he was created for, his role to play on Cybertron (Transformers home world.)  However there were injustices being done to the miners, they were being laid off, and suddenly had no purpose.  Megatron believed that it should be the right of the individual to choose his own path instead of having the ruling class decide what he was.  Then the injustices continued to mount, he was witness to innocent workers being slaughtered for protesting, and he himself committed his first act of murder in self defense.  It was all a downward spiral, working as a gladiator and taking more and more lives.  Ok Rich, whats the point you nerd?  My point is, he was an innocent worker driven to evil.  It started out with good intentions, a belief in something that is right and just but was carried out in a way that was evil and cost so many their lives.  Transforming ones mind, ones soul, and to some extent their own bodies.  Its what I love about The Transformers, there is indeed more than meets the eye.

So what about us as people?  Can we change for the better?  Can a poor boy from Staten Island become something great?  I haven't figured that part out yet.  I have had some amazing thing happen in my life and there was a transformation from darkness to light,  from despair to hope.  Now we are back in the dark, the only light coming from my laptop screen.  Alone....pondering transformers.  Pondering every step that has brought me here to this place.  When I was a child my world was shattered into a million pieces.  There was way too much uncertainty.  There was no security, my world was turned upside down and I grew to hate those around me.  I hated them for having what I didnt.  I hated having to go from house to house, from my moms to my dads and back again.  Holidays were so annoying, spent this amount of hours here, get picked up spend this amount of hours there.  Then the question, why?  When your first life lesson as a child is life isn't fair and doesn't give a fuck about you or what you feel, that is a tough pill to swallow and I learned it at a very early age.  That hasn't made that realization any easier to cope with 27 years later.

I spent my nights wishing my family could get back together but knowing full well it wasn't going to happen.  I think the hardest part was hearing how my parents spoke of each other.  Hearing both sides name call, blame the other for the failure of the marriage.  There was also the third voice in my ear, the world around me, kids who had way more than I did telling me how much of a loser I was because my family was broken.  As if I had any control over it.  As an adult I realize I didn't but 6 year old Richie didn't know that.  Did I do something wrong?  Was it my fault?  Would things have been better if I wasn't born?  (A question I still ask myself.)  I witnessed my mother go into a depression where she spent most of her days locked inside a bathroom or her room listening to music and smoking cigarettes.  I was parked in front of the television or playing with my toys.  Love has always come weird to me.  I wasn't a smothered child in the love department.  Don't get me wrong I dont doubt my parents love me, I know they do but it wasnt always expressed especially during that dark period.

So Rich why didn't you go outside and make friends and play with people?  Well, riddle me this, would you go outside and play if you were being bullied constantly?  Would you go out and play if you had rocks thrown at you while you were sitting on your porch?  Would you go out and play when older kids, teenagers would come over and break your toys in front of you?  Would you go outside and play when older kids shoved dog food down your throat?  No?  I didn't think so.  I was abused daily whether it was kids in the neighborhood or kids at school.  I was a scrawny kid, all bone, and naive.  I trusted people, I wanted to fit in and hang out and be "cool" and I paid for it.  To the point where the only real friends I had up through elementary and middle school weren't actually friends at all.  I was beaten up by them daily, picked on, name called, the whole nine but I dealt with it.  I allowed it to happen because it was either that, or be alone.  It was either accept this kind of attention or get no attention.  Its weird how that works out, I can sympathize with people who are in abusive relationships.  They are people with needs and unfortunately feel that this is the only way they can have whatever need they have met.  Its a sad place to be in.  I use to always say why don't people just leave those situations but you just never know whats going on in a persons head that keeps them where they are.  Maybe its fear, fear of loneliness, fear for their lives, fear of the unknown.  For some the enemy you know is better than the enemy you don't.  I think that is what it was for me as a kid.  I was familiar with these people even if they kick the shit out of me.  Let me tell you now, as someone who has been through this, GET OUT!  DO NOT let someone else trample on you.  DO NOT think that this is love, friendship,  what you deserve, or being afraid.  Please, do it for yourself and don't make the mistakes that I  made, I'm pleading, begging you, get the help you need no matter what age you are.  YOU are so fucking worth it.

I guess I'll wrap this entry up here. In the next one I'll talk about growing up in Staten Island which I absolutely hated.  We'll probably delve more into my family life as well.  Until then, I just want to say I don't know what good will come of this blog.  I don't know if anyone will actually read this at all.  However, if it can help just one soul know they aren't alone in this seeming hell then its all worth it and I can die at peace with my own life.  I don't have all the answers, but the best I can offer is to be completely naked and proudly display my scars.  If only so that someone else can avoid making the choices I have made, if only to save a life.  You arent alone out there in the wasteland.  There is still hope so long as you are able to breathe.  I implore you, get the help you need, please, find a way.  In the internet age, information is literally at our finger tips, there is opportunity today that never existed when I was a kid.  Please, friend, bro, sis, if you find yourself feeling alone, hurting, get some help.  Below is my personal email, RFULCINELLI@yahoo.com.  If you need to talk, if you just want to vent, I will do my very best to listen, to help and be supportive.  Please, I'm throwing myself out there, just make sure to post in the title that you are writing to talk.  Its time to try to do some good in the midst of my own sadness.  Take care all.  Much love.