What is your life story?

I'm awesome

I'm from India originally. Fell in love with a wonderful French woman and had a kid. He's 13 now. We try to love him but it is hard.

He seems to live in a fantasy land, making up stories in his head and telling people about them. He is convinced his toy cars are real. He struggles at school due to all his daydreaming. He also gets in trouble all the time, often for pulling girl's pigtails.

The child psychiatrist doesn't know what is wrong. We blame ourselves. Increasingly I find myself turning to the bottle.

You know what, after reading this thread I have noticed so many people here went to crappy stateschools and a striving for exellence and it makes me really, really happy!

Anyway, I might aswell give my real life story now...

I was born ("finally" apparently according to my mum ....but it's not my fault, if I had known she wanted me earlier I would have saved her all the trouble ) in a really crappy town, I went to a crappy primary school and even worse secondary school.
My parents are Indian, 1st generation Immigrants and my dad is a construction worker and my mum has formed her own catering bussines from home. I'm proud of them both, but especially my mum considering she started when my brother was 4 months old and she is the most hardworking woman I have ever known, she works late into the night and starts work at 4 am every morning.

Secondary school wasn't easy for me at all, I suffered with very bad anxiety and I would cry at the though of having to change my seat or talk in class, I have overcome my anxiety completely (actually I have more than overcome it ) and now I'm in a position where I can really help others with it!

I HATED all my teachers in secondary(I won't talk to much about them because this will go on forever,but they were disgusting human beings that should find another job really), there was not one teacher that beileved I could do well. I went to a CRAP stateschool so everyone was aiming for C's, and most teachers would only teach up to C-grade. I'm proud of what I go from all that struggling, self-teaching and all that sadness I went through in year 11, but it's still not great, my results at best were average(still on the higher end of the school year, which is shocking really) and thus not Cambridge standards. Oh well

Anyway moved 6th forms, THANKGOD!

and my AS year was tough, I didn't feel the so-called 'jump' untill april/may (Not the best time to feel the 'jump'! ) anyway it didn't go great, I think a lot of they way I performed was down to feeling crap about my GCSE experience and feeling useless because that's how many of the teachers made me feel.

So I'm a few months into A2, I have tons of re-sits but I'm aiming high, and I have got my confidence backin school, especially in history, which I stuggled with last year and ended up only getting a C

anyway, like others here, I won't give up. I am absolutely aiming for A*A*A*A and it's going to happen because I understand the whole concept of A-levels better now. I understand how to revise for them now, something I lacked throughout the whole of last year.

I hope everyone hit's their personal goals for A-levels and don't let ANYONE bring you down!!

Well, I'm an American, so you may have to look up the place names if you don't recognise them. You asked for a life story... so you're getting one. I can almost promise that you won't be able to finish it unless you're really bored and like a lot of detail. LOL.

I was born two months prematurely via C-section in Chicago, Illinois at a university hospital to a team of female student doctors learning how to perform the operation. I remained in the NICU for a few months, and apparently I was fed on demand. They couldn't get me to sleep at night, and I'm still a night owl. I was given soy formula rather than breast milk, because my Mom wasn't producing healthy milk after the operation.

I don't remember very much before I moved to Texas. I vaguely remember living in a house with my mother, father, aunt, uncle, and grandmother. I probably don't have a strong accent because my father was from Chicago, my mother and aunt were from Alabama, and my uncle was from Pennsylvania. I was around far too many accents to pick up any strong regional accent as a child, and most people can't identify my accent as specifically Texan to this day. A few people can tell that it's vaguely Southern, but usually they can't tell where in the South.

By the time I was three years old, I had learnt to read, and my father had divorced my mother in order to marry a lady from a wealthy family that had oil money. He started several businesses that all failed, until he finally found success in asbestos abatement. I grew up for the most part with my mother and grandmother, after my uncle and aunt were told they had to go live on a military base in Virginia (which is actually nicer than it sounds; it's like living in a regular neighbourhood). He was in the navy, and they can move your family anywhere they wish whilst you're in the navy. I do remember holding my cousin when she was born right before they left, though.

I remember that when I was five, I got my first Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES. I especially enjoyed playing Mario Paint with the SNES mouse, and watching my mother play Super Mario World (because I was terrible at that game myself). I didn't have the Internet at the time, so I also spent a lot of time reading magazines, Childcraft books, Farmer's Almanac, the dictionary, my Grandma's poetry books, the Bible, and a medical book that my aunt had left behind from studying to be a nurse. I remember learning that my moon sign was Libra at a very young age. I somehow understood how to choose the book from the year I was born and find the month and day in a table.

I also remember escaping from a daycare and evading security cameras because I understood intuitively how they worked when I looked at the monitors as we walked in. I sensed the guardian telling us to stay put as a sign of weakness meaning that she was going to be unable to observe us if we tried to leave, took a route out of the room that wouldn't make me visible on the camera, and then crawled past the desk of the guard monitoring the door. I made it to the door and out into the street. While I was standing on a median trying to figure out where home was, a man in a suit with sunglasses came by, asked me my name, and took me back to the daycare. Needless to say, my mother didn't leave me there again.

I started school when I was six, and that didn't work out as well. I got into trouble with the teacher because I expressed surprise that my classmates were "illiterate" on the first day of Kindergarten, while I was able to identify all the stations in class she wanted to point out, the room number, and tell the teacher where she had attended school by reading the diploma on her wall. Thankfully, the principal liked me, and he just kept sending me back to class saying that I didn't technically break any rules even though she was offended or bothered by various things I said and did. So I spent that whole first year being sent back and forth with notes between class and the principle's office.

Other things I got into trouble for included telling the other students to be quiet because I couldn't hear the teacher, refusing to take my coat off because I was afraid someone would steal it, and not actually sleeping during nap time. One time, I was told to go to the library, and I actually left the school and walked across the street to the public library rather than going to the school library. When asked why, I said "you told me to go to the library, but you didn't say which one", which got me out of trouble with the principal again, but made the teacher angrier than ever. I think eventually they just started letting me sit in the office and not even bothering to send me to class, and we got to the point where we openly discussed why we couldn't fire the teacher, and they were surprised that I already understood "bureaucracy" as meaning "lots of pointless rules that make it hard to accomplish anything", and we complained about Washington and Teacher's unions. I also ended up in the computer lab, doing hall monitor duty, delivering documents around the school, and talking to the school counsellor every day. They pretty much came up with anything they could to keep me out of class.

I remember that before I ended up in the office semi-permanently, I was so unhappy in class that I got to the point that I would actually have "accidents" on purpose, and even make myself throw up in order to get sent home. It took them months to figure out what was happening, because they had never had a student my age think of exploiting the rule stating that throwing up or needing a change of clothes meant an automatic ticket home. The teacher kept a meticulous record of everything I said that rubbed her the wrong way, and apparently I said, "The bell gives me indigestion" at some point.

Anyway, the next teacher I had was better, and I think at one point she asked the class how old we thought she was. Everyone else answered honestly, that she appeared to be in her 30's... and I told her that she looked like she was 27. She smiled, and I ended up getting candy. I got along really well with that teacher, although I didn't do well in Maths. I remember that my only issue at this point was that I occasionally wrote something other than my name on the sign-in sheet as a joke. Most often it was "Microsoft" or "Nintendo", because I was obsessed with video games and computers at this point.

The teacher I had after that in 3rd grade was really bad. I was developing a sense of sarcasm at this point, and it was making the teachers think I had psychological problems. I got told to take a time out for some reason, and I rolled my eyes and said I was so upset it that I was going to kill myself... and they didn't hear the sarcasm in my voice, apparently. I also had an "accident" again, and was asked if I did it on purpose... I said, "No, I fell in a pool", in the same sarcastic tone, and again they took it seriously as a sign of mental illness. The new psychologist (I was friendly with the old one) had read in a book that children my age were incapable of understanding sarcasm, and we actually argued about it, they insisted my mother must have coached me to claim that, etc. Also, it got to a point where my mother couldn't drive me to school because of her work schedule, and I didn't trust the kids in our neighbourhood enough to walk to school with them, so I ended up being "home schooled". Which essentially meant that I sat at home with my grandmother and did whatever I wanted to do for about seven years. Oh, and we all lied to my father about it because we were afraid he'd sue my mother for custody if he found out about it.

Anyway, at home, I got my first computer when I was around seven (DOS and Windows 3.1), but I didn't have Internet access. I ended up buying a lot of computer books at the Half-Price Book Store and learning everything I could that way. I ended up messing up the computer in several ways and having to reinstall the operating system or repair the things I had done. I also read a lot of books in general, even the history books that we had for home schooling, but they couldn't get me to do the Maths. My collection of RPGs and Action-Adventure games was slowly growing (I had found my favourite genre), and I read Nintendo Power every month.

When I was ten years old, I finally got AOL along with a new computer and Windows 98. I spend a lot of time searching for things, and I found emulators, ROMs, and pirated software fairly quickly, as well as a lot of ancient mythology and more information about Astrology.

Things went well for another three years, when I became a teenager and my grandmothers diabetes got worse... I had hormones raging and she had mood swings from glucose, so we were both angry and irritable all the time. Eventually things got so bad between us that she called my father and told him that my mother had been home schooling me. Before I knew what was happening, my mother was crying and making me pack stuff in a little travel case because my father was coming to take me away. He was there that evening at 8:00pm, threw the rest of my clothes in a trash bag, tossed it in his truck, and told me to get in. He gave me maybe two seconds to say goodbye before he dragged me out the door and rushed me along.

I spent the first night with him in a hotel because he "didn't trust me around his wife and children" at first. Apparently my grandmother made me sound a lot worse than I actually was. It didn't help that I'd made a nasty comment about her being pregnant the last time I saw her saying that I hoped she had a miscarriage, because I resented my father having children with another woman and blamed her somehow, although in time I came to feel sorry for her and hate him even more because of how he treated those kids. I finally realised my father was the bad guy.

My relationship with my father wasn't that good, although I liked the fact that he wasn't around most of the time and felt guilty enough to buy me things on my birthdays and Christmas. Aside from buying me things, though, he really only seemed to ignore me, watch television, and spank me if I tried to talk to him (if he was around at all). So I quickly got to the point where I just wanted to see him on holidays and didn't want him around the rest of the time, and we largely stuck to that schedule... he was motivated by a combination of guilt and laziness, while I was mostly motivated by greed and fear (of spankings as well as of him finding out I was being home schooled).

To make a long story short, he took me to this high-powered lawyer's office where the lawyer talked about all the charges he was planning to bring against my mother, and my father threatened to put my mother in the street unless I agreed to sign papers and live with him. My mother had already spent thousands of dollars she didn't have on an incompetent attorney and been forced to quit college in order to fight my father so far, so I just signed and told her to give up because I didn't want her to end up in the street. But she would have put herself in the poor house fighting for me if I hadn't stopped her. She wasn't entirely rational about the situation, so I knew it had to be my call. There was also a lot of stuff where he tried to convince me I was crazy or something by involving a psychologist, trying to keep me from being allowed to appear in court, as well as tapping phone conversations with my mother and punishing her for talking about the case with me, but this will take forever if I talk about all that.

Anyway, my father's lawyer apparently told my mother at some point that my father was an egomaniac about winning, and that if she stopped fighting him, he would probably get bored and let me come home in a few years, which turned out to be prophetic.

So, anyway, they tested me to see where I fell in terms of reading, writing, and mathematics. I was found to have reading and writing skills that broke their scale and apparently were beyond 12th grade level. Let's just say that I asked to read what I was signing in the lawyer's office, and I actually understood the document. But I only had 4th grade Maths skills, apparently. I was enrolled immediately in the 8th grade with an overloaded schedule, with five 90-minute classes a day, alternating between A-days and B-days for a total of ten classes I had to worry about every week. I somehow managed to make an A in all of them and never had a spare moment of downtime. It was really exhausting, but I actually made the highest score in the school in a few cases. I somehow managed to graduate with my class, exceeding my father's expectations.

It was a very strange time. I was emotionally numb most of the time, and tended to be very mechanical. I earned the nickname "The Machine", because I ignored everyone around me, went to class quickly and worked on homework during passing periods, and was completely focused. I think the idea of my father accusing me of being mentally ill got to me so much that I wanted to prove that I wasn't stupid or irrational, and was intelligent enough to make my own decisions in life. I was also compliant for the most part so that he wouldn't have any grounds to accuse me of having been "screwed up" by my mother. I was effectively determined to prove that my mother hadn't raised me badly, and thus never made friends or acted out during my teenage years. I was just cold and focused on proving my father wrong about my mother and me being stupid/crazy. I also didn't want to give him the satisfaction of either seeing me happy or punishing me.

After my freshman year in high school, the only remotely snarky thing I said to him was, "I've served an entire year here. Is that enough for you, or are you just going to make me live here until I'm 18 out of spite?" He apparently thought it would be funny at that point to take me to an actual prison and claim it was a military school, and that he could make me stay there until I graduated if he felt like it. I later found out it wasn't true, but the man is incredibly manipulative.

As time went on, he got lazier and lazier about weekends, only keeping me on them if I did something that displeased him over the week. I found that if I made an effort to be polite to him and not avoid him too much during the week, I would get to go home every weekend. I also get sent home whenever I was sick, because he didn't want to deal with me being sick. I was "his kid" whenever I did something well, but I was my mom's kid whenever I screwed up or got an illness... he'd somehow say my poor health was her fault. It got to a point where I wouldn't even take sick days when I was sick and would take Tums and various cold pills or avoid eating while sick in order to hide my bad health from him. Even if I had to throw up, I would pretend like I was just going to the bathroom normally and go out of earshot.

Throughout the two and a half years he forced me to live with him, I spent at least an hour talking to my mother every day, usually cursing my father and crying, talking about how much I hated him. And occasionally playing Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" though the phone. At one point he had the landline messed up for several weeks because he wanted to install some kind of special Internet wiring, and gave me a cell phone to use. It was terrible and had a bad connection, but I used it... and then he yelled at me and threatened to take it away because apparently I had somehow cost him $1,000 in cell phone charges talking to my mother. I was angry because he didn't tell me I was limited to a few minutes a day, as it had never been a problem when we had the landline, and I didn't know how cell phone plans worked at the time. He was going to keep me from seeing or talking to my mother for a month as punishment for running up his cell phone bill, but somehow I got him to let me do dishes for a month instead. He still didn't let me have a phone until his stupid project was finished (I swear he always had the house torn up in some way so he could remodel something or install new tiles, etc), but at least he let me go there on the weekends.

After my second year of high school, he finally let me come home. I was about 15 or 16, and he knew I was probably going to leave when I was 18 anyway, so he gave in. Like the lawyer said, he was getting sick of being responsible for me. I think the $1,000 cell phone bill got to him as well.

I actually liked the high school at my mother's house better, and had just started making friends for the first time when I graduated. I had been so mechanically focused on doing what I was told for the past several years and striving to make my father let me come home that I had no idea what to do with myself after graduating high school. I hadn't even thought about college or university, as my parents were just proud of me for getting through high school because they were both drop-outs. Although she was disappointed that I had so much stage fright that I gave away all my graduation tickets to someone else so that no one could make me attend the ceremony. The other person invited their whole family with 20 tickets (with the normal allotment of 10 tickets, plus my 10 tickets), whereas I just quietly picked up my diploma from the principal's office the day after graduation.

2007 was the same year the economy started to slow down, and it was really hard on me. I found out that I was expected to have actual contacts or work experience already, and that a diploma by itself suddenly doesn't mean anything now. Even two years earlier, I'd heard of people getting entry level jobs right out of high school or even while they were in high school, but now I was told that all the competitive or ambitious stuff I was intimidated by was the bare minimum they expected in the real world, and that I had essentially missed my opportunity by not preparing myself adequately for either college or the workforce. Apparently focusing my entire life around getting that high school diploma and not thinking about what I was going to do afterwards was a terrible idea. I made As in all my classes (except Algebra II) and graduated, and I got to rub that in my father's face. But none of it was impressive to a college because there was little AP coursework and pitiful Maths preparation, and it didn't mean much to a company because I didn't take any technical training, make contacts, or anything meaningful to them. I had just earned a relatively worthless diploma by just mindlessly going through the motions and not doing anything difficult because I didn't realise it mattered.

Every employer turned me away and required online applications. I could never find out why I was rejected, and it was such an impersonal process that I eventually realised I was being automatically filtered by computer due to not having anything I needed. I was in a community college the fall after graduation trying to earn credits without really being sure why I was doing it, except the vague sense that I needed a goal. I didn't know what else to do. But I did very badly on their placement test, and I got stuck in remedial Maths classes that frustrated me to tears. They had no teacher because I had inadvertently signed up for a "lab class", so they just handed me a textbook and told me to do problems and take tests by certain dates. I made a C in the first one, and an F in the next one. Worse, they had a computer grade my essay, and my writing skills had been found wanting by it as well. I had too much pride to take a remedial writing class, and I was angry about failing my last DMAT class, so I just dropped out in 2008 after a couple semesters.

Eventually, I turned to my father, and I felt like George Bailey turning to Mr. Potter for money in "It's a Wonderful Life". He told me that I either needed to live with him and earn a business degree at the University of Texas at Arlington, or else I needed to come to work for him and live with him. I wasn't interested in that degree, so I chose the second option. I felt like I needed to be working, and I knew he was the only one who would hire me. I realised that he had basically already hollowed me out and crushed my spirit, so I really had no issue signing over what was left of it at that point. Despite a short period in 2009 where I just moved back home with my mother and spent an entire year playing World of Warcraft and making posts on psychology forums, I was back working for my father by 2010, and I worked for him until 2013. I was his "gopher", and I did a lot of meaningless work like restocking sodas for his workers, grabbing anything people needed, and alphabetising file folders. Sometimes I got to enter mileage and fuel data into a spreadsheet. He didn't let me do anything important, and often just had me sit in my office and do nothing. The only thing left I could take pride in was the fact that I insisted on showing up on time or early every day, even though he didn't really expect it.

The avatar I've used on forums ever since 2007 was C-3PO. Because, well, I really do feel like a pessimistic robot obsessed with protocol. My use of it was partly inspired by my nickname being "The Machine" back in Mansfield where my father lived. People actually joked that every word in my posts at that time really did sound like something C-3PO would say. It became a running joke. Why didn't I use it on this forum? Well, his foreign nature subtly reflects on American forums that I usually feel a bit like an outsider, and also gives an air of being serious, intelligent, mildly sad, and/or extremely formal. It wouldn't serve the same purpose here because he wouldn't seem foreign to you. However, I myself am a foreigner here, so it occurred to me that just using my own face might be sufficient.

Anyway, while I was working for my father, his wife started talking to me about how much she disliked him and how she wanted to leave him, but was afraid of not being able to get by without him, or of his taking the children away from her if she tried. I just reminded her that he wouldn't have any money without her, and that he couldn't run the business without her. When he took the children out to shoot at targets with real rifles at about 8 and 9 years old, I said that bothered me, and we started complaining to each other about him every other day. We both wanted his money or favour, but didn't really like him at all as a person any more. So we had a lot in common and were both worried about his influence on the children. Eventually, I lost my job because she took the company from my father during a divorce. I was happy that she finally had the courage to stand up to him and protect her children, but I was mildly unhappy about losing my job.

The unfortunate thing is that now, after all this time, I don't have any references from people who have a last name different from mine. So once again I tried to go to school, this time for Computer Science... I somehow managed to bypass their entrance examination because of prior coursework and start with College Algebra, which I did well in. I managed to do well in every class I took, although when I got to Integral Calculus, the same old problems with Maths came back. So Calculus and Physics are now the limit of my Mathematical skill, which is better than only knowing Algebra, but still not what's really needed.

Now I don't really want to continue that degree, and I'm struggling to separate what I really want from what I should want, and balancing it with what I can actually accomplish.

My life story is simple. Can't remember anything till yesterday and today I'm writing this post.

Hi,
I'm 18, I go to Uni.
Up until I was 9 my life was relatively simple.
At the age of my soon to be step mum died, her and my dad had brought me a horse for my birthday, long story short, the horses got spooked when we were riding them and in trying to stop me from falling and getting trampled by my horse she fell and her horse broke her neck. I watched her die and there was nothing I could do. Fast forward 6 years and I found out that a man had deliberately spooked the horses and it was me who was supposed to die.
Age 16.
I was raped. Didn't know who it was, but he knew me. I got pregnant, kept the baby, he was arrested and is now in prison for 18 years.
I am tired of being afraid, of having people take away my control. For so long I have wanted to be normal, like everyone else.

I'm fairly intelligent but also a lazy bastard who prefers watching football to hard work and has fluked through all my school years.

28 years ago my parents fornicated and I was born. I'll live. Then I'll die. The end.