I’m going to keep this brief; it is a long time ago. One of those times that are a significant turning point in life. First the back story. My parents split when I was six. My mother went to live with her new partner and I stayed with my dad for a little while until he decided he couldn’t cope and I had to go to mums. There were unkind stepbrothers and sisters and too much freedom not /enough attention in this home. My mum and her now step husband fought a lot. He was a drinker, and it turned out a womaniser too, but we didn’t know that at the time.
I saw my father erratically and missed him terribly. When I was about 11 the family went bankrupt and we had to go and live on a northern housing estate (all the family came from near Manchester) where my mum got a teaching job at the local comp, that I also attended, whilst my stepfather went and worked in my Grandpa’s factory. No one wanted to be there.
For some reason I lost contact with my dad. By this time I had a lovely little half sister and we had an au pair. Sounds posh but it wasn’t. I had moved from a private school where I had a scholarship to this new environment. It was horrible. I had to fight physically or I would have been bullied. I had done all the work already, so I became the naughty one. Running around with the wrong sort, stealing cars etc. I had a boyfriend that the au pair poached and I was hanging out with motorbiking drug taking much older boys.
Amazingly, I was very protected. I was 13 and nothing untoward happened to me. At that time one of the gang took LSD and ended up killing himself by accident. It was something of a final straw and was a terrible shock. I became a bit disturbed but no one seemed to notice and one day I decided I had had enough and took all the pills in the cupboard when I knew everyone was out for the day. By pure chance my mother came back from work in the morning break to pick up a box of work she had left behind and she found me unconscious. I was rushed to hospital and had my stomach pumped. Not succeeding was the best thing that ever happened to me.
The upshot was that I went back to live with my dad again just after my 14th Birthday and eventually began to make amends with my mum a few years later. Since then we have developed a very good relationship. I needed some psychiatric support and took a few months off school but I made the decision to never try anything like that again. It meant that if i ever felt myself descending into unhappiness I would follow the trajectory and know that I wouldn’t carry it through. It gave me a strange hopefulness and stability which continues to this day.
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