[TW] About me

My journey with trauma and depression begins with my earliest coherent memory. I was 3 years old, me and my sister (at the time 6), were playing on the back porch. Everything happened so quickly. The corner of the porch broke off, and the corner post slid off with it. The porch roof began to sag, and my mother grabbed the post, pulled up with all her might and yelled for us to get off the porch. When she did this, the scar from the emergency C-section that saw me into this world burst. They accidentally cut several of her stomach muscles, and this same thing can still happen if my mother tries to lift too much weight. Almost instantly she was covered in blood. I froze, my sister had to pull me off the porch. Dad came running around the house and pulled off his button up shirt he tied it around moms stomach as tight as he could to slow the bleeding, got us all in the car, and we took off for the hospital. On the way there, my sister looked at me and said "this is your fault", I was aware of the scar on moms stomach, and where it had come from. To my young mind the statement felt true, if not for me, that scar wouldn't have been there to burst, and none of this would have been happening. I blamed myself as well, and so began my first battle with depression..

@DRHerrington This is not your fault.

Please do not blame yourself for this.

It was an accident.

I do not understand, why people are so quick to blame others, when you know, you could not have prevented this from happening.

You were 6 years old, I do not know too many 6 year olds who, are strong enough, to put back a porch.

I am very sorry, your sister blamed you for this.

I am also very sorry, that your parents, were not very understanding.

@calmMango9611. I was 3 at the time of this incident, my sister was 6. I have understood for decades that this wasn't my fault. I am attempting to relate my story here, and so I must tell how I felt at the time. Thank you for your kind words and support though.

@DRHerrington Your very welcomed.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I fell into despondency. I began to feel like everything that was wrong in my families lives was my fault. The house we lived in was falling in, most of the windows were busted out and covered with plastic. We didn't have running water or indoor plumbing, but it was all my parents could afford trying to support all four of us on dads disability check and what mom could make working on local farms. My sister always talked about the "nice place" where they lived before I came along. My dad mostly stayed too drunk to function. Later on, I came to understand that it was because he was battling a depression of his own, brought on by an inability to provide a better life for his family. However all his drinking served to do was make it even harder for us to survive, and make his epilepsy worse. Eventually I came to the decision that my family would be better off if I were gone, and I snuck off into a rainstorm one night. I don't know how long I was out there in the storm, but I remember feeling even worse about myself when I saw how worried and drenched my Granny was when she found me. I wound up with bronchial pneumonia for my trouble. A few days later, I lost my mind, and my depression became of lesser concern to me..

Some people who know me know bits and pieces of my story. Nobody knows my Whole story. This is where we cross the line into things I haven't told very many people.. Because I have known, even since then, that if I told anyone, they would know I'm crazy, I was only 3 and it only took me about a year to figure it out 😅.....

I was in the hospital, in and out of consciousness. My temperature was skyrocketing to 109°f, then bottoming out to 70°f, the nurses were putting ice packs, then heating pads on me, trying to regulate it. The doctor was trying to talk my family into doing a spinal tap because they thought I had meningitis.. I know this because my family told me about it, I don't remember, because my mind was elsewhere... The fever dream I was experiencing would have a Very profound affect on me. I think mostly because at no point prior, and at no point since have I ever seen anything within my mind. Whenever I close my eyes, all I see is blackness, and what I refer to as "the static" but it's there when they're open as well. Have you ever seen dust floating in the air, it's mostly observable in a beam of sunlight coming through a window.. Imagine billions of tiny points of light in every conceivable color, mostly that size, filling your entire field of vision, moving for the most part not unlike static on an old uhf/vhf TV.

That day, inside my mind, I wasn't D. R. Herrington, I didn't even know who that was. I was Atlas, and I was experiencing my life as a series of flashbacks. I was the seventh Atlas, which was more of a title than a name. It meant "to carry", and that's why I had been selected, to carry the library. The library was an ancient, perfectly formed human skull, made of quartz. The reason for this was that our ancestors had a sense of humor, and saw it as a way to "idiot proof" the thing... Er'body knows we keep our knowledge in our skull 😅.. I was selected because I had a twin who didn't survive birth. By having that intrinsic link to another soul, that no longer resided in this plane of existence, it would be easier for me to learn the use of the library.. I'm not going to relate the whole story, because it would take far too long, and because it is obviously madness born of my imagination. I'll just leave it at, I experienced "Atlas'" entire life through those "flashbacks", including his death, and then experienced another "lifetime" in the same manner, one in which i also experienced "remembering" Atlas' life again, in much the same manner 😅🤦🏻‍♂️. This experience changed my perspective on a Lot of things, and i spent Most of my time for the next year trying to make sense of everything I "learned" from it. Although many of those things have proven useful, and still affect how I view the world, I know that I am insane, and it was all a construction of my own mind 😅🤷🏻‍♂️...

I'm putting entirely to much detail into this thread😅🤦🏻‍♂️. I think partially because I have been trying to write my story as a book, and somewhat because I don't want to discuss things coming up soon in my story 😅🤦🏻‍♂️😬. So... Short version..

I was bullied every day at school, from the time I started, till I was kicked out at 14.. My aunt dropped her 3 daughters of for a visit when I was 7 and never came back for them, my parents adopted them.. I was molested from the age of 6 through the age of 9.. I have only been to a public place on a small number of occasions Without someone hassling me or trying to cause me problems.. I tried to go to college when I was 20, every single day I was on campus security got called on me.. while I was at college I met a woman who pretended to like me, just to make her parents angry, once she had succeeded, she told me that was the only reason.. it took me 4-5 years to get over that. I spent just over 10 years on every dating site I could find without getting a single response or message.. In 2018, my Granny passed away, she left me her house because I had stayed with her for years and helped her out. I let my dad and his wife move in"till they could find a place" because he called me with nowhere to go. I got the first messages I had gotten on a dating site from a woman 600 miles away, I drove to meet her in person, and she decided as soon as I got there, that she only wanted to be friends. I deleted all my profiles and accepted that I would always be alone. My friend from the dating site called me that December, and said she was having trouble finding a place to go, and needed medical help. I found her a place in Kentucky and started taking her to doctors. She convinced me to make profiles on a few dating sites and with her help, I finally got a conversation going. And so at the age of 36, I met the first woman actually interested in dating me. I let her move in with me because she was having trouble with people where she lived at. I had to leave my job because she was paranoid that I was cheating on her everytime I was out of her sight. My dad and his wife, quit helping out around the house and refused to leave. My ex became overwhelmed, started relapsing on drugs, and became even more paranoid, and abusive. We moved to her hometown, I had to leave my truck because it was broken down at the time. She continued to relapse and became more and more abusive, until she stabbed me in the back, literally.. I left her, and moved into the garage where I had been working at there.. about a month later, she said she wanted to talk to me. I agreed and she abducted me, held me hostage for a while, force fed me some drugs, dropped me in a town where I didn't know anyone and stabbed me again.. I found work with a construction company there. Eventually the person I was working with, took me to the garage I had worked at in my ex's town to get my tools, and then returned me to my home to get my truck. My dad was still living in my house and refusing to leave, and I was making better money working with the construction company than I could make at home. I went back out there and continued working construction and living in my truck, waiting for my dad, whom I had evicted, to get out of my house.. 6 months later my ex called me, saying her truck got stolen, and she needed a ride.. I bought her a scooter, and dropped it off for her.. A few weeks later she called me again stranded. I went and picked her up and took her to her moms house, where she had left her scooter. They were going out of town, and said she couldn't stay there.. She stayed with me in my truck, on the condition of no drugs.. we ended up getting back together.. The construction company I had been working with, stopped giving me work, because she was with me.. It started getting cold, and she said she wanted to go home.. I returned to my house again, to discover that my dad had finally left, but my mom and her husband had moved in.. My ex flipped out over "who's stuff is this in our house".. we went back to where we had been staying, and she began relapsing again.. She became abusive again and eventually tried to run me over with the SUV I had just helped her get.. I had to leave her again.. I had been trying for months to get my mother to leave my house, but she continued to ignore me, trash my property and steal my belongings.. So I ended up staying in a friends driveway, still living in my truck..

For my 38th birthday, with the covid restrictions finally being lifted, and being a little over a year since I started telling her to get out of my house, I went to throw my mom off my property.. I found out that she had been using my niece and nephews staying with her and not enough room in her trailer, as her excuse to the rest of my family, for Why she was at my house.. however she wouldn't even allow them here, they were at her trailer, and said she would bring them food occasionally 🤬.. my eldest nephew is autistic, and I found out that my sister had become a drug addict, and had gotten my niece and younger nephew addicted to drugs as well 🥺🤬. I got my mom out of my house, and let them move in here. My niece and younger nephew are off the drugs, almost 2 years clean now . I still stay in my truck most of the time because I gave them all my bedrooms.😅🤦🏻‍♂️. When it's really cold I sleep on the couch.. So that's got us caught up to now then....

@DRHerrington Ok, so I read all of this and: 1. you are going to write a best selling book, no doubt. 2. you are an amazing individual, my respect for you has just grown. Period. Sometime I will be brave enough to share about my life. But suffice it to say, yes, you have a special mission on this Earth, and one mission is to share your story with others because at least I will read it. You are a special individual who has been given a gift (from where? from the stars? from someone?) and you definitely improve the life of those around you. I know there was some chord of familiarity or resonation or something when I first "met" you in General Support. Haha you will understand better when I share more about what I am already writing into "my" book but which I am afraid to publish because I haven't told even people very close to me because of being scared of their judgement. Haha, I have a completed book that I am afraid to publish and it is because of the very thing, the supernatural message that I was given. You are most definitely not alone.

Thank you for sharing more about yourself, DR. You are incredibly resilient, that much is sure.

Hey, there! Thanks for sharing this. You have inspired me to have a little courage and publish my book. You're an amazing person for that and also for your writing skill and your ability to write the span of a life in a few paragraphs. I would say more, but I'll see you around in general support sometime. Have you ever read "Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck? I think you would like it. I also have a few other titles I think you would like, including, "The Art of Memoir" by Mary Karr, which I mentioned to you before in one of our convos. When you have a "fish" (meaning a book that's more or less in good enough shape for someone to read it), then find me. I'll be one of your "beta readers." (An "alpha reader" is a "first reader" like someone in your house, or right near you. "Beta" is the next level.) "Beta" is not for editing, it's more for flow, congruity, arc of the narrative. Editors do the dirty work, commas, grammar, spacing, dangling participles (unless that's a part of your "voice"). See, already everything is coming together. The royalties will be pouring in soon, just you wait and see. You and your family will be safe and secure.

I thought of another book you might like, "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Or anything by Ayn Rand for that matter. Take care. Be well.