I don't even know if this belongs here...

Warning: wall 'o' text AKA story of my life - it might include downright depressing elements

I had a good childhood, I think, until I was 10 or so - I was an awkward, but happy, child. Then, well, things started going downhill. My mother had an infarction while pregnant of my fourth brother, my father hired a nanny to take care of us and to help my mother in the house.

She wasn't a very good person - she used to berate us unless we were doing things for her. My father was doing the same, too. Shouting a lot, punishing us for the stupidest things. I remember us getting the belt, a lot - once, twice, thrice a week. He put a lot of stock into appearances. He didn't want our teachers to say anything to him - immediate grounding. He wanted a spotless house. We lived, in 7, in a 80 sq. m. apartment with a parquet floor and lots of knick-knacks. Talking back, to him or our nanny, would get you slapped, or the belt. Waking him up on sunday? Same. And he had a very light sleep. Not wanting to eat something? Same thing.

Every single infraction of the - unwritten - rules would make him berate us, and our mother, for hours. We were spoiled, we were bratty, we were out of control, and it was her fault for not punishing us more.

He was never home, too. We would dread his return.

Of course, both him and my mother are now denying that any of this happened. "I never touched you", "You are making things up".

But I remember this clearly. I remember dreading fridays, because he would buy stockfish, that I hated. I would try to find an excuse to skip meals, but of course a "normal" family eats at the same time. And I would, always, always, be brought to tears and accused of ruining his enjoyment of food.

For some reason, I can't remember him ever saying to me "good job". I remember the nagging, the scolding, the "if it wasn't for me you'd be eating shit", the "you can't ever do anything right".

In the meantime puberty came. And as I am a trans woman, it was shit. I didn't know that transition was possible back then, and even had I known I would have done nothing about it - I was so paranoid about somebody, anybody discovering this that I would obsessively clear my mind, in case somebody could read it.

I started to detach even more from the world, burying myself in books and virtual worlds (I played muds - that is, until my parents discovered me) and trying to ignore what was happening to me. Hoping to get into an accident that would mangle my genitals. Hoping to die and be reborn. Fantasizing about this.

Then my second brother died. He was 12. The only thing I remember of him is his body in the morgue. I shut down everything. Didn't help that, at the time, I was still a believer, and I believed that my brother died because of one of my prayers. My grandmother, in the meantime, got an ictus and was bedridden. My father promised that he wouldn't touch us anymore, tho.

Fast forward three years. I'm 17, I'm in university (skipped two years), I am happy but I still look at the traffic and wonder what will happen were I to just... walk into it.

Fast forward two years. I'm 19, alone at home with my bedridden grandmother, I hear her laboured breathing. I pop into her room to ask her if she needs anything, but she doesn't answer. "Grandma? Grandma?" I touch her, I shake her, but still nothing. I slap her, but she doesn't answer. I try CPR but I don't actually know how to do CPR. I try mouth to mouth but the air comes back up. I panic, pace, punch a wall and then call my uncle.

I stopped believing after that. At first I was just angry with god. Then I realized that... there is nothing. In the meantime I had a complete meltdown - grief that led to lack of sleep that led to depression that led to lack of sleep that led to paranoia that led to me not going to class. I started cutting. I lost three years. In the meantime the dysphoria grew - I didn't have a name for my wish, but I knew that I would have given an arm, a leg, an eye, a kidney and half my liver to be female. I still laughed it off as... something silly, because it was impossible, after all.

I was ready to die. I couldn't accept the death of everybody that left me - I still can't nor want to. But then I realized that I could actually do something about the second most important thing to me, after "become omnipotent and fix the universe". And thus I'm still alive. Even if most days... well.

I don't even know if all of this... qualifies as trauma. These are just... things that happened to me. And even if I know, intellectually, that what happened is not normal, well. I just wanted to get this off my chest.