hi y'all
I'm gerhildt

07/14: Backstory and current goings-on

so obviously i'm gerhildt, you can tell that from the top header way up there. here's where i'll whine about the past and present for a second.

My Tragic™ Backstory

this section is gonna deal w/ abuse & rape mentions
pls stay safe
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i was #2 of 4 kids my mom had (all of us afab). she didn't get married until she met my little sisters' dad, when i was about 5. before that my gram raised me & my older sister while my mom worked a lot. it was pretty cool, my gram is great. she got me into rpgs and crafts and painting.

my mom's husband was an asshole. apparently everyone except my mom could see this but ofc she didn't listen. (my gram says she just really wanted to get married.) after his first kid was born, he made us move halfway across the country to where he grew up and his family lived. we stayed there until i graduated high school. (him and his kids still live there.)

when i was 7 things started getting scary. the first time i remember him making me cry was the first day of 2nd grade. we had just moved into a new house and i didn't know where my stop was when i was coming home, so i missed it and he had to come pick me up from the school. he screamed at me when we got home and i didn't understand what i had done wrong (cause i was 7). later that year was the first time he hit me. he split my lip open in front of his sister and my mom; neither one of them did anything about it.

it gradually got worse, although after that i don't remember him ever hurting me in front of anyone else. aside from the physical stuff he just treated pretty much all of us like dirt. but especially me and my older sister. (she's mixed so she got a lot of gross racist shit from him & his side of the family, mostly his sister and their dad.) he basically acted like we were only there to clean his house. it was gross on all fronts and super traumatizing especially for how long it lasted (like a decade). my older sister left the house literally the day she turned 18 - she borrowed a friend's car and had me help her load her stuff into it and left without telling anyone but me goodbye.

my stepdad's sister wasn't much better. i don't really remember her hurting us the way he did, but she was bad with the emotional stuff. she took care of us most of the time, because both my mom & her husband worked full time. there was no such thing as privacy with her - she'd search our bookbags for no reason and riddicule anything she found in there that wasn't a textbook. she'd force us to clean every inch of our rooms while she watched, so we didn't have any hiding places there either. she also liked making really gross jokes about me and my older sister being incestuous together, complete with rampant homophobia. (i never really understood that bc my older sister wouldn't even hug me but i'm not a homophobic child abuser so i guess i can't be expected to get it.) she also liked to play us against each other & against my mom especially. when i was probably 10 i remember her screaming at me that my mother was going to hell for being a witch, which also didn't make sense to me because my aunt literally came with us to "witchy shops" (mostly crystal shops) all the time. when my mom came down with lupus after her last pregnancy, my aunt made it her mission to convince us that lupus wasn't even real, and my mom certainly didn't have it. i think she saw the effects of her brother's emotional abuse in me, but she tried to convince me that it was actually my mom's fault. after i got older and a little bolder i once tried to bring up her brother's physical abuse; she told me that if i ever went to the cops about it she'd testify against me and tell them i was a liar.

when i was in 9th grade i had sex for the first time. i was a weirdly naive kid and all i knew was i didn't want to be a virgin anymore. so i slept with the first guy who offered. it wasn't great, and he broke up with me literally the next day. i wasn't super attached to him, but i was confused because he had told me he loved me before i slept with him. whatever. i moved on.

a few months later i had an online relationship with a 20 year old from new zealand. he told me that even though i was 16, that was legal in his country, so we should have cybersex and i should send him nude pictures. i did, because i didn't know any better. a few weeks later he broke up with me because i "seemed cold and distant".

after that i dated a younger guy (i was still 16, he had just turned 15). i was with him for 3 years. he liked to pretend he was going to kill himself whenever i said no to sex. after a while i got tired of fighting to keep him from doing it and i stopped saying no. that's rape, by most modern definitions, and he raped me hundreds of times. he also lied about a massive amount of things, including making up a best friend that somehow he always found a way around me meeting. he outed me to his Extremely Catholic mom as bisexual literally ten minutes after i realized it myself. and he tried to strangle me to death twice. that was fun. /s

also, his ex girlfriend and her clique spread rumors that i was pregnant for about a year and a half.

i didn't get away from him until after i graduated high school. (we went to the same school, so it would have been really difficult to avoid him.) he broke up with me after i talked to another guy at a concert (about a book series we both liked), which was Obviously Flirting And Horrible. during the fight about that he found out that i had still been talking to my best friend (a guy, How Awful) after he had forbidden me from doing so. he, like someone who has never seen any movie ever, told me i had to pick between him and my friend. since my friend had never raped me or tried to kill me, i picked the friend, and my abuser ragequit. (this was all done over AIM so i wasn't in physical danger.)

then i went to southern alabama for a year of college, flunked out, moved in with another abusive family member, got out of there when my mom moved to texas (she had divorced her now-ex husband after christmas the year i was in college), chilled in a stoner commune in houston for a few years, tried to move back in with my mom before i realized she's Not a Responsible Adult, moved in with a friend in raleigh instead, and now i'm up in massachusetts living with a guy i plan on marrying and his family.

Nowadays

these days i'm pretty alright. i'm on medication for depression and working on getting in therapy. i work at a starbucks which is alternatingly fun and stressful. i'm taking online classes at a local college to get a bachelor's in IT with a concentration in web development. i like making teh websites yo.

i live about 45 minutes from the friend i picked over my abuser, and we're still buds. he's got his own shit going on so i don't hang out with him as often as i'd like but we help each other out and shit.

i don't really talk to my mom anymore. i've forgiven her for my childhood shit because she did the best she could back then, but since then she's been pretty shitty towards me. including telling me i "wasn't acting like a human being" for being nonbinary and identifying myself as part of the lgbt community. i don't put up with that shit, especially from a 50 year old who still hasn't got her shit together.

i don't really talk to my sisters either, though i'm more sad about that. my older sister had her own problems and then kinda disappeared on us; i haven't heard from her in about six years. my younger sisters are still reachable and i have them added on facebook and snapchat but we rarely actually talk or anything. i'm a bit scared that anything i say to either of them will get back to my aunt (they hate their dad too, but they're still close with her). but i mean that happens.

as far as my biological dad goes, that's a story i guess. him and my mom lost contact (on her request) when i was 4 and i never saw him again. the summer after i graduated high school, my gram got back in contact with him via facebook and over the phone, and i did get to talk to him a few times. but that november he died, from heart attack #7. it's pretty sad and junk but i like to think he's with Freyja in her hall now and still watching over all of us. so i guess it's more bittersweet really.

and that's pretty much my story. if you wanna ask any questions or want me to elaborate just hmu on somewhere and i'll get around to talking about it.