#PillsVsBullets

Back in the mid 80's my girlfriends brother at the time committed suicide and none of us saw it coming...

It was made even tougher for me personally because I had just finished helping him move all his stuff into a new Apt, including the rifle that he used to shoot himself with.... so in my head at the time, it was as if I had actually assisted him in the act of killing himself, and I would continuously imagine him awkwardly grasping the rifle and placing the barrel of the gun into his mouth... it caused me a great deal of grief, anxiety, stress and compounded my own struggles with my own PTSD that I did not even know I was suffering at the time...

I grew up in Luton, England just 32 miles North of London and attended Catholic school as most of the low income neighborhood around me did. My family had slowly worked our way out of "Council Housing" (similar to public housing in the U.S.) due to my Grandparents moving into a convalescent home and being nice enough to sell their house to my parents at below market rate. And from age 8 through 10 I was submitted to physical abuse from some of the teachers & staff at St. Joseph's Catholic School I attended...

For example: One day we were learning to weave little baskets in arts & crafts class, which sounds so "quaint" and seems like it should be such a loving and down to earth activity, but when the Head Master (similar to a Principal in U.S. schools) saw that I had left some gap's in the rows (only 1/2 mm) I had weaved into this tiny wicker basket, he slapped me in the face so hard it almost knocked me off my feet... He was a full grown Man, & I was 11 yrs. old, and weighed as much as a pile of feathers~!

Another time, the music teacher did the same thing, slapping me in the face & knocking me into a wall for not bringing any old newspapers to class for making Papier-mâché arts & crafts~!

Even though another teacher had told us the day before that we had plenty in stock, so we did not all need to bring any into class... so this was the typical tyranny that all the children suffered at the time so everyone just thinks "suck it up... this is normal" and you live through it just like your older brothers & sisters did and never talk about it until decades later...

The same Head Master that almost knocked me off my feet also had a "Hand-Whip" which was made from 5 woven leather straps that he would use on the outstretched palm's of children's hands as punishment for doing things really bad (like talking back to adults, or talking to other children during class) And since the Hand-Whip was made from 5 individual straps woven into a handle with the 5 loose ends dangling off at the end, the Head Master would refer to it as his "5 Legged Friend" and constantly threaten & terrorize the children with it... over the years it had became his "3 Legged Friend" because after a decade of using it on children including all my brothers & sisters and cousins, 2 of the straps had been worn down so much that they had broken off during his abusive disciplinary sessions...

Luckily for me, my family immigrated to the U.S. when I was 11 and I left Catholic school and it's doctrine of child abuse behind me and looked forward to the adventure of traveling across the Atlantic ocean and learning new customs and ways of thinking and it was a very exciting time for me that I enjoyed very much... So I was very confused when I started to become overly nervous around the other children in 4th grade when living with my Aunt & Uncle in Long Island, NY...

Even though the other kids were excited & inquisitive about me, my family & living in England, I found myself so nervous I was shaking in my chair and would have nervous facial twitches when 3 or more children were focused-on and talking to me at the same time... over the years I learned to deal with it as best as possible but never mentioned it to anyone and it was perhaps so minor an issue that no teacher ever mentioned it to me or my parents either.

By age 12 we were living in West Virginia (which seemed like a totally different country compared to NY~!) and I had just been introduced to skateboarding and was absolutely intoxicated by it~! I would walk 3 miles to my friends house just to take turns riding his board down the street learning how to carve big S-Turns on a flat fiberglass K-Mart skateboard with loose ball-bearings which would fall out occasionally... soon after, I built my 1st skateboard from a piece of wood and an old steel roller-skate I took apart and nailed onto the wood deck...

My first real skateboard was a yellow plastic Makaha that I used to deliver newspapers on my paper-route at age 12 and later that year at xmas my parents got me my 1st legit wooden skateboard... a Logan Earth Ski solid oak wedge-tail with ACS trucks & OJ pure juice wheels with Norcon elbow & knee pads and this is probably what kept me sane (or as sane as I've ever been) for many years to come... and it was my therapy of sorts to help me deal with the PTSD that I did not understand that I had at the time (and still deal with to this day at age 58) If I had never picked up skateboarding or something as fulfilling as it is... then I am certain I would not be alive today... And even with the skateboarding to help me release my aggression, angst, and pent up emotions, many of my friends and family will tell you they are surprised I'm still alive and made it through my teen years.

(My brother Steve, Alex & yours truly, Charleston, WV, 1975)

I continued to mask my nervous disorder over the years and found that doing things I was truly interested in helped immensely... and I was incredibly fortunate to find work with an Underwater Submersibles company in NY after graduating from Tech school with an Associates Degree in Electronic Engineering and soon became a "Pilot-Technician" for ROV's (Remotely Operated Vehicles) and 2-Manned Submarines which I would Co-Pilot. And again, without having something in my life like this that I truly loved to do, I do not think I would have made it through my 20's...

By age 28 during the 90's I was working for Hughes Aircraft and helping them develop the technology that we take for granted these days known as HDTV... I thought I was doing so well, I then had a beautiful Fiancé and was planning to get married and settle down with her... but unfortunately a car wreck was to take the lives of several of her childhood friends, and I had been so good at hiding many of my feelings, thoughts & emotions so well over the years that I did not even realize at the time I had built a very sturdy wall around myself and my emotions... so much so, that I could never be truly honest about what I was thinking with her and only said out loud what I thought was "the right thing to say" while keeping the truth about my own anxious & nervous feelings as well-hidden as possible...

Of course, this turned out to be a recipe for disaster and after going through an agonizing break-up with her... this was the 1st and only time I have ever actually contemplated suicide myself... and for me, it went against every last fiber in my being to find myself in that state of mind and even though it may have only been a 1 hour lapse into utter and complete depression, it is still to this day a daunting reminder to me that will surface during low points in my roller coaster ride of mental well-being moving from one season to the next.

So decades later in 2010, I was married and had been to a couple of different therapists and I was on anti-depressants during one of the most stressful years of my life which combined a failing marriage with a company that was forcing me out after I had helped build them from 3 million dollars in profits a year into a 15 million a year success story... and I ended up losing everything, my job, my wife, my condo on San Diego Bay...

But fortunately for me, I found motorcycling again after becoming a workaholic and not riding for 10 years straight... since I had been in a 'obsessive-compulsive workaholic in a frenzy chasing the "American Dream" that turned into an absolute nightmare that forced me to "Start Over" and truly assess what I want & need to keep me sane & happy... through motorcycling every day after work for hours at a time, I was riding enough to actually get my body physically back into decent shape and ended up losing about 45 lbs. of fat and replaced it with a few pounds of muscle...

(Running Laps at Palomar Mountain, 2014, Photo by Riley)

And at the same time this became my daily meditation that helped me clear my head while exercising my body and that has been a key factor for me that has helped me look back on my life and piece it all together... because until just 5 years ago, I did not connect the dots and understand how much the child abuse I suffered when I was 8 - 10 years of age had impacted my entire life. Sure, my brothers & sisters and I would joke whenever we got back together during holidays about the callous and medieval nature we were all subjected to as children growing up in a cold and stoic society that England was in the early 70's prior to the dawn of Punk Rock and the Sex Pistols explosion on the scene...

So when a friend shared their tragic news with me about her husband taking his own life, this of course brought back a flood of memories for me and along with losing one of my motorcycle buddies in a fatal crash in the same month I found myself reading a lot of different articles about suicide & depression to try and help myself come to terms with things if nothing else...

And that's when I came across this article that talked about PTSD in Children and how it can stay with a person all through their life and into adulthood and this struck a chord with me... Never before, had I ever connected my "trivial" child-hood abuse in Catholic School to all the different symptoms of nervous disorder & social anxiety that I have hidden & lived with throughout my life... and it seemed like a light-bulb going off in my head and appears to be helping me to understand what I have felt & struggled with for so many years... I have touched on this subject with friends over the years, but only on a very superficial level and have never been able to articulate it as much until now, so I thought this was pretty important information to share with my girlfriend Riley who I have been living with for the last 2 and half years... I was wrong.

Riley also had a very troubled child-hood, with an abusive father and a family genetic predisposition that left her susceptible to depression that has caused her to contemplate suicide far too many times over the years... at that time (2015) Riley was an Adjunct History Professor at 3 local Colleges and had to struggle through the modern monopoly of injustice known as "Tenure" where old washed up educators get to play "God" with the lives of hundred's of adjunct professors and thousands of students on a yearly basis...

Times have changed, so now the weapon of terror is economic in nature where adjuncts are forced to ride a roller coaster of barely being able to make end's meet one semester, to being overloaded with too many classes the very next all because of the "Tenured" vultures monopoly of power & status that is just as outdated as my old Head Master's "Five Legged Friend". So when I shared a couple of links to these articles with Riley I was surprised to find her becoming more and more withdrawn from me about the subject and could not understand why she was reacting in this manner and why such an eye-opener for me would not evoke the same kind of "Ah-ha" reaction in her...

This uneasy avoidance of the subject continued for about 1 full week before it finally got to a breaking point and manifested itself in a sit-down "I need to have a talk with you" situation that has only happened 2 or 3 times in the couple of years we've lived together, so I knew it was a very tense and dramatic conversation we were about to have... but I had no idea that the act of me sharing this article I had found on child-hood PTSD would trigger such a negative reaction with Riley... the conversation started out on one end of the spectrum no where near what we would eventually end up talking about and again I think it was partially luck or intuition or just plain stupidity that pushed me to bring the conversation full circle back to the PTSD article I had shared and Riley after many tears and much reluctance, she let me know that she saw the action of sharing the article with her as "A personal attack on her~!".

Riley began to explain to me that over the years in one ruined relationship after another, her ex-boyfriends and/or colleagues would "share" articles and information with her that made her feel like they were saying "See this is what's wrong with you, go fix yourself already~!" Even though, I had shared the article stating how much this had struck a chord for me regarding my child-hood abuse, she did not even remember me writing anything about it having anything to do with me and just saw it as an attack on her...

And that's when she told me about the gun...

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Riley has a .22 Luger which is not a very powerful weapon, but I've always thought they were kind of an unusual and a cool unique design (I grew up around guns in WV and worked for a gunsmith as a teenager) and Riley's abusive father had been a bit of an eccentric collector of military vehicles and paraphernalia back when he was alive (they even had an old Army Tank~!) so this unusual choice for a pistol seemed fitting when she first showed it to me a few month's after we were living together years ago and I had not thought much about it since.

But now Riley was telling me that after I had shared the article with her several other things were also going on that same week by pure coincidence, and she had been reprimanded at school for something trivial while at the same time being overwhelmed with other responsibilities... she was also a volunteer at a local horse rescue and was struggling to pay for her own horse who is was so old he was loosing most of his teeth and more of a burden than a faithful companion most of the time, she had spread herself pretty thin always doing more for others than she does for herself ... I think this is her way of keeping her mind occupied and away from thinking about the past or anything else that triggers her anxiety attacks that leave her in tears at least once or twice a month typically.

So now Riley was telling me that she was laying awake in bed and crying by herself the other night after all of these "perfect-storm" incidents had all taken place and she was thinking once again about the gun under the bed that she could reach down and use on herself to end all the pain and misery that was just becoming too much to bear...

I was shocked... but I slowly explained to her that I had written down how this article appealed to "ME" and how I was trying to share information about my child-hood abuse with her (that I have never shared with anyone else before) hoping that she would also see similarities in the terrible experience she had growing up with her own abusive father... and this time, she finally heard what I was trying to tell her.

Riley then went to the bedroom and brought me the gun and asked me to hide it from her.

This is the article that I read about Child-Hood PTSD that I believe epitomizes what both I have gone through, and what Riley has been affected by far more intensely & extensively than I have...
http://www.naasca.org/201.../081411-PTSDinAdultSurvivors.htm

After giving me the gun, Riley went on to explain further how she has seen many different counselors & psychiatrists over the years and none of them have ever diagnosed PTSD and the fact that I even wanted to discuss this possibility with her was still too much for her to even consider at that time in her life... (which reminds me of my past ability to hide all of my thoughts & feelings from my 1st Fiancé when I was 28, behind a re-enforced mental barricade I had built to avoid talking about this subject with those most close to me too)

This was the 2nd article I shared with Riley because I thought it might hold some glimmer of hope that could help her in dealing with all her child-hood trauma...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/ptsd-drug-treatment/

Is the NRA about to declare war on Big Pharma~? https://blurt.blog/ibor/@cleanenergygarro/is-the-nra-about-to-declare-war-on-big-pharma

Reality Check: Mass Shootings & Psychiatric Drugs

(Right click & open in new Tab to play video)

THE STORY DOES NOT END HERE
So today I realize my Obsessive Compulsive disorder that was caused by the barrage of Vaccines I was forced to accept at age 11 in order to immigrate with my family to the United States has been driving my life the whole time, more so than my own free will... But Riley can not accept this diagnosis since her whole family is immersed securely in the Medical Industrial Complex with her retired Nurse Mother and practicing ER Doctor brother~!

So by September of 2019 after sharing my own personal revelations with Riley along comes Covid... And ALL honest communication with my own wife & family became WRONG SPEECH to their brain-washed & mainstream media programmed minds... They literally thought I was off my rocker for recommending Ivermectin back then~!

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Today we are still struggling as a country to come to terms with the latest mass shooting in Texas... and we keep telling ourselves and each other, when enough people WAKE UP everyone will take a stand & STOP THE TYRANY

What do I think...??? I think we are very close... Welcome to the Storm.

#IBOR
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