I feel like I was robbed of my childhood and my chance at happiness

I’m sorry this is so long and all over the place. That’s just where my mind is at right now.

I’m 48, and only recently have I started really looking back at my life and asking myself if it was really “normal.” For decades I told myself it wasn’t that bad. I mean, I wasn’t locked in a closet, I wasn’t starving, and a lot of people have it worse. But the more I piece things together, the harder it is to keep lying to myself.

I grew up in a house where I was always afraid of my dad. Any little thing could set him off. I don’t remember him ever playing with us, or talking with us, or really being a father. He’d come home, lay in bed, and watch TV. When he did talk to me, I always felt like a disappointment to him. I still hear him saying things like, “Do I need to wipe your ass too?” I don’t know why, but that always made me feel like shit! Then there was him whipping my bare butt with a belt. I remember the bruises all up and down my butt cheeks and legs.

When I was around the age of 7, one of my sisters (L) sexual abused me. I don’t know how long it went on, but I’m beginning to understand how it affected me so much. I disgust myself because at the time I enjoyed it and therefore felt like a willing participant. It filled me with shame and anxiety when it comes to sex. So I don’t put myself in a position where sex may happen to avoid that embarrassment. It’s not that I can’t perform, it just takes me a long time to get comfortable with someone new. Which sucks because I do enjoy sex in general.

I never really blamed that sister because she was so young as well, around the age of 12. I always assumed that it was something she learned, but didn’t give it too much thought. But, I’m piecing things together and I think my dad may have sexually abused my sisters.

When I was young, I don’t even remember how old, CPS came to the house on several occasions. One of my other sisters (H) said something to her school counselor. I don’t know what she said, but I vaguely remember my sisters being coached on what to say, but not me. Just my sisters.

I have another sister (K) who confided in me that she suspects my dad may have sexually abused her, but, like me, she doesn’t have many memories of her childhood. But, she did say she was overly sexual when she was a teenager (something I wish I didn’t know).

I remember a situation with my sister H. My parents had friends over one evening. After the friends left, I walked into the tv room to finish a movie. My dad and sister were both lying on the couch watching tv, my dad behind my sister. I asked to finish the movie and he shooed me away. Not long after, my sister came upstairs upset. She told me that dad unhooked her bra and I think groped her (not sure). He came upstairs shortly after and spoke to H privately, claiming he was drunk and confused her with my mom. H has dark hair, my mom is a blonde. He may have been drinking, but he rarely got drunk at that point in his life.

It all came rushing back about a year ago. I found out one of my aunts accused my dad of touching her inappropriately when she was 5 and he was 15. Forgot all about for decades until recently. Maybe a repressed memory, but this aunt tends to be dramatic and may not be the most trustworthy person, but it made me start looking at things from my past in a new light.

None of this is definitive, but it paints a picture.

School wasn’t any better. I was bullied constantly, year after year. I was the loser everyone picked on and has had my ass beaten more times than I can count. I had suicidal thoughts from the 3rd grade. When I was in 7th grade, my teacher overheard me wishing someone would push me out of the third‑floor window. After that they made me see a counselor every day, or maybe every week, I can’t remember. My parents never once asked me about it. Never once asked if I was okay.

And somehow it didn’t stop when I became an adult. I’ve had relationships, but none of them ever seemed to last, and they all felt one‑sided. Like I cared more than they did, like I was always trying to prove I was worth loving and they couldn’t even see me. I always thought I’d get married, have kids, build a family of my own. But here I am at nearly fifty, alone, without any of it. I’ve never felt truly loved by anyone in my entire life.

Even friendships… I don’t really have any. I haven’t for most of my life.

On top of all that, I have aphantasia. I can’t picture anything in my mind. And I don’t have an inner monologue, either. So while other kids could daydream, escape, imagine a better future, talk themselves through things, I just… took it all in. Silent. Numb. It’s like I never even had the tools everyone else had to survive. I feel like a blind man who just found out everyone else can see. I’m in therapy, but that’s all about rephrasing the voice in your head. How do you do that when there’s no voice. The best way I can describe it is trying to use logic to argue with a feeling?

Now, at almost fifty, it feels like I’m waking up for the first time and realizing everyone else got something I didn’t. Everyone else had a family that cared at least a little, friends who stuck around, relationships that felt mutual, a future they could imagine. I never got any of that.

And the worst part is, even after all of this, I still can’t shake the feeling that the problem is me. That something deep inside me is broken or wrong, and that’s why nothing has worked out. I still have a hard time acknowledging that my childhood was abusive. It doesn’t help that with my terrible memory of my early life, I feel like an unreliable narrator.

I feel like my childhood was stolen from me. But more than that, it feels like my whole life was stolen from me.

And I don’t even know who I could have been.