Sorry for english, I wrote nearly nothing in english before. Although when reading I understand well. I’ve got an unfinished 500-page history of mine, but it is in russian. I just have nothing to do in life any more, except to write my diary with analyses of the causes of my disorders. And I also find it soothing to read similar stories of men like me, but I usually search various psychiatric books for such stuff. Maybe somebody is also interested in detailed autobiographies, so I decided to share my brief story here, since this site is relevant to my case.
It’s about a 24-year-old mummy’s boy and his infantility, cowardice, sexual anxiety and perversions, seclusion at home, escapism and prolonged obsession to a girl.
My mother suffered sadistic treatment from her mother in her childhood, this made her an introvert, but she became not like those women who live alone till the end being very offish and unsociable and all, nay, she became very smiling, very responsive, although very fragile and sensitive and still retaining injures and pain from childhood. Plus she was the prettiest girl in every company she was in, and due to that she got a few rape attempts on her in the youth, and she was often in quarrel with the colleagues at work and ended up fired – all that due to her prettiness and modesty (if she were a male, it might be said that she was bullied). She also had one or two abortions from a not serious relation with her married tutor in university. Her father was an uncommunicative man, almost like me now. In her 27 she met my clownish father.
My father was grown up by his indulgent mother and with sister, he had no man near him in his childhood, and as a result he became carefree, absolutely not an introvert, he would like to have nothing to do in life except to read books on a sofa being treated with meals by some woman, in other words he became what maybe is called in english - a gigolo. It was also communism which caused his infantility, he is still dreaming about living in Cuba, about that style of life there, where anything is given free, as he thinks.
Mum and dad soon found simplicity and а tendency to have fun and laugh as their mutual features, although except that they had nothing in common. After a month of their relations I was conceived. mum says it was he whose idea was to leave me (not to do an abortion) and she would have definitely not done that if she had understood what my father was like. My father had no idea where to live, he wasn’t even thinking about renting. Though an philologist, he had no serious job and wasn’t going to apply to one, it was against his and his mother’s rules, they really thought it was a woman who ought to earn living. His mother herself showed an example working on several jobs feeding him, an adult man.
So after marrying they moved with me to dad’s flat where he lived with his mother and sister. His mother also poked her nose into any business of our family, my mum was feeling like she had married his mother instead of him. After a year my mum had fed up and moved with me to her own parents. After a severe dispute her sadistic mother backed down and moved with my taciturn granddad to their another home leaving a flat to my mother with curses. (however we visited them all the time, and in front of me my mum didn’t appear that they were strained to each other. It was just my grandmum’s lifestyle to have hysterical disputes with the daughter, for she herself had been grown up in a puritanical way and was deeply injured).
At that flat my conscious childhood began. First recollections concern some eating or medicative troubles my mum had with me. For instance, I was once sick having fed with semolina, another time she kind of threatened me with an enema for my refusing to eat something or to have some medication. I was sometimes beaten by her when refused to eat some food I couldn’t stand. That’s where my sexual **** and vomit-anomalies set in.
Dad lived with us sometimes. He used to do some odd carpentry and the sawdust was spreading all over the floor, on which I crawled and played. Seemingly, some of it got into my penis and caused an inflammation. In a local children’s medical center I then underwent a terrible painful incision without anesthesia, which, I presume, subsequently caused the big part of my sexual anomalies.
This children’s medical center as well became kind of a second home for me, my mother being overprotective on me. She led me there at every my minor ailment, where a row of painful surveys was waiting each time. At that age some lifetime illness in the area of my testicles began. They vainly cured something in the bladder, but now I know it was something in the prostate. I’ve read in psychiatric books a lot about the accent on the genital area in childhood and its linking with sexuality in adulthood, so I know it has left a significant trace.
The first love happened at a beach where I used to go in summer with parents. She, or, more precisely, they (for they were twins) were also frequenters there and so I fell in a secret love with them and proceeded to spying on them, always dreaming of making friends with them and playing together. I was 4, and it was the age when the footfetish and the fantasies of tickling settled in my head. This affection to the twins had led to nothing. For the record, at the age of 12 these twins would appear in my life once again.
Then I learned of death. Foreigners may deem it strange, but here in Russia it is common to keep deceased in flats some days, then on the day of burial to put coffins in front of the entrances of our stinky old ten-storeyed houses for some time so that all the people could bid farewell or something. So I witnessed such a ceremony at the age of late 3 or 4 for the first time, saw that yellowish face of the dead and was traumatized hard by the sight and thought, which had never troubled me in so conscious way. It seemed I had never been aware before that that everything ends, that my mum wouldn’t protect me endlessly and all that. I would always be very excited when saw some movie where a man died. I just wouldn’t put up the fact that such a thing is real.
The first day in the kindergarten was a shock, I sat all the day with a sack with toys from home and wept, never spoke to anyone that day and quite rarely afterwards. Never slept at a midday nap, unlike the others.
At the age of 5 climbing up a pillar at a playground I discovered an ability to get this funny feeling in genitals when tightly crossing my legs (without erection), which ended up in the natural way. But in my case then it connected with the thoughts of a psychologically irritative sort, like these thoughts about death, or some obsessive ideas like to tear apart some gift that I got for my birthday.
“Mortal combat” and other movies where the people died became the source of such tickling thoughts and sights, accompanied with my crossing-legs-masturbation. The other boys at kindergarten and at school appeared to notice nothing tragical in death phenomena. Let alone the sexual signals which I found in it. They only focused on those fighting techniques, monsters and all that. They even would let themselves joke about those things. I couldn’t understand how they could play those cruel videogames with their “fatalities” and all. They somehow moved on, while I stuck in that issue of the inevitable quitting this consciousness for good, that terrible cruelty and injustice, was afraid of the idea of my parents’ dying. I promised myself once one my parent dies, I’d take a hammer, break a window and jump out.
I used to beat and torture my cat. Once I went as far as to choke her. It fell on the floor and was lying still, I thought it was dead. Then it started to move and I stroked it and hugged and then I ran to the bedroom and wept. Fortunately, it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever done.
Through my early childhood all I was into was wildlife, reptiles and heavy encyclopedias, with which I was showered for my birthdays. Not having friends to go out with, I used to stay in our flat all the spare time, looking through my expensive terrariumistic books on and on.
It was then that my envy to everything english began. I mean, all the stuff which I was interested in, all those iguanas - it was all originated in the western world. I found the place where I lived (the city of Engels) a bald, absolutely uninteresting point of the Earth.
There were big english dictionaries on our book shelf at home and I tried to study them, or so I thought. I was taught to english since kindergarten everywhere, at pre-school, at school, had a few private lessons, even seemed to do well, but all in vain, as can be seen.
Despite mum’s efforts to enroll me at the best school in Saratov (bigger city across the river) and in various additional children’s classes, I was always falling short of her and my expectations. Not that I was slow, it just felt like I hadn’t enough motivation to do all that. It was like I was subconsciously aware that all that wouldn’t bring me happiness, as if I understood, even then, that all these dreams of me living in the western world, in my own house a great expert in reptiles, were some sort of schizophrenia, or at least some childish fad.
At the age of 6 or 7 there appeared “The Collector” by John Fowles on the book shelf at home. I wasn’t keen on reading (except dictionaries and encyclopedias with images), but this time the book was in a new cover, pleasant to touch, which was a sign for me it was worth reading. Having inquired of my father about its plot, I realized that it was my book.
I myself used to fall for girls everywhere. Every time in a secret way, of course, like it was in the beginning of “the Collector”. Not a single situation from kindergarten to a summer bus trip over to a seaside-resort passed without a girl I had affection to and dreamt of when was alone or went to bed. The dreams were of nothing nasty, just about friendship.
At the age of 8 I and my classmate at school revealed our feelings to one girl. Of course we were only kidding, we didn’t believe that a girl would mutually respond to a boy at that age. She proved our expectation actually, responding most coldly during the two years period of our harassment.
All those years I had a tough time at home, where I mostly lived with mum alone (Dad usually only joined us on holidays, which was ‘calm’ time). She was addicted to spanking as a method of teaching me, and to sudden screams at me. My refusals to eat some meals in early childhood, accidental swearing and, of course, bad grades were the causes for those shocking screams and punishment with a belt. But it wasn’t that severe flogging showed in movies, where parents-psychopaths beat so hard that children run away from home, where the parents don’t love their children at all and where parents are confident in what they do. Nay, my mum was a bit another case. When she went to the wardrobe to get the belt her hands and her voice would tremble. In my later childhood she would burst into tears and hysterical shrills into a pillow, once she lost her voice. I feared she might do something to herself. (and I think if it hadn’t been for the weird relations with her tutor from the university, which she maintained, she would have been even more desperate) Of course the flogging was very hurt and humiliating, but when it was weekends or holidays we became the best friends, we would go to the park or to the beach, would bake a pie and so on. She also would buy me nearly everything I wanted, though I didn’t ask for very expensive things, it would be just a toy, or a pet squirrel, or a visit to an exhibition of reptiles. But all the same I considered that as everything, I considered myself as lucky, and I believed that it would always be so. I mean that she would do everything for me, protect me, fulfill my wishes. It was a shock when I later started to realize that there are things she couldn’t do for me.
As for the masturbation with wringing legs, when I just started it I guessed at once it was bad, but I was not aware that my face gets red, so my mum soon noticed it and somehow figured out that I had some business with penis when I was alone in room, and she scolded me saying also that if I continue my penis would fall off. A couple of times she punished me with the belt for it too.
Well, at 9 sport came in the place of snakes and lizards. Mum enrolled me at gymnastics, to begin with it was only her intention and I didn’t want to and we had a row after the first day. But since the second day at the sport hall I was obsessed with it, although I wasn’t physically fit for this kind of sport. The sport obsession lasted for two years. The second year I insisted that my mum enroll me in the main sport hall in Saratov. It meant that I had to make a journey to the neighboring city twice a day (I went to school there too).
Meanwhile I learned of sex (I was 10), normal masturbation and all that, which for some reasons conflicted with my expectations from life. Then some breakdown on the bridge happened making commuting between the cities even harder; the heating in the tiny flat in Saratov that mum had bought to move there wouldn’t work; something like blood in my stool was found and led to a prolonged survey at that medical center; some important exercises in gymnastics I didn’t manage to do; one more girl who I liked and to whom I revealed my feelings didn’t show slightest interest, so, finally, all that broke me down. I left all those schools and sport and hopes. As for school, mum transferred me to a simple school near us in our city.
Then mum bought me a computer and I started to play in all those computer games which had come out by 2005. At the time the main game for me was GTA-Vice City. I was struck by that opportunity to live such an interesting life (which was again in english spoken world), and I was also struck by all the music which played on the radio in it. In fact, I soon became aware that it was the music that attracted me first of all. But the music in its turn was inseparable from the world where it originated. Even after my computer soon broke down, I would spent all day listening to the tape I had recorded with songs from the game, imagining me living in that world, in that virtual Miami. I didn’t actually do all those missions, I didn’t care about the plot of the game, about its numerous connections with what I had always been afraid of (adulthood, sex, death, etc.). For me it was just a fairytale, a dreamlike life, which had neither the beginning, nor the end.
I began to clean and disinfect things, at first my computer and keyboard, then proceeded to all my things, washed my hands fiercely. I had heard in biology classes about roundworms and the way they multiply (I was even convinced that I could get infected by a contact with my own feces), so I was determined to maintain perfect cleanliness of myself as possible.
I was 12. In early May, strolling with mum along the riverside, I saw those twins at a pier. I had noticed them at school before and found them pretty, but there on the pier standing so close to them, seeing and hearing them in informal situation I then and there fell in love with them once again.
This time I didn’t say or show anything to mum concerning my new affection (on a few previous instances I did).
Since spying and ‘following after’ were the only things I could allow myself, on the next day I was standing on the pier fishing, waiting for my twins. But they didn’t come. On the third day some pugnacious boy bullied me on that pier and it ended in the direst fight I’ve ever had. Nothing special, but I just all of a sudden realized that nobody cared about me. There were women with children on the pier, but they just hurried away instead of breaking up our fight, or something, as it had been at kindergarten and school. I imagined if the twins had appeared nearby and seen the fight, they would just have walked away not giving a damn.
I thought of killing that boy for some days, but eventually resigned myself to what happened.
All the following summer I almost didn’t go out because of my bacteriophobia. I would listen to the tape, read “The Collector” and nothing more.
At the end of that summer dad couldn’t stand the depressive atmosphere and left us for a whole year. In the following year mum at last eased the pressure on me concerning my education. At that time she also used to go to the river sometimes with an intention to drown herself, I’d follow her in tears, yet we’d always end up buying some cake for our idyllic evening at home.
She bought me the expensive mountain bike I always had been dreaming of, but on the first day I hit the tire and on the next ride I fell off and broke my arm in front of that bloody Lenin’s monument at the square. All the summer I didn’t leave our flat at all. I was only playing GTA, listening to american metal music of 80’s, looking at the images on foreign mountain-bike sites and guessing what the users were talking about on the forums there.
I refused to go to school in the following school year, which was the last year of our compulsory education for me. The thoughts of dying became more obsessive, I also began to agonize over thoughts about military service, which would have ripped me out of my accustomed life at home at the age of 18. My dad would twaddle that by my 18 there would be no military service, but he was just an carefree idiot. Anybody sane would say there would always be military service in Russia.
I had seen these movies about army, about war, I had seen the way our neighbor returned home in a freezer. I simply wasn’t going to let strangers do what they wanted to me, interfere in my life. I made agreement with myself concerning it too - I would throw myself out of the window as soon as there is a knock on my door when I’m 18.
My bacteriophobia was also at its wildest at that time.
In October of 2006 my kin on the father’s side arranged for me to be taken to a regional psychiatric clinic in a mean way, from where mum took me away a few days later. I’ve never wept like I did there.
But once you are registered with mental health care system, there is no turning back, everybody around became able to make a call and have you transferred to a clinic anytime.
I was obliged to live with dad and his mother for some time and they couldn’t stand my behavior (I’d swore at them, refuse to sleep at night, etc.), so during several months I lived in clinic much longer than at home, which was the worst time of my life for I knew I wasn’t schizophrenic and didn’t belong there, considered the clinic as a prison.
But dad’s mother however bought me a diploma of that compulsory education and, besides, all those trips to the clinic later helped me Mum to easily register disability and pension for me, which meant I didn’t have to dread military service any more, or study, work and, lastly, leave home if didn’t want to.
Another landmark of late 2006 was I changed my musical tastes and found a purpose in life, which endured through the next ten years. I had played that computer game TES
blivon since early 2006, and then in the late fall in between those trips to the clinic I accidentally bought a tape with one scandinavian epic metal group and on the instant I realized that that was the thing I had been seeking all my life. I mean, a concept of fantasy world matching with that majestic tragic music and living some life in it. It was really to my taste and needed for me. I didn’t yet know anything about history, mythology, nor could I understand english lyric. I just concluded that there existed some such world where I could transfer myself by the means of composing my own songs in that style. That world and music somehow kind of linked with my memories from childhood, maybe with the film Conan and those snowy weekends which I sometimes spent at my grandmum’s sledding. I felt like I had always been taking part in it.
After the clinic’s period mum bought me a guitar. We also sold our flat and moved to a new one in a new-built house in a neighboring street and dad has never lived with us since then (he lives with his mother in a one-bedroom flat).
I was 14, I didn’t have to go to school any more, so I plunged into all this olden scandinavian and western-european stuff and music for two years.
Though I soon became quite disappointed because of its neo-pagan ideology, which I wanted nothing to do with and the variety of all these fantasy worlds (I discovered that the world of the game, of the mythology-based lyric on the tape, of The Lord of the Rings and of British folk were totally different) I anyway kept on self-deceiving and thinking I might find or kind of create my own world myself, taking that stuff as a model.
At composing music I was doing very well. Though not a skilful guitarist or a proficient in sound recording, I still knew for myself I was making the most catchy and tuneful melodies in the genre of music I listened to. I only listened to a few groups and found all the other music in that style an absolute rubbish, I didn’t understand why people loved it, didn’t understand in what way they loved the music and all the nordic stuff at all. I saw even then that there was a sheer difference between me and other people in perceiving it. Even between me and the musicians themselves who made the music, between me and other people playing that fantasy game and so on.
I still didn’t understand english. I’d read lyric in russian translations if I could find. To be honest, I didn’t give a damn about all those viking sagas, history, elfs, the plot of the game I played, etc. Every time I was reading lyrics of some group I wanted it to be something familiar to me and I always got disappointed when I learned what it was really about. That was why I didn’t have motivation to learn english. I didn’t read books, I had no interest. For me it was all in particular kind of melodies and those feelings that I derived from them. I would sit and look at pictures in Google Earth of scandinavian countries and fancied myself living in my own house in mountains, composing songs about some fantasy life which I’d somehow be living and so on.
I didn’t think about dying, didn’t think about any particular girl (forgot the twins). It was the happiest time in my life, the most tranquil and full of hopes. I still didn’t fully understand that there wasn’t any satisfying way of creating a world for me so that it might be both virtual and real.
During the period of 14-16 age I made various short-lived acquaintances on local music forums. In the first year I even was in a metal band, so I went out about once a week. But of course I didn’t share an interest in informal get-togethers, I didn’t have relations with anybody but in a formal way.
At the time my mum used to work as a cleaning woman in shops as an act of her self-abasement. She would wear shabby and dull clothes, she didn’t have any friends round or go out any more – all that was because her son turned out to be abnormal.
So I was alone at home every day and my sexual perverses were flourishing. I didn’t accept any porn but lesbian, especially that with milk enemas, footfetish, vomit and all. The same practices I did myself, going as far as to play with my feces. It seemed overcoming my fears was what excited me, not girls’ beauty or something normal. But it was so when I was at home only. When I was out and looking at girls in real I couldn’t think of anything nasty, I wanted them in a platonic way as usual.
Meanwhile I got crazy about the idea of moving to the north, closer to Europe, so at 16 I went to Saint-Petersburg for a few days, had my portion of living in a dirty dormitory with drunkards(couldn’t book anywhere else due to my age) and returned home to wait until I was legal age.
It’s about a 24-year-old mummy’s boy and his infantility, cowardice, sexual anxiety and perversions, seclusion at home, escapism and prolonged obsession to a girl.
My mother suffered sadistic treatment from her mother in her childhood, this made her an introvert, but she became not like those women who live alone till the end being very offish and unsociable and all, nay, she became very smiling, very responsive, although very fragile and sensitive and still retaining injures and pain from childhood. Plus she was the prettiest girl in every company she was in, and due to that she got a few rape attempts on her in the youth, and she was often in quarrel with the colleagues at work and ended up fired – all that due to her prettiness and modesty (if she were a male, it might be said that she was bullied). She also had one or two abortions from a not serious relation with her married tutor in university. Her father was an uncommunicative man, almost like me now. In her 27 she met my clownish father.
My father was grown up by his indulgent mother and with sister, he had no man near him in his childhood, and as a result he became carefree, absolutely not an introvert, he would like to have nothing to do in life except to read books on a sofa being treated with meals by some woman, in other words he became what maybe is called in english - a gigolo. It was also communism which caused his infantility, he is still dreaming about living in Cuba, about that style of life there, where anything is given free, as he thinks.
Mum and dad soon found simplicity and а tendency to have fun and laugh as their mutual features, although except that they had nothing in common. After a month of their relations I was conceived. mum says it was he whose idea was to leave me (not to do an abortion) and she would have definitely not done that if she had understood what my father was like. My father had no idea where to live, he wasn’t even thinking about renting. Though an philologist, he had no serious job and wasn’t going to apply to one, it was against his and his mother’s rules, they really thought it was a woman who ought to earn living. His mother herself showed an example working on several jobs feeding him, an adult man.
So after marrying they moved with me to dad’s flat where he lived with his mother and sister. His mother also poked her nose into any business of our family, my mum was feeling like she had married his mother instead of him. After a year my mum had fed up and moved with me to her own parents. After a severe dispute her sadistic mother backed down and moved with my taciturn granddad to their another home leaving a flat to my mother with curses. (however we visited them all the time, and in front of me my mum didn’t appear that they were strained to each other. It was just my grandmum’s lifestyle to have hysterical disputes with the daughter, for she herself had been grown up in a puritanical way and was deeply injured).
At that flat my conscious childhood began. First recollections concern some eating or medicative troubles my mum had with me. For instance, I was once sick having fed with semolina, another time she kind of threatened me with an enema for my refusing to eat something or to have some medication. I was sometimes beaten by her when refused to eat some food I couldn’t stand. That’s where my sexual **** and vomit-anomalies set in.
Dad lived with us sometimes. He used to do some odd carpentry and the sawdust was spreading all over the floor, on which I crawled and played. Seemingly, some of it got into my penis and caused an inflammation. In a local children’s medical center I then underwent a terrible painful incision without anesthesia, which, I presume, subsequently caused the big part of my sexual anomalies.
This children’s medical center as well became kind of a second home for me, my mother being overprotective on me. She led me there at every my minor ailment, where a row of painful surveys was waiting each time. At that age some lifetime illness in the area of my testicles began. They vainly cured something in the bladder, but now I know it was something in the prostate. I’ve read in psychiatric books a lot about the accent on the genital area in childhood and its linking with sexuality in adulthood, so I know it has left a significant trace.
The first love happened at a beach where I used to go in summer with parents. She, or, more precisely, they (for they were twins) were also frequenters there and so I fell in a secret love with them and proceeded to spying on them, always dreaming of making friends with them and playing together. I was 4, and it was the age when the footfetish and the fantasies of tickling settled in my head. This affection to the twins had led to nothing. For the record, at the age of 12 these twins would appear in my life once again.
Then I learned of death. Foreigners may deem it strange, but here in Russia it is common to keep deceased in flats some days, then on the day of burial to put coffins in front of the entrances of our stinky old ten-storeyed houses for some time so that all the people could bid farewell or something. So I witnessed such a ceremony at the age of late 3 or 4 for the first time, saw that yellowish face of the dead and was traumatized hard by the sight and thought, which had never troubled me in so conscious way. It seemed I had never been aware before that that everything ends, that my mum wouldn’t protect me endlessly and all that. I would always be very excited when saw some movie where a man died. I just wouldn’t put up the fact that such a thing is real.
The first day in the kindergarten was a shock, I sat all the day with a sack with toys from home and wept, never spoke to anyone that day and quite rarely afterwards. Never slept at a midday nap, unlike the others.
At the age of 5 climbing up a pillar at a playground I discovered an ability to get this funny feeling in genitals when tightly crossing my legs (without erection), which ended up in the natural way. But in my case then it connected with the thoughts of a psychologically irritative sort, like these thoughts about death, or some obsessive ideas like to tear apart some gift that I got for my birthday.
“Mortal combat” and other movies where the people died became the source of such tickling thoughts and sights, accompanied with my crossing-legs-masturbation. The other boys at kindergarten and at school appeared to notice nothing tragical in death phenomena. Let alone the sexual signals which I found in it. They only focused on those fighting techniques, monsters and all that. They even would let themselves joke about those things. I couldn’t understand how they could play those cruel videogames with their “fatalities” and all. They somehow moved on, while I stuck in that issue of the inevitable quitting this consciousness for good, that terrible cruelty and injustice, was afraid of the idea of my parents’ dying. I promised myself once one my parent dies, I’d take a hammer, break a window and jump out.
I used to beat and torture my cat. Once I went as far as to choke her. It fell on the floor and was lying still, I thought it was dead. Then it started to move and I stroked it and hugged and then I ran to the bedroom and wept. Fortunately, it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever done.
Through my early childhood all I was into was wildlife, reptiles and heavy encyclopedias, with which I was showered for my birthdays. Not having friends to go out with, I used to stay in our flat all the spare time, looking through my expensive terrariumistic books on and on.
It was then that my envy to everything english began. I mean, all the stuff which I was interested in, all those iguanas - it was all originated in the western world. I found the place where I lived (the city of Engels) a bald, absolutely uninteresting point of the Earth.
There were big english dictionaries on our book shelf at home and I tried to study them, or so I thought. I was taught to english since kindergarten everywhere, at pre-school, at school, had a few private lessons, even seemed to do well, but all in vain, as can be seen.
Despite mum’s efforts to enroll me at the best school in Saratov (bigger city across the river) and in various additional children’s classes, I was always falling short of her and my expectations. Not that I was slow, it just felt like I hadn’t enough motivation to do all that. It was like I was subconsciously aware that all that wouldn’t bring me happiness, as if I understood, even then, that all these dreams of me living in the western world, in my own house a great expert in reptiles, were some sort of schizophrenia, or at least some childish fad.
At the age of 6 or 7 there appeared “The Collector” by John Fowles on the book shelf at home. I wasn’t keen on reading (except dictionaries and encyclopedias with images), but this time the book was in a new cover, pleasant to touch, which was a sign for me it was worth reading. Having inquired of my father about its plot, I realized that it was my book.
I myself used to fall for girls everywhere. Every time in a secret way, of course, like it was in the beginning of “the Collector”. Not a single situation from kindergarten to a summer bus trip over to a seaside-resort passed without a girl I had affection to and dreamt of when was alone or went to bed. The dreams were of nothing nasty, just about friendship.
At the age of 8 I and my classmate at school revealed our feelings to one girl. Of course we were only kidding, we didn’t believe that a girl would mutually respond to a boy at that age. She proved our expectation actually, responding most coldly during the two years period of our harassment.
All those years I had a tough time at home, where I mostly lived with mum alone (Dad usually only joined us on holidays, which was ‘calm’ time). She was addicted to spanking as a method of teaching me, and to sudden screams at me. My refusals to eat some meals in early childhood, accidental swearing and, of course, bad grades were the causes for those shocking screams and punishment with a belt. But it wasn’t that severe flogging showed in movies, where parents-psychopaths beat so hard that children run away from home, where the parents don’t love their children at all and where parents are confident in what they do. Nay, my mum was a bit another case. When she went to the wardrobe to get the belt her hands and her voice would tremble. In my later childhood she would burst into tears and hysterical shrills into a pillow, once she lost her voice. I feared she might do something to herself. (and I think if it hadn’t been for the weird relations with her tutor from the university, which she maintained, she would have been even more desperate) Of course the flogging was very hurt and humiliating, but when it was weekends or holidays we became the best friends, we would go to the park or to the beach, would bake a pie and so on. She also would buy me nearly everything I wanted, though I didn’t ask for very expensive things, it would be just a toy, or a pet squirrel, or a visit to an exhibition of reptiles. But all the same I considered that as everything, I considered myself as lucky, and I believed that it would always be so. I mean that she would do everything for me, protect me, fulfill my wishes. It was a shock when I later started to realize that there are things she couldn’t do for me.
As for the masturbation with wringing legs, when I just started it I guessed at once it was bad, but I was not aware that my face gets red, so my mum soon noticed it and somehow figured out that I had some business with penis when I was alone in room, and she scolded me saying also that if I continue my penis would fall off. A couple of times she punished me with the belt for it too.
Well, at 9 sport came in the place of snakes and lizards. Mum enrolled me at gymnastics, to begin with it was only her intention and I didn’t want to and we had a row after the first day. But since the second day at the sport hall I was obsessed with it, although I wasn’t physically fit for this kind of sport. The sport obsession lasted for two years. The second year I insisted that my mum enroll me in the main sport hall in Saratov. It meant that I had to make a journey to the neighboring city twice a day (I went to school there too).
Meanwhile I learned of sex (I was 10), normal masturbation and all that, which for some reasons conflicted with my expectations from life. Then some breakdown on the bridge happened making commuting between the cities even harder; the heating in the tiny flat in Saratov that mum had bought to move there wouldn’t work; something like blood in my stool was found and led to a prolonged survey at that medical center; some important exercises in gymnastics I didn’t manage to do; one more girl who I liked and to whom I revealed my feelings didn’t show slightest interest, so, finally, all that broke me down. I left all those schools and sport and hopes. As for school, mum transferred me to a simple school near us in our city.
Then mum bought me a computer and I started to play in all those computer games which had come out by 2005. At the time the main game for me was GTA-Vice City. I was struck by that opportunity to live such an interesting life (which was again in english spoken world), and I was also struck by all the music which played on the radio in it. In fact, I soon became aware that it was the music that attracted me first of all. But the music in its turn was inseparable from the world where it originated. Even after my computer soon broke down, I would spent all day listening to the tape I had recorded with songs from the game, imagining me living in that world, in that virtual Miami. I didn’t actually do all those missions, I didn’t care about the plot of the game, about its numerous connections with what I had always been afraid of (adulthood, sex, death, etc.). For me it was just a fairytale, a dreamlike life, which had neither the beginning, nor the end.
I began to clean and disinfect things, at first my computer and keyboard, then proceeded to all my things, washed my hands fiercely. I had heard in biology classes about roundworms and the way they multiply (I was even convinced that I could get infected by a contact with my own feces), so I was determined to maintain perfect cleanliness of myself as possible.
I was 12. In early May, strolling with mum along the riverside, I saw those twins at a pier. I had noticed them at school before and found them pretty, but there on the pier standing so close to them, seeing and hearing them in informal situation I then and there fell in love with them once again.
This time I didn’t say or show anything to mum concerning my new affection (on a few previous instances I did).
Since spying and ‘following after’ were the only things I could allow myself, on the next day I was standing on the pier fishing, waiting for my twins. But they didn’t come. On the third day some pugnacious boy bullied me on that pier and it ended in the direst fight I’ve ever had. Nothing special, but I just all of a sudden realized that nobody cared about me. There were women with children on the pier, but they just hurried away instead of breaking up our fight, or something, as it had been at kindergarten and school. I imagined if the twins had appeared nearby and seen the fight, they would just have walked away not giving a damn.
I thought of killing that boy for some days, but eventually resigned myself to what happened.
All the following summer I almost didn’t go out because of my bacteriophobia. I would listen to the tape, read “The Collector” and nothing more.
At the end of that summer dad couldn’t stand the depressive atmosphere and left us for a whole year. In the following year mum at last eased the pressure on me concerning my education. At that time she also used to go to the river sometimes with an intention to drown herself, I’d follow her in tears, yet we’d always end up buying some cake for our idyllic evening at home.
She bought me the expensive mountain bike I always had been dreaming of, but on the first day I hit the tire and on the next ride I fell off and broke my arm in front of that bloody Lenin’s monument at the square. All the summer I didn’t leave our flat at all. I was only playing GTA, listening to american metal music of 80’s, looking at the images on foreign mountain-bike sites and guessing what the users were talking about on the forums there.
I refused to go to school in the following school year, which was the last year of our compulsory education for me. The thoughts of dying became more obsessive, I also began to agonize over thoughts about military service, which would have ripped me out of my accustomed life at home at the age of 18. My dad would twaddle that by my 18 there would be no military service, but he was just an carefree idiot. Anybody sane would say there would always be military service in Russia.
I had seen these movies about army, about war, I had seen the way our neighbor returned home in a freezer. I simply wasn’t going to let strangers do what they wanted to me, interfere in my life. I made agreement with myself concerning it too - I would throw myself out of the window as soon as there is a knock on my door when I’m 18.
My bacteriophobia was also at its wildest at that time.
In October of 2006 my kin on the father’s side arranged for me to be taken to a regional psychiatric clinic in a mean way, from where mum took me away a few days later. I’ve never wept like I did there.
But once you are registered with mental health care system, there is no turning back, everybody around became able to make a call and have you transferred to a clinic anytime.
I was obliged to live with dad and his mother for some time and they couldn’t stand my behavior (I’d swore at them, refuse to sleep at night, etc.), so during several months I lived in clinic much longer than at home, which was the worst time of my life for I knew I wasn’t schizophrenic and didn’t belong there, considered the clinic as a prison.
But dad’s mother however bought me a diploma of that compulsory education and, besides, all those trips to the clinic later helped me Mum to easily register disability and pension for me, which meant I didn’t have to dread military service any more, or study, work and, lastly, leave home if didn’t want to.
Another landmark of late 2006 was I changed my musical tastes and found a purpose in life, which endured through the next ten years. I had played that computer game TES
blivon since early 2006, and then in the late fall in between those trips to the clinic I accidentally bought a tape with one scandinavian epic metal group and on the instant I realized that that was the thing I had been seeking all my life. I mean, a concept of fantasy world matching with that majestic tragic music and living some life in it. It was really to my taste and needed for me. I didn’t yet know anything about history, mythology, nor could I understand english lyric. I just concluded that there existed some such world where I could transfer myself by the means of composing my own songs in that style. That world and music somehow kind of linked with my memories from childhood, maybe with the film Conan and those snowy weekends which I sometimes spent at my grandmum’s sledding. I felt like I had always been taking part in it.After the clinic’s period mum bought me a guitar. We also sold our flat and moved to a new one in a new-built house in a neighboring street and dad has never lived with us since then (he lives with his mother in a one-bedroom flat).
I was 14, I didn’t have to go to school any more, so I plunged into all this olden scandinavian and western-european stuff and music for two years.
Though I soon became quite disappointed because of its neo-pagan ideology, which I wanted nothing to do with and the variety of all these fantasy worlds (I discovered that the world of the game, of the mythology-based lyric on the tape, of The Lord of the Rings and of British folk were totally different) I anyway kept on self-deceiving and thinking I might find or kind of create my own world myself, taking that stuff as a model.
At composing music I was doing very well. Though not a skilful guitarist or a proficient in sound recording, I still knew for myself I was making the most catchy and tuneful melodies in the genre of music I listened to. I only listened to a few groups and found all the other music in that style an absolute rubbish, I didn’t understand why people loved it, didn’t understand in what way they loved the music and all the nordic stuff at all. I saw even then that there was a sheer difference between me and other people in perceiving it. Even between me and the musicians themselves who made the music, between me and other people playing that fantasy game and so on.
I still didn’t understand english. I’d read lyric in russian translations if I could find. To be honest, I didn’t give a damn about all those viking sagas, history, elfs, the plot of the game I played, etc. Every time I was reading lyrics of some group I wanted it to be something familiar to me and I always got disappointed when I learned what it was really about. That was why I didn’t have motivation to learn english. I didn’t read books, I had no interest. For me it was all in particular kind of melodies and those feelings that I derived from them. I would sit and look at pictures in Google Earth of scandinavian countries and fancied myself living in my own house in mountains, composing songs about some fantasy life which I’d somehow be living and so on.
I didn’t think about dying, didn’t think about any particular girl (forgot the twins). It was the happiest time in my life, the most tranquil and full of hopes. I still didn’t fully understand that there wasn’t any satisfying way of creating a world for me so that it might be both virtual and real.
During the period of 14-16 age I made various short-lived acquaintances on local music forums. In the first year I even was in a metal band, so I went out about once a week. But of course I didn’t share an interest in informal get-togethers, I didn’t have relations with anybody but in a formal way.
At the time my mum used to work as a cleaning woman in shops as an act of her self-abasement. She would wear shabby and dull clothes, she didn’t have any friends round or go out any more – all that was because her son turned out to be abnormal.
So I was alone at home every day and my sexual perverses were flourishing. I didn’t accept any porn but lesbian, especially that with milk enemas, footfetish, vomit and all. The same practices I did myself, going as far as to play with my feces. It seemed overcoming my fears was what excited me, not girls’ beauty or something normal. But it was so when I was at home only. When I was out and looking at girls in real I couldn’t think of anything nasty, I wanted them in a platonic way as usual.
Meanwhile I got crazy about the idea of moving to the north, closer to Europe, so at 16 I went to Saint-Petersburg for a few days, had my portion of living in a dirty dormitory with drunkards(couldn’t book anywhere else due to my age) and returned home to wait until I was legal age.
