The truth about my childhood (Patreon)

Check the attached files at the bottom if you'd like to read the post from your PC. Otherwise you can read my life story here in this post.

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Ajoji – The truth about my childhood

I started writing SWFTD with the intention of making something that was uplifting and fun, since my life was so depressing. I didn’t think anyone wanted to read a more serious, introspective story--not from me at least. On the rare occasion, I’ve talked about my mental health struggles, but it wasn’t until the 4 year mark that I started to unravel from the pressure to perform and unresolved trauma from my childhood. I’ve always been very vague about my life because I’ve had strangers online trying to get me deplatformed and family using personal information I shared with them as a bludgeon against me out of envy, spite, and conflict with my views on life, but I’ve always appreciated people that are open about their personal struggles and wished more artists would talk about what happened to them, so I’ll try to share as much as I can here.

I am the daughter of refugees that fled from genocide, and due to my parents’ unresolved trauma (as well as my family, since the entire 1st generation was impacted by war in which half of my family died from starvation and execution, including all my grandparents, and some uncles, aunts, cousins and other relatives), I was physically / emotionally abused and neglected as a child. I suppressed my pain and blamed myself for my problems for a long time due to my conditioning, but I’ve since realized I can never heal if I continue to betray my feelings and punish myself on behalf of all of those that wounded me as a child and as a young adult.

It all started with my parents getting sponsored to live in a first world country towards the end of the war. My mother was getting older and felt pressured to get married and have children by her remaining family, so she flippantly chose someone they approved of and it went to hell from there. I’ve spoken to my mother briefly about this and she admits to making a mistake and rushing into a relationship with a man she didn’t know very well. It turns out, my father had no interest in being a father or a husband, so that led to infidelity, abuse, instability, and eventually abandonment. He left when I was young and had no interest in being involved in my life. He started a new family and allowed me to visit him sometimes, but he would never participate or help my mother with raising me. There were times he’d pity me and try to give me money, but if my stepmothers found out (my father had children with multiple women), they would interfere and withhold any financial support so it was entirely on my mother to raise me and my sibling by herself. Out of all of my siblings, I got the least amount of affection because I was considered the problem child. To this day, my parents favor me the least because I’m the only one who tried to address the problems from the past. Keyword is “tried” because they deny everything and think that all that matters is that they “tried their best.”

My mother was always working or spending time with boyfriends, so I was often in the “care” of many different people who weren’t interested in my cultivation, and I have no idea how they treated me, but I do know I’ve always had issues with being aggressive and afraid of things. My mother told me I’ve hurt other children when I was a child ( I genuinely don’t recall this, but I remember other similar events), and my sibling also had violent tendencies towards anyone that tried to touch them. I do know that we were physically beaten and screamed at as children because my parents recounted these events and laughed at them, since for them, it’s perfectly normal to terrorize their own children with their size and strength, and break wooden utensils on them when they “misbehave”. Or it’s perfectly reasonable to throw metal tools at their toddler when I annoyed them with cries for their attention. My mother and father exposed me to real life pornography, and they allowed me to be violated. There was a time when a male “friend” of the family would grab my crotch when I was child in front of my mother, and I tried to run and hide behind her, but all she would do is laugh because he was “just a perverted old man”. In our culture, the adults are weirdly invasive when it comes to a child’s body. My mother did things that were very humiliating and uncomfortable, and this pattern of being dismissive towards this kind of behavior continued when I later found out that my father was guilty of misconduct with a child in our family that could have landed him in prison, but for reasons I don’t want to get into, he was never punished for that. All I can say is that the person involved is not a mentally stable adult to this day, and that includes myself. I am neurotic, I’m a control freak, I’m sensitive and I do get triggered if I feel like something could reopen old wounds. I’ve always felt dysphoric because of these issues and I avoided romantic relationships for a long time. NSFW and comics were the only outlet I had where I could control things and depict them however I wanted.I’ve had my problems diminished by my family for my whole life because physical and emotional / mental abuse is normalized in my culture. My parents were also abused and abandoned as children. My mother hated my grandma for forcing her to work as a child (there were no laws against this during her time) and her dad did nothing to protect her from her tyrannical mother, in fact, he prevented her from going to school just so she could provide for the family (remember this, this will become relevant later on). My father was also abandoned by his father (who, like him, started a new family with another woman and his mother left him with other children and adults to work). My whole family has suffered from abuse, neglect, and instrumentalization. They don’t really understand the concept of mental health, and for the few that have some inkling, they believe it’s not something you should take seriously or dwell on. They have no respect for actual education and only care about making money and material displays of wealth. It’s all about reputation and posturing because they’re insecure about looking poor.

Due to all of the suffering and confusion around my childhood, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to better understand human psychology, and unfortunately, the more research I’ve done over time and the negative experiences with mental health “professionals” accumulated, the more distrustful I became of the system. That’s not to say all of it is untrustworthy; if I could find a really good psychotherapist, the risk and investment would be worth it for me, but I’m not optimistic about that. So please don’t glibly tell me to go to therapy.

Once I saved up enough money from drawing comics and NSFW art, I tried to break free from my family and move across the country on my own, but I was still tethered to my mother and felt pressured into choosing an ideal place for her where she could have continued access to me. I’ve decided that to fully break free from my family, I have to move out of the country eventually. The problem is, due to learned inadequacy, being forced to stay at home due to being a girl (my mother was often at work and didn’t want me to leave home because she was afraid I’d get moIested), and just too much negative social interactions (I grew up around other unstable, violent children and adults from broken homes), I developed agoraphobia so it’s been difficult because I’m afraid to leave my home and travel alone. My goal is to travel abroad and work simultaneously on the comic while I figure out which country would suit me best. I just have to work up the courage to leave first...

I’ve been doing a lot of journaling and reading books about child developmental psychology; it’s helped me to unlock old memories and reexamine them with a more informed, adult lens. I remembered many negative experiences, but I couldn’t figure out why I always felt bad when I would think of them. Blame was always placed on me, and I attribute that partly due to the callousness of the adults around me when I was growing up, and the culture. In many different cultures, part of the conditioning people receive as children is to always assume you’re at fault and that you have the power to change everything that is “wrong” with you, but no one ever asks what happened to you. What if you weren’t just a “fuck up”? What if you were simply responding in a healthy way to years of mistreatment, but the people that mistreated you either didn’t realize they had mistreated you due to impulses from their own childhood trauma, or they justified it in their mind due to said trauma?

I realized that happened to me a lot as a child. Because of the absence of my father, my mother allowed many different men to have power over me (including men from my family). I was from a lower class family having been abandoned by my father and raised by an immigrant single mother. I had one relative from an upper class family (by marriage) that would often try to humiliate and degrade me in ways that I couldn’t detect as a child, but I knew something was wrong. I still remembered the interactions well into adulthood, and I realize now how malicious and spiteful those interactions were.

Despite being an adult, he was always measuring his intelligence against mine (remember, I was still a child in elementary school and this persisted into my teenage years), trying to dominate me and morally grandstand about how bad of a kid I was, and he pushed his children to do the same to me. He even gossiped about me to his mother and said that he couldn’t understand why I was in advanced classes because I seemed too stupid to be in them. I confronted him about it and he doubled down. He would often try to act like he cared to get me to divulge personal information, even things as petty as asking me to show him what my school crush looked like, just so he could call him ugly. Any information I gave, he would later use that to mock me behind my back and he encouraged his children to tear me down as well. I didn’t know about this until I was an adult and other family members told me about it.I have a lot of anger towards my parents for putting me in vulnerable situations with adults like this who clearly resented me for opportunities they felt they were owed and tried to diminish me to soothe their ego and make themselves feel better. Of course that would never happen since it doesn’t get to the root of their issue. It turns out, that this particular relative was also abused by his parents, specifically his mother, and he used me to gain validation from his abuser. My mother specifically allowed this particular relative to scold me and humiliate me when I did “bad things”. I realize now, a lot of those bad things were just trauma responses to abuse from my own parents. On top of this, my mother had a knack for selecting toxic men and I’ve had very uncomfortable stuff happen that I don’t want to get into, but it made me feel filthy and put me off from relationships for my entire life. It wasn’t until recently that I gained the courage to start dating, and it’s been very challenging because I struggle to trust anyone.

The humiliation rituals and psychological attacks also happened often in school with callous, mean, resentful teachers who enjoyed having power over their students and trying to break our spirit. I have a lot of anger towards the institutions that lord over children and teenagers, turning them into fearful adults who deny their feelings and doubt everything they do. I had my first psychological break down in high school and was continuously blamed for troubling my mother with truancy. God forbid I didn’t want to go to the place where I was being humiliated by my teachers and peers, and forced to deny my feelings and interests, and had my skills and time squandered. My mother would often used her childhood as a bludgeon against me. She constantly reminded me that she was denied an education as a child, and that’s why I should be grateful for the opportunity, but I just ended up with a lot of unresolved trauma. I continued to have nightmares about school well until adulthood, until I finally realized I never should have been treated so harshly, and I finally stopped punishing myself for it. I actually had a dream where I wasn’t wearing any pants in front of my class. I could have felt humiliated, but I just didn’t care and the other students in my dream didn’t care either. It was awesome and I have not had any school related nightmares since then.

I’ve had a complex about my intelligence for a long time and always doubted it, until other intelligent people complimented me for it and I started to view myself differently. The irony is that my mother has had ample opportunity to pursue education on her own time after I became an adult. She can read and write in English, and she’s built a good life for herself. She even brags about her intelligence, yet she has no interest in cultivating it. There are so many youtube videos and free online resources she can indulge in to learn just about anything, but all she does is watch TV and mentally regress like every other boomer. All that brow beating about education only for her to reveal that she doesn’t actually give a shit.

I honestly resent everyone that tried to guilt me into feeling bad for responding in a healthy way to being crushed by the adults that had power over me and the Western education system. I had a few psychological break downs where I cried in front of a teacher. It happened twice, once with a female teacher and once with a male teacher. The female teacher had zero sympathy for me and had a look of disdain for me because she resented me for not doing well in her class. The other teacher was this gentle man who had a young son that he loved dearly, and he’d often bring him to class. This man was very sympathetic and never punished me for doodling or struggling with the class work. I remember he caught me doodling in his class once, and instead of scolding me, he smiled at me and complimented my artistic skills. There was another male teacher, an old humorous man, whose class I would have failed had he not been sympathetic. One day, when we were asked to write letters to him at the end of the year, I thanked him for being kind to me despite failing his class. He pulled me aside at the end of class when all the other students had left and told me he was touched by my letter. I started to tear up, and he told me that clearly I had a talent for conveying my feelings through writing and art, and that not everyone is cut out for every subject. Many years later and I still think fondly of him and that other male teacher to this day. I hope they’re alive and well, because I’d like to write them a letter.

I was often ridiculed and put down for the choices I made throughout my life. Never allowed to make my own mistakes and become a fully developed adult. Decades later and I still feel emotionally stunted, stuck in my teenage years as that girl who rebelled against her oppressors, and was attacked psychologically and sometimes physically for asserting her autonomy. I still remember there were times when my mother struck my face when she didn’t like my attitude or what I had to say. When I got big enough, I caught her hand enough times that she eventually stopped trying to hit me because I wasn’t the little girl she could terrorize or intimidate with her strength or loud voice, or manipulate me with the threat of homelessness anymore.

My parents, relatives, and most teachers were dismissive of my mental state and were very callous when I became desperate for help. I turned a lot of my anger towards them inward and was quite cruel to myself for most of my adult life. I often scolded myself in place of my abusers, and denied my feelings and interests. My family discouraged me from pursuing art and told me that it was a fruitless endeavor. I had one family member tell me that if I wanted to be the successful 1% of artists, I had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a prestigious college, and if I didn’t, I would fail and end up toiling away at some soul crushing job. I did rot at away doing subhuman work for a while. I doubted my ability to amount to anything more, but I am glad that I decided to finally honor myself and pursue my interests. It took a while, but I’m finally here.

Though, the more recent problem is that I continued to betray myself for the duration of my career as an artist. I tried to please others and suppressed my true self since I was convinced that no one would like or appreciate the real me, but it all fell apart when I started to mentally unravel again. That’s why I decided to scale back the work I’ve been doing on Patreon to finally figure out what I wanted out of my life and out of art. I felt so depressed and numb and I couldn’t understand how to fix it. I really did not want to risk taking psychiatric drugs or talking to a callous psychologist who wouldn’t understand me and could potentially make things much worse. So I floundered, sliding deeper into depression until I met someone who helped me to see my life and the world much differently.

I tried to address these problems with my parents, but my parents are severely disassociated, disengaged, dismissive people. My father is evasive and awkwardly laughs at how he’s failed me and my siblings, and my mother gets combative and plays the “amnesia” card, saying she doesn’t remember anything and that I should be happy that she tried her best. It’s so infuriating because there are so many events that both of my parents remember from my childhood, but because they don’t want to take accountability, they refuse to tell me more about my past. The thing is, they’ve always been like this. Ineffectual and out to lunch. I remember there were times other children bullied me and threatened to physically harm me, but my mother did nothing about it and I couldn’t turn to my siblings either. I can’t talk to anyone else in my family about any of this stuff because they can’t bring themselves to criticize our parents even though they all struggled with depression as well, so I realized I have to do my healing entirely on my own.

Through tons of journaling and reading literature on childhood trauma and human psychology, and talking extensively to someone I trusted, I finally made a break through. I realized I could make art about all these things I’ve thought so deeply about. I’ve always had an interest in understanding people and the world around me, and ultimately understanding myself, so why not write about that? I’ve always had an idea about a secret society that valued an open and honest discussion, so I elaborated on that and turned it into a story about a secret academy that cultivates people in a concerted effort to revive a dying culture. I think a lot of the issues we have as a society starts with the family, and so many children are crushed emotionally and spiritually, having their talents and intelligence squandered. If we could stop normalizing the abuse and neglect of children, and properly cultivated them and allow them to become fully realized, independent adults--there would be a much healthier culture, especially for the arts.

I realize now that this is my purpose. I want people to realize what has happened to them, and I fully believe that this is a globally pervasive issue, because you don’t get cultural decline from just a handful of rare cases of mistreated children. Some countries are better at cultivating people than others and have a healthier art culture, so that’s also why I want to move abroad. I want people to take their lives seriously. That doesn’t mean becoming a dull “adult” who denies their feelings and desires to make life more comfortable for other suppressed “adults” in denial. I used to cringe at my teenage self, but upon extensive reflection, I realized that I was quite vibrant and interesting. I’m not sure if I’ll show an updated picture of my art studio / bedroom, it’s still a chaotic mess, but it’s very colorful now and filled with art supplies, crafts, toys, books, and art from other artists. There really is no reason to give up things that are perceived as “childish,” and ever since I’ve allowed myself to pursue whatever I think I want, my feelings have slowly returned. I feel less suppressed and I’m starting to make a break through with having interest in life again.

I have quite a bit written out about the secret society Ellie gets welcomed into, how it started, how it operates, how exactly it cultivates its students, and how it’ll impact her life to some extent, but it is a new update and I need more time to flesh it all out. I would like to start posting publicly again next year, but as this is a massive undertaking, I will continue to work gradually on it and figure out a way to make the production sustainable for myself.

I will continue to update you with more on the new version of SWFTD. I’m really lucky to have an understanding, patient, empathetic audience who sees the potential in me as an artist and has contributed to my cultivation. I hope with this new iteration of the comic, that it will encourage you to reflect on your own past and consider your life more seriously, so that we can all work towards a world where we are less suppressed, more healed, more creative and more exuberant about life itself.