Chairman Kaga
living in the past
- 12,044
- Posts
- 20
- Years
- Age 36
- Kitchen Stadium
- Seen Mar 9, 2013
It's been five years to the day since last I was here. Those of you who have been here long enough to remember my time here know that I left under strange and mysterious circumstances, and that fact combined with deep shame for the friendships and duties that I coldly shirked at that time makes no way of returning completely appropriate for me. I have no right, nor would I be shameless enough, to simply and abruptly stroll back into this place, declare "hey, I'm back!", and expect to be immediately and unconditionally welcomed. Not because any of you wouldn't be gracious and welcoming, but because my disappearance demands answers, demands apologies. But, enforcer of rules that I once was, I'll use the standard venue that anyone on PC would normally use to announce their arrival or return—this forum. My old friends, who I have never forgotten, here is my story.
Note: if the following makes my 18-year-old self sound irrational, melodramatic, self-absorbed, spineless, and just plain stupid, that's because I was! The moral of the story before you even read the story is to not let self-pity overwhelm your need to survive.
As some of you may remember, I was set to graduate high school in June 2006. As with any senior, I had my share of difficult decisions to make regarding higher education and my future in general. Things were looking incredibly up for me by the spring of 2006, as I had already received five free ride four-year scholarships from universities and had been courted by Harvard and Yale among other places because of my miraculously high ACT score. I was frightened of the prospect of moving away from home for the first time, but because of my abusive home environment and the utter desolation of my community I was counting on this opportunity with the full intensity of my entire being. Wherever I went, it would have been as if I was receiving new life. No more agonizing boredom of small-town life, no more high school classes unable to satisfy my academic voracity, no more father threatening to shoot me in my sleep or burn the house down if I disobeyed him in even the slightest way. I didn't just want to leave for college, I had to for my own sanity. I cannot underscore enough the singular, all-consuming strength and intensity of this desire, and any of you would have to be in my mind and body to fully comprehend it. Freedom was, at the time, literally all that motivated me to continue living.
Well, the future that I wanted for myself suddenly looked as if it was going to be unobtainable that May. I had been busy scrimping and saving from my own meager allowance and had purchased almost nothing for myself in two years. I already knew that I could expect no financial support from my family, as my father was a deadbeat who faked disability in the 1970s in order to be able to pull Social Security benefits for the rest of his life at a young age. He felt that this enabled him to never have to work again, and so he chose to sit on the couch for the rest of his life fully knowing that he was damning his family to near-poverty. Although he was psychologically unstable and threatened my mother, my sister, and me with violence regularly, he at least acted as though he had a soft spot for enabling my education and promised me for years before graduation that he was saving in order for me to be able to be established wherever it was that I was supposed to go to university. It was on the cusp of my graduation that he slowly began to backpedal on this, first by telling me that he wouldn't support me unless I chose the university that was closest to our home.
I had already been cheated out of my first choice of college by the fact that they refused to grant me a full ride just because I was out of state, and the colleges that I had already been granted full rides at were spread all over the state. I had applied to almost every college in the area just to maximize my odds of receiving a favorable scholarship from one, but as it turned out, the university that was closest to me and had also granted me free tuition was as far from what I wanted as possible. It was small, located in a rural community, reeked of austerity and privilege, was run by a quaint religious sect, and didn't even offer courses in my desired major, which was Political Science. I rebelled against this, begging my father to allow me to choose a college that was more in line with the lifestyle and education that I wanted to pursue. I was told absolutely not, and that I would have to go to the nearby local college or be completely denied any kind of support from him. My heart sank deeply after hearing this, but I ultimately relented. This, however, was not enough for my father, who then suddenly added an extra condition: that I would not be permitted to go to college at all unless we moved as a family and I commuted from our new home. While I was 18, legally an adult, and my parents' "permission" was not binding to me in any way, shape, or form, with my father there was always the implied threat that if I did something that I did not have his "permission" for that very bad things would happen. I was hesitant to accept his terms, but he became very menacing about it, and, at last, I relented again, knowing full well that my desperate dream for freedom and for the education of my choice was dying with every concession I made. My heart was already on the edge of the abyss, but a week or so after my concession to be forced to live with him wherever I went, things became awful.
My father proposed that we travel to the town where my college-to-be was located so that we could go house hunting. This was foolishness as my father had little money to his name, but I hoped that the one redeeming outcome of this trip would be that we would find something, my father would use the so-called "savings" he had promised would be used to start my education to make a down payment on the home, and he could sell ours, pay off the loan, and start a new loan for the new house. My ideal college life was already in shambles before it had begun, but I was not so choosy as to turn down an opportunity to attend any college, even if it was on the conditions of my despotic father. Hours passed, and as we crawled along the streets of the town and visited various real estate agencies, my heart began to sink. The area was, on the whole, incredibly wealthy, with all houses for sale in the area being in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and far beyond the ability of my deadbeat father to ever take out a loan on. Toward the end of the horrible excursion, we finally found a house that was in my father's price range, but upon a tour of it, I lost that momentary spark of hope that we had finally found something. There was no indoor plumbing, the floors were littered with dead cockroaches, electrical wires were torn out of the walls, the walls and roof were full of holes, the windows were shattered. Repairs totaling more than the cost of the home itself would be necessary just to make it habitable, and so we left without a single potential home to consider. I asked desperately about his promised financial support only to be told that it had only ever amounted to hundreds of dollars and had been frittered away on minor car repairs over years.
It was then that I was told that I simply would not be going to college. No available homes meant we couldn't move, and not being able to move meant that I couldn't attend the college that my father demanded. He, who only had an eighth-grade education and at my age was a street thug, was stamping out the future of my own education based on hell knows what insane, irrational criteria that were driving his every decision. I just couldn't go anywhere. Even though I was willing to work or get a loan and pay the monstrous $8000 a year room and board costs at this university, even though I was willing to commute 90 minutes both ways from home, even though I was so desperate at that point that I would have done anything just to attend even that college which I had no desire to go to and couldn't even offer me the education that I wanted. I am humble and realize that it is a privilege to go to college at all, much less for free to a small, elite private university where a four-year education normally costs in excess of $100k. I knew that then. However, for one thing, I cannot underscore enough the vicious tyranny that I had to suffer from my father for my entire life to that point. While he was always too much of a coward to actually do violence to me, the threat was perpetually there, and not just to me, but the people I loved. I lived under the idea that it only took one time for him to follow through on his threats for my life to be ruined, and so I remained always obedient at great personal sacrifice, even when my life was already as good as ruined.
My freedom from this was to be a non-negotiable portion of my college education, and although I did relent from this it was only out of extreme desperation. Furthermore, I was an extremely high achiever in school and had been built up my entire life as something special. From a young age I was told by everyone around me that I would be an Ivy Leaguer, do great things for business or society, that I was amazing and brilliant and any other number of accolades. Being an awkward, bullied child with a bad home life, my academics were my one source of pride, the only thing that ever caused me to receive positive reinforcement and praise from others, and, according to them, my ticket to a better future. I simply wanted the life that my mother, my teachers, and my friends were all constantly telling me would someday be mine, and having to lower and eventually completely abandon my standards and aspirations over the course of a few weeks at the whim of an insane, sadistic old man dealt an indescribably deep, crippling emotional and psychological blow to me.
A couple of weeks before graduation, I felt like the walking dead. It was as if it took intense effort to breathe, to speak, to move. It was my heart had been ripped from my body and replaced with a freezing sludge. Those final days in high school when the senior class was so elated, so hopeful, reveling in the culmination of their youth and ebullient with grand plans for the future, were agony. I lied to everyone and told them that I was going to X college to pursue Y degree, too ashamed for anyone to know the truth that I was to idly sit at home under an oppressive yoke while they all lived their lives, attained knowledge, trained for what they planned to do with the rest of their lives, had fun, found love, did the things that normal people do at that age. I had lived for that one opportunity. In school I found myself perpetually choking back fits of rage and tears, wanting to rend my own flesh with the pens I signed senior portraits with, wanting to strangle, maim, utterly destroy anyone who dared to do so much as jovially discuss their future plans within earshot of me. These impulses were a new and disturbing sensation to me, kind and even-tempered as I normally was, but the weight of hopelessness coaxed me into indulging these vile feelings ever more intensely. I shut out my friends, refusing to call, chat, go to graduation parties, anything, for having friends was only the unbearably cruel evidence that I had once lived in a more carefree time with hope for the future. In my increasingly-deranged mind, they were specters whose very existence was a mockery of my exquisite, abyssal, crushing despair. My soul was dead, save for hate and a violence that alternated between explosive and implosive. And at that time it was the same with you, my old friends, here on PC.
I suppose my disappearance coming as quite a shock to all of you is evidence that I was quite skilled at hiding my feelings. While I would open up to you at times regarding my personal problems, this came so quickly and dwarfed the other problems of my life so greatly that I could not bear to discuss it. Several of you whom I regularly spoke with were yourselves preparing for college, and, thus, my jealousy-induced loathing quickly found its way into my PC relationships. For weeks I tried to carry on as normal here, keeping up a good image due to my position as Super Moderator. It finally came to pass, though, that I could no longer bear my friendships here for the same reasons that I could no longer bear my physical, face-to-face friendships. The greatest darkness began to invade every thought, with the assumption that my life was over beginning to dictate my actions. With no future ahead of me, any contact with the happy elements of my life was a form of futility that only served to torture me emotionally. I no longer wanted to feel anything, and total isolation was the most immediate way I had of purging myself of this suffering. I lingered here, wondering when and how to finally cut things off forever. I remember that the once-venerable PC member Dakota, who had long since fallen from grace and become a malcontent, had decided against my desperate pleas to go on a final campaign of trolling and spamming coming off of a temporary ban. When I saw his actions, I asked then-Assistant Admin Miharu (now retired and known as Ryoutarou) to allow me to permanently ban him myself, which he allowed, and I expelled my former friend from this place forever. It felt like an execution, and was as close to an act of violence toward an internet friend as I could have committed, and, considering the hatred and bitterness that I felt toward everyone around me at the time, I deigned it an appropriately symbolic time to make my exit from PC. I may have posted for a day or two afterward, but then simply lurked for a few days, and then on May 20, 2006, I logged out from my account for the last time, cutting myself off from friendship as I edged closer to what I believed at the time was my own oblivion.
Graduation came and went, and I spent long, hot days simply laying in bed or staring blankly into the television. Every time I saw my father, I had to shut down my mind in order to keep myself from lunging into him like a wild animal and tearing at him with my teeth and nails. I was truly out of my mind. My older sister, herself still living at home, quickly became distraught with the zombification of my personality. As I became completely unresponsive to her, it affected her so deeply that she herself quickly seemed to be on the edge of a mental breakdown. Alternating between a near-catatonic state and frequent, bitter weeping and screaming, she had witnessed all of what had happened to me and to my hopes in the past month or two, horribly grieved that the life had entirely gone out of me. I soon realized that, with no plans, completely adrift, and subjected to my sister's emotional torment in addition to my own, I had fully lost the will to live. I would sit, stare into space, and contemplate how many more days, weeks, months, and years I would do the very same thing every day. My father told me that I could not get a job or even leave home without his supervision, leaving me no way out of the empty nothingness of my life. For a long time I leaned toward simply ending everything, seeing no way else out of my imprisonment, getting as far as drafting a long farewell letter to my family, memorizing the location of the gun in my father's room, and considering planning it for his birthday, which was in late July, for maximum impact and spite. To this day I don't know if I could have ever actually done it when push came to shove, but at that time it felt absolutely like I could.
A chance run-in with a friend in July brought me back from the brink, however. Being the only one to see through the complete shut-out of my friends that I undertook in my final weeks of high school, he dropped by to see how I was. I was so starved for any kind of human interaction at that point that this won out over my feelings of rage-fueled jealousy, and I invited him into my room for a while and allowed him to speak to me. As it turned out, he was facing a similar situation to me. He had planned to go to college to get a degree in programming, but the day that he turned 18 his parents told him that he was no longer welcome under their roof unless he paid them a rental fee for his own room. His wages from his work at a fry cook would barely allow him to save for classes at a technical college, so this cruel ultimatum from his parents completely dashed his aspirations of higher education and he was henceforth forced to work just to live in his own house. He was a middling student in school, could not get a scholarship anywhere, and was thus stuck in somewhat the same sort of limbo that I was. I took note of how much more calmly he approached his predicament than I did, and backed away from my despair for a moment. I was outraged as his parents' actions, and somehow through my deranged mental state I saw the hypocrisy in wondering why my friend would not defy his parents while thoughtlessly accepting the irrational demands of my father. In that brief moment of clarity, I suddenly realized that living an empty life of monotony, or especially ending that life, were already the worst possible outcome for me, and that my life could only improve if I successfully defied my father. I first sought consent from my mother and sister, who were already utterly broken at the sight of my current state and told me that any repercussion that they would potentially face from my father would be worth my making it out. I accepted their resolve and proceeded to contact all of the colleges that had offered me full scholarships when I had the privacy to do so.
I was sent reeling almost fully back into my despairing state when it turned out that I was past the deadline for freshman admission for each of the colleges and that all of my scholarships were now worthless. Before totally giving up, I decided to try every single college in the state to see if there were any that were both still admitting freshmen and offering financial aid, and at the end of an exhaustive search I found one. It was a large public university on the other side of the state, an area that was an absolute unknown to me but now my last chance at freedom. I would be able to pursue my chosen major, and not only was I offered financial aid, but the combination of my high ACT score and 0 rating on my FAFSA made me eligible for so much financial aid at this university that I would have thousands of dollars left over per semester to do whatever I so chose with. It seemed too good to be true, and now convinced that this was my last, best shot, I finally worked up the courage to tell my father that I would be leaving for college in the fall. I broke it to him as gently as I could, but it still devolved into a hellish argument that eventually involved my mother and sister as well. For a while I was more than a little frightened that he would kill me before I had the chance to go, but I simply remained defiant and proceeded to prepare for college in the face of his resistance. After his threats had no effect for weeks on end, he slowly sunk into a disgruntled silence on the matter and, I feel, a tacit acceptance that he couldn't stop me. In retrospect simply not listening to his demands seems so easy, but it was by far the scariest thing I'd ever done at that time. Late August came, and I made it to college, a feat which I had thought impossible.
Long story short since then, I put in my four years and graduated a history major. I quickly abandoned PoliSci when I lost an interest in politics in general, and have since aspired to be a professor of American History. Unfortunately, there is no job market for young people with history degrees and no work experience, so I've been jobless since graduating a year ago and am, amazingly, at home again for the time being. A while after I went to college, my father pulled a knife on my mother, the police were called, and he went to jail and was convicted on a domestic violence charge. He's mellowed out since then and, I being 23, much bigger, and much stronger, I have complete freedom, but my mother has fallen ill. I am helping to take care of her, but primarily I'm living here because of a curious legal issue involving my inheritance of the property that requires my residency here for a given period of time. After that, I'm likely to move somewhere in search of greener pastures, but it's a ways off and my plans are vague and nebulous.
Now that the reason behind my disappearance has been revealed, if I haven't killed all of you with the wall of text, allow me to address the most important part of this post: the apology.
Everyone, my friends, the people who entrusted their feelings to me, the people who looked to me for laughter and companionship, the people who relied on my commitment to justly enforcing the law at PC, and the people who I worried, insulted, and hurt by my vanishing into thin air, I am, from the bottom of my heart, the deepest depths of my being, with my soul's full sincerity, and with all humility, guilt, shame, regret, and willingness to atone, sorry for my short-sighted and selfish act. I do not know how to express myself in a way that will account for the long length of five years, and I do not know how, if at all, I can make amends in any shorter amount of time, but I am here again first and foremost because enough time has passed since that horrible summer that I have been able to reflect upon and finally grasp the reality of what I did, and it has weighed too heavily on my conscience to simply go unaddressed forever. If you'll have me back, I'd also love to know what my old friends have been up to in this span of time and to, somehow, anyhow, be here again in any capacity. If any of you wish to get in touch with me, I'm sure there will be no end of things to discuss. I'm pretty much the same person I was years ago, albeit a bit more sober, hopefully a bit wiser, a bit more accepting.
Man, what a load off my chest this was.
To people who were not around when I was active:
First of all, congrats on making it this far! Hope you didn't lose sleep reading this novel, especially since this ancient history is incredibly boring to those who weren't involved. My name is Chairman Kaga, I'm 23, and my favorite Pokemon is Dunsparce. I'm a disheveled hobo with a bad case of insomnia. Hope to have fun at PC with you guys!
Note: if the following makes my 18-year-old self sound irrational, melodramatic, self-absorbed, spineless, and just plain stupid, that's because I was! The moral of the story before you even read the story is to not let self-pity overwhelm your need to survive.
As some of you may remember, I was set to graduate high school in June 2006. As with any senior, I had my share of difficult decisions to make regarding higher education and my future in general. Things were looking incredibly up for me by the spring of 2006, as I had already received five free ride four-year scholarships from universities and had been courted by Harvard and Yale among other places because of my miraculously high ACT score. I was frightened of the prospect of moving away from home for the first time, but because of my abusive home environment and the utter desolation of my community I was counting on this opportunity with the full intensity of my entire being. Wherever I went, it would have been as if I was receiving new life. No more agonizing boredom of small-town life, no more high school classes unable to satisfy my academic voracity, no more father threatening to shoot me in my sleep or burn the house down if I disobeyed him in even the slightest way. I didn't just want to leave for college, I had to for my own sanity. I cannot underscore enough the singular, all-consuming strength and intensity of this desire, and any of you would have to be in my mind and body to fully comprehend it. Freedom was, at the time, literally all that motivated me to continue living.
Well, the future that I wanted for myself suddenly looked as if it was going to be unobtainable that May. I had been busy scrimping and saving from my own meager allowance and had purchased almost nothing for myself in two years. I already knew that I could expect no financial support from my family, as my father was a deadbeat who faked disability in the 1970s in order to be able to pull Social Security benefits for the rest of his life at a young age. He felt that this enabled him to never have to work again, and so he chose to sit on the couch for the rest of his life fully knowing that he was damning his family to near-poverty. Although he was psychologically unstable and threatened my mother, my sister, and me with violence regularly, he at least acted as though he had a soft spot for enabling my education and promised me for years before graduation that he was saving in order for me to be able to be established wherever it was that I was supposed to go to university. It was on the cusp of my graduation that he slowly began to backpedal on this, first by telling me that he wouldn't support me unless I chose the university that was closest to our home.
I had already been cheated out of my first choice of college by the fact that they refused to grant me a full ride just because I was out of state, and the colleges that I had already been granted full rides at were spread all over the state. I had applied to almost every college in the area just to maximize my odds of receiving a favorable scholarship from one, but as it turned out, the university that was closest to me and had also granted me free tuition was as far from what I wanted as possible. It was small, located in a rural community, reeked of austerity and privilege, was run by a quaint religious sect, and didn't even offer courses in my desired major, which was Political Science. I rebelled against this, begging my father to allow me to choose a college that was more in line with the lifestyle and education that I wanted to pursue. I was told absolutely not, and that I would have to go to the nearby local college or be completely denied any kind of support from him. My heart sank deeply after hearing this, but I ultimately relented. This, however, was not enough for my father, who then suddenly added an extra condition: that I would not be permitted to go to college at all unless we moved as a family and I commuted from our new home. While I was 18, legally an adult, and my parents' "permission" was not binding to me in any way, shape, or form, with my father there was always the implied threat that if I did something that I did not have his "permission" for that very bad things would happen. I was hesitant to accept his terms, but he became very menacing about it, and, at last, I relented again, knowing full well that my desperate dream for freedom and for the education of my choice was dying with every concession I made. My heart was already on the edge of the abyss, but a week or so after my concession to be forced to live with him wherever I went, things became awful.
My father proposed that we travel to the town where my college-to-be was located so that we could go house hunting. This was foolishness as my father had little money to his name, but I hoped that the one redeeming outcome of this trip would be that we would find something, my father would use the so-called "savings" he had promised would be used to start my education to make a down payment on the home, and he could sell ours, pay off the loan, and start a new loan for the new house. My ideal college life was already in shambles before it had begun, but I was not so choosy as to turn down an opportunity to attend any college, even if it was on the conditions of my despotic father. Hours passed, and as we crawled along the streets of the town and visited various real estate agencies, my heart began to sink. The area was, on the whole, incredibly wealthy, with all houses for sale in the area being in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and far beyond the ability of my deadbeat father to ever take out a loan on. Toward the end of the horrible excursion, we finally found a house that was in my father's price range, but upon a tour of it, I lost that momentary spark of hope that we had finally found something. There was no indoor plumbing, the floors were littered with dead cockroaches, electrical wires were torn out of the walls, the walls and roof were full of holes, the windows were shattered. Repairs totaling more than the cost of the home itself would be necessary just to make it habitable, and so we left without a single potential home to consider. I asked desperately about his promised financial support only to be told that it had only ever amounted to hundreds of dollars and had been frittered away on minor car repairs over years.
It was then that I was told that I simply would not be going to college. No available homes meant we couldn't move, and not being able to move meant that I couldn't attend the college that my father demanded. He, who only had an eighth-grade education and at my age was a street thug, was stamping out the future of my own education based on hell knows what insane, irrational criteria that were driving his every decision. I just couldn't go anywhere. Even though I was willing to work or get a loan and pay the monstrous $8000 a year room and board costs at this university, even though I was willing to commute 90 minutes both ways from home, even though I was so desperate at that point that I would have done anything just to attend even that college which I had no desire to go to and couldn't even offer me the education that I wanted. I am humble and realize that it is a privilege to go to college at all, much less for free to a small, elite private university where a four-year education normally costs in excess of $100k. I knew that then. However, for one thing, I cannot underscore enough the vicious tyranny that I had to suffer from my father for my entire life to that point. While he was always too much of a coward to actually do violence to me, the threat was perpetually there, and not just to me, but the people I loved. I lived under the idea that it only took one time for him to follow through on his threats for my life to be ruined, and so I remained always obedient at great personal sacrifice, even when my life was already as good as ruined.
My freedom from this was to be a non-negotiable portion of my college education, and although I did relent from this it was only out of extreme desperation. Furthermore, I was an extremely high achiever in school and had been built up my entire life as something special. From a young age I was told by everyone around me that I would be an Ivy Leaguer, do great things for business or society, that I was amazing and brilliant and any other number of accolades. Being an awkward, bullied child with a bad home life, my academics were my one source of pride, the only thing that ever caused me to receive positive reinforcement and praise from others, and, according to them, my ticket to a better future. I simply wanted the life that my mother, my teachers, and my friends were all constantly telling me would someday be mine, and having to lower and eventually completely abandon my standards and aspirations over the course of a few weeks at the whim of an insane, sadistic old man dealt an indescribably deep, crippling emotional and psychological blow to me.
A couple of weeks before graduation, I felt like the walking dead. It was as if it took intense effort to breathe, to speak, to move. It was my heart had been ripped from my body and replaced with a freezing sludge. Those final days in high school when the senior class was so elated, so hopeful, reveling in the culmination of their youth and ebullient with grand plans for the future, were agony. I lied to everyone and told them that I was going to X college to pursue Y degree, too ashamed for anyone to know the truth that I was to idly sit at home under an oppressive yoke while they all lived their lives, attained knowledge, trained for what they planned to do with the rest of their lives, had fun, found love, did the things that normal people do at that age. I had lived for that one opportunity. In school I found myself perpetually choking back fits of rage and tears, wanting to rend my own flesh with the pens I signed senior portraits with, wanting to strangle, maim, utterly destroy anyone who dared to do so much as jovially discuss their future plans within earshot of me. These impulses were a new and disturbing sensation to me, kind and even-tempered as I normally was, but the weight of hopelessness coaxed me into indulging these vile feelings ever more intensely. I shut out my friends, refusing to call, chat, go to graduation parties, anything, for having friends was only the unbearably cruel evidence that I had once lived in a more carefree time with hope for the future. In my increasingly-deranged mind, they were specters whose very existence was a mockery of my exquisite, abyssal, crushing despair. My soul was dead, save for hate and a violence that alternated between explosive and implosive. And at that time it was the same with you, my old friends, here on PC.
I suppose my disappearance coming as quite a shock to all of you is evidence that I was quite skilled at hiding my feelings. While I would open up to you at times regarding my personal problems, this came so quickly and dwarfed the other problems of my life so greatly that I could not bear to discuss it. Several of you whom I regularly spoke with were yourselves preparing for college, and, thus, my jealousy-induced loathing quickly found its way into my PC relationships. For weeks I tried to carry on as normal here, keeping up a good image due to my position as Super Moderator. It finally came to pass, though, that I could no longer bear my friendships here for the same reasons that I could no longer bear my physical, face-to-face friendships. The greatest darkness began to invade every thought, with the assumption that my life was over beginning to dictate my actions. With no future ahead of me, any contact with the happy elements of my life was a form of futility that only served to torture me emotionally. I no longer wanted to feel anything, and total isolation was the most immediate way I had of purging myself of this suffering. I lingered here, wondering when and how to finally cut things off forever. I remember that the once-venerable PC member Dakota, who had long since fallen from grace and become a malcontent, had decided against my desperate pleas to go on a final campaign of trolling and spamming coming off of a temporary ban. When I saw his actions, I asked then-Assistant Admin Miharu (now retired and known as Ryoutarou) to allow me to permanently ban him myself, which he allowed, and I expelled my former friend from this place forever. It felt like an execution, and was as close to an act of violence toward an internet friend as I could have committed, and, considering the hatred and bitterness that I felt toward everyone around me at the time, I deigned it an appropriately symbolic time to make my exit from PC. I may have posted for a day or two afterward, but then simply lurked for a few days, and then on May 20, 2006, I logged out from my account for the last time, cutting myself off from friendship as I edged closer to what I believed at the time was my own oblivion.
Graduation came and went, and I spent long, hot days simply laying in bed or staring blankly into the television. Every time I saw my father, I had to shut down my mind in order to keep myself from lunging into him like a wild animal and tearing at him with my teeth and nails. I was truly out of my mind. My older sister, herself still living at home, quickly became distraught with the zombification of my personality. As I became completely unresponsive to her, it affected her so deeply that she herself quickly seemed to be on the edge of a mental breakdown. Alternating between a near-catatonic state and frequent, bitter weeping and screaming, she had witnessed all of what had happened to me and to my hopes in the past month or two, horribly grieved that the life had entirely gone out of me. I soon realized that, with no plans, completely adrift, and subjected to my sister's emotional torment in addition to my own, I had fully lost the will to live. I would sit, stare into space, and contemplate how many more days, weeks, months, and years I would do the very same thing every day. My father told me that I could not get a job or even leave home without his supervision, leaving me no way out of the empty nothingness of my life. For a long time I leaned toward simply ending everything, seeing no way else out of my imprisonment, getting as far as drafting a long farewell letter to my family, memorizing the location of the gun in my father's room, and considering planning it for his birthday, which was in late July, for maximum impact and spite. To this day I don't know if I could have ever actually done it when push came to shove, but at that time it felt absolutely like I could.
A chance run-in with a friend in July brought me back from the brink, however. Being the only one to see through the complete shut-out of my friends that I undertook in my final weeks of high school, he dropped by to see how I was. I was so starved for any kind of human interaction at that point that this won out over my feelings of rage-fueled jealousy, and I invited him into my room for a while and allowed him to speak to me. As it turned out, he was facing a similar situation to me. He had planned to go to college to get a degree in programming, but the day that he turned 18 his parents told him that he was no longer welcome under their roof unless he paid them a rental fee for his own room. His wages from his work at a fry cook would barely allow him to save for classes at a technical college, so this cruel ultimatum from his parents completely dashed his aspirations of higher education and he was henceforth forced to work just to live in his own house. He was a middling student in school, could not get a scholarship anywhere, and was thus stuck in somewhat the same sort of limbo that I was. I took note of how much more calmly he approached his predicament than I did, and backed away from my despair for a moment. I was outraged as his parents' actions, and somehow through my deranged mental state I saw the hypocrisy in wondering why my friend would not defy his parents while thoughtlessly accepting the irrational demands of my father. In that brief moment of clarity, I suddenly realized that living an empty life of monotony, or especially ending that life, were already the worst possible outcome for me, and that my life could only improve if I successfully defied my father. I first sought consent from my mother and sister, who were already utterly broken at the sight of my current state and told me that any repercussion that they would potentially face from my father would be worth my making it out. I accepted their resolve and proceeded to contact all of the colleges that had offered me full scholarships when I had the privacy to do so.
I was sent reeling almost fully back into my despairing state when it turned out that I was past the deadline for freshman admission for each of the colleges and that all of my scholarships were now worthless. Before totally giving up, I decided to try every single college in the state to see if there were any that were both still admitting freshmen and offering financial aid, and at the end of an exhaustive search I found one. It was a large public university on the other side of the state, an area that was an absolute unknown to me but now my last chance at freedom. I would be able to pursue my chosen major, and not only was I offered financial aid, but the combination of my high ACT score and 0 rating on my FAFSA made me eligible for so much financial aid at this university that I would have thousands of dollars left over per semester to do whatever I so chose with. It seemed too good to be true, and now convinced that this was my last, best shot, I finally worked up the courage to tell my father that I would be leaving for college in the fall. I broke it to him as gently as I could, but it still devolved into a hellish argument that eventually involved my mother and sister as well. For a while I was more than a little frightened that he would kill me before I had the chance to go, but I simply remained defiant and proceeded to prepare for college in the face of his resistance. After his threats had no effect for weeks on end, he slowly sunk into a disgruntled silence on the matter and, I feel, a tacit acceptance that he couldn't stop me. In retrospect simply not listening to his demands seems so easy, but it was by far the scariest thing I'd ever done at that time. Late August came, and I made it to college, a feat which I had thought impossible.
Long story short since then, I put in my four years and graduated a history major. I quickly abandoned PoliSci when I lost an interest in politics in general, and have since aspired to be a professor of American History. Unfortunately, there is no job market for young people with history degrees and no work experience, so I've been jobless since graduating a year ago and am, amazingly, at home again for the time being. A while after I went to college, my father pulled a knife on my mother, the police were called, and he went to jail and was convicted on a domestic violence charge. He's mellowed out since then and, I being 23, much bigger, and much stronger, I have complete freedom, but my mother has fallen ill. I am helping to take care of her, but primarily I'm living here because of a curious legal issue involving my inheritance of the property that requires my residency here for a given period of time. After that, I'm likely to move somewhere in search of greener pastures, but it's a ways off and my plans are vague and nebulous.
Now that the reason behind my disappearance has been revealed, if I haven't killed all of you with the wall of text, allow me to address the most important part of this post: the apology.
Everyone, my friends, the people who entrusted their feelings to me, the people who looked to me for laughter and companionship, the people who relied on my commitment to justly enforcing the law at PC, and the people who I worried, insulted, and hurt by my vanishing into thin air, I am, from the bottom of my heart, the deepest depths of my being, with my soul's full sincerity, and with all humility, guilt, shame, regret, and willingness to atone, sorry for my short-sighted and selfish act. I do not know how to express myself in a way that will account for the long length of five years, and I do not know how, if at all, I can make amends in any shorter amount of time, but I am here again first and foremost because enough time has passed since that horrible summer that I have been able to reflect upon and finally grasp the reality of what I did, and it has weighed too heavily on my conscience to simply go unaddressed forever. If you'll have me back, I'd also love to know what my old friends have been up to in this span of time and to, somehow, anyhow, be here again in any capacity. If any of you wish to get in touch with me, I'm sure there will be no end of things to discuss. I'm pretty much the same person I was years ago, albeit a bit more sober, hopefully a bit wiser, a bit more accepting.
Man, what a load off my chest this was.
To people who were not around when I was active:
First of all, congrats on making it this far! Hope you didn't lose sleep reading this novel, especially since this ancient history is incredibly boring to those who weren't involved. My name is Chairman Kaga, I'm 23, and my favorite Pokemon is Dunsparce. I'm a disheveled hobo with a bad case of insomnia. Hope to have fun at PC with you guys!
