I became consumed with a need to make my dad like me. I kept myself to myself and tried my best to keep out of trouble. I didnt steal and I tried to think positive thoughts about him. But whenever I was near him a hatred would rise - beginning with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

 

Dad had just got some passport photos done and I asked for one. He didnt question why I wanted it.

I stuck it on my desk in my bedroom and would spend hours just staring at it, trying to sort out what I felt, trying to find something to like in the lines of his face.

 

He caught me one afternoon staring at his photo and seemed bemused that I had chosen him as my pin up. He walked away with a smug grin and I thought I had finally found a way for him to warm to me. But the more I looked at the photo the more I was certain I hated him and we had no future as father and son.

 

On the outside I was getting on with life at school, throwing myself into drama classes, auditioning and winning parts in end of term productions.

I was making friends, but at the same time kept a safe distance. Ever since Vicky moved when I was younger I felt that people I loved where always moving away. Along with Vicky, my friend David moved, a few people I  would walk to school with went away too. I believed this was down to me.

 

At 13 I thought the world revolved around me. If I wasn't good then floods would strike in foreign countries, if I swore or spat then friends would fade.
From always being told that I was nothing, I believed it and my ego tried to convince me that I was something, even if it ment  I was causing all the worlds problems.

 

I remember sitting on a bus one day, looking out the window and seeing people washing their cars, watching the  world go by. And a thought struck me.
'None of this is real'.

Everything I could see, everything I would hear, touch, smell - wasn't real. I began to believe that the world had been destroyed and the only survivor was myself.
The life I experienced was beamed down to me by a super computer.
I totally believed this to be the case and fell into a long depression thinking that my  friends were elaborate holograms, the food I tasted was really thin air and that I was completely alone in the world.

I distanced myself from my friends even more. I couldn't see the point in keeping up the pretence. I began to fear the computer as much as I feared my father.

 

Years later, during one of many counselling sessions I recalled this memory to my therapist.
She pointed out that if the good things weren't real then surely the beatings from dad were fake too.

I realised I had made up this fantasy scenario as a way to survive my father. I can remember looking down at a bruise on my arm after another beating and thinking it wasn't real. It was the computers doing. And if the bruise wasn't real then nor was my father.

 

Gradually I put this thought to the back of mind where it stayed until I reached adult hood.

It was raining outside and me and emma were bored. Matthew was downstairs with mum, dad was at football.
We knew mum kept a box full of family photos and we carefully climbed to the top of her wardrobe and pulled it down.

A few loose photos fell out too. Ones I had never seen before.
One was from my dads navy days.

At first I couldn't make him out and thought it was a photo of his crew.
He would talk for ages about how he was the captain of his ship and even how he once had to sell the ship to pay  back some gambling debts.

 

I took the photo to mum and asked her about it.
She pointed to a picture of a young waiter, with what looked like a towel draped over his arm. That's your father she said.

 

My father was never the captain, nor was he a hero sailor, he was a waiter and was thrown out of service.

Shocked as I was, I also saw the funny side and began to think that dad wasn't all he appeared to be. Why  should I believe I was the demon child he said I was. This gave me back a bit of independence.

 

I still wrote in my diary, everything about him and also the new feelings and changes to my  body I was experiencing through the onset of puberty.

 

Masturbation was a novel, guilty pleasure. I would write all my fantasies in the diary. Most of them centered on the neighbourhood boys. I just couldn't get sexually aroused thinking about females.
Dad would hide his porn films and I took this to mean that sex was something to be hidden away.

Feeling  gay was something far worse, and my diary became my confidant.

 

One day I realised my dairy wasn't in its usual hiding place. I feared the worst thinking dad had got hold of it.
Pacing up and down my room I heard giggles coming from my sisters bedroom. I walked in to find her and a friend immersed in my most private thoughts.

 

As their laughter got louder I stormed out the house with the diary I had snatched back, heading for the nearby woods.

 

When I was certain no one else was around, I tore up my  years of growing pains and frustration and scattered the pieces into a small river.

 

I was sad to see my work being flushed away, but was burning with a rage I never knew I had.

A fury at my sister, and a hot anger at my dad for reducing me to hide away my innermost desires and thoughts.

 

From here on, I resolved to do what I wanted, when I wanted and to hell with the man who called himself my father.