fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3517 ]

[ SECRET POST #3517 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3517 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Let's get real, folks. Was your childhood, broadly speaking, a happy time? Why or why not?

It was a mix. My dad was a raging dickhole at times but he spent tons of time with us even though he was the primary wage-earner, and taught us how to read and count and whatnot. My mom was passive-aggressive and made it pretty clear she preferred my brothers to me, but she was also severely depressed and now that she's on medication she's much better.

Kids were mean to me because I was a fat, then absurdly muscular tomboy, but I did my share of the beating up, too. I also made great, lasting friendships.

So... a wash. I enjoyed it.

It was not unhappy, but neither would I describe it as notably happy.

Generally speaking, yes. My sisters and I were pretty close in age, and the bad shit mostly didn't land until all three of us were in our teenage years and we discovered that there was a significant history of mental illness on both sides of the family that seemed to kick in with puberty, combined with school stress and my dad having to rapidly change jobs. But before that? Childhood? Pretty good. We had a very close-knit family, and while we all had varying degrees of trouble with school, it was generally pretty happy. At least as I remember it, anyway.

Hard to judge. I was abused as a child, but at the time I barely recognized that that was an abnormal way to grow up. So at the time I thought I was as happy as anyone, but looking back, I'm not so sure.

That was my experience, as well. (I posted below, at 10:29? Too lazy to look it up lol)

Same here. The only real "happy" moments were more like moments of respite from hell.

Private life: Generally, yes. I had a lot of fun running around exploring and playing with friends. Especially during trips to my grandparents. It was very idyllic.
School life: Generally, no. I was bullied a lot.

It really was. We lived out in the country, so we had lots of outdoors to run around in. My childhood memories are of family dinners, bonfires, summer trips, going into the woods every December to cut down our own tree for Xmas, sitting outside on the patio in the summer watching the fireflies, talking and laughing all the time. I was so, so, so very lucky. I would not trade my childhood for anything.

(This was in the seventies, just to be clear.)

Ehhhhh? Like in the middle of the road, I'd say. Bullying and the emergence of mental illness kinda ruined what was otherwise a pretty okay childhood.

I still have my pretty happy memories although some of the memories of family trips were a bit tainted by OCD shit because I would get hella overstimulated. It wasn't until my adult years that I figured out how to manage my OCD. And as a child OCD was fucking terrifying.

Yep. Absolutely. I was well raised, well loved, had access to good food and enrichment. Got along with sibling. My parents were excellent. I was healthy and had a decent amount of friends.

I had a great childhood.

Nope. Well, first 9 years was. Then we move overseas. I was bullied by both peers and teachers from third grade on at a very conservative school where I didn't at all fit in. My parents weren't much help. I was depressed from about 4th grade on as well as had some anxiety issues. Everyone read it as just lazy or uncaring.

:(

Where overseas were you, if I may ask?

Re: Was your childhood happy?

philstar22 - 2016-08-21 00:34 (UTC) - Expand

It... depends. School life was always a freaking nightmare for me. I was the kid who didn't want to do homework and always had to talk to the principal because of disciplinary reasons (I was not violent, but awkward and sweared in class and to the nuns). ...I'm female, so I was a real anomaly because I was always with the worst students who happened to be males BUT to ME they kept telling "you're so intelligent! you just have to study a little bit" while to the others they were just really plain mean, yelling and calling them name like "idiot" or "one who'll do nothing good in his life". That was so fucked up, it made me rage for years. I kept hearing that fucking "you're smart, you could do great things" speech through most of my life and it still makes me angry sometimes. Usually people can't understand why it hurt so much, but that sentence for me means something like "doesn't matter what you do, people don't see YOU. They just see what you appear to be". I was a really cynical and hopeless kid since elementary school. Great fun was had.

But I had a very good family life! My older sister was/is a little mean, but we always played outside with lots of other kids without any real dangers. There was always drama because kids can't stay happy and I was very socially awkward, but I also had fun. Got the best dog and 2nd sister in the whole universe, too! I was really lucky.
My mother was not really the hugging type and that fucked me up really bad for years, but now it's getting better and she was a really kind if scary mother so I can't complain.
Things got complicated when I was 10 years old and my grandad died. ...and then my father almost died because of a motorcycle incident. ...and then my aunt killed herself... Got a lot of shit to deal with during middle and high school. It's better now (my family's mostly dead) THANK GOD.

TL;DR: I had a pretty decent childhood, but I prefer adulthood. More pressure and stress and yadda yadda, but I'm free to be whomever I want.
And I'm still studying even after university and getting a scholarship, so... yeah. School life surely improved. Friend's quality improved greatly, too.

...outside of my escapism into books and cartoons and video games? Not particularly.

I'd rather not reveal the particular details of my home life...but it wasn't all that great.
I was bullied in school for, among other things, my stuttering, being in and out of the hospital, always being behind the times on the trends, speaking with a lisp, being too sickly to ever be athletic, and then the combo of braces and glasses at about the same time? There went my elementary, middle, and high school years right there.
And some of the teachers weren't much better than the students about bullying me. Because clearly it's okay to bully a student over stuttering. NOT NAMING ANY NAMES SHITTY SCIENCE TEACHER FROM EIGHT GRADE WHO DOCKED PARTICIPATION POINTS AND SCREAMED AT ME FOR FUCKING STUTTERING.
...oh and did I mention I was hella sickly so pretty much I spent a lot of my time in and out of hospitals? So there I'd be a depressed, bored, miserable, sick kid in a hospital.

I'm gonna go with no. I had to switch schools because I came home crying more days than not. I got into knock down shout matches with parents on a near daily basis to the point they were considering boarding school. I was badly depressed and over medicated to the point that much of my middle school days are a near blur to me.

I mean not all of it sucked, but it's probably a good thing that I can't remember much of it and adulthood has treated me kinder.

It was alright?
I mostly read books and played video games, but I wasn't particularly unhappy in general I don't think.

Although I was probably unknowingly lonely. Didn't really have friends, or much of a social life outside school (where I was the unpopular kid at a small school), extended family, and (eventually) Scouts.

Yes. Looking back, I can't think of any serious, on-going problems. There were specific incidents where bad things happened, but that's true for everyone.

My teen years were a little rough what with me being a total dork with really bad skin, but even that wasn't so bad because I had lots of friends, did well in school, and wasn't bullied. I think it makes me appreciate adulthood more (even if I still get zits at 36) because I don't look back on those years as my peak.

Not really, but both of my parents had had much shittier childhoods than mine (as they liked to remind me frequently), so I was always aware that my life could be so much worse. But I got no affection or positive attention from my father, who hit me and my brother a lot, and always acted like I was a nuisance just for being there, and my mother expected me to take care of her feelings and protect her instead of the other way around. I had no one in my family or life who seemed to like me just for myself and not what I could do for them, or who supported me and who I could turn to for comfort when I screwed up or got hurt by the rest of the world. I still at nearly 40 have never had a relationship like that, and I've put up with so many shitty relationships because that's just normal to me. It sucks.

So, uh, I guess my answer is a solid no, no, it was not happy. But escaped into books and my imagination, and that's what saved me.

Re: Was your childhood happy?

(Anonymous) - 2016-08-21 07:25 (UTC) - Expand

Generally yes, though it had its bad moments. My parents were/are loving but strict so I grew up pretty sheltered and it's made me a more anxious person than I might otherwise have been, IMO. I'm not white but grew up in a mostly white neighborhood and some kids were little shits about it, especially in elementary and middle school. Sometimes it got physical, but I wasn't bullied to the extreme extent you hear about sometimes. I think if it's possible for kids to be clinically depressed, I was. Not diagnosed and I managed, but I remember being a rather anxious, withdrawn child and not very trusting. I just didn't realize that wasn't normal at the time.

Childhood, great. And now that I'm an adult, things are pretty sweet as well. But my 18-25 years were a horrid mess plagued by depression and anxiety; ironically these are often said to be the best years of one's life.

Nope.

Looking back on it, I'm genuinely surprised I didn't end up some kind of a statistic (either suicide or drugs).

Mostly. It was mostly moderately poor with a few low points, especially after Mum finally got sick of Dad's shit and divorced him, but it was mostly okay.

I'd have to go with pretty much, yeah? We were comfortable money wise, my brother and I got along. I never liked school much because I always got into trouble for reading and was (looking back because I didn't really register it as such) faintly bulling in middle school for being a nerd.

Funnily enough, no one seemed to give a shit in HS? But it was never bad or terrible enough that I felt it impacted my overall happiness.

HS was extra weird because my brother knocked up his GF and there's nothing more awkward (in my experience) than sitting in Parenting class with your brother's pregnant fifteen year old GF. And then going home with her because her mom is a douche-canoe extreme and kicked her out for getting pregnant (when SHE had HER at sixteen).

no. it licked elephant ass. I was bullied constantly for not being good-looking, for hitting a freakishly early puberty, and for being "weird" (I had Asperger's before anybody knew what that was) and my parents didn't take my being bullied seriously. For some reason which I can't even guess at, they thought I was following the bullies around.

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