So we’ve all read them and all been appalled by them; the amazingly candid and beautifully written memoirs of kids who have suffered the most horrendous abuse at the hands of others, usually written like this: Kid grows up in an abusive home, kid struggles to get away from their abusers, kid has a troubled youth, kid meets a mentor/saviour and comes good, the end!!

Or is it?

Some of these kids DO achieve Nirvana and have the most fulfilling and gratifying adulthoods, and do so with what appears to be apparent ease. For most of us however, it’s a completely different picture, one that’s exhausting, challenging and often destructive and always takes a massive amount of effort, every damned day just so that others looking in think you’re some semblance of normal.

In my own pursuit of mental wellness I discovered that while there was lots of support and resources for female survivors, support for males was extremely thin on the ground and didn’t address the whole plethora of struggles I was careening through; guilt, shame, self loathing, guilt, deceit, substance misuse, guilt, anger, promiscuity and those are the parts that were not so bad…..

I hope this will become something  other than Poor Me because I’m anything but poor!!

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