It’s Sunday. Grey. Wet. The kind of piss-stained British weather that makes your bones ache and your soul file for divorce. I’m sat here in my wheelchair—beard tangled, hair like I’ve been dragged backwards through the astral plane—trying to make sense of the cosmic blender my brain’s been trapped in since I woke up.
Everything hurts. Tinnitus screaming like a kettle left on too long, left side numb, head full of fog, and no one to turn it off.
For some reason, this particular Sunday’s dragged me back to my childhood. Not the golden-hued, Enid Blyton fantasy version. Nah. More like the “adopted kids survival guide with optional emotional scarring” edition.
What triggered it? Comics, of all things.
I never got comics. Not from my parents, anyway. Other kids got pocket money. Sweets. Lemonade. I got rationing and disappointment. So I did what any desperate little bastard would do—I borrowed, I begged, and I bargained my way into reading The Beano, The Dandy, Eagle, Dan Dare, and those strange little pulp mags like Tit-Bits.
I’d trade chores, favours, whatever it took to lose myself in a world that didn’t look like mine. Because mine? Mine was all silence, rules, and the quiet kind of cruelty—the one that doesn’t leave bruises but fucks you up for decades.
No pocket money. Not a penny. And if some relative was daft enough to slip me a birthday note? Straight into National Savings Bonds. Not for me, of course. That would be outrageous. No, those were squirrelled away “for the future.” A future I didn’t believe I’d see, and when I did—it was barely worth the paper it was printed on. Might as well have used it to light a roll-up.
So I started grafting at ten. Anything I could do. Carry bricks. Cut grass. Clean out sheds. Learn early: work equals money, and if you want anything in this life, no one’s handing it to you.
My parents? Victorian-tight. Iron-arsed. The kind who think smiling is a moral weakness and crisps are the first step to heroin. Sweets? Nope. Lemonade? Don’t be bloody ridiculous. Treats? Only if you stole them.
And adoption? Oh, don’t get me started. You ever been the cuckoo in the nest? You know—you look like the wrong photo in the family album. Everything about you is just... off. I wasn’t just adopted. I was an inconvenient truth in a family that wanted obedience, not personality. And when I started asking questions, trying to find out who I really was—they shut me down. Hard.
I’ve got stories. Proper horror-show stuff. And they don’t get easier to tell. But I remember. I always bloody remember.
Abuse? Yeah. Not the shadowy, behind-closed-doors kind. The public, soul-splitting stuff that happened while people looked the other way. And when I did speak up, tell someone? I got disbelief. Or worse—blamed. That kind of gaslighting changes you. It teaches you that your pain’s not real unless someone else approves it. That you don’t count unless someone tells you you do.
Well bollocks to that.
They’re gone now. Dead and buried. And part of me still flinches at the memories. But another part—the stronger bit—refuses to stay quiet. I won’t forget. I won’t forgive. And I sure as hell won’t shut up.
These days, I sit in this chair—66, beard like a pagan prophet, hair like a Viking roadie, long past caring what people think. MS has taken a fair bit from me. Left side’s dead. Numb. Hurts to blink some days. But I’ve got a spine made of scrapyard steel. And I’ve got stories.
You know what keeps me going? Not hope. Not faith. Not any of that new-age incense-and-crystals bollocks.
Truth.
Raw, ugly, unapologetic truth.
Told in the voice of a man who’s been broken, rebuilt, and broken again—but still here.
And sometimes? A memory of those comics—those silly, glorious little pages that gave me an escape when I needed it most. You never forget your first lifeline.
“The views in this post are based on my personal
experience. I do not intend harm, only honesty.”
“By ink and breath and sacred rage, I write.
By storm and silence, I survive.”
🧌✨ @goblinbloggeruk ✨🧌
