NUSKA
“Darkness will always give you an opportunity to create your own light.”– Iain Thomas
Formerly Practical Growth with E.B. Johnson...NUSKA is a light in the darkness. A place where we can all come together to remember the human thread that unites us. Art. History. Mythology. Oddities. If it's interesting, if it's human, you'll find it here.
Welcome to NUSKA. Positive dissociation.
NUSKA
This Is Why We're Brain Damaged
Ever listened to something one of us has said and thought...wtf? Well, you're not alone.
It's a new episode of Nuska, and this time we're talking crazy childhoods. That's right. Moms talking to aliens. Psychic conventions. Ghost girls in the road. If you want to know what makes us so kooky, we're going to lay it all out for you.
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Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Newska. It is me, Evie, back with Connie this morning. And we have a great episode for you today. We are going to be talking a lot of fun stories. So, as you've noticed, the the episode title for you guys today is This Is Why I'm Brain Damaged. And Connie and I, after having a long conversation, realized in terms of trauma and in terms of how our brains have been wired, it becomes pretty obvious in the childhood stories what happened. So that's what we're going to be talking about today is our weird, wild, and crazy childhood stories. As Connie pointed out, I do seem to have a plethora of them, maybe. We have broken brains. Some some Easter basket of extra trauma in there. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Some weird stories, some spooky stories, some trauma stories, some family stories. You guys are going to get a little bit of everything. Uh, and for some of you, this might not be new, but I think there will be a few stories in here today that are definitely going to enlighten you. If anybody's ever watched any of my stuff on TikTok and has been like, what happened here? What, what, what's going on here on this day?
SPEAKER_04:This episode will be the enlightening one that will uh yeah, this episode because the amount of times I ask you about like just random things in her life, and then she comes out with these stories and my brain falls apart. And I'm like, dude, are you okay?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there was a lot of colorful stuff going on. My family, like I thought everyone's family was like this as well, right? Because my everyone would tell me that there was lots of like, don't tell anybody that this is going on. But there was also my mom, you know, when anytime I would question things and be like, This seems a bit odd, my mother would be like, No, this is what every family is like. You're just a snob and you think you're too good for us, but this is what every single family is like. And I would just look at my friends, you know, like sitting across the room and be like, Is this really? Is your mother talking to aliens at night when you go home? Is that just does she say that Jesus talks to her in her dreams and tells her about all the different breeds of aliens? Because that's what my mom does. And do they just know how to handle this better than we do? Yeah, it's like because they all seem so much more well adjusted. I I is is this everybody's doing this? I wonder. I think my mom was kind of at the helm of all of that. All of well, not all of it, right? She and another family member, another close immediate family member were kind of the the circus masters of crazy in our family. But a lot of it happened, it was I think it was already happening before my dad left, but like after my dad left, because my mom and dad, they separated and they were separated for like, I don't know, a decade or something before they actually got divorced. But like basically immediately after my dad left, my mom kind of just walked into the living room one day. And I I remember this specifically because I was sitting in this horrific green 70s, like spinning office chair that had this horrific cloth on it that was like the roughest, most awful thing ever. And it was all rippled, but I loved sitting on it because it was textured and I could just like rub my hands along it all day long and distract myself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she came in, and I think my sister-in-law was like playing with my dolls or something because my sister-in-law used to like to sew clothes and like do my dolls' hair and things, and she was my mom walks in and is like, right, you guys, I have to tell you something. My father-in-law has been coming to me in my dreams, and I remember both my sister-in-law, who is, you know, 13 years older than me, both looking at each other and just not saying anything because she can't say anything to my mom. Like, my mom is ballistic. And then my mom just launches into this story about how her dead father-in-law, who's been dead for like 10 years or something at this point, came to her in her dreams and told her that she was a psychic and she was gonna save the world and deliver God's true message. And she had to watch the grapes of wrath. She had to watch the grapes of wrath. So we had to go and sit in the living room that morning and watch the grapes of wrath, like two or three times over and over. Because my mom said there was gonna be messages from God and her dead father-in-law in it. And she would like walk around the house and go, Don't you smell that? Do you smell that? That's cigar smoke, that's cigar smoke. That's your grandfather, that's your grandfather, like crazy shit like that.
SPEAKER_04:I had a dream about my granddad the other week, and you know what he did? He made me pancakes. So I don't know, man.
SPEAKER_01:I would have trusted it a lot more if she said, Hey, you made me pancakes, but no, no, of course not. No, no, no, no, no. She was gonna save the world as a psychic, and she was she was so special that God was going to give her, herself, his true message. No one in the history, not in the billions of people that had ever lived or were alive, it had to be my mother. She was so special and important, and that that from there on it was just ballistic. Everything in my life, I feel like from that moment just turned into, you know, that there's like there's a ride I used to like to take at the carnival, and it we called it the Alpine Bob. But it was like you just get in these little cars and they go around in a circle. And I know you the listeners, you can't see my hands, but it's these little cars they go around in a circle and they go up and down at the same time, like you're going around hills, and then they'll stop and make it go backwards, and it'll go really, really fast, and you're just holding on to the bar for dear life, and everything just turns into a blur. That's what my life is like a carousel, but like with the seats instead of kind of they're like roller coaster cars almost that you sit in and they're all attached to each other in a circle, and there's like literal hills in this circle that goes up and lifts you up and down, up and down over these hills. That's why we call it Alpine Bob. And I always had like a Yeti painted in the background and yada yada yada. Anyways, loved it. Always made anyone who was in there with me sit, but it was I loved when it got really, really blurry when you were going around backwards and the pictures all just turned into a blur. That is what my life felt like from that time when my mom's like, I'm a psychic and I'm talking to God. Like from there, it's like the Amityville horror for 10 more years. It literally just turns it, like maybe that's why I like that movie so much. Cause I'm like, oh, this is my childhood. It's like Amityville horror mixed with Malcolm in the Middle.
SPEAKER_04:Hey, hey, we don't use Malcolm in the Middle for comparisons, okay?
SPEAKER_02:Malcolm in the middle, stay the fuck out of this. All right. They were fucked up, but they were not as fucked up as your mom.
SPEAKER_04:Maybe the grandmother. Maybe the grandma, actually.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, she oh, she reminded me of my family because I was like, I bet that would have been my mom's mom. The way my mom talked about her mother, it very much sounded like that. Very much sounded like which I also found out kind of fucked up. My mom left out the part where her her mom's dad died in the first world war or something like that, and she was out. My grandmother, who would have been my mom's mom, just basically was like out of the house and already having kids at the age of 14, which is still not usual, even in the 20s and 30s. It's not usual.
SPEAKER_04:No, no, that only happened when 16 and pregnant started coming out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's like I I know people and like to use history all the time. They're like, oh, well, you know, children were getting married. That was not usual. That was not usual. That was like Henry the Seventh, his mom got pregnant with him at 13, and people were disgusted. It was like a huge political scandal that this 13-year-old was going to give birth, and they they tried to keep it a secret because it was looked on as like the most offensive, disgusting thing you could do impregnating a child.
SPEAKER_04:At the point of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare was trying to point out the fact that Juliet was a teenager.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and it was in Tudor England, they believed that the best time for a woman to have a child was actually in her 20s. They thought that the 20s is when you should basically just be pumping them out because that's when you were strong enough and hardy enough and smart enough to not have a dumb baby. That's what they thought. Like even Henry, that's why Henry VIII, most of the women that he was with were older. They were in their mid to late 20s when he got with them, or even in their 30s. Yep. Yep. Anyway, that was a side note. But yeah, I think that's probably when there was there was lots of crazy. There was a time in my family as well where supposedly there was no money, and all we had to eat for six months was just pancake mix, like flour, water, butter, I think is like all they could afford. And that was like one of these big horror stories that was told as being the most horrific thing that ever happened to my family.
SPEAKER_05:But my mom did that with pasta and and tomato soup packets. This is and we she would pour tomato soup packets into pasta for like six months solid of my life.
SPEAKER_04:And I remember like sneaking food to the toilet in my mouth to spit it out and flush it in the toilet so I didn't have to eat it.
SPEAKER_01:I did that with ketchup sandwiches. I would like to hide it in napkins because there was a ketchup sandwich period where that's like all there was to eat. And yeah. But I think when my mom started talking to I look at that now and I'm like, how did roomfuls of adults watch this woman cart me around? Because my mother started going to psychic conventions and all this kind of stuff after that. She started a business doing psychic readings for people and energy clearings, and she would talk to their pets and talk to their dead loved ones and their spirit guides, and she would talk to Jesus for them, and she would contact aliens like all this weird ass shit. And there would be these, she would cart me with her everywhere to do it. Cause as I've told the story before, she would also have me draw pictures of people's spirit guides for them, and I would charge 20 bucks, like that kind of a thing. It was so gross. It was so roomfuls of adults would watch this happen. They were just like, yeah. It was very gross. She would take me to this very popular. There is a very, I bet it's still there because it was a it's one of it's like a Mecca in America. It was called Phoenix and Dragon, and it's a new age spiritual bookshop in Atlanta, Georgia. And she took me down there several times and she would she had a little room and she would sit in this little room and do readings, and they would give me a little table, like sometimes in another room, sometimes just outside of her room. And I would sit there and draw pictures of just random people that I would imagine in my head, and she we would say it was there's it was their spirit guides, and we would sell it, which has got to be like some kind of child law.
SPEAKER_03:Very kind of I wish they could see your what's giving like the the program of like a major degree of freedoms, and you've just like started drawing like we have little creatures.
SPEAKER_01:I would like I would draw like uh because I this is the time remember I I had mentioned this when we were doing the production call. Like as a kid, I was obsessed, obsessed with Native American history and learning about the different tribes and what part of America they lived in and like their spiritual beliefs and all this kind of stuff and like the their wars and things that they had had. And so I there was one day I just sat there and would just draw different different Native Americans that I had seen in the books that I had been reading from the library that had been in these like old West sketchbooks and all this kind of stuff, and people would be like, Oh, I knew it. I knew it. I'm like one tenth Cherokee. I'm like, Yeah, 20 bucks. Absolutely, Missy. Yeah, there's probably some woman in Albuquerque, like draped in turquoise right now, who's got one of my pictures framed, and is like, this is Mahehe, my my my spirit, my great-great grandfather, or some shit. You know the irony of this, the real irony is so my mother had a race problem, okay? And she she would try to hide it, but she had a really, really, really big one against the gypsy people, right? Romani gypsy people. She, yep, yep, one of those, right? And the irony of this is what we found out shortly before she passed away, and she was not happy about it, is that her biological mother, her maiden name was Hercules, and she was a Romani Gypsy immigrant. And then my mom ended up being a fortune teller, the kind of stereotype that she liked to throw at those people. She became the stereotype that she made up in her mind as the hateful bigot.
SPEAKER_05:That is clear.
SPEAKER_01:And I that a part of that really makes me happy that she be as a racist became the stereotype. That was not at all what the reality is. You know what I mean? Like it just like it that this is why I taught narcissism. This is this is why I'm like a narcissist will always fucking reveal themselves, and just you just have to stand back and watch them. They will tell you everything about themselves, they will hang, they will climb up on the ladder and put their own neck in the noose.
SPEAKER_03:Just by watching like angry come forward to of like my mom telling me that she was the reincarnation of Nancy Sid Vicious' girlfriend or something.
SPEAKER_00:My mom used to do stuff like that all the time.
SPEAKER_01:She nothing cool like that because she was like a like a 1950s prude, but see, this is why we're brain damaged and this is why we're friends. My mom used to do past life stuff with me all the time. And what was funny is when she would do hers or talk about hers, she was always in like some position of leadership, and she was always being called back to like help humans or people, and then she would do past life stuff with me, and she's like, Yeah, you were like a caveman. Yeah, you just like lived on the plains in the deserts. Oh, yeah, you were just in like ancient Egypt. You worked on the temples, like I was always fucking nothing. I remember even this was after I moved here, after I moved here, and Dan took me down to London because he had to go to London for work, and so it was my first time getting to go to London. I went with him and I got to go see a bunch of places where Anne Boleyn had actually been. I got to go to the Tower of London, I got to go to that childhood home she grew up in, and it was I was telling my mom about all this, and I was so excited. Yeah, Anne Boleyn is my favorite, she's my patron saint. But they I was telling her about all this, and like in the middle of it, she went, Yeah, I think you might have been like one of Anne Boleyn's servants or something in a past life. And I just remember being like, God damn it!
SPEAKER_06:Why?
SPEAKER_01:Why are you doing this to me? And then she tried to tell me I brought a ghost home with me. She was like, You were one of Anne Boleyn's servants, and there's a ghost in your back seat that you brought home with you who hates her and hated you. It's like what kind of what c like what kind of soap opera shit is this? This doesn't make sense. Yeah, and also you would not find a tutor following me up to Scotland. It's not gonna happen, right? They were not exactly friendly at that time, so not a chance. But yeah, no, that she she did all kinds of crazy shit. And what what was crazy is it it took her all the way to one step removed away from the fucking Dalai Lama, like that's how far she got with that crap. Running that stupid, I'm a psychic, I talk to spirit guides. She was one person removed from the fucking Dalai Lama. She could have gotten a letter into that man's hands if she wanted, and that still makes me sick. That makes me sick, makes me absolutely sick. Don't know how anyway. She used to have seances, she would drive me. Failing upwards, she failed upwards so hard. She was like a female JD Vance before it happened.
unknown:Before JD Vance.
SPEAKER_04:Oh.
SPEAKER_01:And she would like compliment for her. I would always beg to go to the museums and stuff, right? Which were in the city. So, like a like a 30-minute drive down the highway to get to these museums that I would want to go to. She would never, ever, ever take me to the museums, but she would drive 45 minutes to an hour, like into and past the city to go to these friends' houses where they would have these like open seance nights that she would drag me to again as a child, so that she could sit in the middle of the room and all these women would sit in a circle around her, and they would bring her possessed items and she would clear them and she would contact their dead lot. Like it was a seance night, and they would just like send me upstairs with the other kids and be like, Okay, you guys go play. It's like, what are we doing here? Like, what the fuck are we doing here? It's absolutely and now I'm basically I think schizophrenia, maybe because she also would imagine things that that never happened. She would say they she would like 100% conviction they happened.
SPEAKER_04:Actively having conversations with people in the sense of that it's like full reality. It's kind of you know, like I and it's not like she can think of someone who's like outside of her immediate, and a lot of the time, like I like because my my was talking about how she was having full-on conversations with her dead brother every single morning for a couple hours. That's how my mom talked about it with her father-in-law.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and my mom is diagnosed schizophrenic, so like I it's gotta be it, right? It has I I she she was convinced, she was convinced that this stuff was happening, and but then she would also, like, like I said, she would make stuff up. She'd be like, Remember that time you played trumpet in that cathedral? Be like, what the fuck are you talking about? That never happened, that never happened at this point. I was I was a trying to implant memories in people as well, like totally the thing. Yeah, also that, also the gaslighting. But so I had that going on with my mom, and then at the same time, there was family members who were having falling outs who were cheating on their spouses, and so you know, I was like 10, 11 years old and being rounded up into the van in the middle of the night to go and like try to hunt down these cheating family members, and I'm just like in the back sitting playing on my Game Boy, and they're like, Are they in there? Are they in there? Is he with her? Are they in there? And then you find out that that person's with a teenager. It it's just it's a lot. It's a lot, that's a lot of childhood. That's a lot of stuff. And I thought everybody was doing this. Well, I mean, I guess they were, they just weren't calling themselves psychics.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, like, there's there's like casually, you know, trying to catch a family member in the act of cheating, and then there's like you know, like uh sending a message to the the the partner and helping them get out of the situation, you know, like there's a big difference storming an entire restaurant.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's what which is what happened in my case. Like we lived in a very small town, found the cheating family member at basically the only restaurant and the only like sit-down restaurant in town at that point being served by his teenage mistress, no less, all at the same time. That was that was messy. That was messy. And then we all got given flowers the next day. Like this family member sent us all flowers, and it's just so fucking weird. It was first and last time I ever had flowers, I think. Even when I was in the hospital. Fuck you. Don't even come near me. Yeah, that one that was um both of those, that family member and my mother, I think, like I said, they were kind of the wheel of crazy in the house biological. Related, so I think that they both had the same wiring is probably ultimately what was going on. One time that being like adopted has sort of been in your favor. Oh, really? I've I have been thankful about that since I was a teenager and learned about genetics in school. I was like, whoo! I've even told my my dad that like my dad who's raised me. Like, no offense, man, but god damn am I glad I don't have her jeans. Cause fuck. I straight up my I my dad is very much and my dad's still to this day the only person. My mom kind of gave me like a weird apology a week before she died because she it was 100% just about her. She felt guilty. She just like in the middle of ranting about her her roommate who was moving out, she just started sobbing and was like, please forgive me for being a bad mom. And there was like no specific examples. She just, I think she knew she was on the way out. My dad is the only one who's ever apologized to me. And he's very much, I think, just your just just an just an undiagnosed ADHD dad. You know, he he might he might be Audi H D, but he's just always like he's just always busy like tinkering and doing stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Often, oh that is true.
SPEAKER_01:That is true. Yeah, that is true.
SPEAKER_03:He definitely has him.
SPEAKER_01:Just definitely tissue him. He was he was the only one in the family who's like, Yeah, I'll take you to a museum. Hell yeah. I still don't think I don't even think the rest of the family goes to museums. Like they'll sometimes go to a theme park or something, but I don't think they go. I mean, there was there was like these weird little roadside museums sometimes that my brother would take me to when we were little, but I don't think that was so much about like uh that yeah. I think roadside museum in America, and I'm like, I feel like it's gonna be haunted.
SPEAKER_05:That is terrible.
SPEAKER_01:One of them was, one of them was so one of them was the house of Alex Haley, which is the guy who wrote Roots, the which is this huge series about slavery, very intense, very, very intense. And then I think he also wrote Amistad, which was a really big movie in the 90s, and then there was the Casey Jones Railroad Museum, which this Casey Jones was this railroad guy that crashed his train, and his house is like two and a half hours away from where I grew up, and so sometimes on a Sunday, my brother would insist we drive there to eat the breakfast buffet and walk through the little museum. I that makes my whole body shake. I'm like two and a half hours, and then one day he stopped and bought puppies one time, like fucking unreal, dude. My family is unreal. It's so weird. Uh yeah, yeah. And there was always so there was this running joke in my family that my mom attracted weirdos, and all of her friend all of her friends were fucking weirdos. They really, really, really were. She had she had this one friend that she was friends with forever, and she was my godmother, and she and her husband did weird puppet play with each other, and they they would just leave their puppets out all over the house, uh, which was they were also like these Star Trek obsessed people. So they had one room that was just so full of Star Trek stuff you couldn't get into it. But the puppets were it, but she always had these weird friends, she always had really weird friends, and she she was seeing my face.
SPEAKER_06:Oh my god, baby.
SPEAKER_01:Well, she became a special ed teacher at a neighboring school, not the school that I went to, and there was a kid that was in there, Jeff, who now we know we kind of Connie and I talked about this. I I think it's possible he had savant syndrome, which is not the same as autism, apparently. I did not know this, I was not aware of this.
SPEAKER_04:There's a distinction between the two. You can't have savant syndrome in autism, but there is a distinct like diagnostic difference.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, at that point in the 90s, they were just calling him. They said he had Asperger's at that time, but he was like super, super high intelligence, super sweet kid, and he had a hard time in school because he really, really struggled with communication and he struggled with anything that was like outside his special field of interest, but absolutely, absolutely brilliant, like the kind of person who could he literally you could say, like, what day of the week was Tuesday, or like what day of the week was the 4th of July in 1786? And he could tell you, like, oh, that's a Tuesday, that's a Wednesday, that's a Thursday, or whatever it was. Like, absolutely freaking brilliant kid. So my mom ended up befriending his mother, who was quite a colorful character herself. She adored Jeff, she was like with him all the time, so our families became friends, and we spent a lot of time. Like on the weekends, we would go and Jeff and I would sit in the back of the van, and our moms would sit in the front and just and we'd go to like flea markets and stuff like that. Well, Jeff turns 16, his mom gets remarried. She gets remarried to this super, super, super wealthy, well-known guy locally that owns a well-known business in our small town. The guy ends up being a drunk, abusive piece of shit, beats up on her all the time. There were several times where she would call my mom in the middle of the night and ask for help and stuff like that. One night he really roughed her up. And so Carol, Jeff's mom, leaves the house. Jeff is left alone in the house. Jeff is 16. He's probably about 6'3, 6'4, about 300 pounds, or maybe about he might be 250. He's huge. He's a huge, huge, huge, huge kid. Jeff decides to go and confront his stepdad and say, You're not gonna hurt my mom anymore. Takes a baseball bat with him to try to intimidate him. Ultimately, stepdad yells at him. Stepdad goes to the bedside table to go for a gun that is kept in the drawer. Jeff jumps on top of him, beats him to death.
SPEAKER_04:This one. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. Jeff immediately panics, drags the mattress with the body on it outside, hoses it down, and then realizing what he's done, he calls his biological father, who is also a piece of shit, a human piece of shit. And his dad says, Call the police and confess, they'll understand. It was self-defense, they'll understand, they'll understand. Spoiler, ladies and gentlemen, they did not understand because they were friends with the piece of shit who had been killed. So Jeff was basically arrested right then and there, put in prison as an adult in the state of Tennessee at 16, tried as an adult for a capital murder at 16. I I think he's out now, but that was obviously a formative childhood experience.
SPEAKER_04:I just, oh man, honestly, like America's the way America is like the laws work against anyone who is not rich is just it's so terrifying.
SPEAKER_01:And that self-defense thing only applies if they like you. If they don't like you, that's it. And no one liked Jeff because Jeff was Jeff.
SPEAKER_04:Oh no, the evidence is gone. Oh no, yeah, there's no self-defense anymore.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, they they claimed that there was no gun found and all this other kind of stuff. And Jeff Jeff just didn't have it in him to lie. I mean, the damn kid called the police himself and told them what happened. He was just not a kid that would do that to his detriment. That's that's one of the reasons why he struggled so much because he couldn't, he wasn't able to tell the kind of social lies that you have to tell to be socially successful in a neurotypical world.
SPEAKER_04:He couldn't like his dad expecting him to be able to make a phone call to the police right after happening. Yeah, like that's that's crazy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he was the the dad was a by word for piece of shit in my house. Like, I remember just my mother raging about that, being like, he should never have told him to call the police. He should have immediately called a lawyer. The first fucking thing he should have called a lawyer, and then a lawyer should have contacted the police. Like, that's absolutely his his dad basically set him up to get fucked because everyone knew when this went immediately when it happened. We were like, Oh, that's it. They're gonna they're gonna throw the book at him because his stepdad, again, wealthy man with a business in a small town. You might as well be God, a wealthy white man with a business in a small town. That's he had this this business for like 40 years, so everybody knew this business. That's it. You know, you might as well have shot the president. Like you're going to Guantanamo. Yeah. Yeah. So there was there were they were never gonna listen to self-defense. I believe Jeff's gotten out now because there was a law changed uh that basically if you were tried for a capital offense 16 or younger in Tennessee and you had gotten life, no parole, then they had to retry you. So I think Jeff's gotten out now, but he he will have been in prison longer than he was out of prison. And again, he was high supports need. His mom has died since he's been in prison. I believe his father has also died. He may not, his dad might still be around, but again, his dad's a piece of shit who was not in his life before all this happened. So uh I don't know, man. I wonder why we have brain damage. Yeah. Again, I thought this was happening to everybody, and that was another one that my family was like, Don't tell, don't, don't talk to any of and that one I think I did not tell my friends about when it was going on. Some of them had met Jeff and they they noticed when he wasn't around anymore, but I I believed that one I was like afraid that we were gonna get in trouble for murder somehow because I knew someone who had murdered someone, so that was pretty like holy fuck. Like, this was someone I had I would like let play my Game Boy, you know? Yeah, like very intense, very, very, very, very intense. We should try and interview him. No, I'm kidding, that would traumatize us both. Well, that's um I'm yeah, I'm scared that you know, like what if he's fallen in with like white supremacy elements when he was in jail or any of that? He there's any any of that because he was in general population. He was a 16-year-old kid with autism or savant syndrome left and and general population. And and they purposefully put him in, they would move him around because they were trying to keep his mom from having access to him because she would just go to the prison constantly to visit him, and so they would move him further and further and further away from wherever she lived, because so they was in Tennessee and they put him in the worst of the worst of the worst maximum security facilities where there was like rapists and child murderers and all this kind of stuff. And he was in he was in population with those people, and she was going all the time. So then they moved him to like Ohio, and then they moved him to Indiana, and they just kept m trying to move him, and she ended up going broke essentially because she kept moving. Anywhere they would move him, she would move to follow him. And she, I think she died about 10 years ago of cancer. She had pretty bad cancer, and she didn't have money to treat it. So that's America. That's the America I grew up in.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Oh yeah. And you know, this is a good set. It's such a it actually was such a violent place to grow up. I mean, Memphis is so I grew up outside of Memphis and it's it's usually ranked like number five most violent cities in America. And it I I think it just doesn't even register to me because senior year they found a girl's dead body, like basically dumped not far from my friend's house, like basically between our school and my friend's house. They would find dead bodies all the time, all the time, all the time. And then we had the West Memphis 3 happened as well when I was little, and that just kept carrying on and carrying on, carrying on, which was the the Robin Hood Hills murders, for those who don't know, and they they the state of Arkansas convicted three children, three teenagers who were absolutely innocent in a satanic panic scandal. They didn't deserve that, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And and yeah, literally, and it set fire to the satanic panic era. Like, like it was just it was like adding stoking the fire with a giant motherfucking log doing that with what they did to those three kids. And the worst part about it all at the end is that those three boys who did die will never like have actual justice. Like they'll there really there's any kind of evidence that ever could have been attributed to finding the actual murderer gone. Gone, yeah, it's gone.
SPEAKER_01:Minus, minus apparently, there is still a one of the binds that was on one of the kids has Terry Hobbs hair in it. They found Terry Hobbs hair in one of the kids' ligatures. So he, I think, I don't know if he's still alive though. I think a lot of these parents are even dead now because it's West Memphis is tough, but even growing up in the wake of West Memphis 3, it fucking sucked because I was a kid that wore all black and listened to metal and listened to punk and all that, and you were that's it, you're a devil worshiper. Everybody just automatically thought you were a demon worshiping. Even my brother used to say stuff to me like, I can't believe you're gonna let her out of the house looking like that. Like they're gonna think we all worship the devil. I'm like, mom's in here fucking talking to aliens, right? I think me wearing black is the least of our fucking problems in this family.
SPEAKER_04:Uh your brother's ability to actually, I don't know, culturally make a decent choice for himself or anyone else around him is is pretty fucking skew anyway.
SPEAKER_01:So non-existent, non-existent. The last piece of the puzzle to me, which is not I don't think I've ever shared these stories before. Maybe Connie, when I was telling her these yesterday when we were kind of going through this, she was like, What the fuck?
SPEAKER_00:So I can feel the pain. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_01:So I I don't okay, so I don't I don't like the word haunted because I it I don't know what it was, but I uh for a period of time my family lived in these two houses across the street from one another, which had incredibly, incredibly weird stuff going on. And what's interesting is it does actually tie into like my mom and my brother having escalated, escalated behaviors, extremely escalated behaviors, because the stuff that went on in the house. I I didn't experience the worst of this stuff, I saw stuff and I felt stuff, but it was always kind of like secondhand. I was not the target. Um I think that's basically what I'm trying to say. So my brother fell in love with this house. There were these two well-known houses on this main road in town. This one house had these big gates in front of it, super well known. Everybody knew the gates, yada yada yada. He ends up becoming friends with a family that owns the land because of course he did, right? He wants this land, gets the history of the land, used to be a plantation, got burned down in Sherman's March to the Sea and the American Civil War. Lots of slaves on the land, all that kind of good, wonderful, lovely stuff. He gets the house. He moves into the the old house first, right? Immediately, weird shit starts happening. Immediately, immediately, immediately weird stuff starts happening. Faucets will go on, and this this house is still from the 1940s. It still has all the original features from the 1940s in this house that's on this land. Faucets will turn on and water just going everywhere, doors are slamming. There's this old, old, old, old phone that had its own little vestibule in this hallway. It was so old it couldn't even be hooked up anymore because they didn't have the wiring for it. It would just ring, it would just ring. Even in the daylight, daylight, nighttime, it would just ring. So fucking weird. Very, very weird. My brother and sister-in-law got married right after they moved into it and they went on their honeymoon. And while they were on their honeymoon, my sister-in-law's mom stayed in the house. And while she stayed in the house, she called me and my mom again. One, I think it was like in the afternoon when she had just gotten up from a nap, called us screaming, panicked, demanding we come and pick her up because stuff had flown off the mantle, these decorations that had been on the mantle and broken, flown across the room, broken. She's like, Get me the fuck out of this house now. She literally left and went back to the state that she lived in. She got on a flight like that night and went home. I went to. Yeah. So the house was just locked up. My brother and sister-in-law, we picked them up from the airport when they come back from their honeymoon. We bring them back home. There had been boxes of photos that were under the couch. I believe they were under the couch. They might have been on the dining room table. Either way, boxes opened, spilled. My sister-in-law's face had been ripped out of pictures. And they were I distinctly remember seeing them scattered across the living room floor when we came in the house. Because I came in the house with them when this happened. So that was super freaking freaky.
SPEAKER_04:I you can't even pin that on like I can't remember the word for it, but like when someone like secretly squats in your house and like.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's what we thought it was at first. We thought maybe like my brother had cheated or something, and his little girlfriend had gotten in the house and ripped out my sister-in-law's pictures. But the house was alarmed. They had alarms on the house, and the alarms had never, ever, ever gone off. Ever. Oof. So no one had gone through any of the doors. There was like two main doors and a basement, and none of the alarms had ever gone off. That's one that was another weird thing. There doors would open and shut, faucets would go off, lights would go on and off, but the alarm, the house alarm would never go off. It the motion sensors never ever ever went off for that kind of stuff. Anyway, so the the pictures ripped up obviously freaked my sister-in-law out. She obviously thought something was going on with my brother. Escalation, escalation. My brother makes up in the middle of the night and unplugged radio. The like they're static and the dial is moving, and he can hear like the radio stations changing, and he hears my sister-in-law's dead dad's voice. He and this is he does not believe in this stuff. He still does not believe in this stuff. And hand to Christ swears that he heard her dead dad's voice coming over the radio, and it scared the shit out of him because he thought he was being threatened. His behavior got worse and worse and worse. Like he just absolutely declined in his behavior. Toys, my nephew's toys that didn't have batteries in them would go off. They'd like go across the floor, lights and sirens because he had these little police cars and things, and they would take the batteries out because they hated the noise. Those would go off. You would hear people walking around in the attic. The biggest thing was again, I was with my brother who did not believe in any of this, and his best friend, and we're in the basement, and I'm down in the basement with them because I'm I'll be damned if I'm gonna be left upstairs in this creepy ass house by myself. So we're all I don't even want to leave by myself. We're all down in the basement, and my brother is is a few feet away to the right, to my right, like showing his friend some something he found. And we hear walking upstairs, and so my brother says, Oh, that must be my wife. She must be home. Aaron, can you go out and help her? Because she was supposed to bring home groceries from work. So I don't go up the stairs into the house, I go up the stairs that lead outside straight to the driveway from the basement. I pop out, I look, there's nobody there. There is no one there. There's a there's a big long driveway that leads you to the street. There's no one on the driveway, there's no one parked behind the house. My sister-in-law is not there. I turn around to tell them, and I'm coming back down the stairs into the basement. By the time I get to the bottom, I look up at the stairs that lead into the house. Mind you, my brother and his friend are still standing just not far from the base of those stairs in front of me. A huge black, like it was like a just like this cloud that you could see through. It almost looked like teeny tiny little black dots, like gnats or flies or something, floats down the stairs, goes straight for them. And as it like hits them, it disappears. And they both saw it. They, these two grown ass men, they would have been probably in their 30s by this point, just stop and like they just no one says anything for a second. We're all just fucking freeze. And then Mark eventually is like, all right, let's go outside. And nobody wanted to talk about it. No one wanted to say anything. It was just like, get the fuck out of the basement right now, right now, right now, right now. And they we were outside for ages until his friend finally left, and my sister in law came home, and then we went inside, like nothing happened. But shit like this happened in this house all the time.
SPEAKER_03:The house, man. What are you doing?
SPEAKER_01:It's so fucking weird. Again, I don't, I'm not saying I don't know what it was. I thought it was just flies or something. But it disappeared. There were no there were no flies. There were no flies. There were no gnats. Like it just disappeared. It was the weirdest thing. It was like grainy, almost like an old picture. It was just like it was very weird. Very, very, very, very weird. Yeah. Very creepy. It makes my stomach turn. So my brother eventually moves out of that house, and he moves into the house across the street, which is a little bit newer and it's a little bit bigger because my my brother has a bunch of kids. Well, when he moves out of that house, my mom moves into this creepy haunted house. And thank God I'm gone by this point. I'm in college. I think I'm in like my first or second year of college. She moves into that house and more weird shit starts happening, and her behavior becomes fucking deranged as well while she's living in that house. She swore hand to God up and down. She, so the house was heated by a furnace, and it had these big huge vents in the floor that the heat would come up through, right? Because the furnace is in the basement and then it heats the pipes and it blows the hot air up into the house. She would wake up in the middle of the night and she would hear like a child's voice calling to the dog, like trying to get our dog Molly to come downstairs into the basement, which was creepy as fuck. Creepy, creepy, creepy. This is the only time when I was like, okay, I think I might believe this with my mom was when this stuff was happening. It was like Amity Bill.
SPEAKER_04:Like your mom is definitely saying something like legit. Holy crap.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. Her behavior just got worse and worse and worse. She really stopped doing her psychic stuff when she was doing this as well. And she it was it was very, very dark. It was very, very deep, very, very dark. She would what what she there was something else she did in that house. It was absolutely nuts. I don't know. She she went nuts. Meanwhile, across the street at the other house, which again, same land, family owns both of these houses across the street from each other. We've got my nephews saying things like, Oh, the little boy that lives in my room told me to throw my fire truck down the stairs. And there's this like creepy little room, right? That's off of their room that's got it creepy little attic space, crawl space kind of thing. Absolutely unsettling. And multiple kids were like, Yeah, no, there's kids that live upstairs in our room. And everybody was just like, Yeah, this is fine. The stuff with the first house eventually got got so bad that my mom got people to come out and bless it to try to get stuff to stop. But it was like the most creepy stuff would go flying off of shelves, stuff would go flying off of tables, and there was no cats or anything living in there. There was no one, they didn't have any pets, nothing like that. So I don't, I still to this day don't know what it was, but it did not feel nice. Like the second you came onto the property, it did not feel nice. It didn't have a nice history, from what I can understand. So you know, but I it was it was not it was not comforting, it was not friendly, it was not a house you wanted to stay in by any means. It still to this day is the creepiest looking fucking thing that's ever existed.
SPEAKER_04:So I have one I have one story that I can share in comparison to that, and like I've never really experienced very many like spooky things. Maybe when I was a really young child, like inexplicable things that sort of like could be just a child's dreamy imagination. But when I was like 16, 17 years old, I was living in this a street that like was like I was it was a hill, like um the two hills on the side of this this street. The the town I lived in was just like literally rolling meadow hills. And we lived at the the bottom part of these two hills, like literally in the bottom crevice of the divot. And what ended up happening was it was like late at night, and I was heading out to to see my boyfriend at the time, and I was the way that the trees would come over the like the road, it was really cool. You could look up at the stars and like see all the leaves and stuff, and I really just uh the so it's so cool. So I would always walk up the middle of the road is my favorite thing to do. So it's late at night, I'm like walking up the middle of the road and I'm toddling along. And as I'm like, you know, I've just started the actual climb at the base of the hill, sort of thing. And it's not a big hill. We're talking like maximum, 10 houses. You know, it's not a huge hill. And I look at the I look up and I see this girl walking towards me. She's in this like long skirt, and I couldn't really make it out. And I'm like walking and I'm walking, and she gets closer. I realize she's wearing a bonnet, like one of those like like tie-on bonnet hats that like cover all your hair, and this like blouse and this like mauvey ready brownish like skirt that's like to the ground, can't see her feet because it's so long, kind of thing. And I'm walking and I'm looking at her and I'm like, okay, that's an odd thing to wear at nighttime. And yeah, I'm walking and she's walking past me, and oh my god, I'm getting like shivers thinking about it. Oh my god, okay. So she's like walking, I'm walking, she's walking, I'm going up the hill. She's walking in the center of the road, too, mind you. Like, this is what like sort of messed me up was that she I was like, Oh, she also likes to walk in the middle of the road. I found a buddy, and so I got to smile at her as we're as I'm walking past her. She just looks me deep in the eye. That's all I got from her. I've got shivers all over my body right now. And then and she just like looks at me deep in the eye as she passes, and then I like I'm like, okay, panic. She's like two meters away from me at this point, like walking past me, sort of thing. That's the like the gap between us. And I'm like, just keep walking up the hill, just keep walking up the hill, don't look back, don't look back. And I'm like, no, I have to look back. I can't not look back. I have to look back. And I look back, and she's walking up the other side, looking at me the whole way, and I'm like, oh my god, keep walking, keep walking, keep walking, and get to the top of the hill. I turn back, she's gone. That's absolutely gone. So I was like, I had no idea how to process it, and I didn't want to go back down to my house because that's weird.
SPEAKER_02:It's the creepy girl.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but that almost sounds like one of those time slip things, you know, where like time rubs against each other or like that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_04:That's can you imagine like the time the just like some random girl working walking at night in some other century, just being like, What is this cracker you? I had purple eyebrows, bro. Like, I was I was coach.
SPEAKER_02:Witch, that's that's wild.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, see, that's that kind of weird stuff was just all everywhere all the time, all the time. And I was also like terrified of going to antique shops. I went to antique shops all the time and would buy stuff because my dad would also was the only one in the family who would take me to antique shops to just let me look around, and I he would always let me buy something really, really cheap. But I was scared to to bring stuff home because my mom would be like, There's gonna be spirits attached to it. Don't bring home stuff from antique shops, there's dead people attached to it.
SPEAKER_04:So that was kind of just like my ex wouldn't like me buying stuff from op shops because dead people might have used it, and I was just like, That's that sounds like my mother.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I remember being like, Well, maybe they're cool though. What if they're a cool dead person? What if they're fun?
SPEAKER_02:Why are we afraid of it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, everything was like evil. My mom, everything was evil except what she did and what she could do and what she could talk to and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it was like that all the time we had to leave out stuff for the elementals that lived in our house. She said that elementals lived in our house, and we had to like leave offerings for them, which was crazy because then she also hoarded and let the animals shit and piss everywhere, and like had sewage running into the carpets and all this kind of stuff. And I remember thinking, like, well, why do we have to leave offerings to elementals? Why don't you just like get the fucking roof fixed instead? Like, wouldn't they prefer us to get the house taken care of? And the ones in the car, and she would like make us talk to the elementals in the car and thank them for letting the car run. And again, I remember being like, I don't think that's how that works. I don't think there's a gnome living in here that makes the car run.
SPEAKER_04:I don't think there was a gnome making cars run. I would already be best friends with my car gnome because the amount of times I had to get my car fixed recently. Like, oh my god. I want a car gnome.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah. Well, you could uh if you lived with my mom, you guys could you could have lots of car gnomes, car elementals, and she but she would always be like, they're horrible looking, they look like they're made out of stone and they're horrible. And be like, well, why are we talking to them then? If like they're still stargoils. What do you mean? Like crazy. She just made stuff up. Well, a lot of it I'm now learning is a lot of it seemed to come from like David Ike and then all I don't know. There's a lot of like weird pagan stuff that was getting drawn in, but she also thought pagans attracted demons and demonic spirits.
SPEAKER_04:Honestly, props to your mom for even having a car though, because my mom made us walk everywhere and never got her license. So fair enough.
SPEAKER_01:If if if that if walking had been an option where we lived, that my mom would not have driven. She wouldn't, she if if if that had been an option, that's what she would have opted for. Because I mean, she she kind of made my brothers buy and my dad buy her cars. I don't think she ever and then her friends gave her cars after they couldn't buy her cars anymore. And yeah, no, she was but my mom was a bum in a lot of ways. But she, you know, she was she was the savior. So I guess we gotta give her credit for being the savior. Apparently, saviors die alone in their houses, and the police have to kick in the windows to get them because that's that's how powerful.
SPEAKER_02:Wait, what? You have not told me this one. What do you mean?
SPEAKER_01:No, when my mom died, no one fucking knew. I was the only one who realized it because she hadn't texted me in 12 hours, and so I was like frantically trying to get a hold of everybody, and no one had heard from her. So my brother eventually called the police and asked for a welfare check, and they had to kick a window in to get into the house to get to her. You know what?
SPEAKER_04:That's what you get, your bitch. You get to die alone in a crusty old board at home.
SPEAKER_01:That's the that's the sign, man. That's that's like the true the truth of her life. The fact that no one even no one but me even realized she was fucking dead. Like crazy, crazy, crazy.
SPEAKER_04:But she was the savior annoying you with delusions of grandeur and and I'm talking to aliens.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, she was always the smartest person in the room, always. I mean, we could have been in a room with a rocket scientist, and she would have told that rocket scientist like that she knew better than the rocket scientists, but at the same time, there was you could just tell it was also crippling, crippling insecurity because she knew for a fucking fact that she was not the smartest person in the room, and she would do nothing to validate it. She was, you know, she had opportunities to go back to school. There was a time in the 90s where she could have done it for fucking free as a non-traditional single mother kind of thing. She could have gotten everything paid for and gone back and done whatever she wanted, couldn't be fucking bothered to do it. She couldn't even be bothered to take care. I mean, she ultimately died because of her diabetes that she was not managing appropriately. She got the diabetes. Yeah, she had a bunch of heart problems that she got again from not taking care of herself, taking care of her physical body. She was she was she was sitting eat a box of fucking little Debbie's after she had been diagnosed with this like horrific diabetes, and they were like talking about taking her toes and stuff, and then she would go home and eat little Debbie's after she had her fucking shot.
SPEAKER_04:Okay, I need to ask though, this is a total sidetrack question. Why do people with diabetes end up having to get like their feet amputated and their limbs like okay, okay?
SPEAKER_01:Or it affects the circulation. Yeah, they basically the the blood just stops being able to pump all the way down to their feet and they get necrotic. So she had like necrotic toes and stuff, and she was just like, No, I'm not gonna, and she she would inject herself, and she eventually got a pump sometime after I moved abroad, but she would like inject herself in the same place, but I think she also like was not cleaning herself very well, so like the spot where she was injecting herself on the stomach with her diabetic medication would get infected all the time, like a fucking heroin junkie. Like you know, when you see people, yeah, with the infected injection sites, yeah. Like that, like just just just my mother could have probably still been alive, she would have still been alive today if she had ever taken care of her body ever once. She never did, she never ever took care of her body. She did nothing, like she was working when she wasn't needed to, but she nah. Nah. So if anybody's ever like, what the fuck happened to you? That's what the fuck happened to me. And that's not even the adoption stories either. Like that that doesn't even include like her dragging me down to Florida to go and see my birth mother who won't even stay in the same room with me, and like chasing her around and all that. That that that woman was gonna leave me in the woods with a with a devout religious family who already had like eight kids that they did not allow to go to school.
SPEAKER_05:This is why we're brain damage.
SPEAKER_01:Bingo Bingo.
SPEAKER_04:So my whole childhood, my brother would tell me, You're you were you were adopted, you were adopted, and my my mom would tell him to shut up, but she would never like defend or or like appease me in any kind of way, and I couldn't figure out why. And then when I when I finally left living there and had to go live with my sperm donor, I mentioned in passing how my brother would say and this man just casually was like, Oh yeah, well, she did put you up for adoption, and I had to come and rescue you because you hadn't been held by her and you were like four days old. Jesus Christ. What in the fuck? Jesus Christ. She'd like gone on, was sectioned and put into hospital and then went into labor, put me up for adoption. I was not held by like any kind of familial person for like four days of my life. So like and it's there's like a like a chemical bond thing that happens in a baby in a mum's brain when they hold their baby for the first time. Yeah, so I've never had that. So I have to actively like that's great schedule hugging my children. That's wonderful. I I only have that bond with them.
SPEAKER_00:I don't have the like every parent is magical, every parent is special and loves their children.
SPEAKER_01:That's why we're brain damage. Well, here's my favorite that I've heard a lot because they're the because we're going right right now, the therapy speak is now going right. And so I've heard a lot of people, you'll hear like that, right? Your mother didn't hold you for the first four days, and someone now be like, It's her first time being a human too, you know, it's her first time too. Get fucked again, go to hell. Go to hell, go to hell. Oh my god, yeah. So I so basically the two of us grew up with the sh the the stress of like a 30-year-old banker on Wall Street in the 80s. So it's no wonder we ended up fried chunk. I think to an extent, like uh I know that uh my stories are like wacky. I do think to an extent every millennial in some way or form had this kind of stressful childhood, like the majority of us. Oh, yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_04:You kids were being defend for themselves like 90% of the time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And also just outside of the crazy stories, we had parents that were like used humiliate, like humiliation was the name of the game. You were constantly ready for your parents to try to humiliate you actively, to shame you actively. Like it's just high stress, man. Absolutely high fucking stress.
SPEAKER_04:You knew to keep yourself scarce when your parents were getting drunk because, like, if they wanted you to disappear from the room, they'd start talking about you. So you'd just run. Just stay out of the stay out of there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I didn't have the drinking because my mom was like fucking crazy about that. But it was the same, it was still, it's still somehow. I wish she could see this. I wish she was alive to see this. She still somehow simulated that childhood in so many ways. Because it was the same thing. It was like when they were all together, you just stay awake or they're gonna start shit talking you. Yeah, yeah. Just keep away. Keep away. She's off for me. It's step out of the room. Yeah. Meanwhile, my mom's got her meds in a cabinet and just pretends that they don't exist. No, no, no, no. I don't need to take those five tablets that a psychiatrist gave me. What I need to do is talk to Jesus and the aliens.
SPEAKER_04:That's how I knew. I knew my life was gonna be upended was like all of the little blister packs. Because my mom was so bad at taking her meds that they gave her like specific blister packs for each portion of the day. Really? And she she gets these big shakes and they're like you know, like you get those cute little things that you can divvy out your meds or whatever Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. She's got a 8 a.m., 12am, 12 p.m., 3 p.m. like and it's like for every single day, and she gets a month of those blister packs at a time, and they're just what my mom needed. And like the cupboard would just be full of them, they'd just be absolutely chalked to the brim. And I'd be like, Oh, mom's not taking her meds again. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my god. Yeah, we uh yeah, we had a family member that we had to sneak. People I've had people get mad at me when I've told that story. Like, that's disgusting. I'm like, this person was gonna kill someone. Like, we had some we had someone in the family had to sprinkle the medicine in the food sometimes because he like would not take the food, like he would not take the medicine and it was dangerous.
SPEAKER_04:I don't want to do that to my mom because it was so terrifying just watching her go off her hands.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, oh yeah, it was and it was common as well. Like that this person had physically assaulted people or threatened it.
SPEAKER_04:You know how I know that like part of it was a choice by the by our parents specifically. I don't know about other parents, is that like now as I get older and I meet people with the same conditions that my mom is diagnosed with and that your mom should have had diagnoses of, yeah, they don't stop taking their meds because they just feel better. They have children to take care of, they have families to take care of, they have animals that they love dearly, and they keep taking their medication because they need it to be stable. And that's just it just is what it is.
SPEAKER_01:100% a choice. And that again, my mom had access, she had really good health insurance through my dad, she had opportunity, she didn't want to do any of that because it's all ego. They don't want to, they don't want to admit to that for some reason. Because like if they had a broken arm, they would not shut up about it. You know what I mean? Like if my mom had broken her arm, she'd be like, Oh, my broken arm, you guys have to do everything for me, but a broken brain, she's like, Oh no, doesn't exist, doesn't exist. We're just gonna pretend that didn't happen. I'm actually God. Fucking wild. The the the service to the ego. It's just you can't do that when you're a parent.
SPEAKER_04:Childhood trauma and and the injury that it causes to the brain is permanent, like that's a permanent trauma.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like my brain will never function the way it should.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and in the country I'm in, you can get like so my country's a bit better than America. Sorry, America. Yeah, and we have like nationwide like insurance-y type thing, it's called ACC, and essentially you can make claims when you have injuries and they pay for everything, or at least up to 80%, and you can claim for childhood trauma and like a brain injury from that. And they like uh it's a bit of an arduous wee process, but you can get like support and help through them to like be able to be essentially compensated for the fact that your parents were shit cans.
SPEAKER_01:I man, I'm telling you, I think everybody's like, Well, how do we make parents better? How do we make parents better? Let us sue them as adults. I'm like, let us, if you can prove that your parent like traumatized. You in these insane ways, you should be able to sue the shit out of them, and they have to pay you tons of money for the rest of your fucking life. And I bet you that would scare the hell out of some people. Be like, Well, I'm not shitting out a kid because I'm for sure gonna hit it. No, absolutely not. I'm not paying 10 grand a month for the rest of my life when that thing's 18 to 90. Nah.
SPEAKER_04:No, because I remember when the laws here changed, and you're not you're like, it's legally against the law now to not be able to hit your children here. And that happened when I was like eight, I think, like quite young, but like cognizant enough to remember. And I remember how mad all the adults were that they couldn't hit their kids anymore.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_04:And I'm like, I as an adult have children, and I'm like, I could never hit my kids. Yeah, the idea of doing that makes me like literally want to bowl my eyes out. Like, why would I want to hit a child?
SPEAKER_01:At the school, like where I grew up. That's crazy, man. Well, I was 17, 18 years old, and I still had to bring in a permission slip signed by a parent saying whether or not I was allowed to be paddled at 17, 18 years old.
SPEAKER_06:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:They still do that. It's they love that where I grow up, grew up.
SPEAKER_04:It's just like that their Christian and Catholicist culture has demonized sexuality so much that they have to pervert any kind of discipline because they can't go like be kinky.
SPEAKER_01:It's just uh it's very, very, very, very twisted. But yeah, this is why we're brain damaged. This is what's happened. This is where it's come from. I think that'll explain a lot about me. High stress, high stress childhoods, and that is ultimately what causes, you know, so many nervous system problems later on in life because you encounter this, your little child's brain, which is developing, all those little neurons and synapses are like, ah, and like frantically trying to connect themselves and readjust, and when they are trying to process information that they don't even have the cognitive skill to process yet. So uh it messes up the wiring, messes up the wiring.
SPEAKER_04:I um I did this course and it uh watched this uh little like informational video and it was explaining how like these children in this high stress situation were being visited by the police and a social worker and a psychologist, blah blah blah. There's three kids. There's a little girl who's sitting in the room of the incident that happened, there's food everywhere, all over the walls, everything's tipped up, and she's blaming herself, right? Then there's a little boy sitting in front of the TV and he's dissociated, and then there's a seven-month-old baby in the crib, and the baby's like crying, but like not super unsettled, right? And it wasn't until seven years later because they followed this family through their life to to see how the trauma impacted the children. And the the girl and the son weren't as impacted as the seven-month-old baby that had to hear it all and couldn't do anything.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my god.
SPEAKER_04:By the time this the seven-month-old baby was like seven years old, it was aggressively fighting children at school anytime any inconvenience happened.
SPEAKER_01:Powerless because it grew up and that's the basically the the baseline got established in powerlessness. That's horrific.
SPEAKER_04:And that's that's the impact of just hearing a traumatic situation for a baby.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And our parents were like, hey, here's some some trauma. Why don't you jump right on into the middle of it here with me and come along with it?
SPEAKER_02:My mom would she'd go off for meds and she'd be like walking up and down the hallway having conversations with people that were like towns over, just like yelling and mad about it.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's what was going on with my mom. I really do. I really do. The older I get, that's what I think was going on. Yeah. I do.
SPEAKER_04:The similarities between our mums. I I'm dead sure. Like it's it's pretty, it's pretty out there.
SPEAKER_01:Oh man, I that had to be. That had to be. I know like they they've mentioned dementia in my family before, but I don't think it was dementia because she was not like going through memories of things that happened. She was talking to people that fully were not there. And some some of them had never been there for her ever, ever. They were not they were not real things. So God. Everything explained. Everything explained. Well, this is why we're brain damage. Yes, yes, yes. That is gonna be our episode for this week. Hopefully that has enlightened you a little bit. I would love to hear uh your crazy childhood trauma stories or your crazy, you know, your drama, or like your crazy millennial stories. Did you have a mom that was talking to aliens or having you draw pictures of people's spirit guides? I would love to connect if any of you had similar childhood experiences. Or maybe your dad was like shooting off fireworks and set the neighborhood on fire on the 4th of July or something, you know, whatever it was.
SPEAKER_04:What was the clingsha moment that that was like, yep, I'm not talking to my parents ever again. Fuck them.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes, we want to hear those stories. So share those stories with us in the comments. You can send us an email, admin at the real ebjonson.com, or you can find us on social media at the real eb Johnson, just basically wherever. Let us hear your childhood crazy growing up stories. The best ones might get shared in a future episode. We'll read a couple of them. Um, so yeah, let us know. Uh, if for everything else, thank you so much for following. You can find us, like I said, Instagram, you can find us on TikTok. And if you want to listen to more of the podcast and you want to support us, go to patreon.com slash newska. And we'll be back hopefully next week, maybe the week after, you know how things go here. Uh, we'll be here when we're here, and we'll see you next time.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, everybody. Bye.
