- Joined
- Sep 2, 2026
- Messages
- 64
- Location
- Melbourne/Naarm, Australia
- SL Rez
- 2002
- Joined SLU
- 2006
- SLU Posts
- 10000000
Thank you for joining me on episode two of "What the fuck, he's back?"
Yes, no one is more surprised than me but I suppose Cris' community-building skills were so extensive that even in death he could bring us all back together. Mild sarcasm, I make joke see?
If you don't have some idea of what's going on already, I made another thread yesterday, but separately I wanted to explain... something, I guess. I was waiting until I had my thoughts more in order to figure out what, but I remain as unsure of what I want to say now as any other day over the last couple of weeks. Strap in for an unabridged history of the last ~25 years of life as told from my point of view. None of this is really a secret to anyone who's known me long enough, but this is probably the first time I've put it all into one place.
I got into Second Life in the earliest non-Linden Lab alpha/betas (I genuinely don't remember which at this point, I've given Second Life very little thought for a very long time and these details have escaped my brain) because a dude I'd had a sort of relationship with was working there at the time and got me an account when they started doing the earliest external tests. He wasn't out to anybody and there was a significant age gap between us and I may have technically also been under 18 at the time (I could look up the specific timeline, I suppose, but I know I was right on the cusp) so he wanted me to be discreet about everything. He's long since left Linden Lab and I don't even think there's anyone left at the company who was also around at that time either.
I poked around a little bit but I had inconsistent broadband access at the time and those days most of the US was still on dial-up, so my interest was not captured initially. I did meet some of the very old oldbies, including Cristiano, and some time later when I took more of an active interest in SL and the SL forums we reconnected and he remembered me and the little robots I used to make. We became friends even though there was also a significant age gap between us at the time as well; through Second Citizen was when we became close friends, and obviously SC exploding and everyone moving over to SLU brought us even closer. I think everyone knows enough of the history of all of that and I probably don't really need to get into specifics there.
I've not really made much of a secret that my childhood growing up was really abusive. I referenced it a fair bit, but because in my head at the time it was all ancient history as far as I was concerned, I think I probably only referred to things as snippets. I promise there's a point to bringing it up now.
I grew up in New Orleans to deeply religious Southern Baptist hypocrites who were also drug addicts and alcoholics. I knew I was gay pretty young and when I was 12 my parents found out too — a guy I'd been "dating" at school (to the extent that two gay teenagers could "date" in the late 90s in Louisiana) committed suicide when his parents found out, and as he was very well liked by the students everyone took it really hard. I was depressed and not myself and my parents assumed the only explanation was that I'd gotten into drugs or something; my dad put a keylogger on the family computer and got access to my email and saw all of the messages between me and my classmates talking about the suicide and he put two and two together.
Both of my parents were tremendously violent and abusive people. Mom wasn't physically abusive as much as my dad was (she had her moments though!) but she was definitely psychologically violent. And that was when they weren't on something — some of my earliest memories are of cleaning up the house because they were both passed out. I developed self-sufficiency at a very young age, and more or less raised my younger siblings until I finally decided to leave home myself.
I moved out of home twice when I was a teenager — first was when I was 16 and I moved in with friends of the family in another city about an hour away from New Orleans. After a year with them I briefly moved back in with my family to finish high school. We lasted a few months before I left home completely. My 17th birthday present to myself was getting legally emancipated and I moved into an apartment with a friend of mine from high school who was a couple years older than me. Just before I turned 18, I moved up to New York City.
I promise, I promise, I have a point.
I thought that the horrifying childhood I'd escaped was in the past for a good chunk of my life. While I knew what I went through was awful and unusual and at a young age I learned to keep my mouth shut about the constant violence, drugs, physical and mental abuse — because I recognised other families didn't go through that stuff — I thought once I left home (and certainly once I left the South) that I'd escaped and it was done and dusted. I certainly never would have thought I had any lasting trauma from it or that I'd still be carrying that abuse with me into adulthood.
One of the more pertinent ways this impacted me was interpreting a lot of interpersonal interactions in the lens of someone trying to control or bully me in ways I needed to protect myself from. I can look back on it now that I've tried my best to understand my own brain a lot more than I ever realised I needed to and I understand the protective defence mechanisms I operated with for so long without even knowing it — my parents were the first bullies I ever encountered. Weeks before I moved out of home for good, my dad and I had gotten into an argument because I needed to be driven to rehearsals for the school play that I was in, and as my parents had refused to allow me to learn how to drive it meant I was beholden to them for transport. At the same time, this sort of thing was a grave inconvenience for two people who never really left the house. We got into a fight about it and because my dad's solution to most problems was to punch them in the face, he did so and afterward I swore to myself that if he ever hit me again I was going to leave. The next time he did, I simply turned around and went to my room to grab a backpack I'd gotten ready for exactly that situation and left. I hadn't realised how deeply I had internalised "I will never be treated this way again" to the point that anything that mildly triggered those feelings put me in a headspace where it was imperative that it was not enough to just defend myself — I had to absolutely and utterly destroy the threat as a warning to any others.
Which is how most of you will have remembered me from my active time in Second Life, Second Citizen, and SLU.
I'll be delicate on my wording here because I don't want to point fingers or blame anybody or make anybody feel defensive, but in retrospect I can't really begin to articulate the really deeply inappropriate way I was regularly being treated by people who were often significantly older than me when I was barely old enough to drink. I'm not trying to make myself seem blameless because I certainly know I could be equally as vicious and I gave it as good as I got it, but it wasn't until I had time and distance that I realised how Not Right a lot of that stuff was. It was a constant, perpetual level of attack that I didn't realise was actually affecting me because it was "just internet shit" that I didn't think bled into my real life. On top of just the constant barrage of really vicious arguing, there was stuff some people knew about and other stuff I wasn't as open with — there was constant real life stalking, legitimate, actionable threats that involved police investigations, someone worked out that I was employed at Yahoo and spent a weekend tying up the company fax line sending threats against me to my place of employment. I believed myself to be resilient and unaffected by all of this but it was always a constant need to protect myself, because if I couldn't do that I was back to being a little kid getting the shit beaten out of him by a much older adult. This was a sustained degree of harassment across several years that I didn't realise the completely inappropriate and weird degree of until I got enough distance from it to go "holy shit."
And, again, I'm not trying to make myself seem like a victim, or like I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not quite going to offer an apology, and I'm not trying to justify myself either — with time and distance I've realised the headspace I was operating in and made a conscious decision that it wasn't the sort of person I wanted to be.
In early 2013, my parents visited me in Australia for the first time since I'd moved there. My relationship with them since leaving home had its ups and downs, and that particular time there was enough of an up that me and Adam (my partner at the time) got them tickets and a hotel as a Christmas present. It was their first time seeing my life in Sydney — which I was finally able to start putting roots in as my permanent residency got approved after considerable delays. Their visit was incredibly not good, and the aftermath was a relationship breakdown catastrophic enough that I didn't speak to them at all until I moved to Melbourne several years later. But it was in that visit that I realised the extent to which the childhood abuse still affected me, I realised I was not handling things as well as I thought I was, and I decided to start getting help.
Yes, no one is more surprised than me but I suppose Cris' community-building skills were so extensive that even in death he could bring us all back together. Mild sarcasm, I make joke see?
If you don't have some idea of what's going on already, I made another thread yesterday, but separately I wanted to explain... something, I guess. I was waiting until I had my thoughts more in order to figure out what, but I remain as unsure of what I want to say now as any other day over the last couple of weeks. Strap in for an unabridged history of the last ~25 years of life as told from my point of view. None of this is really a secret to anyone who's known me long enough, but this is probably the first time I've put it all into one place.
I got into Second Life in the earliest non-Linden Lab alpha/betas (I genuinely don't remember which at this point, I've given Second Life very little thought for a very long time and these details have escaped my brain) because a dude I'd had a sort of relationship with was working there at the time and got me an account when they started doing the earliest external tests. He wasn't out to anybody and there was a significant age gap between us and I may have technically also been under 18 at the time (I could look up the specific timeline, I suppose, but I know I was right on the cusp) so he wanted me to be discreet about everything. He's long since left Linden Lab and I don't even think there's anyone left at the company who was also around at that time either.
I poked around a little bit but I had inconsistent broadband access at the time and those days most of the US was still on dial-up, so my interest was not captured initially. I did meet some of the very old oldbies, including Cristiano, and some time later when I took more of an active interest in SL and the SL forums we reconnected and he remembered me and the little robots I used to make. We became friends even though there was also a significant age gap between us at the time as well; through Second Citizen was when we became close friends, and obviously SC exploding and everyone moving over to SLU brought us even closer. I think everyone knows enough of the history of all of that and I probably don't really need to get into specifics there.
I've not really made much of a secret that my childhood growing up was really abusive. I referenced it a fair bit, but because in my head at the time it was all ancient history as far as I was concerned, I think I probably only referred to things as snippets. I promise there's a point to bringing it up now.
I grew up in New Orleans to deeply religious Southern Baptist hypocrites who were also drug addicts and alcoholics. I knew I was gay pretty young and when I was 12 my parents found out too — a guy I'd been "dating" at school (to the extent that two gay teenagers could "date" in the late 90s in Louisiana) committed suicide when his parents found out, and as he was very well liked by the students everyone took it really hard. I was depressed and not myself and my parents assumed the only explanation was that I'd gotten into drugs or something; my dad put a keylogger on the family computer and got access to my email and saw all of the messages between me and my classmates talking about the suicide and he put two and two together.
Both of my parents were tremendously violent and abusive people. Mom wasn't physically abusive as much as my dad was (she had her moments though!) but she was definitely psychologically violent. And that was when they weren't on something — some of my earliest memories are of cleaning up the house because they were both passed out. I developed self-sufficiency at a very young age, and more or less raised my younger siblings until I finally decided to leave home myself.
I moved out of home twice when I was a teenager — first was when I was 16 and I moved in with friends of the family in another city about an hour away from New Orleans. After a year with them I briefly moved back in with my family to finish high school. We lasted a few months before I left home completely. My 17th birthday present to myself was getting legally emancipated and I moved into an apartment with a friend of mine from high school who was a couple years older than me. Just before I turned 18, I moved up to New York City.
I promise, I promise, I have a point.
I thought that the horrifying childhood I'd escaped was in the past for a good chunk of my life. While I knew what I went through was awful and unusual and at a young age I learned to keep my mouth shut about the constant violence, drugs, physical and mental abuse — because I recognised other families didn't go through that stuff — I thought once I left home (and certainly once I left the South) that I'd escaped and it was done and dusted. I certainly never would have thought I had any lasting trauma from it or that I'd still be carrying that abuse with me into adulthood.
One of the more pertinent ways this impacted me was interpreting a lot of interpersonal interactions in the lens of someone trying to control or bully me in ways I needed to protect myself from. I can look back on it now that I've tried my best to understand my own brain a lot more than I ever realised I needed to and I understand the protective defence mechanisms I operated with for so long without even knowing it — my parents were the first bullies I ever encountered. Weeks before I moved out of home for good, my dad and I had gotten into an argument because I needed to be driven to rehearsals for the school play that I was in, and as my parents had refused to allow me to learn how to drive it meant I was beholden to them for transport. At the same time, this sort of thing was a grave inconvenience for two people who never really left the house. We got into a fight about it and because my dad's solution to most problems was to punch them in the face, he did so and afterward I swore to myself that if he ever hit me again I was going to leave. The next time he did, I simply turned around and went to my room to grab a backpack I'd gotten ready for exactly that situation and left. I hadn't realised how deeply I had internalised "I will never be treated this way again" to the point that anything that mildly triggered those feelings put me in a headspace where it was imperative that it was not enough to just defend myself — I had to absolutely and utterly destroy the threat as a warning to any others.
Which is how most of you will have remembered me from my active time in Second Life, Second Citizen, and SLU.
I'll be delicate on my wording here because I don't want to point fingers or blame anybody or make anybody feel defensive, but in retrospect I can't really begin to articulate the really deeply inappropriate way I was regularly being treated by people who were often significantly older than me when I was barely old enough to drink. I'm not trying to make myself seem blameless because I certainly know I could be equally as vicious and I gave it as good as I got it, but it wasn't until I had time and distance that I realised how Not Right a lot of that stuff was. It was a constant, perpetual level of attack that I didn't realise was actually affecting me because it was "just internet shit" that I didn't think bled into my real life. On top of just the constant barrage of really vicious arguing, there was stuff some people knew about and other stuff I wasn't as open with — there was constant real life stalking, legitimate, actionable threats that involved police investigations, someone worked out that I was employed at Yahoo and spent a weekend tying up the company fax line sending threats against me to my place of employment. I believed myself to be resilient and unaffected by all of this but it was always a constant need to protect myself, because if I couldn't do that I was back to being a little kid getting the shit beaten out of him by a much older adult. This was a sustained degree of harassment across several years that I didn't realise the completely inappropriate and weird degree of until I got enough distance from it to go "holy shit."
And, again, I'm not trying to make myself seem like a victim, or like I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not quite going to offer an apology, and I'm not trying to justify myself either — with time and distance I've realised the headspace I was operating in and made a conscious decision that it wasn't the sort of person I wanted to be.
In early 2013, my parents visited me in Australia for the first time since I'd moved there. My relationship with them since leaving home had its ups and downs, and that particular time there was enough of an up that me and Adam (my partner at the time) got them tickets and a hotel as a Christmas present. It was their first time seeing my life in Sydney — which I was finally able to start putting roots in as my permanent residency got approved after considerable delays. Their visit was incredibly not good, and the aftermath was a relationship breakdown catastrophic enough that I didn't speak to them at all until I moved to Melbourne several years later. But it was in that visit that I realised the extent to which the childhood abuse still affected me, I realised I was not handling things as well as I thought I was, and I decided to start getting help.
) and I know I hurt people even if my intent wasn't to be hurtful. As for those who were hurtful towards me at the time, from my point of view I genuinely can't muster up the energy to really care about it anymore — a paedophilic sociopathic narcissist has control of the US' nuclear stockpile and is in advanced stages of dementia, I think we should all take the opportunity to try and put more love into the world while there's still a world. I don't need anybody's apologies, I don't need anyone's mea culpa, I'm not really interested in holding a grudge about it. I do understand if that's not reciprocal, and other people are entitled to be mad at the 20-something year old version of me they argued with on the internet over a decade ago. All I can say is that I made a realisation that I was not fuelling the sort of person I wanted to live up to and I have made a conscious decision on who I want to be as a result of that realisation.
