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Anita, thank you again for responding to me,
When I was seventeen I was very emotionally immature and couldn’t process how to be an adult when I left. I lied, cheated, and manipulated to survive and there were times where I found out that my way of behaving “right” was nowhere close to what other people thought right was. I turned to alcohol right away and between the ages of seventeen and eighteen consumed enough liquor and beer to last me the rest of my life. I only knew how to project a false self because I was terrified of ever being completely honest and I said and did things during that time that made people shake their heads. Once, I got really drunk on a Korean liquor called Soju and ended up urinating on someones door, which got me shoved to the floor by a guy three times my size who went on to try and say I was being racist, when in all actuality, that wasn’t any part of it. I got up after he shoved me and then had to clean up my mess and be shamed in front of some of my peers and the next day he and his friends urinated on my bed, my Dvd player and a few of my other things after I manned up an apologized to him the next morning and he acted like everything was okay. I grew up around people saying inappropriate things, constantly, so my idea of what constituted something funny wasn’t funny to some and I embarrassed myself by my jokes and speech quite a few times. I also got attention from women for the first time in a way I wasn’t used to. In my town, I was a low, dirty, poor kid and when I went to the Army, I got to be something else. I finally had money to buy my own personal hygiene products and clothing and a place with three hot meals a day and hot showers and girls who I thought would have never given me the time of day started giving me notice and I engaged in risky, promiscuous behavior for awhile. I didn’t know how to process that attention.