It can be lonely when you're shy. I spent my school years cowering in fear of the other kids because I was smaller and weaker than them due to severe malnutrition. There wasn't any food at home most of the time except what my mother bought for herself, which we children weren't allowed to go near. She lived on a diet of Pepsi-cola and chocolate candy bars. I was bullied in school, and went around speaking to no one, hoping the other students wouldn't notice me because I didn't want to get beaten up or harassed. I was a pathetic mess, wearing the same clothes to school day after day, unbathed and probably smelling very offensive as a result. I was prone to passing out often in school, but nobody asked me why. At school lunch time, I would give my food to the big kids to avoid being 'punished' by them. We were extremely poor and we moved a lot because of my mother's schizophrenia mixed with narcissism. We moved from ghetto neighborhoods to city hotels that were filled with welfare recipients and prostitutes and drug users, to finally a tiny trailer in the middle of the desert near Pueblo, Colorado, where my mother could have absolute control over us, to beat us, starve us, and psychologically abuse us to her heart's content. We had no neighbors close to us, so she could do as she pleased. She enjoyed hurting people in ways too sick for me to go into detail about here. My mother died in January of this year, and I'm still not sure how I should feel about her.

I think that shyness and loneliness are closely associated. I think a person's upbringing can be at the root of the two. I also think that it is possible for people to overcome their pasts and create a better life for themselves. I would like to encourage all of you to keep reading posts and doing your own posts in this group until you find something that will help you on a path to a brighter tomorrow.

Regardless of your past, be good to yourself today. Do more of what makes you happy. Try not to worry over the small bothers in life as much as you can. Focus on the sunshine and joyful activity in the world. Take small steps towards participating in the goings on in your community when you can. If you are lucky enough to have a friend, be sure that you are a good friend to that person in return, because real friends are hard to find (take this to heart, it's from someone who has never had a real friend in the physical world). Celebrate being alive.

When I was about 17 years old, I finally decided that I had had enough of the abuse and starvation and other problems in life, and made plans for running away from home, as my oldest brother and sister had done (they never returned). I was ready to make my escape one evening, but my other brother and other sister went to my mother and told her. My mother called the police on me and they came and told me I would go to jail if I ran away. The next day after school, I was picked up by two pale puffy white bald men (I am still not sure about them, because one of them spoke with a woman's voice and had an effeminate manner) in a tan four-door car and taken to the state mental hospital. In my mother's schizophrenic mind, I was not her son but her ex-husband (my father), and she wanted revenge on him for putting her into a state mental hospital in Ohio, so she made up a bunch of bizarre lies and having the power of a parent, had me committed there in Colorado. What many people don't know is that in mental hospitals you don't have rights - even in prisons, people have rights including access to legal services, visits from a chaplain, and a little time outdoors each day if you behave. I was beaten by the staff, stripped naked except for my undershorts, locked inside a room that stank of urine, and forgotten for four days. During that time I was not given food or water or allowed to use the bathroom. When they 'discovered' me, they told me they just didn't have enough staff people who were willing to work on holidays, so what they would do is take all the patients over a certain number and lock them up in rooms. That was their excuse for the abuse. I was in the mental institution for about nine months. It was the scariest place you can imagine. When they transported people from building to building, they took them through underground tunnels between the buildings. In these tunnels I saw people chained hand and foot, people strapped to hospital beds so that they couldn't move, with their mouths gagged to prevent them from screaming, and people who were so messed up that they were barely human and more like some kind of sick animals who were being horribly mistreated. Many of these people probably had not breathed outside air or been in sunlight for decades, due to their incarceration and the tunnel system between the buildings. A couple of the inmates tried to anally rape me twice, but I managed to get away from them and run to the staff area both times. After the incidents, the institution staff insisted that I was a homosexual and put it into my record, but I am not and have no interest in ever being one.

When I was released from the mental hospital, I was sent to a facility for juvenile offenders, no matter that I had no criminal record and that I was a shy, compliant youngster who had never gotten into trouble with anyone. I should have been sent to a foster home where I would have at least been treated like a human being. Within the first week at the facility for juvenile offenders, I was again stripped naked, this time by juvenile criminals, and never got my clothes back. They traded my clothes back and forth with each other for marijuana and cigarettes. I was given some unclaimed clothes from the laundry room, but had no socks or underwear. I was beaten up several times and had male staff members approach me for homosexual sex, to which I said no. They had read my records from the mental hospital and assumed I must be what they had written down, a homosexual. Again, I never was and never will be, a homosexual.

When I reached 19, I was discharged from the juvenile offenders center. I lived homeless on the streets for a while, then enlisted in the U.S. Army for a few years, then returned to being homeless. For a while I worked as a day laborer, doing work such as moving furniture and assembly-line work for a day or two a week while living homeless on the streets or in low-rent hotels. Much of my life has been spent in hiding from people because I have an extreme fear of people in general. It's very lonely, and I wish I could trust people enough to have friends, but I can't seem to overcome my fear of people, and when you're desperately poor and kind of weird looking (maybe ugly is a better term), the choices you have in way of friends is among drug addicts, alcholics, severely mentally ill people, and other people who really aren't suitable for real friendships, at least, not for me, because I have nothing in common with such people and I don't like the abuse they do to people like me.

So here I am at age 47, without any thing tangible to show for those 47 years. I am ashamed of myself for allowing people to abuse me, even though I know it was beyond my control. I am ashamed of myself for being afraid of people, even though I have real reasons to fear people, given my past. If my brother and sister hadn't figured out that I was planning to run away from home, perhaps none of this would have ever happened to me.

My advice to every person who reads this is simply don't be like me. Make friends, hold a job, stay in one place long enough to build a life, and take care of yourself and others. Somehow you have got to overcome your shyness or loneliness by reaching out to others first - that is how it works, strangely enough. You listen to other people talk about themselves in an understanding way, and maybe the next time you meet, they will listen to you talk about yourself.

Life has been a weird journey for me, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone else.

If, like me, you are a survivor of child abuse, no matter what your age (I'm 47), and would like to join a group of other people who have experiences similar to what you have been through, please consider joining us in A Child Abuse Survivors Group by clicking on the link here: www.dailystrength.org/groups/achildabusesurvivorsgroup

I wish you the best imaginable day.