review – Diary of a Gay Nerd

never be bullied into silence

Well I said that I was going to make this, and I finally finished. I really wish I could give the person who created the pattern some credit because they deserve it for the work. I honestly wasn’t even sure if I would have the patience for this, but I did and it was actually fun. Some parts on the top are stretched in certain spots, but that’s fine, I’ll stretch the rest out to even it out, or maybe it will even out on its own.

It took me a couple weeks to make this because I was sick when I started this project. It took me a couple days to make the red, then another couple days to make the orange and so on. The green, blue and purple one day each. Actually I did the purple and the words on the same day. The reason I say it took 2 days for the first few colors is because I could only work on it for so long before the pain in my back came to stop me. This pattern is so detailed and the thing that took the most time was every time the embroidery floss knotted up as I was pulling it, and it was always in the back, but I always managed to remove them so I could continue. I didn’t have to use more than 1 skein of each color. In fact, I used less than a full skein for each color.

So some people may wonder why I would want to create something with the words “Never be bullied into silence.” Well, you see it’s personal to me. When I was a child, my mother knew I was being abused by my step father, she just didn’t want to admit it to herself. My little sister had bruises that the pre-school teacher saw. She was taken to the hospital and my mother was accused of abusing her, which in all honesty was false accusations. My little sister was so hyper that one day when I was sitting with her while she was playing on the stairs, cement stairs mind you, I was literally watching the bruises form. My parent’s were never abusive to her, but they were to me. When the guy from child protective services came to the house, my mother took me aside and threatened me. She told me so help me god if you say one word to these people, you will have the beating of a lifetime you will never forget. She knew I wasn’t going to accuse them of abusing my sister, she knew I would accuse them of beating me. So I was bullied into silence by my mother.

Another reason I would want to create this is because my sister does not like that I wrote my book. Her “friend” wrote a horrible review of “my book” (but it wasn’t a review of my book, it was an attack on me as a person by someone I’ve never even met). He said in his “review” that I am fooling my readers into thinking my lies are true when they are in fact lies and that I need to change the genre of my book from autobiography to fiction because it is full of lies. My response is it is not full of lies. This is my truth based on my memories of what happened in my life. I am allowed to tell me life stories, and if someone doesn’t like that, they can… and this is the part where I have to edit myself lol.

I wrote my book Diary of a Gay Nerd based on my memories of what happened to me during my childhood, when I was homeless at 15 and 17, and then homeless/sleeping on couches and living in motels until I was 23. And then of course my 3 bad relationships and my final relationship with the person I have spent the last 22 years with. These are my truthful life stories that I wanted to tell.

So I will never be bullied into silence, and that’s why I made this.

I said in my previous post that I was going to make this into a pillow, but my partner has convinced me to frame it instead. Since he wants me to frame it, and I still want it as a pillow, I’ve decided to compromise with him by making a second one lol. It was kind of fun to make and I want to make another one.

I’ve shared many images similar to this on my Facebook page and Twitter along with a 1 liner about how true the image is, but I’ve never written a blog post because I’ve never actually had something that hit as close to home as this particular image does.

When I began writing my book when I was 19 years old on my old Apple //e computer that my ex brother-in-law sold to me (for $750 that I made payments to every week until it was paid off), I wasn’t sure if 1 I could write it or 2 if I should write it. I lost the disk when I had to sell the computer to live. I could only get $75 for it after only a few short years of owning it.

I spent my entire adulthood wanting to write it, but afraid to because if I ever spoke my mind, my family would throw something back in my face, something that is not really that damning to me really. If I said that someone did or said something to me, they would always say that I ran away from home when I was 13 years old and went to studio city. Who cares! They never bring up the reason I decided to run away, that I was following in my own sister’s footsteps. She was gone for 3 days with her boyfriend. I was gone for maybe 2 hours at the most. Who cares about that, but apparently they seem to think that it is such a horrible thing, like they are comparing it to murder.

In 2010 my HIV doctor told me that I probably only had 10 more years to live, I decided that I really wanted to write it and who cares what anyone thinks. I finally published it in February 2012 knowing that if my family ever found out, they would bring up this horrible running away story as if I were this horrible person. My sister had her friend call me names like a drama queen in his “review” of my book. It wasn’t so much a review as much as it was an attack on my character. This coming from a man who has pictures of swastikas in his Facebook photo albums and calls himself a Anti-Zionist. Someone who doesn’t know me, has never met me, has only ever heard stories about me seems to think he knows everything there is to know about me. I’m an onion Baby Jane Hudson. I have so many layers that you don’t even know about. Don’t presume to think you know me.

Anyway, this guy says in his review that I should stop lying to people and change my book from memoir to fiction. You can bully me into silence all you want, but it’s not going to work because my book is my truth. It is how I saw life through my memories and no one can change that. He threatened that I could be sued for slander, which by the way you cannot sue me because you don’t know me and because I changed all the names for “their” protection. It was more for my protection.

I will never be bullied into silence. This is my life and I will speak my truth and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. I don’t care if it means never speaking with my sisters who don’t really speak with me anyway. And frankly, I could give a rats patooty if I never speak with my step father again for the rest of my life. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have a need to write a book.

Oh, he mentions in his “review” that I used Writing Fiction for Dummies to write my book. Well, no I didn’t, but I did buy that book for another purpose. It was always my dream since I was a child to write a book, it just turns out that the book I chose to write about was my life story. I didn’t read that book to help me write my book. I wrote my book without any help, I did that on my own. I wrote it the same way I would tell someone in person. 4 years after I wrote my memoir, I am finally starting to read that book, but I found another series more helpful and I am reading those now. If I still have 6 years to go, I want to write this fiction that I have wanted to write since I was a child and I don’t care what anyone says about it. It’s my dream and I will make that dream come true, just you watch.