Introduction
This is a story from before I was rehabilitated.
The person I am now is completely different from back then. No—rather than different, it might be more accurate to say I became the opposite.
Even so, looking back now, I still think the same thing.
I was incredibly lucky.
As a child, I picked a fight with someone who was much stronger than me. I hated backing down, so I took a kitchen knife and went to kill him. But the knife broke, and he survived.
When I ran away from the juvenile reformatory, I truly believed something then too: I’d run even if it killed me. If anyone got in my way, I was prepared to kill them if I had to and get away. I escaped with that level of resolve. But I didn’t kill anyone, and in the end I got away cleanly.
I was in three accidents as well. In every case, I was the only one who got away with minor injuries.
I also fell into severe drug addiction. But I was able to fully overcome it.
For a normal person, someone like me should have had his life over a long time ago.
Normally, I might have ended up in prison. I might have become trapped in severe drug addiction and never come back. Or I might even have ended my own life. None of that would have been surprising.
But I managed to avoid all of it.
Of course, I’ve reflected on what I needed to reflect on, and I did reform long ago. I’ve faced both my own harmful side and my own victimized side. I’ve dealt with many emotional issues. I’ve also found answers within myself to why I turned to delinquency and what happened in my early childhood.
Still, I can’t help but think:
Why was I so lucky?
Now, I have this sense of “a reprieve granted by luck”.
But that reprieve was not an easy one.
During that reprieve, I suffered for 20 years.
So for me, it doesn’t end with just saying I was lucky. I feel like I spent the next 20 years inside a prison of the mind.
And those 20 years changed me profoundly.
As if I were a completely different person. No, more like I became the opposite.
This article is about that story.
What happened when I was 9. Why I turned to delinquency. Why harshness couldn’t change me, and only genuine concern could. Why even my escape, when I look back on it now, was not simply a matter of degradation. And what the 20 years of prison of the mind, including drug addiction, did to me.
This is not a text to justify my past.
It is not a text to cast myself as a victim either.
Quite the opposite.
Even if my home environment was bad, there was still a part of me that chose that path myself. There was still something wrong with me. No matter how much I had no other way to resist, no matter how it was the only route I could see to resist control, there was still something of my own problem in it.
I believe I spent 20 years taking responsibility for that.
So this is not an excuse. It is a record of a passage.
I want to gather here, in my own words as much as possible, how I broke, how I changed, and how I returned to being human.
Chapter 1: I was originally a child with a strong sense of justice
Hearing only the story up to now, you might think I was someone who had been troubled from the start.
But at least as I felt it, that wasn’t the case.
From the time I was a child, I had a strong sense of justice.
This is something I came to understand clearly only later, after looking deeply at myself, reflecting, and reexamining everything.
The original me hated dirty things. I hated unfair things. I had a strong aversion to injustice, lies, control, and things like that. Even as a child, I was extremely sensitive to them.
I think I had a strong conscience.
But having a strong conscience also means being easily hurt.
And my conscience was hurt by the people around me from a very early age.
You could sum it up in one phrase by saying I grew up in a bad family environment. But there is also a part of me that doesn’t want to reduce it to that.
Because saying only that the family environment was bad doesn’t really convey what happens in a child’s heart.
The important feelings inside me—my desire to believe, my wish to stay straight, to remain honest—were gradually wounded by the dirt, irrationality, and control around me.
How painful that is.
Especially for a sensitive child, it is truly unbearable.
And in my case, the point at which that flow became decisive was when I was 9 years old.
Chapter 2: At age 9, my conscience was wounded
When I was 9, my conscience was deeply wounded.
Looking back now, I think that was the major turning point.
Back then, I still had things in my heart that I wanted to protect. A desire to stay straight, to trust people, to be decent. I genuinely had those things.
But they were hurt far too deeply.
Now I understand.
I couldn’t bear having my conscience wounded.
It wasn’t just that I was hurt.
I was powerless against it.
And I was scared.
I think I lost to this helplessness and fear.
I couldn’t protect the things I really wanted to protect. It was too painful to keep holding on to what mattered inside me. At age 9 especially, I was far too young to endure that pain.
Keeping hold of what matters may sound idealistic, but in reality it is tremendously painful.
To keep holding it with a sensitive heart.
To remain untainted even when your surroundings are dirty.
To not be twisted even when you’re being controlled.
That is far more painful than words can convey.
And I couldn’t endure that pain.
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