Never Lose hope.

Let me tell you a story:

As a young boy I used to get smacked around a lot. It was the 80's and our butts used to get the slipper or the hand. It was normal for any kid of my time. We were the generation that got smacked.

I spent a good portion of my younger years behind the iron curtain in the USSR because my dad was a nuclear engineer technician type guy. And he wasn't only a technician but he was a project manager and used to call the people that worked with him his crew.

The Russian kids used to love me at christmas time because I'd have all the toys to play with and I would share it with them.

Anyway

One day I had been playing out with the guys building snow forts or something. Big huge snow palaces, nothing like we see here in the UK. They were good at building this stuff. Once they had built them we would retreat inside them and play snowball fights with each other. I got soaked and they all laughed.

Coming up the stairs I was swearing and cursing for getting my clothes wet knowing I'd get a spanking for it. My parents heard me and I got a double spanking for cursing and swearing and being wet.

Yeah, this is what life was like for a lot of us western children back then. We were all scared of the slipper or the hand.

Fast forward 10 years and I was a young boy at school.

There's a reason for this story, stay with me.

Anyway, I was making fun of this boy for his English accent, we were sat on top a hill and playing football on lunchbreak on a hot summers afternoon. He said something funny and since we were in Scotland I laughed and mocked his strange tones that weren't particularly in Scottish

He punched me in the face. To be honest I don't blame him. He had enough of my constant taunts and broke and punched me square in the nose. Shocked, I held my nose, dropped my school-bag and ran up to him, jumped up and punched him back.

I didn't know what would happen next but in the next moment I found out he was friends with some of the most mad people in the whole school. My friends were telling me to run, but in my split craziness I thought I could talk my way out of it.

And they ran down from their perching place after they heard what I did and beat me up into near unconsciousness.

And thus, after a lifetime of being smacked and hit, and at school being beaten down for defending myself I began to realise that how I was doing life was wrong.

So I started being ultra nice. I stopped focusing on myself and began focusing on other people. I stopped my own pursuit and began focusing on other people's lives. In my mind I was doing it this way to save myself any grief -- the beating I got from that boy was so bad that I was scared to put a foot wrong.

And through my mother and father I was scared to put a foot wrong with authority at all. I was double screwed.

I didn't see it at the time though, to me it was how life worked. I was acing life. And because I wasn't caring for myself I slipped into a deep depression. To which I became anxious about being depressed - it's a real weird combination.

I started drinking alcohol real heavily. To the point that it got me in some real trouble. You see, I ended up in a psych ward in the acute section. And sectioned for six months. This was 20 years ago - but I remember having to see a lawyer at the time.

I spent 4 years in recovery sitting in my house, being bored, sad, almost suicidal and not giving a shit about anything.

That's when I met someone. Someone that changed my life beyond all recognition. She said stop the drink and come with me. If you keep sober then we'll help you.

And help me they did.

Of course I did most of the work when it came to giving up the alcohol and the drugs (yes I was on drugs too) But they helped me with getting myself educated, learning to drive, learning to build for the future.

That's incidentally where I met my wife, she had physical problems, and I had mental problems - we're quite the odd bunch! And we had a beautiful son, who's grown to a pillar of what I could even have hoped to have grown to.

I now have a wonderful family, an awesome extended family, and a business I really enjoy working in.

So you see. Never give up hope. It only takes some trying!