My mum suffered with severe postnatal depression which went undiagnosed for decades. Her and my father split when I was six. We moved with my mum to the new house, and almost immediately after the split tensions between me and my mum began to rise. I was older than my sister by two years and tended to take the overwhelming majority of the flak. I was frequently and repeatedly told that I was "the worst mistake she'd ever made", she "hated my very existence", and she "wished she'd had me aborted", etc. I would wake up screaming with blood pouring from my nose because she'd punched me whilst I slept and so on, and the resulting fights would result in me being thrown out.
By the age of twelve or so I was getting big enough to defend myself physically, which caused her a problem. The result was that the mental aspect of the abuse got stepped up a level. I'd regularly stay away from home - eating with friend’s families after school and sleeping on sofas.
My dad's girlfriend had made the fatal error of trying to "take over" the role of mine and my sister's mum shortly after the split. She was met with an overwhelming barrier of rejection - according to our mum she was responsible for our parent's split, so no matter what she did for us she would always be considered an enemy. This caused my dad to largely reject us, as having us around the house for any extended period of time led to huge arguments between us and his girlfriend.
By the age of fourteen I was working illegally for a games stool company (the kind that rob you of your money at fairgrounds). You only got paid a couple of quid an hour, but I was topping it up by stealing some of the money I took so that I had no need to go home. Theft was rife in the company, even the management were hugely corrupt. I'm not excusing what I did, it was wrong, but I needed money to survive and that was how I got it. At this point I almost never went back to my mum's house, and if I did it was late at night after everyone had gone to bed, and I'd leave again first thing in the morning. I continued to do this as a summer job through my college years, often missing school to work instead. I think my attendance was something like 42%..
Towards the end of my schooling I moved to a more stable part-time job at a DIY store which required a lot less travelling for much better pay. By the time I was seventeen I had finished college and left home entirely. Upon finishing I had asked to go full-time at the DIY store while I looked for a more permanent / career orientated job. I had been sleeping on my friend's living room floor for a few months, but with a full-time income I went through the ads in the paper and moved in with a guy who was renting a room out. He was a good few years older and taught me a lot of really valuable life lessons - some intentionally, some just through observation - like how to eat properly (cooking with fresh food, rather than the takeaways that I'd lived on for the past few years), how to be responsible with my money, and how to dress appropriately etc. He worked in sales for a major IT firm and drove a new BMW wearing Boss suits etc, things I could never dream of affording.
I didn't find anything immediately work-wise, but worked hard at my job and quickly got promoted five or six times. By nineteen I was Duty Manager of a store worth several million in stock, and responsible for up to seventy-odd staff with hundreds of thousands in cash passing through the tills each day. I was recognised by my Regional Manager and asked to assist in recovering a failing store. I was given a dedicated team of four staff and turned their warehouse ordering system around inside a week. Two weeks after I left, the store I'd done it for had ruined it all again. My Regional Manager put me forward for Store Manager training, but the course was an on-the-job year-long internship thing, and only one person from each store was allowed to be on it at a time. There was already someone from my store attending and they still had something like nine months to go, so it would have been almost two further years before I could take my next step career-wise, which as someone who's quite driven frustrated me immensely. Despite my achievements and responsibility, I was still only young and being paid very little, around £17k a year I think. The pay upon completing the management course would have bumped me up to £20k~ or so.
I was reasonably good with computers, I had taken IT at school / college, could break my way out of their primitive filtering systems which made me hugely popular with the other kids, and spent a lot of time playing PC games at my friend's house. I'd often be asked to fix the stock management computers at the DIY store and so on too. I was telling my friend of my frustration at not being able to advance my career, and the pay it would have taken me to etc. He replied saying the Service Desk where he worked was looking for agents and that I was easily technical enough to do phone work - furthermore the starting pay was £21k. My housemate got me dressed in one of his expensive suits (I'd never been for a big job before and didn't own one), went for an interview, and was offered the job before I left the building.
Within a few months I'd become a duty manager to the desk, but I was enjoying the technical work and wanted to pursue it further. There was no 2nd line at my work, they were site-based, and going from a Service Desk role in to 3rd Line role was unheard of. Regardless, I applied four times and was rejected each time. On the fifth application the Infrastructure Team's manager pulled me aside and went "you've got two weeks, if you can't hack it you go back to the desk". I worked my bollocks off, and I stayed.
I broke up with my long term girlfriend and said to the same friend who'd gotten me a job on the Service Desk that I wanted to go on holiday to get away from it all. Not a guys holiday, just some quiet all-inclusive resort where we could drink beer and chill by the pool. We ended up in Turkey - there were two other girls in that resort even remotely within our age range, and by the end of the holiday I was in a long distance relationship with one of them - who unfortunately lived at the opposite end of the country.
For a year we drove up and down to see each other each weekend, but she had three years left at university studying so was tied to that location. Deciding I had nothing really tying me down, I picked up my stuff, sold most of my stuff, scraped together a deposit, and moved a few hundred miles to buy a house and be with her. It didn't work out, but I got a job with a company when I moved up and exaggerated my previous pay somewhat in the interview, which resulted in them offering me a decent pay rise for the role. The company wasn't particularly good to work for, but it was a fantastic environment to learn in, with hundreds of enterprise-level clients and thousands of technologies in use. I was a 3rd line level engineer when I got there - but I wasn't a very good one. I'd come from a Service Desk after all. The guys here could see that, and didn't particularly like me because of it. There was a lot of that old school 'IT guy' attitude, if you knew less than them you weren't worth their time.
As the years went by and some of the older guys left I became more and more experienced. Eventually I'd earnt the respect of my peers and was fast becoming the 'go to' guy at the business. The company eventually got bought out by a much larger business owned by an investment group. I'd hoped (as had most other people) that the business would finally start to see some investment now that it was privately owned, but instead we saw the opposite. Within a year we'd lost 27 of my fellow engineers - centuries of customer experience - none of which had been replaced. I was acting as a manager, but not being paid for it, nor was my title updated to reflect it despite regular promises that it would be. I'd had enough, and started to look elsewhere.
I was interviewed for a role as the Technical Manager for one of the largest IT businesses in the world heading up their brand new Managed Services division. I told them I wasn't interested in a pay rise, they could match my existing salary for all I cared, I just wanted the freedom to build my own team and be allowed to run my division as I saw fit. They offered me the role shortly afterwards along with a significant pay uplift. My last company made me a counter-offer of over £50k a year not to leave - what would have been around a 35% pay rise - I declined it. One of the best decisions I've ever made.
I have been in the new role less than 9 months. In that time I've delivered two "impossible" customers, my team has tripled in size, and I'm due to gain another four to six consultants before the end of the year. I'm in a loving relationship with an incredible young lady, and yesterday my director text me on the way home to say he'd had the business case signed off for me to be moved on to the management bonus scheme - a 20% uplift on my base salary.
I'm just over 30 now, and due to be mortgage-free by about 37 years old. I'm not perfect (not even close), I needed to get some professional help following the events of my childhood which I only faced up to in the last twelve months, and there are still a million things I want to achieve - but y'know what? Things turned out alright.
I wouldn't be where I am or who I am today if it wasn't for the incredible friends I have. I get on with both my parents, and have a loving relationship with both of them now that we're not living together. My little sister is considerably more successful than I am, and an incredible lady unto herself. Things will be shit sometimes - really shit, but decide what you want for yourself and fight for it. I'd be lying if I told you I never considered giving up, but I'm pleased I didn't.