My parents divorced when I was very young. My mother ran off with an abusive, alcoholic, mentally ill drug addict, who by his own admission hated me, because i was not his son.
My entire life until very recently has been extremely traumatic and hostile to my wellbeing. No thought or concern was paid to my future by my stepfather or mother. I slept on piles of molding cardboard for ten years. I stuffed dryer lint into plastic grocery sacks for a pillow and use dirty clothing over my body as a blanket during the winters in new york. The windows to the basement were all broken so i stuffed trash into them to keep the snow from blowing in. When it rained, water came through the crumbling concrete walls in spouts and I would wake up in water. It was impossible to clean my clothes, so I always smelled awful at school and had no friends.
My stepfather was extremely anti-social, and beat into my head apocalyptic fundamental christianity, in which nothing matter, because the world was ending, and the government was the satanic new world order, so timothy mcveigh was a hero. The very idea of seeking government assistance to secure a more happy and productive place in society was unthinkable. However, he did not find it a blow to his pride to stay home all day doing drugs and drinking while my poor mother worked. I do not wish to detail the full scope of cruelty i suffered by him.
It should come as little surprise that my schoolwork suffered greatly, and that i was an extremely troubled child. I was never out of trouble and spent a great deal of time in the school counselors office. In 10th grade i was expelled for disabling all the locks to all the doors before classes started so that the doors had to be taken off their hinges, and I had to get a job to pay for a lot of new doorknobs.
Since then i've worked consistently, but my stepfather took most of my money and i had no further assistance in life on the path of becoming economically independent - no one to teach me to drive, or take me to get my license. It took me two years to get a social security card replacement because my parents had lost mine. i walked miles to work every day, even through new york blizzards.
When i was 24 i decided that i had nothing whatsoever going for me or to look forward to, and walked about 2500 miles across the US with a backpack, sleeping in ditches or on game land.
Through a stroke of miraculous good fortune my fathers wife found me on the internet and my fathers side grandparents were in the area, in kansas. They offered to let me live with them. I found work in a factory. I've been amazed at what a supportive and healthy environment really is like. It took some time but I've unwound myself and left the past behind.
I would like to find a productive place in society, and make something of myself, to which end I have decided to go to school. I have applied for financial aid, and was approved. But now I find that there is something called 'selective service' a program by which in case of an existential threat to our nation, all men may be called up into the armed services. I am 26 years old, and I learn that I am ineligable for financial aid or any form of government assistance, unless the officer in charge of financial aid deems that my failure to register was neither knowing or willing, but was a result of extenuating circumstance.
I have not been incarcerated, institutionalized, or hospitalized. I'm not really sure what documentation I could provide to prove what my life has been up until recently. I do affirm that my failure to register with the selective service was not intentional. I simply had no idea that such a thing existed. No one told me. Until recently I have never sought out federal or state assistance of any sort whatsoever.
I hope that this provides some insight into the cause of this failure, which I intend now to correct.
