My name is Paul Hornsby and I have had a hell of a life which gave me the chronic mental health conditions I have today. I will go more in depth into my past if I get enough subscribers on my channels as I really don’t like remembering it.

A medical professional told me when I was either 12 or 13 that I was on the slower end of the spectrum, but not enough to be classed as disabled. The school I went to made my parents get me tested for my mental capacity as they weren’t sure if they were equipped to deal with me and if I needed to go to a special school.

I have been beaten to various degrees, a few punches to being left in a bloody pulp on the floor, hundreds of times in my life, no word of a lie. One and a half years I went with almost daily beatings, another time four months with many broken jaws and ribs during this time. Because I’m slow and was too trusting, people saw me as an easy target. Plenty of other times ‘friends’ have betrayed me or turned on me.

I was bullied all throughout my high school life, apart from the time I joined the bullies. This lasted maybe three weeks and I hated every moment of it, so I gave up being in league with the bullies and allowed myself to become the bullied once more.

As you can tell, all of this mounted up on me. There was a time in my teenage years when I couldn't leave the house because no matter which street I walked down, which direction I took, I always came face to face with one of the bullies. I couldn’t take it anymore so I became a recluse.

I have had one fight in my life when I was 11. I won by default by bloodying the other person's nose before it was broken up, and I vowed from that day I would never hurt anyone ever again. I hated it. I became a pacifist and have never hurt anyone physically and try to never hurt anyone mentally ever since. Not even when being attacked. I just took the beating.

Because of how slow I am and my mental issues, I find it hard to retain information immediately. I need it explained to me time and time again otherwise I forget it quite quickly. I have memory issues too. When starting new employment, I always had reels and reels of new information piled on me at once and it set my anxieties off. I couldn’t remember everything they said and I always ended up getting fired. I have never been able to hold secure employment for long.

Everything got on top of me at one point and I turned to alcohol to help me sleep somewhere late 2000. It started with just a few glasses of cider, then I needed more and more until I was drinking 2 litre bottles every night making me pass out. Then this also got on top of me and I had my first huge anxiety attack when watching my young nephew. Scooby Doo had just finished, it was 15:57/58pm and I couldn’t breathe, it came out of nowhere. I felt as though I was dying. An ambulance was called that took me to the hospital, they hooked me up to the heart rate monitor and it was going so fast it kept setting the alarm off. They monitored me for an hour, gave me some medication and told me to make an appointment with the doctor the next day.

This increased my need for alcohol because without it I had anxiety attacks daily. For the first year I was at the doctors most days of the week as I couldn’t cope with them. I started drinking all day everyday to cope with them. This made me very self absorbed, only bothered about where my next drink was coming from. I was an awful guy during that time, not violent but not polite. At least it numbed the pain of the beatings though, although I never knew I had a broken jaw at one point until I started trying to eat something. I never, ever instigated the beatings though.

I struggled along with this until 2005 in which I stopped the stronger stuff and dropped to weaker alcohol just to feel normal. No more passing out, no anxiety attacks. Enough alcohol to stave these off, not enough to be the jerk I was. Then, February 15th 2006, 00:53am. I was watching the Home and Away special on DVD and suddenly I didn’t want to drink anymore, something snapped. I’d had enough. I tipped my final can of lager down the sink. All the anxieties returned the next day and I went without medication, although this can be deadly, please don’t do this, and persevered through all the pain.

I got help from an alcohol counsellor who helped me get into a dry house, to learn to live life without alcohol. I still hold the guilt of the kind of person I was to this day but if I was offered a magic pill to take that guilt away, I would refuse it. It’s what stops me buying it again when times are really tough.

Then, during a murder mystery night the staff from the dry house put together, I found what I loved to do. I played the lead character, the guy whose mother was murdered. The staff said I really gave it my all and really stepped into the characters shoes. They advised I try to get a place in my local amateur dramatic theatre. My keyworker went with me the first time but for the first time in my life I was welcomed with open arms. These people didn’t want to beat me, they wanted to make me a part of their community. I wasn’t used to this at all but by the end of the night I was loving it so much I told my key worker he could leave. I felt as though I belonged for the first time in my life. I started out in the chorus in a pantomime even though I wasn’t a very good singer. I learnt all of buttons lines in one night just in case he was sick one day, he never was but I impressed the director. They said I made the character my own, using facial expressions and actions without voice to react to what was happening. I then started to get main and secondary roles. I also went to college and got my national diploma in performing arts and my NCFE video qualification. Then the betrayal happened again.

While I was on stage acting in The Long, and the Short, and the Tall, as the geordie, I was burgled by people I actually knew. I knew it was them as they were asking me questions about what time I would be back and such before leaving to perform. This suspicion was solidified a year later when one of the people wrote to my sister's boyfriend admitting to who it was who did it. Also just after the burglary, my housemate turned back to drugs, angered a pusher who terrorized me for weeks before I couldn’t handle it anymore and had to move. I truly loved living in that house until the burglary. Then my mental state started declining. I had to leave the theatre, by my own choice even though I was still being offered roles, as my mind would no longer keep all the lines memorized. I had to give up acting for good.

As the years went by, I got jobs, I lost jobs within weeks, and my mental state continues its decline, now gaining paranoia and a deeper depression. My insomnia was getting worse, my anxiety also. I was finally put on tablets to stop the decline, but it also doesn’t improve it either. It’s kind of flatlined far below the healthy mindset. Sometimes it drops massively way down into the deepest slumps, when I’m doing the reaction or gaming content I barely feel it. It’s only when I’m with my own thoughts.

I now find it hard to speak to people face to face, especially if I don't know them or barely know them. I can barely form a coherent sentence. I have so many issues I don’t know if I can bounce back to a healthy mindset. I have tried counselling many times but it never worked.

I first started The Purgatorians back in 2015. I wanted an outlet for all the darkness in my mind. Please don’t get me wrong here, all the stories told in the show are not the thoughts in my head, the darkness just created them. I then wanted to make this a reality so I set to casting for it. I got together a wonderful cast and production had started, then it happened again causing the show to go into unofficial cancellation.

Somebody moved upstairs in the flat above us, me and my current partner since 2010. He was fine to begin with but he must have found out our sexuality and began shouting homophobic slurs at us through the ceiling on a nightly basis. Then one day he kicked the front door in when my partner was at work and beat me badly. After leaving the hospital, I was only in overnight with concussion, we packed up what we could and left quickly. We were homeless for a time before my partner's parents found out and let us stay there for a while. We then moved into a new place and, apart from the odd verbal abuse, no physical abuse since then but it played havoc with my mental state.

Then in 2024, I was pining for the show, what I had lost. I felt guilty about leaving the actors high and dry, with no communication about what happened. To be honest, this was the last thing on my mind at the time and I also didn’t have time to grab my PC, nor could I carry it with me what with being homeless. I missed what I once had and started to watch through the 2015 interviews I had put together. Then I downloaded them to create new videos separated by questions for my own personal use. Finally, I thought I would see if I still had access to the old emails since it was 9 years ago. The best thing then happened.

I found the old emails and started reading through them, and then I got to a very special email, once that got me to where I am today. I found the one with all the scripts I had written that I had sent to the cast. I thought these were lost forever. Then, as I scrolled up, another thing I thought I’d lost forever turned up. It was an email with a download of my old scriptwriting software along with the activation code. I was elated. It was like fate made me long for 2015 when the show was being created. I got in touch with the old cast and some agreed to return, some said no and some others ghosted me even though I saw their name had checked my Casting Call Club profile when I put the auditions back up. This bothered me to begin with but we have found a great cast to bring this show to life.

The show is in production once more. Although this is more about my dream becoming a reality than it is money, I do hope one day I can finally become self employed, pay taxes again and finally rid myself of benefits forever. Although the show and gaming channel is taking every spare penny I have, forgoing all luxuries, I would not trade creating this audio drama with the team for anything in the world.

And there you go. My life story, and that wasn’t the in depth version, although more depth that I wanted but in a weird way I feel lighter. As though some of the burdens have been lifted. I have never spoken about this so much except to counsellors in my life. You are among the honored few to know this. If you made it this far, I thank you ever so much. You don’t know how much this has helped me, just by telling you this.