u/Eco_Luddite

About 2 years ago, I was extremely depressed and had plans of ending it all. I was also self harming. Family issues were happening at the time and my parents were in the process of separating, which was an even bigger weight on me. At the time, when I was metaphorically deep in the trenches and struggling with something I never told anyone about, I had an interest in certain philosophies and ideas. About a year before, I learned that the Unabomber had died in prison, a guy who I knew relatively little about until then. I started reading into his ideology and I started to understand his belief about how the industrial technological system oppresses human autonomy and how it destroys the environment. And I think the environmental aspect was what mainly drew me in to begin with.
Ever since I was young, I’ve always loved the Earth. And even during my dark depressed state, I still loved the environment, with bushwalks in my local bushland being one of the few escapes from my already existing stress about society. Always knowing that the environment was being destroyed by mankind always enraged me, and now (which was back then) that I knew it was specifically industrial society that was destroying it, I would admit, I was radicalised by the Unabomber’s anti-tech ideas.
I always had a journal that I vented my depressive episodes and anger into. Unfortunately for my future scenario, I had and have an interest in pyrotechnics, unrelated to any motivations of my anti-industrial beliefs. I had a mate who also had an interest in explosives. I would send him videos of experiments I had done and he would interact with these videos as well, giving me advice. We would make edgy jokes sometimes, the kind that you would see on a schizo meme. Sometimes, I’d tell him about my beliefs on industrial society. I’d also vent to him my anger about people like politicians or CEOs who destroyed the environment.
This mate was also a marijuana user, and I suspect he was high when he did this, but one day, he called the police and reported me, claiming that I was trying make a bomb to kill such people. As he was a boarding student at the school I was at, the police notified the heads of the school that an interview needed to be done. That evening, he did an interview with the regular state police. Those police spoke to me the next day, which ended with them taking me with my mother to an emergency examination order at the psych ward at the hospital. After that, I was released with the recommendation that I should be monitored by my parents and I shouldn’t be let near sharp objects. The following Monday, due to the school’s involvement, a meeting for my future safety and well being was supposed to occur at school in the morning. That all changed when a search warrant was done by the federal police at my dad’s house and my uncles house (which me, my brother and my mum were living at the time). During these warrants, they informed my family that they were investigating me for a potential terror based offence. They were searching for explosives and any writing that could link me to an ideology. Sure enough, they found my journals, where I had previously written things that most people would consider as a venting journal, where I could write things only I would see. However, from the perspective of the feds, it essentially doesn’t come across that way. They also seized my devices, where I filmed my experiments and had downloaded some risky memes. They didn’t find much explosive materials that I supposedly had used in my experiments but they found some.
After the warrants, it felt like I was on house arrest. I had no way of contacting friends or family, I wasn’t able to get school work because of my devices being taken and because the feds changed the passwords on all my devices so I couldn’t access my actual school work. The school was also advised that don’t attend the school for the next few weeks. Around that point, I started to open up about my well being to my parents, whom they had now realised how deteriorated it had become. 4 weeks pass and to simplify what happened, I got arrested by a group of undercover feds whilst walking my dog with dad.
Whilst I was in juvi’, I was incredibly stressed about the whole thing. I even attempted to hang myself my first month in, which the staff intervened and put me on suicide watch. However, as time passed whilst I was in, I got the actual mental health support that I previously didn’t have. I started to speak up to my parents about how I felt. In that perspective, getting locked up might have been the best thing for me.
So last month, my trial begins for the first time in almost 2 years. As expected, the prosecutors were trying to depict me as a terrorist, whilst my barrister was trying to say that I was just mentally unwell. As you can assume from the title, I was found not guilty by a jury.
So now, here I am. I still hold my beliefs but now, I’m aware of my mental health and how I can speak up about it. Since I’ve been out, I’ve been going for hikes and bushwalks out in nature. I wasn’t too keen on immediately creating a new bank account and a new phone number and email, etc. Not out of laziness but because I didn’t want to immediately embed myself into the system when I just want to get out and enjoy nature. It’s a good thing that I got out because otherwise, my 18th birthday, which I celebrated recently, would’ve led to me getting transferred to an adult prison.
That’s all I needed to get off my chest. There were news articles about my court acquittal but since this is more of a venting that I wanted to get off my chest, I don’t care about attaching any article link. Thank you for reading.