We come into this world so innocent and oblivious to what surrounds us. Our intentions are pure and our minds consistently molding. What we know is simplicity and what the surface tells us. This carries on throughout adolescence.
My mind took me back to when I was a teenager. I remember the smell of the air and how different everything smelled. Maybe it was puberty amplifying my environment? The world at 5am smelled fresh, crisp, and new every day back then. This is typically when I returned to my guardians’ home to sleep and start over again from the previous evening. That hallow place of negativity, narcissism, and feelings of hatred from my “keepers”. My “home” life was a mixture of being made aware I was not welcome and instability. This led me to couch surfing throughout my last two years of high school.
The fight or flight mode started when I was just a child. A very obscene age to have to traverse life in such a manner. Children seldom have choices. They are prodigies of their surroundings and adapt to their situations. This is the cycle that this society fails to embrace as means of prevention to much more serious issues.
Looking back at my year after high school, I was very confused and lost. I wanted to attend a university and have the chance for higher education and development. Unfortunately, this was hard to embrace living in chaos and living out of your vehicle.
As most humans do, I wanted to be loved and a place in someone’s thoughts. Waking up in my car to the smell of dew-covered sheet metal, every morning for several months, I would look across the lake side where I would park for slumber and search for answers. A lot of this time it would result in a flush of emotions. Emotions of shame. Shame of the pictures and situations that danced in my memory of childhood abuse and neglect. At this point in my life, I always blamed others. But as anyone with Stockholm Syndrome, I would return to my captors (abusers) as means to an end, or possibly the distorted thought of “love”.
Recalling my feelings from this time in my life, there was not much stress other than putting gas in my car and finding five bucks to eat on. I worked and saved feverishly for a place to call home but ended up giving what I had to help others. I showered daily at the local state park. Occasionally, the park ranger would invite me in for eggs and toast and light conversation. He never prodded much beyond that, as now I know, he knew somehow. Music infused my life during this time. Everything from classical, to blues, and even heavy metal. My playlist was like my emotions.
I remember the simple joy of meeting up with a friend and redirecting my mind for several hours from the reality in which I lived. Most of my school friends went to college, I was left with those who never finished high school and were either working for beer money or surfing into something illegal. Life in a small town.
This is when I pointed my vehicle one morning to the big city to live with my birth mother. I mustered up the strength and determination to deal with her severe mental illness and try to make a go of it in a different environment. Little did I know, I would be forever altering my path.
to be continued…
dk